The people at the Acton Institute do not believe in an absolute right to property (or to contract as a derivative of the former) and it’s misleading to portray it as Libertarian if by L you mean “absolute property right.”
Catholic Social teaching is clear on this. The right to property is a God-given and basic human right (and freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor is also), but these rights do have a “social mortgage” on them, that is, may be abridged for the sake of the common good. Any system that takes them away largely or entirely is incompatible with natural law and Catholic teaching, any system that makes them absolute is also. This is the teaching of Rerum Novarum, Centesimus Annus, Laborem exercens.
The debates, for Catholics, are going to be about the exact nature of “common good” limits on private property. Acton Institute advocates subsidiarity as the key–whatever social good limits are placed should be placed at the lowest, most local level where they are more likely to respect the human person, more likely to arise from face-to-face personal encounter (also God-given and basic). Claims that huge federal bureaucratic limits on freedom to own and enjoy property are justified by the “common good” should be treated with utmost suspicion.
Most of the Catholic bishops tend to ignore subsidiarity and favor big-government solutions based on “common good” reasoning. Acton Institute is simply pointing out the ignoring of subsidiarity. It is not advocating laissez-faire capitalism of the Libertarian type.
If you need a foil for the extreme form of property and contract rights Libertarianism, Ayn Rand would be a lot closer than Acton Institute. They do arise out of the 18thc secularization. Acton Institute and other Catholic “neo-conservatives” are often lumped in with these, but in fact Catholic social teaching of Rerum Novarum and following draws on pre-Enlightenment sources. This is also true of the much maligned “individualism” of Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard Neuhaus. Though accused of excessive individualism, in fact they fully recognize a common good mortgage on property rights.
I would also suggest that the American Founders recognized that, even after the “secularization” of the 18thc. Pure Libertarian absolutists are out there, but I don’t think one can portray the American Founders, the Acton Institute, or the so-called Catholic Neo-Conservatives as being among them.

As far as Berman’s historical analysis is concerned, he takes valid points and loads more historical freight on them than they will bear. This is true of his earlier, much hailed, book on the revolution of the Gregorian Reform in the 1000s–clearly it was a major turning point but that all of the things Berman claims were birthed by it originated there, is a stretch. I suspect something of the same sort is happening here.
The Devil’s usually in the details.

Phil (#1) — I am quoting directly from Acton’s website: “[p]rivate property and the freedom to contract are fundamental human rights, as each person is entitled to enjoy the fruits of his labor.” This draws, insofar as I can tell, directly from Locke and and perhaps also Nozick. I enjoy some of Acton’s stuff, but they do seem to me to be using subsidiary to reinforce libertarianism.

wow great topic. i’m glad people like berman are at least working through these issues and bringing them to the forefront a little.

David and Phil (#1,2,3),
Help those of us who are not trained in these things to know what the implications are? Or, “put the cookies on the bottom shelf” for some of us. I am interested in the ideas. For example, is this about a big business enterprise having “the right” to take my house and property for an alleged “greater good” of the community (as is reported in the news from time to time)?

The right to property is a God-given and basic human right (and freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor is also), but these rights do have a “social mortgage” on them, that is, may be abridged for the sake of the common good.
Phil, can I ask you what biblical basis we have for property rights? perhaps you’ve already addresseed it somewhere, and I’ve missed it. if so, I apologize. but from what I can tell, property rights are more in line with enlightment political thinking and have no real basis in scripture.
in fact, one of my critiques of the Acton Institute (granted I’ve only read one of their books – Money, Greed, and God – but I check their blog often) is that the concepts of Jubliee or gleaning have no real fit within their theory of economics or “human rights.”

John (#5) — I’ve never heard of the right of big business to take your property — but there are lots of complaints about big government doing so. You may be referring to the Kelo v. New London case, which involved a government taking of property as part of a redevelopment plan. The redevelopment plan involved private entities that would develop the condemned land for commercial and residential purposes. Kelo is a very controversial case because eminent domain is supposed to be used only for public purposes. That a “redevelopment plan” involving private commercial developers is a “public purpose” is a dubious proposition, which I would not want to defend — i.e., Kelo is a bad decision.
But how about, for example, the public debate and rhetoric over health care? How much of that debate is cast in terms of the government impinging on individual property rights? Are those really the appropriate terms of debate from a Christian perspective?

