Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

Having and Losing: Exploring the Eighth Commandment

HAVING AND LOSING: EXPLORING THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT
Then Peter said, …”Look, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?”

Jesus said, …”and everyone who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my name’s sake will receive a hundred fold. “ Mathew 19: 27-29

Introduction

This essay explores a Christian view of having and losing things, money and personal identity. What should it mean for a Christian to own or possess something or a personal identity? Specifically, how should the Jewish-Christian belief in God as Creator shape Christian understanding of owning or possessing things, money and personal identity? Having and losing underlie the Eighth Commandment, in which God prohibits stealing. But stealing assumes rightful ownership or possession. A Christian view of rightful ownership or possession is the subject of this essay.

As Christians, we believe that God is the Creator, Preserver and Governor of everything in the world. God’s relation to everything, as Creator, Preserver and Governor is unique, unlike that of any human ownership. Even if we believe that God gives of life and things, can we hold that we humans have an absolute right of disposal over them; that they are “ours” without qualification?

Or, should Christians believe that anything we have, including even our lives and our identities, in some sense still belong to God and “belong” to us only as loaned or in trust? This belief, that God is the original creator, owner and giver of all that is, including our own existence and lives, might mean that we humans have no absolute, primordial or original right of ownership over anything in this world. If not, then what kind of ownership or possession is right? In this essay we assume that the Christian beliefs about God, the Creator, and about the world as created, complicate the idea of ownership or possession. For Christians, the alternative: full ownership/ no ownership is too simple. This is our working thesis.

Are Christians clear on this? Is this a problem for Christian self-understanding today? Have Christians thought through the problem of ownership and private property in relation to God. Or do many believers accept without question a modern notion of private ownership that gives unqualified right of disposal in relation to things, money and even one’s life and identity, an idea familiar from the economic idea of private property? This essay gives a qualified “yes” to this question.

Certainly many Christians today, among others, have rethought humanity’s relationship to nature, the physical environment. Recent theology of the environment or ecological theology gives voice to this rethinking. However, the flourishing of a non -Christian “green spirituality” on the edge of and outside the churches shows that many perceive Christianity to have had a century- long blind spot about humanity’s relation to nature. Indeed, the Commandment against stealing becomes involved when the younger generation charges past and present generations with robbing them of a sustainable, healthy environment.1

In relation to poverty, indebtedness, hunger and Aids at home and in the developing nations, many Christians have rethought just distribution of scarce resources. Just distribution of scarce recourse for food, energy, health and education raises directly the meanings of rightful ownership and of stealing. Much creative thinking has been done on these issues.2 Yet, to our knowledge, Christian writing in these areas has been one-sidedly moralistic rather than theological, appealing to a Christian norm of justice or mercy rather than addressing the deeper question of ownership or passion, as such. Even in the discussion of poverty, Christians may have a blind spot about the deeper problem of possession and ownership.

At the more individual level, most thoughtful Christians do sense that ownership, in the sense of “absolute rights over, ” is theologically false and morally unacceptable, in relation to their spouses, their children, or themselves. In English language we speak of “having” children, “having” a spouse, and of “self-possession.” But few Christians, hopefully, believe they own their wife, their child or themselves, in the same sense that they think they own their house or car or their money in the bank.3 Likewise, Christian ethical and western legal traditions deny that a person has the right to sell himself or herself, i.e., enslave herself to another. And until the contemporary debate about euthanasia, Christian ethical tradition considered suicide as an offense against God to whom our lives belong.4 Now, however, many persons inside and outside the churches think of their lives as wholly and unqualifiedly at their own disposal. This view is expressed in the context of bioethics, specifically in the abortion debate and in the euthanasia debate. Thus, the issue of ownership of ourselves, or our bodies, is open again.

When talking about an object we have purchased, or about money itself, most Christians today appear to accept without question the concept of private property. This idea is not new in the modern era, but it received great reinforcement in the theory of capitalist economics. The reinforcement came by joining the idea of private property with the idea of individual civic and human rights, and thus with the theory of democratic government. These ideas were joined by a founding father of modern market economy theory, Adam Smith (1723-1790) , author of The Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith and most modern people after him link private property with individual freedom, holding that a right to private property safeguards individual rights and civil liberties in a democratic political order.5 The exceptions would be movements of Christian socialism that have remained on the periphery of the Church.

Closely related to the unquestioned acceptance of private ownership is a parallel, unquestioned acceptance of corporate or national ownership. Blindly accepted by most modern Christians is a key assumption of the modern nation state: a national population, in and through their government, owns the natural resources under, on, over and around its borders.

Historically and today, Christians in the west showed little awareness of the assumption of national ownership that underlay nineteenth century nationalism and colonialism as well as modern anti-colonialism and modern nationalism. Christians, including missionaries to Africa and Asia in the nineteenth century often, though not always, assumed they had the right to enforce their cultural practices on “less enlightened” people.

For these reasons this essay assumes that the meaning of rightful ownership, assumed by the Eighth Commandment, should be opened up and explored. That many Christians today may have an allergic reaction to even exploring this question (a sign that it should be explored) let me make one point clear. This essay will not argue for Marxist/Leninist rejection of private property. The reason is that Communism definitely does believe in rightful ownership, indeed of ownership in the sense of absolute rights of disposal over what is possessed. Classical Marxist theory rejects private property, but asserts without question the right of the State (in the name of the Proletariat) to own and control the means of production.6 Therefore, Marxist-Leninism does not reject the idea of private property but only rejects what they call the bourgeois idea of private property in favor or a corporate ownership.7 This essay is not going to propose that the Christian answer to the question of rightful ownership is corporate ownership. The problem is much too complex for that.
Our Approach

