"25 Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbour, for we are members one of another. 26 Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, 27 and give no opportunity to the devil.28 Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. 29 Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. 32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you."
Ephesians 4:25-32
The significance of the contrasts presented by the Apostle in these verses is that they represent at their roots two very different and indeed mutually exclusive attitudes. Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, in his remarkable and challenging book 'The Other Side of 1984', speaks about the change of 'mind-set' in modern life as compared with earlier periods in our history. He says, 'The difference between mediaeval society and our own time is that mediaeval society emphasised the idea of the duties involved from each person by his or her position in society, whereas from the Enlightenment onwards it was the rights of man which seemed axiomatic.' The results of this change of 'mindset' is that the world becomes (as in the contemporary western world it has become) a place where each individual has the 'right' to pursue 'happiness' in the domestic and privatised sense, and that it is the responsibility of the state to see that this right is honoured . It can hardly be controverted that this has become part of the unquestioned assumptions of the western world. It is one thing to quote with approbation (as we must surely do) the famous words in the American constitution, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ...' but history has shown that the implication 'limited only by the parallel rights of others' was only too easily forgotten until in our time the divorce of the idea of 'rights' from that of 'duty' and 'responsibility'' has become virtually complete. We are seeing the fruit of this today with a vengeance, when the whole concept of 'duty' has become a dirty word in the human vocabulary, and 'rights' are paramount, even if gaining and maintaining them should cause untold damage to individual and society alike. What, after all, is terrorism - whether of the IRA or of Islamic fundamentalism or of the Animal Rights' atrocities or whatever - but the insistent and imperious demand that their particular right should be established, regardless of the cost to others? There is nothing in any reasonable and common-sense understanding of all this to suggest that one section of the human race - the human rights' activists of whatever sort - should be the permanent imposers of the restrictions and the rest of us the permanent sufferers of them. There is no one-way traffic possible here. It is essentially a two-way system.