This chapter explores the relevance of the Christian tradition to contemporary debates on solidarity in international law and human rights. It positions the genealogy of solidarity within early Christian writings in which the western theological concepts of suffering, love, and salvation are detailed. Linking the Pauline doctrine and writings of early theologians to the processes of modernity – of which notions such as the West, the Global South, good neighborliness, and human rights are a part – the concept of solidarity is traced to a particularly Christian dynamic. As such, the promise of solidarity in international legal discourse, human rights discourse, and refugee discourse is considered as analogous to the way in which forms of messianism manifest themselves through a Christian logic of love, sacrifice, and debt.

Augustine’s doctrine of the totus Christus, the whole Christ with Christ as Head and the Church as Body, developed within his preaching ministry. The doctrine emerges from Augustine’s prosopological exegesis of the Psalms and grows into a theological reflection on the enduring union of Christ and the Church that leads Augustine to say that Christ and the Church share a voice, an identity, and a life. This transforming union gives Christians a new identity as members of the Body of Christ through the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. The life of the Church reflects the love and unity of Christ in its life and action in the world. Because of its deep roots in his preaching, Augustine’s doctrine of the totus Christus can be called a preached theology. That is, it is a theology developed within the context of preaching, both in the preparation for preaching and in the preaching itself.