WEBVTT NOTE Nineteenth Century Conservative Protestant Theory and the Biblical View of Property 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.360 Okay, the subject of the thinkers that I'm going to talk about in most of this paper 2 00:00:06.360 --> 00:00:10.240 sort of falls somewhere in the middle after Calvin, but before Rockefeller. 3 00:00:10.240 --> 00:00:16.360 So I'm going to talk about primarily 19th century conservative Protestant theologians 4 00:00:16.360 --> 00:00:24.640 and how their thinking was shaped by their conservative Protestant theological tradition 5 00:00:24.640 --> 00:00:29.400 up to that point, and also Scripture itself. 6 00:00:29.400 --> 00:00:39.160 And I think what made me want to revisit this literature, I've drawn upon this for a book 7 00:00:39.160 --> 00:00:47.760 that I've hopefully am close to completing, is with the election of Obama, it seems like 8 00:00:47.760 --> 00:00:52.120 the, what we call the religious left is feeling their oats. 9 00:00:52.120 --> 00:00:57.960 Here I present to you, a series of white papers, specifically people like Jim Wallace and Sonjeners,]. 10 00:00:58.800 --> 00:01:03.480 a blog devoted to faith-based interventionism called God's Politics. 11 00:01:04.360 --> 00:01:10.520 And recently they provided an excellent foil, they provided a values audit of Obama's budget. 12 00:01:10.940 --> 00:01:18.160 He claims to have coined the phrase, he says, Wallis does, and it's entered the lexicon of the value audit of a budget. 13 00:01:18.160 --> 00:01:23.520 This is what he says about, this is what Wallace says about Obama's budget, quote, 14 00:01:23.520 --> 00:01:27.560 it contains major investments in the president's three priorities, significantly expanding 15 00:01:27.560 --> 00:01:32.200 healthcare coverage, focusing on climate change reduction and developing renewable energy 16 00:01:32.200 --> 00:01:35.800 and investing in education, early childhood programs, strengthening and reforming public 17 00:01:35.800 --> 00:01:41.200 schools, expanded opportunities for college, all of which will benefit low income people. 18 00:01:41.200 --> 00:01:46.280 So it's chock full of values, but one value that both Obama's budget and Wallace ignores 19 00:01:46.280 --> 00:01:49.040 And this is of course the value of private property. 20 00:01:49.040 --> 00:01:55.240 So what I wanted to do was to provide sort of a comparison and juxtaposition of or just 21 00:01:55.240 --> 00:02:02.180 use the sort of the current say religious left Protestant interventionist perspective 22 00:02:02.180 --> 00:02:09.000 on property and compare that to and show how that's in opposition to an important strain 23 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:15.080 of 19th century American Protestant thought and scriptural passages that comment on the 24 00:02:15.080 --> 00:02:17.560 and the Ethics of Property. 25 00:02:17.560 --> 00:02:22.120 Historically, you can trace back, clear back to the Gospels, 26 00:02:22.120 --> 00:02:26.280 a line of thought that has affirmed and defended 27 00:02:26.280 --> 00:02:29.120 private property, certainly in general. 28 00:02:29.120 --> 00:02:31.280 This begins in the patriarchs. 29 00:02:31.280 --> 00:02:35.000 You also find it in the broader scholastic tradition. 30 00:02:35.000 --> 00:02:40.000 And also, as Timothy Terrell just pointed out, 31 00:02:40.040 --> 00:02:45.040 at least inconsistently in the literature of the reformers, 32 00:02:45.080 --> 00:03:07.080 This line of thought had some impact on 19th century Protestants, both of whom saw themselves as theological descendants of reform thinking, Calvin, Luther, etc., and also those who didn't really think of themselves as much, the Baptist tradition. 33 00:03:07.080 --> 00:03:20.080 The first 19th century Protestant theologian I want to comment on is Francis Wayland. He was a Baptist minister and educator who was president of Brown University for 28 years. 