O’Donovan, Oliver and Joan Lockward O’Donovan, Editors. From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999)

“Rights sanctioned by men for their own advantage were very various, and changed with the social expectations and the times…Though man is an animal, he is an extraordinary one. And among the distinctive features of human behavior …is a desire for society.” Fundamental to the ordering of a peacable and just society is the nature of humanity to organize by their human rational capacities. This separates them from other animals because to use one’s human intelligence and acting upon a series of well-formed judgments is appropriate to human nature.

This discussion of human nature presupposes what Hugo Grotius calls “Right”. It is the concept that in creating human kind and endowing them with his image, that this bears certain implications for how man lives together and how God is concerned with human affairs. One of Grotius’ famously misinterpreted lines “even if we were to accept the infamous premise that God did not exist” is in the context of the discussion of Right, which Grotius argues would still be legitimate to human nature without God. However, he claims it bears even more gravity because of God. This Right bears the natural law that man must obey God without qualification. We owe it as much to ourselves as to our Creator, owning possessing nothing apart from him.

Some would divide the complete conception of right into Natural Right and Civic Right. Some would even say there is a Right of Nations. Grotius argues, “If a citizen who breaches civil Right for his own immediate interest destroys the fabric which protects the enduring interests of himself and his posterity, so a people that violates natural rights and the rights of nations, undermines the supports of its own future tranquility.”

In his discussion of what is Right, Grotius asks the followup question, what is Just? For Rightness and Justice are inextricably linked. “’Right’ in this context means simply, what is just – ‘just’ being understood in a negative rather than a positive sense, to mean ‘what is not unjust.’ ‘Unjust,’ in turn, means what is inconsistent with the nature of a society of rational beings.”

Grotius, who refers often to historical and theological sources, quotes Aristotle on this issue of Right. Natural and Voluntary Rights, which roughly correspond to the Hebrew conception of natural right and positive right, are concerned with man “obliging us to do what is correct.” This involves virtues other than mere justice, because he uses the distinct phrase “what is correct” and not “what is just”.

On a very basic level, what is just and what is correct are close enough the same that we could use the terms interchangeably. However, sometimes other virtues supercede what is in fact just. In such cases, it may align more with the character of God to intervene in situations in ways other than the meting out of justice. One thinks of Christ’s atonement on the cross. Justice demands eternal damnation for all humanity. However, what is correct to the nature of God supercedes what God’s justice demands. That is, that some portion of humanity be reconciled to Christ. The question then, which most reformers dealt with, is how are God’s other attributes (mercy, justice, righteousness, sovereignty) fully satisfied in all cases?