Freedom. Well, freedom is integral to a biblical worldview because it goes to the whole idea
of Christianity. The heart of Christianity is choice, the freedom to accept Christ or
to reject Christ. And choice is the enemy of dictatorship. If you go back to the Bible,
you'll see that when Israel was being created as a nation, that only happened because Moses
was able to stand against a tyrant, Pharaoh. And that's an example that the Bible repeats
over and over. It's an example that English men and women drew on at key points of history
over and over again, most obviously in the run up to the Civil War, when Charles I was
trying to bring in a dictatorship which treated Magna Carta as though it didn't exist.
So the concept of freedom, so important to our Magna Carta inheritance, actually predates
it. What about democracy?
In terms of democracy, of course not mentioned in Magna Carta, one of the fascinating incidents
which gives the lie to where that comes from in England, took place just after the Civil
War. October 1647, Parliamenters won the Civil War, it has King Charles I prisoner and negotiations
are taking place with King Charles about what should happen thereafter. The new model army,
superbly disciplined force, is in ferment. The soldiers who've been fighting for four
years are concerned that the clock might be turned back, everything they've been fighting
for might turn out to have been for nothing. So they're on the verge of mutiny, they haven't
been paid for two years, things are looking pretty bleak. The army high command does something
absolutely extraordinary. It asks every regiment of the army to send two men to a church in
Putney, St Mary's Church, and they're going to debate there in front of Oliver Cromwell
what the future governance of England should be. It's like a constitutional conference,
no army in history has ever had anything like that before. And when those men arrive, they
start to ask for democracy based on one man, one vote. And the reason that they give for
it is a biblical reason. They say look at the book of Genesis, the very first chapter
tells you God made man, humankind, in his own image. That means that everybody is of equal
worth and everybody deserves an equal say. So, democracy, one man, one vote. Our modern
parliament still displays much evidence of our Christian roots, but does the concept
of the rule of law also exhibit that heritage? The development of rule of law as well is
something that very much owes the debt to the Bible because that biblical worldview
gives you the idea that there's a moral dimension to law. It shows you that a ruler is subject
to law as well as ordinary folk. And it describes a God who is a covenant making God, a contract
making God. And the extraordinary thing about this covenant making God is that he allows
human beings to hold him to his side of the bargain. Now if that's the character of God
that he makes covenants and abides by them, clearly he requires human beings to do likewise.