34 00:03:20.080 --> 00:03:35.080 He, I believe, was born late 1790s and was highly influential. He explained the Christian ethic of property in his treatise on ethics called The Elements of Moral Science. 35 00:03:35.080 --> 00:03:40.860 Science, and what turns out to be a common approach amongst Protestant Christian theologians 36 00:03:40.860 --> 00:03:47.660 writing about the ethics of property, Whelan viewed the right of property as a divine ordinance. 37 00:03:47.660 --> 00:03:51.880 Not just a positive convention, but a divine ordinance that God reveals to us in three 38 00:03:51.880 --> 00:03:52.880 ways. 39 00:03:52.880 --> 00:03:58.720 Our conscience, the general consequences of society either embracing or rejecting property, 40 00:03:58.720 --> 00:04:00.920 and Holy Scripture itself. 41 00:04:00.920 --> 00:04:04.680 For instance, all people, he argues in his book, all people as soon as they are old enough 42 00:04:04.680 --> 00:04:08.680 to begin to think, perceive the difference between mine and yours. 43 00:04:08.680 --> 00:04:18.680 Possessive pronouns are used in all known languages and people naturally feel that whoever violates property rights or their own property rights is wrong and unjust. 44 00:04:18.680 --> 00:04:30.680 Secondly, Waylon points out God teaches us that the ethics of property, he teaches us that private property is ethical through the observed consequences of either upholding or violating the right to property. 45 00:04:30.680 --> 00:04:38.680 Weyland notes that in those lands without the right to property, people tend to labor only enough to manage their own individual subsistence. 46 00:04:38.680 --> 00:04:42.680 They tend to neither accumulate capital, goods, nor plan for the future. 47 00:04:42.680 --> 00:04:50.680 And consequently, without private property, quote, the human race must perish or exist in wretchedness. 48 00:04:50.680 --> 00:05:01.680 Weyland further developed private property rights, defended private property rights and developed its implications for economic society in his Elements of Political Economy. 49 00:05:01.680 --> 00:05:10.680 This work was the leading economics text written by an American in its day and was so popular that taking into account total college enrollment at the time, 50 00:05:10.680 --> 00:05:17.680 Weyland's book had more per capita sales than Paul Samuelson's economics. So it was pretty popular and influential text. 51 00:05:17.680 --> 00:05:22.640 Well, in that book, Whalen explains that the motive to productively use capital can be 52 00:05:22.640 --> 00:05:29.640 destroyed by either common ownership of property or by theft, and Whalen shrewdly notes that 53 00:05:29.640 --> 00:05:37.120 theft can be perpetuated or perpetrated by either individuals or by the state, which 54 00:05:37.120 --> 00:05:42.200 he classifies as the most destructive form of theft, is when the state gets involved 55 00:05:42.200 --> 00:05:49.160 through Confiscatory Taxation and other means of restricting the use of private property. 56 00:05:49.160 --> 00:05:57.980 Wayland was a group of Northern pre-Civil War Protestant thinkers that a recent historian 57 00:05:57.980 --> 00:06:05.080 of thought has termed the clerical economists. This group included Wayland, John McVicker, 58 00:06:05.080 --> 00:06:10.880 an Episcopal priest who taught political economy at Columbia College for 40 years, Alonzo Potter, 59 00:06:10.880 --> 00:06:18.800 and an important Episcopal bishop and Henry Bethaic, a Presbyterian layman who taught 60 00:06:18.800 --> 00:06:23.760 at the University of Pennsylvania from 1836 to 1855. 61 00:06:23.760 --> 00:06:27.840 All these northern Protestants promoted a high view of private property and free economic 62 00:06:27.840 --> 00:06:34.120 policy basically with certain exceptions here and there. 63 00:06:34.120 --> 00:06:39.960 And so that there was this tradition of at least northern Protestant thought that affirmed 64 00:06:39.960 --> 00:06:45.520 Private Property and applied it in a way that promoted a free economic policy, free market 65 00:06:45.520 --> 00:06:47.760 economic policy. 