Our method will be exploratory. Like a caterpillar on a leaf, (not to be confused with a blind person who has lost his way!) we will approach the theme of ownership and possession biblically and theologically. We will address the theme of possessing and losing at the level of things and money and at the even more basic level of personal identity, of “having a self.” As a test case, we will explore Israel’s relation to The Land and the theme of possession of life and things in Jesus’ teaching, as well as the idealized picture of the early Christian community in Jerusalem. Then we will examine three theologians, St. Bonaventura , Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther. Bonaventura’s idea of common property and Thomas Aquinas’ appeal to a natural right to take things from another to help another in danger will interest us.. Luther’s interpretation of the Eighth Commandment with the idea of Mildigkeit (mercy and generosity) will interest us less than how he revolutionized the theological and ethical subject of work. Luther’s revolution in the theology of work completely changed Protestant Christian view of work and had enormous implications for how modern people received a sense of self. Finally, we will examine the even broader theme of post-modern critique modern ideas of individual identity, as something a person possesses. The Christian meaning of ownership, of possessing things and personal identity is too fundamental, too complex to settle in an essay. We have chosen a more modest, more manageable approach of probing some Christian resources. Our goal is to make available to Christian readers some possibilities for their own reflection on ownership and possession, the premise of the Eighth Commandment.
The Eighth Commandment in the Second Covenant: Possessing The Land

A basic aspect of Israel’s faith is that God created all things and, to that extent or in that sense, everything that is belongs to God. God is its creator and preserver. God’s will should, therefore, determine how the world should be used, treated or regarded. God, for Israel’s faith was the Lord of ownership.

The first step in exploring this belief reviewing Old Testament divine ordinances that relate to possessions. This review will demonstrate that in significant ways, God’s Lordship as Creator and Guide of Israel’s history complicates the simple binary opposition between “to own”/ “not to own.” That God gives things into human possession is assumed in the whole Bible. God gives Israel, the Covenant People, harvests and a land flowing with milk and honey. Yet we will show, in the test case of The Land, that this possession is provisional and conditioned by God’s continued Lordship over all that is given. The test case of The Land is important both because it’s gift is at the center of the Covenant, but because the issue is central to the modern politics of the Near East.

In the next paragraphs we will review some divine legislation from Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. This review will demonstrate how God’s Lordship as Creator and Covenant Lord conditions the idea of possession and ownership.

First, we establish that private possession or proper ownership is assumed throughout the Bible. In the First Covenant (Old Testament) this reality of ownership is demonstrated by specific divine ordinances related to stealing.

Exodus 22:1ff records God’s ordinance that when someone steals an ox or a sheep, and slaughters it or sells it, the thief shall pay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep. “The thief shall make restitution, but if unable to do so, shall be sold for the theft.” This ordinance clearly assumes that the person robbed is a rightful and proper owner of the ox or sheep. Restitution would make no sense at all if the person robbed were not a victim of a wrong doing, because the ox or sheep belonged to him.

Exodus 22:2: “If a thief is found breaking in, and is beaten to death, no bloodguilt is incurred, but if it happens after sunrise bloodguilt is incurred.” In this ordinance the assumption is that the thief is a wrong doer and that, at night at least, the house owner can use lethal force to protect his property.

Exodus 22:7: “When someone delivers to a neighbor money or goods for safekeeping, and they are stolen from the neighbor’s house, then the thief, if caught, shall pay double. If the thief is not caught, the owner of the house shall be brought before God to determine whether or not the owner had laid hands on the neighbor’s goods.” Again, the reference to “the thief” assumes a wrongful taking of what rightly or properly belongs to another. The apprehended thief’s payment in double, and the procedure to determine whether to caretaker of the neighbor’s goods was the thief both presuppose that the stolen goods “belonged” to the neighbor.

Exodus 22:9: “In any case of disputed ownership involving ox, donkey, sheep, clothing or any other loss of which one party says, ‘This is mine.’ The case of both parties shall come before the Lord; the one whom God condemns shall pay double to the other.” This ordinance deals with disputed ownership. But ownership cannot be in dispute between two persons unless ownership, as such, i.e., “this is mine,” is possible among the Israelites.8

Exodus 19: 13-14: “You shall not defraud your neighbor, you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning.” In this divine ordinance stealing and fraud are named together. This suggests that defrauding the neighbor could be a kind of stealing and assumes, as the notion of stealing does, the reality of rightful ownership. Similar to this ordinance is that found in Leviticus 19: 35-36: “You shall not cheat in measuring length, weight, or quantity. You shall have honest balances, honest weights, and honest ephah and an honest hin.” Having a dishonest balance, weight, ephah and hin is fraudulent. One commits fraud when one does not give the equivalent worth either in money (to the seller) or of goods (to the buyer) and in that sense one party steals from the other party. Again, rightful ownership and private property is assumed.

We have provided enough evidence from Old Testament divine ordinances to demonstrate that within the framework of the Covenant between Yahweh and Israel something like our modern, western notion of private property and private ownership existed. The phrase “within the framework of the Covenant” is italicized, because we will see that this Covenant framework radically conditions or relativists private ownership in relation to The Land.

The theme of the Covenant and ownership touch each other on the question of ownership of The Land. I write “The Land” in caps, because it was and is a basic aspect of the Covenant between Yahweh and Israel. The Covenant between Yahweh and Moses9 had at least four aspects. Yahweh promised to choose Israel as His People among the nations. God has chosen Israel from among all the nations to be “His treasured possession” (Deuteronomy 7:6). Yahweh’s possessing Israel is based on Yahweh’s sovereign choice of Israel to be His People. Yahweh’s ownership of His People is the primordial kind of ownership and may be the basis of ownership in the life of People. As Creator and Lord of the whole earth, God’s will is primordial; hence His choosing of Israel precedes and is the condition for the possibility of all human choices, including choices to possess anything created. Yahweh promised to free this People from slavery in Egypt10; and, He promised to give them The Land, for them and their inheritance forever.11

Israel’s obligation, as the other side of the Covenant, is set forth in the Ten Commandments. As we have stressed in the second essay in this series, the chief of these Commandments is the first: honoring Yahweh alone as god. The exclusivity and primordial nature of Yahweh’s election of Israel to be “His” People is mirrored by the exclusive worship that Yahweh requires of Israel in the First Commandment. In this sense, the First is the chief of all the Commandments and was specifically to be obeyed in the face of the temptation to worship the gods of the peoples. Israel’s duty to dispossess the peoples occuping The Land is based on God’s choice of Israel and God’s promise. The exclusive worship of Yahweh, in contrast to any deflection of loyalty to the worship of other gods 12

These terms of the Covenant bring us directly to the issue of Israel’s ownership of The Land. On the one hand, the Covenant contained the promise that Yahweh would dispossess the existing inhabitants of The Land and give The Land to Israel to possess forever.13 In this sense Israel is given the Land to possess.

