bring on the lovingoverthrow

The Christian church has exercised and continues to exercise enormous influence upon the way property is held and regarded in the western world.  This fact has been much discussed by environmentalists and theologians who point out that the church's teachings regarding dominion have tended to overshadow its teachings about stewardship. 

My interest is in how the church came to give up what was clearly Jesus' teaching that union with god does not leave room for notions of private ownership.  Whatever was dissipating the strength of that teaching as it was practiced by the earliest Christian communities, a death blow was delivered when those wealthy Romans (who thought the world must surely be ending since Rome had been toppled by the barbarians) sought to insure their salvation by giving their massive estates to the church in such droves that the church itself became one of the wealthiest landowners on the planet.  Control of land became a way that bishops brokered and vied for power with princes until the class of the privileged just beneath them saw a way to take the prize from the hands of them both. 

Although the right of ownership had an arguably noble beginning in that it was a means for throwing off the oppression of corrupt authority, it was nevertheless not designed or intended to insure the embrace and liberation of each and every last one of us on the planet (even though Thomas Jefferson did eventually and naively dream that America was so vast that each man could be given his own small plot).  Those early elite, the ones long before Jefferson, were already in control of lands.  If they were princes they saw that by throwing off the church's power and confiscating its lands, they could use the land to make grants and thus build their power.  If they were simply the wealthy elite, they were tired of having their control of land subject to the whim and fortunes of princes.  In crafting the arguments that fueled the overthrow of the church, they discovered the means to overthrow a great part of the princes' power as well.

(What did the wealthy landowners do with their land once these notions of private ownership gained currency?  They embarked upon a massive program of "enclosure" by which the people who had lived and labored on the land since time immemorial were evicted and forced to flee to the cities where those same wealthy not only hated the people for their poverty, they blamed them for it saying that they were lazy and unwilling to work.  The most heartbreaking thing about this story is that it is not over.  As the notion of private property ownership is spread throughout the world and any nation who will not submit to its requirements is targeted for destruction, people are still being evicted from their ancestral lands and being forced to the cities where they have no choice but to be grateful if some corporation sets up shop and offers them dangerous or debilitating work at less than subsistence wages and with no means to guarantee the education and/or health of themselves or their children.)

The church fathers

One of the early questions we face when talking about economic justice is whether the ownership of private property is a feature of natural law and, thus, some would say, divinely ordained, or is it a feature of law as created by human beings.  If someone finds that ownership of private property is a matter of natural law, they are likely to go on and find that the consequences that flow are also natural, including extreme inequality in access to the means of survival and flourishing and therefore in the distribution of wealth.  Christians should note, however, that St. Thomas Aquinas who reportedly first saved the church from the burden of the Apostolic teaching that ownership of private property is the furthest thing from God's will, did not place the right of ownership absolutely in the individual but in the Sovereign.  In his time that was God via the partnership of church and state.  In our time that is the people.  St. Thomas also recognized it as sinful for us to exclude others indiscriminately when we have appropriated more to our own use than is really needed and that it is not a sin to steal in case of extreme need precisely because God intended and designed earth's bounty for the support of all.  I suspect that St. Thomas felt justified in giving the church a loophole regarding ownership because he thought the Sovereign in the material realm would steward the wealth toward the realization of justice.  Little did he know that the Pope would be complicit with Princes in oppressing, not only the poor, but all who seemed able to thwart their power, until the very privileged rose up and threw off the hold of both church and state claiming that the right to own property belonged, in theory to all people, and in particular to those such as themselves who were already in possession of lands and might, if pressed, make their own claims to the position of sovereign.