66 00:06:47.760 --> 00:06:52.040 Another noteworthy Protestant who advocated the ethical imperative of private property 67 00:06:52.040 --> 00:06:58.760 was the important Southern Baptist pastor, educator, and chaplain to the Confederacy 68 00:06:58.760 --> 00:07:00.760 as he was known, Basil Manley. 69 00:07:00.760 --> 00:07:07.120 Manley noted that God instituted private property and consequently God's social order necessitates 70 00:07:07.120 --> 00:07:13.280 The Defense of the Right to Private Property. In a sermon that he preached on a fast day 71 00:07:13.280 --> 00:07:17.360 at the request of the governor of Alabama, he told the congregation that, quote, 72 00:07:17.360 --> 00:07:22.080 the rights of property are established by the creator. Respect for them is essentially not only 73 00:07:22.080 --> 00:07:27.040 to the well-being of society, but to its very existence. If we don't have private property, 74 00:07:27.040 --> 00:07:33.520 we have no society. Now, Manley was important not just as a pastor, but also as an educator. 75 00:07:33.520 --> 00:07:38.560 Later, he was the president of the University of Alabama for many years. 76 00:07:38.560 --> 00:07:42.960 As the president of that institution, he taught political economy and he used Whelan's text 77 00:07:42.960 --> 00:07:47.080 as the text for the class. 78 00:07:47.080 --> 00:07:50.480 And he followed very closely Whelan's perspective. 79 00:07:50.480 --> 00:07:58.200 So Whelan was primarily a pro-property, free-market guy. 80 00:07:58.200 --> 00:08:04.400 Finally, these lectures are also pro-property, free market in perspective. 81 00:08:04.400 --> 00:08:09.000 Not unlike Mises, Manly believed that private property was, quote, co-evil and commensurate 82 00:08:09.000 --> 00:08:13.300 with any step in social progress. 83 00:08:13.300 --> 00:08:18.920 Baptists and Episcopalians did not have a corner on the ethics of private property. 84 00:08:18.920 --> 00:08:24.440 Moving past the Civil War, Charles Hodge, the towering Northern Presbyterian theologian, 85 00:08:24.440 --> 00:08:27.560 also provided an important argument for private property. 86 00:08:27.560 --> 00:08:33.660 In his magnum opus, Systematic Theology, which was published in the 1870s, when he comments, 87 00:08:33.660 --> 00:08:39.880 he goes through and comments on all of the different commandments that was presented 88 00:08:39.880 --> 00:08:40.880 by Moses. 89 00:08:40.880 --> 00:08:47.200 In the Commandment Against Theft and the Commandment Against Stealing, he says very explicitly 90 00:08:47.200 --> 00:08:51.720 and matter of factly, God has instituted a divine right to property. 91 00:08:51.720 --> 00:08:56.460 And he goes on to elucidate in this section that the violations of the right to property 92 00:08:56.460 --> 00:09:03.660 include theft, fraud, and indeed communism, noting wisely that quote the right of property is 93 00:09:03.660 --> 00:09:08.380 ordained by God and cannot be violated without incurring his displeasure and the certain 94 00:09:08.380 --> 00:09:15.260 inflictions of his divine punishment. Southern Presbyterian theologian and pastor R.L. Dabney 95 00:09:15.900 --> 00:09:24.300 also concurred. He, similar to Whalen, he defended private property in a later book, 96 00:09:24.300 --> 00:09:31.820 probably the latest book that I quote from. His Practical Philosophy was published in the 1890s. 97 00:09:33.020 --> 00:09:38.540 He said that I'm going to provide three lines of argument to defend property. First, the 98 00:09:38.540 --> 00:09:44.780 experimental and prudential. Second, the scriptural. And third, the logical and ethical. So it's a 99 00:09:44.780 --> 00:09:47.820 sort of triumvirate that's broadly similar to Wayland's perspective. 100 00:09:48.940 --> 00:09:52.780 Dabney explained that all civilizations have recognized private property as a basic 101 00:09:52.780 --> 00:09:56.140 Principle for the Development of Society and as such part of the natural order. 