On the other hand, this is the Yahweh-given Land.14 Therefore, Israel’s “possession” of The Land is qualified and relativized in at least two senses. The first sense has already been documented in the passages from Leviticus cited in the preceding footnotes. Israel’s continued possession of the Land is only on the condition of separating themselves completely from the religious and moral practices of the nations whom Israel will dispossess under Yahweh’s leadership and power. Disobedience to God, specifically, following the moral practices of the nations, spells the end of the right to possess The Land. Disobedience will “defile” The Land and The Land, or Yahweh, will “vomit” out the disobedient Israelites. This threat is concentrated in the terrible promises of Yahweh collected in Leviticus 26, culminating in the statement: “I will lay your cities waste, will make your sanctuaries desolate, and I will not smell your pleasing odors. I will devastate the land, so that your enemies who come to settle in it shall be appalled at it. And I will scatter among the nations, and I will unsheathe the sword against you; your land shall be a desolation, and your cities a waste.” (vv.31-33).

This brings to a second aspect of how Israelite’s ownership of The Land is qualified and relativized because it is “given” by Yahweh. In the context of describing the ordinances for the Jubilee Year in Leviticus 25:23 we find the following remarkable statement, legitimizing the provision for redeeming ancestral lands which was a chief provision of the Jubilee Year: “The Land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land.” In the 1991 edition of the Oxford Annotated Bible, the following note is attached to this verse: “A statement of the theological premise of the [Jubilee] program: Israelites are aliens and tenants on land that does not belong to them by right but that the Lord has given them as an inheritance. Thus the land is not private property, to be bought and sold speculatively. Although there is no evidence that the jubilee program was ever carried out, the law opposes foreign conceptions of property that resulted in the swallowing up of ancestral holdings.” The note then makes further reference to the story of Nathan’s Field and King Ahab in 1 Kings 21.3. Given the warnings in Leviticus not to intermarry with people from the nations, for fear of being seduced away to following their religious and moral practices, that Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, is not an Israelite is significant. Thus, the prophet Elijah charges Ahab with having “forsaken the commandments of the Lord and followed the Baals.” (I Kings 18:7; 1 Kings 16:31).

The following passage explicitly states both God’s ownership of all that God has created.

So now, O Israel what does the Lord your God require of you? Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord your God and his decrees that I am commanding you today, for your own well-being. Although heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to the Lord your God, the earth with all that is in it, yet the Lord set his heart in love on your ancestors alone and chose you, their descendants after them out of all the peoples, as it is today. (Deuteronomy 10:12 ff)

I think all we have shown in this review of Old Testament legislation is that in relation to one very important possession, The Land, God’s Lordship directly and radically qualifies a notion of ownership or possession. We have not, however, been able to show any direct relation between the Eighth Commandment and Yahweh’s Lordship over Israel or Israel’s faith in God as Creator of all that is. Some relation may exist in Old Testament legislation between God’s mercy to Israel (liberation from slavery) and Yahweh’s ordinances about honesty between Israelites in money matters and just treatment of aliens and sojourners. In the Torah, we often read that as Israel was a slave in Egypt and Yahweh had mercy on Israel, so Israelites should treat aliens and sojourners with justice.15

Analogous to linking justice and mercy in treating the alien and sojourner to God’s mercy is the Old Testament legislation prohibiting taking interest in loans to fellow Jews.16 The prohibition of taking interest, later referred to as usury, is, of course important for later Christian economic ethics. The theological point of the Old Testament legislation seems to be that Israelites treatment of fellow Israelites should mirror God’s merciful treatment and God’s righteous. Taking interest, in the context of Israel’s agricultural economy, as in agricultural economies today,17 burdens the already financially needy borrower with a further burden of paying interest on the loan. In this setting, not charging interest avoids harsh and cruel treatment of a fellow Israelite, just as not keeping poor man’s coat overnight avoids harshness and cruelty.

Another indirect relation between Yahweh’s Lordship and the meaning of ownership is the warning, repeated in Deuteronomy, that prosperity in The Land should not lead Israel to forget Yahweh.

Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances and his statures, which I am commanding you today. When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and locks have multiplied, and your silver and god is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, …Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today. (Deuteronomy 8: 17-18)

This warning links forgetting Yahweh with wealth, and may be an important source of statements in the New Testament warning about wealth and riches. But this warning does not directly link the prohibition of stealing with Yahweh as the Lord of the Covenant or as the Creator. For example, nowhere in the Old Testament, at least not in the Pentateuch, do we find a statement saying that God prohibits stealing because, actually God ultimately owns all and no human being can properly own anything in an absolute sense.

However, we have been able to show that Old Testament divine legislation does radically qualify the meaning of Israel’s ownership or possession of The Land. In regard to The Land, the Old Testament shows a different model from the alternative mine/not mine; owned/not owned; personal property/not personal property. The Biblical alternative is God’s property, given over to human beings for proper use.