Quoted from Acton Institute’s site: “[p]rivate property and the freedom to contract are fundamental human rights, as each person is entitled to enjoy the fruits of his labor.”
Exactly my point. To own property is a fundamental [but not absolute] right. And Acton Institute did not put im “absolute.”
What would it take to falsify the quote from Acton Institute: “Private property and freedom to contract are not fundamental human rights” and “no person is entitled to enjoy the fruits of his labor.”
Surely we do not want to go there, do we? All Acton Institute is saying is that to deny the right to own property is wrong, to deny the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor is wrong.
I think the error lies in misreading “fundamental” as absolute. The right to property is fundamental. But there can be a common-good set of limits on it without denying its fundamental reality. Instead of this proof-text from the website, read a bit in Acton Institute stuff and I think you’ll find all sorts of common-good limits placed on this fundamental right. Acton Institute is not against the common good and its misleading to portray it as such.
But the common good may not be abused as a justification for any kind of socialism or communitarianism or bureaucratic state that denies all or most private property rights. There’s a sliding scale from absolute property rights to absolute denial of property rights. Most of us are in the middle and the debate has to be about the exact limits and extent of common good limits on property rights. To portray the Acton Institute as being at one end is just plain wrong.

What a disservice to the organic development of contract law in the Anglo-American tradition. Contract law was confined to the courts of equity at common law. Through the common law, developed a whole host of societal protections based on the bargaining power of the parties, frustration of purposes, misrepresentation, and fraud. These protections furthered the basic understanding that unjust or fraudulent promises should not be enforced. However, for the most part, agreements between parties should be left alone and enforced.
This is a Christian understanding of human freedom, fallibility, and humans as image-bearers of Christ. In a civic society, notions of jubilee and gleaning are fantasies. The best we can hope for, against the encroachment of a secular state, is freedom of individuals to pursue certain ends according to his or her own convictions.
North Park University ’08
Michigan State University College of Law ’11

What a disservice to the organic development of contract law in the Anglo-American tradition. Through the common law, developed a whole host of societal protections based on the bargaining power of the parties, frustration of purposes, misrepresentation, and fraud. These protections furthered the basic understanding that unjust or fraudulent promises should not be enforced. However, for the most part, agreements between parties should be left alone and enforced.
This is a Christian understanding of human freedom, fallibility, and humans as image-bearers of Christ. In a civic society, notions of jubilee and gleaning are fantasies. The best we can hope for, against the encroachment of a secular state, is freedom of individuals to pursue certain ends according to his or her own convictions.
North Park University ’08
Michigan State University College of Law ’11

Phil (#8) — I think you’re making a false distinction between “fundamental” and “absolute.” When the Acton website says property and contract are “fundamental” rights and connects that to the right of each person to enjoy “the fruits of his own labor,” that is an explicitly libertarian argument.
Here is how Ayn Rand put it: “Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property?by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort.”
What is the difference between this quote from Rand and the quote from the Acton Institute? In either instance, is there any notion of “stewardship?” A “steward,” remember, manages property that is owned by someone else.

Quoted from Acton Institute’s site: “[p]rivate property and the freedom to contract are fundamental human rights, as each person is entitled to enjoy the fruits of his labor.”
Exactly my point. To own property is a fundamental [but not absolute] right. And Acton Institute did not put im “absolute.”
What would it take to falsify the quote from Acton Institute: “Private property and freedom to contract are not fundamental human rights” and “no person is entitled to enjoy the fruits of his labor.”
Surely we do not want to go there, do we? All Acton Institute is saying is that to deny the right to own property is wrong, to deny the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor is wrong.
I think the error lies in misreading “fundamental” as absolute. The right to property is fundamental. But there can be a common-good set of limits on it without denying its fundamental reality. Instead of this proof-text from the website, read a bit in Acton Institute stuff and I think you’ll find all sorts of common-good limits placed on this fundamental right. Acton Institute is not against the common good and its misleading to portray it as such.
But the common good may not be abused as a justification for any kind of socialism or communitarianism or bureaucratic state that denies all or most private property rights. There’s a sliding scale from absolute property rights to absolute denial of property rights. Most of us are in the middle and the debate has to be about the exact limits and extent of common good limits on property rights. To portray the Acton Institute as being at one end is just plain wrong.

Tyler (#10) — if you’re suggesting that Harold Berman has done this “disservice,” you might want to go back and hit the library stacks a little harder. Berman was the preeminent historian of law and religion of our times. Every scholar working in the law and religion field — and I mean every one, conservative, liberal, or in between, — goes to Berman as a first source. What you’re missing in your construal of the historical narrative is everything that came before the English common law as it developed through the 18th and 19th Centuries. Berman goes back to the Medieval sources and shows the Christian roots of all those equitable doctrines you mention.
You also said: In a civic society, notions of jubilee and gleaning are fantasies.
I respond: I’m not sure what you mean here by a “civic society.” You mean a civil democracy? Why would that be the case? Let’s say a pharmaceutical company is awarded a patent on a valuable medical compound. Why would it be fantasaical to suggest that the company be required to leave some of the fruits of that grant — i.e., some doses of the medicine — for the poor who can’t afford to pay the on-patent price?

