ABSTRACT
This chapter contends that both church and state share in a common mission, namely, liberation. Liberation consists primarily though not exclusively in conferring dignity on those to whom dignity is presently denied. This chapter (1) recognizes phenomenologically how dignity is first conferred and then claimed; (2) acknowledges the tacit reliance of the modern West on the Enlightenment understanding of dignity, according to which each person should be treated as a moral end and not merely as a means; (3) shows how the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights assume dignity is self-evident, immanent, and archonic; (4) explicates both Roman Catholic and Lutheran understandings of natural law which claim that divine justice instructs governmental law in both religious and secular situations; (5) identifies a theoretical problem: the apparent inconsistency of claiming dignity to be immanent while socially constructed; (6) advocates that theologians ground dignity in God’s eschatological conferral of dignity. The thesis of this chapter is that the imago Dei is eschatological; today’s conferral of dignity amounts to a proleptic anticipation of God’s final conferral of dignity which makes it immanent to human nature.