This notion of Israel’s ownership of The Land is analogous to Adam and Eve’s relation to the garden in which God places them. In the second, later, creation story in Genesis (Genesis 1-2:4a) Yahweh blesses humankind, created in His image, with the words, “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28). In the next verse, Yahweh says: “I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth”; just as God has given all other living things “every green plant for food.” Thus, to human kind, i.e., to male and female in partnership, God gives responsibility for stewardship over the earth. In the historically prior, creation story, Adam and Eve’s, representing humankind’s stewardship, responsibility is even more explicit: The Lord God took the man and set him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” (Genesis 2: 15. ) Eve is created from Adam’s side (showing affinity and mutuality) after Adam is charged with stewardship, but clearly after her creation, Eve shares with Adam the responsibility of stewardship.
Ownership in the New Testament: Jesus’ Teaching and the Jerusalem Church

Turning to the New Testament with the themes of stealing and ownership in mind, we encounter at least four levels of relevant material.

The first and most obvious level is verses in the Gospels and Letters that simply repeat or assume to validity of the Eighth Commandment. Thus, in the story of “The Rich Young Man” (Matthew 19:16-22) Jesus repeats the Eighth Commandment along with several others from the Second Table of the Law as the first answer to the question, “What good deed must I do to have eternal life?” Here we see that Jesus, or the Jesus tradition or the authors of this story receive the Decalogue from the tradition of Israel and appropriate it for the Christian community. 18

In the Fourth Gospel the image of the Good Shepherd is contrasted with the hired hand and the thief and the robber. 19 The hired hand, who “is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, ” allows the wolf to come and abandons the sheep. This comparison implies a standard attitude that stealing is morally wrong. But, as throughout the Fourth Gospel, deeper levels of meaning concern Jesus’ identity as the Son of God and the meaning of belonging to the Son.

Another example of this first level is Jesus’ enigmatic response to the Pharisees entrapping question about paying taxes. “ Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”20 Jesus seems to have intended this answer to be ambiguous; therefore, we should be wary of declaring its full meaning. At face value, however, Jesus’ statement assumes that the emperor has the right to tax, i.e., that the state has the right to collect assets for its purposes. Hence, Jesus’ teaching presupposes, further, private ownership of money, since private assets, whether money or goods, were the subjects of taxation. At this first level the New Testament displays a simple appropriation and reaffirmation of the Eighth Commandment’s prohibition of stealing.

A second, much deeper level, however, is Jesus’ warnings, in a kind of wisdom teaching, about the dangers of wealth and possession. This teaching exists in different forms: parable, sayings, and stories. The common theme is that those within the Kingdom of God should put behind them the world’s concern for increasing material wealth, for securing that wealth, and even for depending on that wealth for meaning daily needs. Matthew’s and Like’s versions of the Sermon on the Mount are sources for this kind of teaching.

In Matthew 6: 19 (i.e., within Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount) Jesus warns against “laying up treasures on earth.” The security of earthly treasure is precarious, because thieves can “break in and steal” and in time, “moth and rust corrupt all earthly goods. By contrast, the disciples should “store up” for themselves treasures in heaven, “where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. “ Indeed, disciples should not “worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink.” Analogous to teaching about the priority of the Kingdom over concern for material wealth is Jesus ‘ calling the rich man who built a second barn to store his goods a fool, because that very night his soul was required of him. 21The point, granted, seems not to be that meeting needs for food and clothing are irrelevant but that no comparison exists between the rule of God over our lives and our control over our worldly goods.

Probably fitting into this same teaching is Jesus’ parable of the man who sold all he had to buy the field in which he had discovered a buried treasure (the Kingdom of God) or the parable of the merchant who sold all he had in order to buy “one pearl of great value.” 22 Similar is Jesus’ telling the “rich young man ” If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 23 The worth of the Kingdom is comparably greater than any earthly possessions.

Related this moral teaching of ignoring or forsaking material possessions for the sake of membership in the Kingdom of God is Jesus’ warnings against wealth and his praise of “the poor.” In the first of the Beatitudes, Jesus describes the “poor in heart” as blessed; in Luke’s version, Jesus simply calls “the poor” blessed. Following the story of the “Rich Young Man” in Matthew’s Gospel is Jesus’ saying, “It will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again, I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”24 Similar in content is Jesus’ saying “no one can serve two masters…. You cannot serve God and wealth.”25

A third level of New Testament texts important for the theology and ethics of possession is the description of the earliest Christian community in the opening chapters of The Acts of the Apostles.

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Acts 2:44-45

Now the whole group o those who believed were of one heart and soul and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common… There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands of houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. There was a Levite, a native of Cyprus, Joseph, to whom the apostles gave the name Barnabas (which means ‘son of encouragement”). He sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the money, and laid it at the apostles’ feet. (Acts 4: 32-37)

The story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1-11 is interesting because it implies that their sin was not in selling their property and keeping the proceeds, but rather was deception. They pretended to give all the proceeds for the poor but, in fact, kept some of the proceeds for themselves. (Acts. 5:2.) This story implies that not every member of the Jerusalem community was supposed to sell all their possessions; but if they did sell something, they were not hold back some of the proceeds of the sale for themselves and give the impression they had donated all.

These verses, with the story of Ananias and Sapphira, are important for understanding early Christianity in Jerusalem.26 Even granting that the author of Luke-Acts idealizes the earliest Christian fellowship in Jerusalem, it seems indisputable that this early Christian group pooled financial resources. In this respect they were similar to the Essenes. But, this description also makes clear that the pooling of resources and the helping of the poor among the Christians were closely linked. Therefore, to conclude that these passages imply a theological or ethical theory that private property is per se immoral goes beyond the plain meaning of the text. The motive for pooling wealth was to show mercy to those in need. A theory that private property is per se immoral is not involved.