102 00:09:56.140 --> 00:10:00.500 While criticizing the Romantic poets, as he called them, who longed to return to a property 103 00:10:00.500 --> 00:10:07.140 less state of nature, sort of like Rousseau, he explained that, quote, the scanty products 104 00:10:07.140 --> 00:10:11.020 of the spontaneous powers of nature can never be increased until the institution of private 105 00:10:11.020 --> 00:10:13.540 property is made permanent and sacred. 106 00:10:13.540 --> 00:10:16.240 The mythical poets were simply silly. 107 00:10:16.240 --> 00:10:20.780 Their age of community was not the golden, but the iron age, the age of squalid want 108 00:10:20.780 --> 00:10:22.580 and hard savage misery. 109 00:10:22.580 --> 00:10:26.660 It is the institution of private property which brings the Golden Age, her ever-increasing 110 00:10:26.660 --> 00:10:33.700 abundance for her happy and multiplying children and securing the enjoyment of her blessings. 111 00:10:33.700 --> 00:10:38.780 The Christian view of property begins with the understanding that we hold property as 112 00:10:38.780 --> 00:10:41.220 stewards of God, who ultimately owns all there is. 113 00:10:41.220 --> 00:10:46.460 In fact, the whole earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, is what Psalm 24.1 tells 114 00:10:46.460 --> 00:10:47.460 us. 115 00:10:47.460 --> 00:10:51.260 So our property is God's gift, and this is how Dabney perceived it, that property is 116 00:10:51.260 --> 00:11:15.260 Dabney also wisely notes that an existential fact of the created order is that use of this property is individual. Therefore, if God has given man the earth to use for his glory, it must be that he has distributed particular units of the earth to individual persons so that they can use them to fulfill God's cultural mandate. 117 00:11:15.260 --> 00:11:24.560 Now I go on in the paper to then point out that not only do these Protestant thinkers 118 00:11:24.560 --> 00:11:30.540 link the right to property to sort of our natural conscience and to the consequences 119 00:11:30.540 --> 00:11:35.560 of having property or not having property, but also very explicitly to Scripture. And 120 00:11:35.560 --> 00:11:39.160 so I go into a section where I talk about what I call the biblical view of property 121 00:11:39.160 --> 00:11:44.400 or the Christian view of property. Wayland, Hodge and Dabney all appealed explicitly to 122 00:11:44.400 --> 00:11:48.760 The biblical texts in their arguments for property and clearly we find in the Old Testament 123 00:11:48.760 --> 00:11:54.660 many precepts against acts of theft, you know, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill. 124 00:11:54.660 --> 00:11:59.200 The prohibition against theft is also affirmed, however, in the New Testament where Jesus 125 00:11:59.200 --> 00:12:04.280 indicates that not stealing is a commandment to be kept by the rich young ruler. 126 00:12:04.280 --> 00:12:09.540 The biblical ethic, there's other passages there you don't have time to go into. 127 00:12:09.540 --> 00:12:13.360 The biblical ethic forbidding theft includes abstaining from fraud. 128 00:12:13.360 --> 00:12:16.280 We find in Proverbs verses like this, 129 00:12:16.280 --> 00:12:18.360 A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, 130 00:12:18.360 --> 00:12:20.840 but a just weight is his delight. 131 00:12:20.840 --> 00:12:23.620 Unequal weights and unequal measures are both alike, 132 00:12:23.620 --> 00:12:25.520 an abomination to the Lord. 133 00:12:25.520 --> 00:12:27.360 Abomination, by the way, is a bad thing. 134 00:12:27.360 --> 00:12:32.360 The encroachment of someone else's property 135 00:12:34.040 --> 00:12:36.560 by moving recognized property boundaries 136 00:12:36.560 --> 00:12:38.600 is likewise prohibited. 