This is a carefully researched and judiciously argued contribution to an important area of political theology and theological ethics. By taking an historical approach it grounds the discussion in particular situations and authors, and is therefore more interesting than a generalised treatment of the subject would be.
The two main areas dealt with are the contributions of some Spanish Dominicans – notably Vitoria and Las Casas – to the debate around the colonisation (to use a very mild word) of Central and Southern America; and the contribution of John Locke to the debate on natural rights in North America and late Stuart England a century later.
The Spanish Dominicans argued in an explicitly theological manner that the Indians who had been conquered and expropriated – and excoriated for their barbarism – by the Christian colonists were in God's image and therefore endowed with human rights even if they refused to turn from their gods and accept the Christian Gospel. Ruston plots painstakingly the discussion of issues of possession and self‐determination, of just war and slavery, and of what counts as Christian civilization. The relevance of the whole debate to present concerns is made explicit in the brilliant introductory paragraph to the section on Salamanca and Francisco de Vitoria, where he writes of the world's one superpower which aggressively exports its culture to tropical countries which it ransacks for their raw materials, developing a doctrine of pre‐emptive strike against the enemies of Christendom etc. etc.; and you suddenly realize that he is describing, not what you thought, but 16th century Spain.
The chapters on Locke are usefully revisionist, in the sense that they correct the picture of Locke as simply a founding father of possessive individualism, and indicate that he stood in a genuinely theological tradition which saw the earth as belonging in common to humanity, and government as being for the good of the people, not the wishes of a tyrant. What made him more of a capitalist hero is that he thought that once a person had started making profitable use of what had been common land, that person had a right to possession; this meant that the colonists of North America had the right to dispossess the Indians who roamed over the land hunting and therefore could not be said to put it to any profitable use. That clash of cultures is, again, hugely relevant to the contemporary world.
The book is topped and tailed with an introduction and a conclusion which discuss in particular the Catholic Church's attitude to human rights both in society and within the Church. The most important part of that discussion is, in my view, on pages 282–284 where the concept of “the image of God” is shown to be somewhat double‐edged: it can either reduce the image to some attribute which we share with God (rationality, say, understood from our specific cultural viewpoint) or expand it to include all those who are other than us. Although this is not a point Ruston is making in this book, it is vital that we decide how we are going to use the concept of “image of God” in discussing the status of, say, people with dementia.
It is important to note what this book is not: it is not a general textbook on human rights or an image‐of‐God theology; it is a description of how certain people have confronted actual situations which required a theological response. It does not say much about Rawls, and it says nothing about Marx, but it does confront issues which are of interest to both those writers. It does what it sets out to do, and should be welcomed as a major contribution to several ethical and theological debates.