Similarly, no theory that private property is as such immoral lies behind the monastic tradition of poverty. Monastic poverty pertained to the individual monk or nun, not to the community, which could become extremely wealthy in money and lands. Also, the link between early Christian holding things in common and later communistic and commune experiments is not clear. The description of common ownership in Acts is closely linked with helping the poor. The modern (nineteenth and twentieth-century socialist, communist and commune experiments) did not have helping the poor at their center. Rather at the center was an attack on the idea of private property as such. Thus, Part III of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, in which Marx and Engels review the history of socialism, does not begin with Jerusalem Christianity but with the struggle between aristocracy and bourgeois in France and England in the eighteenth century. The only kind of socialism/communism interesting to Marx and Engels is that generated by modern class warfare between capitalist exploiters and the urban proletariat in the context of contemporary industrial development. Both Marx and Engels had a very sophisticated sense of historical development and discerned the evolving links between class struggle, the development of work technology and the theory of private property. They saw the difference between Christian pooling of resources to help the poor or to free one from earthly obligations and attacking the very idea of private property as such.

Thus, when Friedrich Engels wrote his essay On the History of Early Christianity, he did acknowledge “notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement.” 27 However, in listing these points, Engels does not mention holding property in common. The first point of resemblance, according to Engels was that Christianity (in Engels’ view) was a movement of oppressed people, just as the urban working class in early capitalist countries was an oppressed class. Engels immediately names the contrast, however, between the two movements. Christianity seeks salvation beyond this world; socialism places salvation in the world. Both, Engels says, are persecuted groups. Engels then jumps to the peasant revolts in the Middle Ages to pick up resemblances between Christianity and the socialism he and Marx advocated. Thus, to say that the Jerusalem Christianity community practiced communism or socialism, in the modern sense of Marxist-Leninism, draws conclusions that Lenin was not willing to draw.

A fourth, and perhaps the most theological level addressing the theme of possession and ownership, is Jesus’ teaching about his relation to the Father and to the disciples. Here, John’s Gospel is most explicit. The repeated theme is that Jesus and the Father are one and that what Jesus teaches, indeed, his own mission and ministry, are not “his own” but is given him from the Father. In this respect, the Father is “greater” than the Son; the Son receives from the Father His teaching and his mission. On the other hand, insofar as Jesus, the Son, does obey the Father and teach what has he has “heard” from the Father, then, to know the Son is to know the Father. In this way, the unity of Father and Son is implied. (John 14: 6: “No one comes to the Father but by me;” John 14:8 “He who has seen me has seen the Father. …Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?”) Jesus’ relation, as the Son, to the Father, transcends a simple distinction between “I” and “Thou.” Personhood in the Son-Father relationship is reciprocally and dialogically defined, even while the Father is “greater than” the Son as He who commissions the Son’s teaching and works.

Similarly, a relation of sharing exists between Jesus, The Son, and the disciples. All that the Son has received from the Father, Jesus will share with the disciples. This occurs through the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send when Jesus returns to the Father and at Jesus’ request to the Father.28

This Johannine theme of Jesus, as the Son, being in the Father and the Father being in the Son, and the mutual sharing between the Father and Son and the disciples, possible through the Spirit, is the basis for the later Trinitarian notions of perichorisis, the mutual indwelling of the Father and the Son (and the Holy Spirit.) But such a notion of mutual sharing, indwelling and participation, makes a simple alternative between possessing/not possessing insufficient. Sharing in what another has: The Son’s sharing in the Father; the disciples’ sharing in the Son and the Father through the Spirit, these relationships transcend the categories of “private ownership.”

Perhaps related to this Johannine complication of ownership and possession is the remarkable Johannine teaching that precisely in Jesus’ most complete act of dispossession, his self-giving of his life on the cross, is also his most intense act of glorifying of the Father. The implication is that God’s own life is self-giving and that Jesus “being lifted up on the cross” glorifies the Father, i.e., makes the unexpected splendor of God visible, precisely because it is an act of total self-giving. 29 This Johannine theme parallels Jesus’ teachings about the seed that must die before it bears fruit and the necessity of losing one’s life if one would save it. 30
St Bonaventura On Things We Can’t Own

St. Bonaventura discusses the Commandment against stealing in his Sixth Collation of his work Collotiones de decem praeceptiis, (Lectures on the Ten Commandments).31 Two aspects of his discussion of this Commandment are interesting. One is his, typical of scholastic theology, analysis of stealing. The second, especially relevant to the theme of possession and ownership, is his notion of time as a good that cannot be owned. This second point offers a weighty consideration for our theme.

Bonaventura defines stealing as taking what belongs to another against the prohibition of God, motivated by greed. 32 By this definition, Bonaventura is able to classify the Israelites’ “despoiling the Egyptians” as not stealing, because they took what belonged to the Egyptians at the command of God.33 Also, dispossessing an violent person of his sword is not stealing, because this taking is motivated by benevolence, not greed.

Given this definition, Bonaventura proceeds to analyze stealing. Simple fraud is stealing something belonging to another. Rapine or plunder (defined as forcible seizure of another’s property) is open, public stealing, involving violence. Robbery is covert stealing, involving violence. Three further kinds of stealing involve trickery (per circumventionem). Each of these involves contracts. One involves the negotiation of a fraudulent pact, and this can take three forms: fraud by false weights, numbers and measures; second, an evil contract, the example being usury. The third form of fraudulent contract is simony (the selling and purchasing of ecclesiastical offices, earnings or pardons). This fraudulent contract is an act of profanity, i.e., literally treating something sacred as profane, i.e., exchangeable for money.

With Bonaventura’s analysis of stealing in mind, we can focus on usury, taking interest for money lent to another. Reviewing divine legislation in the Old Testament, we saw that Yahweh forbade Israelites lending money to another Israelite at interest. Bonaventura gives a theological reason for this, which is our interest in this section.

Usury is an evil contract (pactione iniqua) because it sells something that no individual can own, i.e., time, thus making private what is common. Bonaventura writes: “Si autem fiat cum pactione iniqua, sic est usura, in quia id quod venditur, est commune, scilicet tempus.” (If however fraud occurs by means of an evil pact, this is usury, in which that which is sold is common, namely, time.)

