Stealing from God
S. M. Hutchens on the Eighth Commandment
The Eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal,” met for many months a block in my own mind, for I had surprising difficulty determining to my own satisfaction what stealing was. Theft, it would appear, is unlawful deprivation of ownership, but ownership is a problematic concept whose connections with the mind and will of God are easily obscured by thinking in terms of political and legal philosophy. Whether we lean toward the communalist or individualist pole, we tend to think of property held privately or in common as a natural right recognized and protected by the state. These conceptualizations carry a strong secular bias and should not be entirely satisfactory to people who believe in God.
Those of us raised in American churches during the cold war years may remember this part of the theological argument against communism: Judeo-Christian faith assumes the existence of private property, for it has laws against theft that are meaningless without private ownership. The clear line between mine and thine, it was implied, could only be changed by a bona fide legal transfer or an act of God. This comported well with the doctrine of grace in which all that we are and have are gifts of God, for a gift is something given and received. It does not pass from one to another unless there is a severance, a donation in which the proprium of the giver becomes in the same sense and to the same degree that of the receiver.
But we were also just as clearly taught the other side of the doctrine of grace: that all we have in this world, including our very selves, belongs to God, and that we are stewards, caretakers. No one is his own, but bought, with all he has, as a slave, at the full disposal of the Lord. The first of these ideas—the Bible’s cognizance and condemnation of theft—supports the idea of ownership, individual and corporate; the second makes all theft essentially theft from God, and relativizes, some would say obliterates, any claims to private ownership. Early Christians had all things in common, did they not? What could be a more fitting example of fraternal life in the household of God, where each receives according to his need, and each gives according to his ability?
God the Owner, Man the Possessor
In English and American common law the highest form of ownership is in fee simple, wherein property is conceived as granted by the sovereign and held at his pleasure. Holding from the king comports with the views we must take if we believe in a God who is himself, in the final instance, the only real Owner.
This does not, however, efface the laws of possession, but rather makes stealing the wrongful alienation of what by divine donation pertains to another, a definition that accommodates the laws of the state, but to which they are ancillary—obliged to serve the higher claims and interests of “what God hath brought together.” Things pertain to us in varying ways and degrees because it is by these means that God has set the bounds of our habitation—the conditions under which we come into being and pursue our lives. Some of these things that pertain to us are under our control in such a way that we speak of owning them, either individually or collectively. This is only allowable, however, if we remember that we “own” things only in a manner of speaking, in a limited way.
Possession as a gift from God is a concept with variables that encompass the nature and degree of many kinds of having. I do not possess my wife or my children in the same way I possess my home, nor my home in the same way or to the same degree I possess my dinner or handkerchief. In the end, however, all kinds and degrees of possession are contingent upon forces beyond my control that terminate in the will of God, as Job understood. When his children and property were taken from him, he recognized that behind it all was the hand of God—the Lord (not the desert wind or Sabean raiders) gives, and the Lord takes away.
While there are innumerable means of granting and obtaining what may be possessed—from inherited capabilities or the upbringing given by one’s parents, to grants of the state, to the sweat of one’s brow, to mere luck (randomness is one of the most fascinating creatures of God, one of greatest proofs of his sovereignty)—each instance of possession is exactly as secure as God makes it, and from our point of view, both the security and the depth of our association with our possessions may be counted upon only to the degree that we are allowed to know the mind of God on the matter. It is all too easy to confuse secondary means of possession and the rights and privileges we trust accompany them for the primary, and from this arises much of our confusion about what possession fundamentally is, and therefore what theft is.
Tevye, the godly Jew in Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, presents God with a great many reasons why it wouldn’t hurt to make him a little bit rich. God responds by showing him riches he already has, and, as if to drive the point home, adds others of the same sort, to where they become more than the man can bear or comprehend. Whatever misapprehensions Tevye—and those who have grown up in the same Scriptures—might have about God’s way of working, he does understand something that no longer goes without saying in a post-Christian culture: All goods that we have or can hope to have come from the hand of God, who determines the conditions of our existence.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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