Byrnesys Blabberings

My Class on Christian Ethics today had an interesting discussion on property, poverty, ownership, and theft, which was based around Saint Thomas Aquinas exhaustive text "Summa Theologica", but enough for the academia of it, what really interested and enlivened me was the fact everyone had embodied the spirit of practical theology and really tried to apply and respond to it from their context. It is a small class but quite diverse. We have one US southern Pastor, a guy from Ghana, a pastor from Malawi, a Baptist from Scotland, and me an evangelical Englishman!  

The discussion for me, centred around the concept of stealing and giving. Aquinas writes that if in dire need, it is not theft to take something of someone elses property.

if the need be so manifest and urgent, that it is evident that the present need must be remedied by whatever means be at hand (for instance when a person is in some imminent danger, and there is no other possible remedy), then it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another’s property, by taking it either openly or secretly: nor is this properly speaking theft or robbery. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2A2Ae Q66

kind of in the spirit that he details earlier that everything belongs to God, and we are merely "looking after it", while agree with the last point and believe it is a helpful addition to Western minds which are so fanatical about property and ownership to understand property as temporal I think there is an important factor.

Earlier Aquinas mentions (the modernised and wholly paraphrased version) that the reason ownership is helpful is because it helps keep order within society and mean people looks after items that otherwise in a society owned framework would be left for someone else to up keep due to the general laziness default of mankind.

For me this concept is becoming key in my understanding of political and social structures in light of Jesus Christ. For a very long time I have been quite left leaning politically, but it has been motivated more than anything out of a fustration of the seemingly compassionless and hard nosedness of the captalist structure, but I am coming round to believe that in fact communal ownership while an idillic concept, always realises itself within the human setting, and when concepts come into real life, they are tainted by the realitys of human sinful nature, greed, idolatory, covetousness, slothfulness etc.

Not to put a bleak view on things, but we live in a corrupted world, thankfully God has made a way for all to be liberated from this, although this is at least at a certain level located in eschatology (eg. Its only going to be fully fixed when Jesus comes back).

Going back to Aquinas, just before he details this allowance for theft (or taking what you need) Aquinas quotes Ambrose and for me, hits on the heart of the issue, Charity.

"It is the hungry man’s bread that you withhold, the naked man’s cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man’s ransom and freedom." Saint Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologia quoting Ambrose.

This combines Aquinas helpful understanding of property as ultimatly God’s but requires generosity and compassion with the ownership of property.

As I have come to own my first house in the last month, I have been quite blessed by being unable to grasp the concept of "owning" something so large, and that is worth so much money. I say blessed because it has allowed me to understand the house as God’s (he’s a much better landord than my last!) As Christians I think is important to dissect these issues but not to align ourselves with the world who are selfish with their possesions, remembering that our goal is to give glory to God. In Isaiah we can see below hoe God gives us things to give them away…

In Isaiah 58:5-6 God says, “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them … ?" (TNIV)

…of course I am not proposing to give my house to someone, but to use the things you have to serve God and not your own selfish desires.