Bonaventura clarifies this point by asking, rhetorically, if I can agree to lending clothing, or a horse or a house for money, why is it wrong to take interest on a loan? He points out that lending a shirt or horse or house is not usury because this involves things, not money. (Sed quaeritur: quare, si accomodo tibi vestem vel equum vel domum pro denariis, non est usura, sicut est de pecunia? Dico quod in veste vel equo vel domo trahitur usus ex re, non ex pecunia; et ideo non dicutur usura. ) Bonaventura thus sharply distinguishes a proper profit from lending things from an improper profit from lending money.

Why, then, is usury prohibited? “Some say usury is wrong because God prohibits it”, Bonaventura observes. But he replies: sed certe est prohibita , qia mala (but certainly it is prohibited because it is wrong.) Bonaventura explains: if I lend you money, something of mine becomes yours. If you, by your industry, gain something from this loan, and I demand some of this gain, I am selling time, which is common and cannot rightly be sold. The amount of money does not become greater or less in value, as can happen with a house or horse or clothing. The amount of money lent must be returned in its totality and integrity. Thus, because from usury a person demands something there is here a perversion of order and the taking of something that is common (perversio ordinis et appropriation communitatis; et debet quilibet sibi de hoc cavere.) 34

Of interest in Bonaventura’s explanation of why usury is wrong is his notion that one person’s earning money based on time is a perversion of order, for time is something “common” which an individual cannot properly own.

Is it plausible ontologically and ethically to generalize Bonaventura’s concept of goods which cannot be bought and sold because they belong to everyone? One thinks in this context of the sharp criticism by such English moralists as Robert Sanderson of the enclosure movement in the seventeenth century. Enclosure involved land owners fencing in, for their private pasturing of sheep and cattle, land previously commonly available to tenant farmers to pasture their own cattle. This enclosure movement, sharply criticized by moral theologians in the seventeenth century in England, dispossessed tenant farmers of common land on which they could base an small but independent economic base. As the enclosure movement progressed, more and more tenant farmers became totally impoverished, reduced either to day laborers, indenture or to total indigence. This was the first step to the creation of a landless proletariat, the pool of impoverished persons that would become the urban proletariat as the industrial revolution began in the eighteenth century.

Today people are properly asking whether water, clean air or the human genome is common property or whether these two can properly become individually owned, patented, bought and sold. Today, the buying and selling of water is common. Clean air has become a matter of the free market, as we see in the international buying and selling of pollution certificates. The issue of whether new genetic materials can be patented and bought and sold for profit is at the center of current moral debate in genetic technology.

St. Bonaventura presents us with a concept of “common ownership” which is neither a collective ownership nor a private ownership. Time, for him, belongs to everyone; it does not belong to the state or to an individual. Notion of things belonging, by their very nature, to everyone in common may become a key ethical category as we face global issues of public ethics.
Thomas Aquinas on Stealing

Thomas discusses the stealing and plundering in the context of his treatise on justice.35 In Article 7 of this Question, he addresses the question whether it is permissible to take from another in case of necessity. (Utrum liceat alieni furari propter necessitatem.) He says that in cases of urgent and evident necessity, for example in case of obvious danger, when no other help is available, it is permissible to take something from another, either openly or covertly. (Si tamen adeo sit urgens et evidens necessitas ut manifestum sit instanti necessitate de rebus occurrentibus esse subveniendum, puta cum imminet personae periculum et aliter subveniri non potest; tunc licite potest aliquis ex rebus alienis suae necessitate subvenire, sive manifeste sive occulte sublatis. Noc hoc proprie habet rationem furti vel rapinae.) 36

As justification for such taking, Thomas refers to the natural order as established by God’s governance (naturalem ordinem ex divina profidentia institutum) whereby lower things are ordered to that which serves human welfare. Therefore if one person has a superabundance of goods and another is impoverished, he who has in abundance should share with he who is in want. (Et ideo res quas aliqui superabundanter habent, ex naturali iure debenture pauperum sustentiationi. )

Thus Thomas teaches that in the case of desperate human need, e.g., urgent danger or destitution, a natural law exists that precedes human law. According to that law, what is lower serves what is higher. Things should serve people. Hence, if things are appropriated from another who has them in abundance, to help another in need, this is not properly robbing or plundering. Certainly we see in Thomas’ teaching here a challenge to a theory of absolute private possession; God’s intention that things serve human need can take precedence over a person’s claim to exclusive and total possession of something.
Martin Luther: Work as Vocation and Identity

In his discussion of the Eighth Commandment in his Sermon von den guten Werken (Sermon on Good Works), Luther says the Commandment is not just against stealing other peoples’ goods or money. The Commandment also concerns shortchanging others through such immoral practices as usury, greed, over-pricing, and cheating by false products, weights and measures. At the heart of the Commandment is the positive virtue of Mildigkeit.37 Mildigkeit combines mercy and generosity. The examples he gives of Mildigkeit are being willing to help others and avoiding seeking one’s advantage. He equates the heart of the Commandment with The Golden Rule.38

At the level of this interpretation of the Eighth Commandment in the Sermon, Luther does not go much beyond common Christian teaching about honesty and generosity. However, the relevance of Luther’s theology and ethics for the topic of possession and ownership is far greater than this. For Luther revolutionized the Christian understanding of work and thus laid the foundation for what some call our modern “work society. ” In our modern “work society” paid labor is both the means of accumulating wealth and of participating in the society and having a sense of selfhood. Luther’s theological reevaluation of “one’s work” has enormous implications for the themes of possession, ownership and the winning and losing of personal identity.

Manual labor and all the work required for the maintenance of life was, up until Luther, considered unworthy, as menial in the negative senses of that world. In classical Greek and Roman societies, slaves did this work, inside and outside the home. In feudal, western society, the lower classes, the peasantry and artisans did this work. Perhaps it is hard for us today to understand the notion of paid labor as something contemptible. This devaluation was expressed theologically in the distinction between the active life and the contemplative life. The vita contemplativa was that lived by monks and nuns, and was superior in value to the vita active, the ordinary life of laity and secular clergy who earned a living by their work. The low evaluation of paid labor continued through the Middle Ages. With Luther came a revolutionary theological reevaluation.