137 00:12:38.600 --> 00:12:41.760 And additionally, besides outright acts of theft, 138 00:12:41.760 --> 00:13:11.760 The New Testament also instructs that the Christian ethic of property includes the right to voluntary exchange, and this is implied by passages that teach that being secure in one's property includes the 139 00:13:11.760 --> 00:13:16.880 The ability to do with that property what one wants as it relates to interpersonal relations 140 00:13:16.880 --> 00:13:20.880 provides he does not aggress against someone else. 141 00:13:20.880 --> 00:13:23.800 Me, Calvin Beiser, has written some really good stuff on this. 142 00:13:23.800 --> 00:13:31.960 In Acts chapter 5, for instance, which is a passage that a lot of interventionists and 143 00:13:31.960 --> 00:13:39.360 even socialists like to appeal to as a justification for intervention or socialism, in Acts chapter 144 00:13:39.360 --> 00:14:09.360 In chapter 5 you find the historical account of the demise of Ananias and Sapphira for lying to the Holy Spirit and what happens of course is that Ananias with the full knowledge of his wife sells a piece of property and asserts that they were giving all of the proceeds to the Church in Jerusalem all the while holding back some revenue for themselves and the Apostle Peter confronted Ananias and says, quote, while it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? 145 00:14:09.360 --> 00:14:11.360 This is your property. Why did you do this? 146 00:14:11.360 --> 00:14:14.360 He says, you have not lied to men, but to God. 147 00:14:14.360 --> 00:14:19.360 And then Ananias is struck dead, and his wife comes back, 148 00:14:19.360 --> 00:14:24.360 says essentially the same thing as Ananias did, and God dispatches with her as well. 149 00:14:24.360 --> 00:14:31.360 So Peter expressively says that their property was theirs to do with as they saw fit. 150 00:14:31.360 --> 00:14:37.360 In Matthew chapter 20, we find a parable about the Kingdom of God 151 00:14:37.360 --> 00:14:41.760 God, where Jesus tells the story of a master who hired different laborers to work different 152 00:14:41.760 --> 00:14:44.040 amounts of time but paid them the same amount of money. 153 00:14:44.040 --> 00:14:47.880 In response to complaints from the laborers who worked the longest but received the same 154 00:14:47.880 --> 00:14:53.200 pay as those who worked the shortest, the master who represents God says, quote, friend, 155 00:14:53.200 --> 00:14:54.720 I am doing you no wrong. 156 00:14:54.720 --> 00:14:57.320 Did you not agree with me for a denarius? 157 00:14:57.320 --> 00:14:58.800 Take what belongs to you and go. 158 00:14:58.800 --> 00:15:05.040 I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. 159 00:15:05.040 --> 00:15:09.460 Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? 160 00:15:09.460 --> 00:15:15.000 Or do you begrudge my generosity? 161 00:15:15.000 --> 00:15:19.240 The moral force of this parable relies on the acceptance of the principle that the owner 162 00:15:19.240 --> 00:15:23.760 of property can do with it what he wants as long as he does not violate someone else's 163 00:15:23.760 --> 00:15:25.000 right to property. 164 00:15:25.000 --> 00:15:29.720 As Weisner concludes, quote, justice in economic relationships requires that people be permitted 165 00:15:29.720 --> 00:15:38.480 to exchange and use what they own freely so long as in so doing they do not violate others' 166 00:15:38.480 --> 00:15:39.480 rights. 167 00:15:39.480 --> 00:15:43.780 Now I would not say that the main point of the parable was to defend property rights, 168 00:15:43.780 --> 00:15:49.960 but I would say that the moral force of the parable as it applies to the kingdom relies 169 00:15:49.960 --> 00:15:58.240 on the acceptance of the ethics of private property. 170 00:15:58.240 --> 00:16:03.080 So how does this apply to policy in general? 171 00:16:03.080 --> 00:16:09.440 Well the 19th century Protestant theologians recognized that ethics of property applies 172 00:16:09.440 --> 00:16:20.000 to economics by mandating a free society, a free market, a market in which people have 173 00:16:20.000 --> 00:16:24.960 the right to engage in voluntary exchange. 