Luther’s transformed this devaluation of work completely in his notion of Beruf (German: calling) or Vocatio (Latin: calling). A man or woman’s calling, i.e., his paid job, or a woman’s expenditure of time, energy, skill, and knowledge in daily tasks and maintenance of life and household, was a means of serving the neighbor. If this service was done with the right motive, i.e., not as a means to earn a right relation to God but as an expression of God’s grace in Christ grasped by faith, this work was holy. Work for the Protestant tradition came, good fruity from a good tree, from the center of the Person who believes. Such work incorporated love for the needy neighbor and was a natural expression of faith as trust in God. Work, far from being devaluated as a menial, worldly necessity, became a means of performing the Second Commandment to love the neighbor. Work, in Luther’s theology, and in later Protestant culture, engaged the Person in his or her individual identity. 39 Thus, Luther attacked the heart of the existing theological justification for and privileging of withdrawal from the world into monastic vita contemplativa.

In modern societies, work is more than doing what is necessary to survive physically and to feed one’s family. Work has become and is for modern men and women the chief means of participating in the society and receiving a sense of recognition and a sense of personal worth. In early industrial capitalism, a man’s work increasingly became both the means by which he supported his wife and children and the means by which he participated meaningfully in the larger society. Paid employment gave adult males the meaning of their identity in a society where identity was sought and found in the secular world rather than religiously. With full-time, paid employment came not only income, health benefits and retirement income. And with this employment came as sense of who one was, one’s identity.

The Feminist movement’s demands for women’s equal place and payment with men in the marketplace is a wider acceptance and appropriation of this appreciation of the personal meaning of work. The modern notion of work as the means of self-development, social engagement, self esteem implied that non-paid work, volunteer work, the work of raising children or caring for elderly parents, was of little value. Doing such works threatens one with becoming “a non-entity.” Thus, the first phase of contemporary feminism fully embraced the modern, patriarchal meaning of work as the means of personal autonomy, personal identity and personal development. The meaning of work for males became the norm or standard for what work should mean for women—an ironic situation, often recognized within the Feminist movement.

This ironic acceptance by most, if not all, first generation feminist leadership of the modern, industrial, male meaning of work involved a crisis of identity for many men. By his work, a man confirmed his value as “bread-winner” and as occupying a valuable place in the society. When women also assumed and acted on this identity giving meaning of paid labor, many men were challenged in their male identity.

However, recently this modern notion of work as the chief means of social engagement and personal worth for a man or a woman is increasingly fragile.40 In the period of mass production, promising full employment in modern societies, this notion of work as the means of personal identity, was viable. Increasingly, however, work in the sense of paid, steady employment, is a rare good, a scarce commodity. In countries like France and Germany, the development of a secure social safety net has brought the problems of unemployment. Globalization means that many labor-intensive jobs are exported to lower-wage areas of the world. Modern societies are realizing that significant unemployment (over 10 % of the working population) is not a temporary, cyclical phenomenon but a permanent fact of global, information-age, service economies. Paid, full-time work will less and less be a means for participation in the society and personal self-development, personal recognition and self-esteem.
Self Possession: The Crisis of Personal Identity

The growing problem of paid employment as a modern means for social involvement and personal identity opens up the much larger issue, that of how human identity is constituted as such. The modern world, western culture since the Enlightenment, set human identity on a new basis, at least philosophically. This modern sense of selfhood is complexly related to our modern scientific, technological culture. The modern sense of selfhood involves possession and ownership in an intimate way. We want to conclude this series of explorations by probing this modern notion of an identity that I possess and indicate how postmodern thinking challenges this modern notion.

We start with a philosophical idea that underlies the modern notion of selfhood as something that I possess within and through myself. Here the theme of ownership and possession becomes most intimate and existential.

The early Enlightenment philosopher, Renee Descartes, by common agreement, is said have established the subject- object split as a fundamental aspect of modernity’s worldview. Descartes distinguished between res extensa (material, measurable things) and res cogitans (mental, or thinking things).41 Human subjects are, essentially, thinking beings, defined in their personal identity by their self-awareness, their subjectivity. Everything else in the world is res extensa, things reduced to their quantitative aspects. From this springs the primordial subject-object split; humans are subjects; things are objects. This twofold division implied a value judgment: subjects were more valuable than objects; humans not only can transcend things as knowing and willing subjects, but they should and dominate things for the benefit of humanity.

Important for our topic of ownership and stealing is how Descartes equates or identifies self-possession and personal identity. Descartes equated personhood with self-awareness, subjectivity. A human person’s identity, his or her res , is constituted in and through his or her self-awareness. In the realm of practice, this self-identity expresses itself in self-determination, i.e., in freedom as absolute disposal of oneself in relation to other selves and things in the world. This notion of freedom as autonomy, as being a law unto oneself, in turn closely links to a specific idea of freedom, with freedom as choosing, which in turn require options, individual and civil freedoms and rights. Indeed, selfhood could eventually be equated with choosing as such.42

At the public level, the worldview of subjects confronting a world of objects to be known and controlled became linked with the methodologies of modern natural science and with technology/industry. The result is the modern industrial, technological, rational world, increasingly globalized. Nature is reduced to its measurable aspects, i.e., to objects, subject to investigation by scientific reason and technological control.43

Descartes idea of a self-constituting self, a personhood grounded in its own self-awareness, or subject-hood, was not atheistic. Descartes appealed to God’s existence as an ultimate guarantee that human self-awareness was not subject to a demonic self-deception. However, the Cartesian (from Descartes) and modern idea of self differed radically from the traditional Christian idea. The Christian idea of self is intrinsically connected to God as Creator, Redeemer and Perfecter, and to the biblical view that hyman being is man and woman created in God’s image. Certainly the Christian view of human being excluded any idea that human beings constitute their own identity.

Much later western, modern philosophy was explicitly atheistic. It contrasted a notion of selfhood as self-constituting, in its knowing and controlling the world, with a notion of human identity as intrinsically related to God. This was a humanism that was also atheistic.

Feminist and post-modernist philosophers have subjected this earlier modern division between subject and object to thoughtful analysis and critique. Not only did they point out the assumed value priority of subject over object. They also are pointing out how the modern self inevitably feels threatened by other selves and by modern couture. This threat comes first from the very logic of the modern idea of self and also from a curious dynamic in modern culture.

The logic of the modern idea of self entails each subject self viewing the other as an alien subject self, threatening its own “space” for knowing and acting in the world. I am I, and I confront innumerable other I’s who experience themselves as a center of their own life world. The other can only be a means and material for my own self-development. The individual self can associate with others to build groups—gender, ethnic, national, racial, class groups. But each group sees itself as an individual center and subject confronting other groups at its own level and at higher levels. Life is experienced as power struggles among and between individual and corporate subjects. The “other” is a danger, a threat to oneself. Child raising and schooling aim at equipping the individual to compete and succeed, to pursue his or her career. Life is divided between winners and losers. Geopolitics is the story of the clash of cultures.

As communications technology has advanced, the assertion of self and of groups in everyday life becomes increasingly theatrical, i.e., a matter of dramatic self-presentation. People view their identity as a “character/persona” that they can choose, and, properly styled, can present as an “event” in public life. This notion of “an event,” prepared by experts and strategically presented to the public through the media increasingly controls politics; sports, business, not to speak of entertainment.

Joining this inevitable logical development is the unexpected dynamic in modern culture whereby the self is threatened by a devouring, anonymous pressure toward uniformity, homogeneity and standardization. The modern technological, secular world generates standardization. Confronting humans as self-constituting subjects is a “counter-world” that exerts a totalizing pressure toward standardization and homogenization. This counter-world essentially involves the mass media; people wear the same kinds of clothing, watch the same TV programs; speak the same languages, engage in the same global economy, listens to the same music, pursue the private lives of the same sports and entertainment stars; purchases the same consumer goods; travel to the same exotic places on vacation; have the same dreams and hopes. On the one hand modern western culture is excessively individualistic; each wants to do his/her own thing and be his or her own person and do it his or her own way. On the other hand, our modern culture is increasingly standardized, homogeneous and uniform.

A third layer of the loss or threat to self also arises from this primordial modern subject-object division. Human knowledge becomes divided into two kinds. Knowing the world of objects, by means of the methods of modern science, is “objective, scientific” knowledge. Knowledge of human beings, the human sciences (philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, etc. ) , attempt to apply natural scientific methodology to human beings. But this methodology requires objectifying and quantifying the self, and this contradicts the modern self-understanding that the self is a subject. As a reaction to this objectification of the subject the human sciences have increasingly become historical, i.e., understanding the self as subjects in time, subjects defining themselves in their historical contexts through their actions and passions.

This historicizing of the self, however, ultimately threatens humans in their sense of uniqueness. Understanding individuals and groups in the context of their time and place slips into explaining human beings as products of their time and place, a radical relativizing of the human self. Selves who learns to consider themselves as merely products of their time and place are threatened selves..

The self that feels threatened by other competing individual and group selves, that feels threatened by a counter world that is oppressively homogeneous and standardized, by a sense of historicity that relativizes all values and sense of identity is not a happy self. It is an anxious self, a lonely self, a self that can also be a depressed, confused and violent self.

The public disclosure of personal pain, of sadness and victimization is a major theme of western, cultural life. TV programs, autobiographies, films are stages on which victims en-act their sexual victimization, their political persecution, their cultural exclusion, their economic deprivation for public display and consumption.44
CONSCLUSION

This essay is a series of probes into ownership of things and identity. These probes have been in the Bible, Medieval and Reformation theology, Trinitarian theology and modern and postmodern thought. The only clear result may be to confirm our initial thesis. The Jewish -Christian understandings of God radically complicate the idea of possession. Believing that God is the Creator, Redeemer and Perfecter, one cannot continue to imagine that one has absolute rights over anything he or she possesses, including one’s very self. Modern humanism, insofar as it has also been an atheistic humanism, is an especially interesting development. If our reading of the cultural situation is correct, atheistic humanism is no reliable path to a selfhood that one can securely possess.

A self and things received from a Creator and Redeemer are intrinsically not one’s own in any absolute sense. One aspect of this insecurity is the possibility of robbery, of stealing, which the Eighth Commandment directly prohibits. An altogether positive aspect of this insecurity is that having a self and having things is a gift that relates us to God, and this opens the possibility that our self and our world can be in saving and renewing hands.

David Scott (Ph.D.)

Murnau, Germany

June 2006

As a conclusion, I will make a brief reference to a notion of identity or personood informed by Christian theology. A Christian view of human identity must be theological, because Christians , with Jews, believe humans are created in God’s image. The issue of hhuman personhood must begin with the notion of personhood in God.

For Christians, Personhood in God involves the classical tradition of the Trinitarian understanding of God as One Nature in Three Persons. Recent understandings of the Trinity have stressed that Personhood in the Trinity is not a static identity but a is dynamic, dialogical and relational . The distinctions among the Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are determined by their mutual relations, not by an identity they possess apart from each other. And these mutual relations are co- inherent such that their three-ness also constitutes a Unity or Oneness. The mutual indwelling and self-giving of the Three Persons, within the Life of God, involves both sharing and self-giving in the very idea of divine personhood.

In human terms, the paradigm of divine personhood means that simplistic ideas of static identity and separate individuality are not helpful to discuss a Christian idea of human being. Human identity constitutes itself in relationship and in interaction. And this interaction is most radical in mutual self-giving which is love. This mutual self-giving constitutes the self as individual identity at the same time as it involves the self in community. Thus, in relation to the modern demonic alternative between absolute autonomy and loss of self to the standardized, collective, objectivied self Chritianity has a creative and fruitful alternative to present.