174 00:16:24.960 --> 00:16:31.760 The limits against theft apply not just to individuals, but also to the ruler. Individuals 175 00:16:31.760 --> 00:16:39.800 who are not allowed to engage in theft, it is true that the Biblical ethic of property 176 00:16:39.800 --> 00:16:44.680 means that the rulers are not allowed to engage, or individuals are not allowed to engage in 177 00:16:44.680 --> 00:16:51.140 theft. It also implies that the state is not allowed to engage in theft. And also, if the 178 00:16:51.140 --> 00:16:58.540 The right to property implies that individual citizens have the right to use their property 179 00:16:58.540 --> 00:17:03.540 freely as they so choose, including engage in voluntary exchange, that the state has 180 00:17:03.540 --> 00:17:09.860 no ethical right to be able to stamp out voluntary exchange. 181 00:17:09.860 --> 00:17:14.140 So the implications of the Christian doctrine regarding private property are relatively 182 00:17:14.140 --> 00:17:15.420 straightforward. 183 00:17:15.420 --> 00:17:19.700 As Wayland defines it, the right to property, quote, is the right to use something in such 184 00:17:19.700 --> 00:17:24.380 Christian manner as I choose, provided I do not so use it as to interfere with the rights 185 00:17:24.380 --> 00:17:25.380 of my neighbor. 186 00:17:25.380 --> 00:17:30.260 Later, he also says this, quote, each one has a right to use what is his own exactly 187 00:17:30.260 --> 00:17:31.580 as he pleases. 188 00:17:31.580 --> 00:17:36.660 If society interfere by directing the manner in which he shall appropriate it, it is an 189 00:17:36.660 --> 00:17:38.460 act of injustice. 190 00:17:38.460 --> 00:17:44.780 Good intentions, therefore, on the part of any Christian to achieve a social end are 191 00:17:44.780 --> 00:17:45.780 not enough. 192 00:17:45.780 --> 00:18:12.780 A truly Christian economic policy must not merely be seeking ends that are perceived as desirous or even specifically Christian. 193 00:18:12.780 --> 00:18:18.780 An economic policy that is in agreement with Christian ethics must also achieve its ends with ethical means. 194 00:18:18.780 --> 00:18:25.780 The theology and ethics of a diverse group of 19th century American Protestant theologians and pastors provide good counsel 195 00:18:25.780 --> 00:18:30.780 as we attempt to accomplish divinely sanctioned ends using divinely sanctioned means. 196 00:18:30.780 --> 00:18:35.780 It is understandable that Christians feel compassion when others less fortunate must endure harsh working conditions 197 00:18:35.780 --> 00:18:41.780 or find themselves in bankruptcy or must try to support a family on what we think are very low wages. 198 00:18:41.780 --> 00:18:51.780 The Christian Ethnic of Private Property, however, requires that we do not resort to acts of violent aggression or theft in order to alleviate the suffering of the downtrodden. 199 00:18:51.780 --> 00:18:57.780 Just as we are not allowed to use the owner of the state to force people to go to church, we are not allowed to force people to give to others. 200 00:18:57.780 --> 00:19:01.780 We are not allowed to use the power of the state to keep people from entering into voluntary contracts. 201 00:19:01.780 --> 00:19:09.780 We are called to be charitable to those who need it. We are called to be merciful to the poor and see that widows and orphans are not oppressed. 202 00:19:09.780 --> 00:19:14.340 Justice demands, however, that we use our own resources to help those in need and 203 00:19:14.340 --> 00:19:19.140 to convince others voluntarily to do so. Lobbying for government intervention in 204 00:19:19.140 --> 00:19:26.980 the economy to do by force or to use force to force other people to do so, 205 00:19:26.980 --> 00:19:30.340 lobbying for government intervention in the economy to force others to do so, 206 00:19:30.340 --> 00:19:35.340 violates the right to property and therefore violates the Christian ethic.