[Sorry, the captcha messed me up again and somehow dumped me back to an old comment. This is the one I intended to post just now.]
Dopderbeck,
The Ayn Rand quote does not say absolute either. Proof-text are not going to help us. The key to whether the Acton Institute is as Libertarian as Ayn Rand lies in what else both of them say. Acton Institute does recognize the “common good” limits on property rights–it’s there in their overall picture. Ayn Rand Institute recognizes some, but not nearly as much. But the first step is “critical empathy.” From your opening situating of Acton Institute as absolutist on property rights, I suspect that you are coming at this with a bit of a bias. For the sake of critical empathy, you need to set that aside. Otherwise, when you read more thoroughly in Acton Institute stuff, you’ll tend to see the sort of absolutism you presupposed, which apparently is what the commenter who read their stuff but didn’t find Jubilee there so wrote them off (I don’t remember his/her name and can’t scroll back now to find it).
I don’t think there are any absolutist property rights people out there, or at least not many. By Ayn Rand Libertarians are closer to the absolutist end of the spectrum than Acton Institute is.
And both of them are nearer the “freedom” end of the spectrum than Social Democrats of Europe or advocates of big-government “common good” limits here or most of the Catholic bishops (who are big-government types) or the Jim Wallis types or “let’s bring back the Jubilee” types are.
There are good arguments to be made from various location on this spectrum. But the discussion is not helped by portraying Acton Institute, which defends property and contract freedom out of the Catholic social teaching framework by applying negelected subsidiarity principles as being at the same place on the spectrum as the Ayn Rand people are.
It’s not just that Acton does operate out of Catholic Social Teaching (CST). That by itself is a useless catch-phrase. Extreme big-government Catholic liberals always wrap themselves in CST but conveniently ignore Subsidiarity.
All the “free-market” people located about where Acton Institute is on the spectrum are saying is that free markets generally speaking do a better job of applying the “common good” limits to private property rights than do faceless massive scale bureaucratic regulation appliers of common good limits.
They may be wrong about that, but there is a body of literature in economics out there that suggests they have a point. Advocates of various kinds of bureaucratic state/Democratic Socialism etc. tend to overlook the ways in which centralized planning and regulation, while well-intended, create injustice. Extreme libertarians sweep a different set of problems (exploitation of workers in absence of good regulation) under the rug.
Acton Institute does not advocate no regulation at all. It simply points out the fact that under the guise of regulation (whether Jubilee type or welfare-state type or European Social Democracy type), exploitation can often arise.
I really meant it when I said, the Devil’s in the details, esp. the unsavory details about whichever system each of us is in favor of–we tend to ignore them.

By civic society, I mean a modern liberal democracy. This discussion, separate from the work of Berman, does a disservice to the organic history of Anglo-contract law and political liberalism. You suggest that using the violent force of the state to compel the labor of one organization for use by another favored group is a desirable end. This does violence, not only to the 13th Amendment, but also to the fabric of our society.
The Acton Institute is merely conserving the social institutions that have developed over time, while furthering the moral, philosophical, and theological influences that contributed to those institutions. It is a fools errand to reinvent the wheel of contract law based on some theological good, such as jubilee. It is neither desirable nor possible.

Dopderbeck wrote “I think you’re making a false distinction between “fundamental” and “absolute.”"
Sorry, I just have to really push back hard against this. The distinction between fundamental and absolute is crucial to the matrix out of which Acton Institute comes, as it was for the Founders and has been historically through much of history. The distinction between fundamental property and fruit of labor rights and absolute rights of that sort is just as plain as the nose on my face in John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus, Laborem exercens and in Leo’s Rerum Novarum. I’m sorry, I did not invent this distinction. It’s embedded in Catholic Social Teaching and, I would argue, in common sense. If you want to dismiss it as something I read into the prooftext from AI, you can do so, of course. But you are incorrect.
If “fundamental” on the AI website means absolute, then they are denying all forms or “common good” limits on property and labor.
But they simply do not do that. They recognize eminent domain, they recognize and obligation to freely chosen philanthropy, they recognize a wide range of government regulation of business and commerce.
If you insist on reading AI’s “fundamental” as “absolute,” then you and I are going to be talking past each other for ever. But far worse than that, you will be caricaturing AI, whom you set up as your foil for this post.
I think you need to go back and do a lot more assessment of where the free market Catholic democratic capitalists like Acton, Neuhaus, Novak etc. are coming from. They are routinely dismissed as absolutist laissez-faire capitalists by their Catholic liberal CST opponents as well as by the Chestertonian Distributist and paleo-conservative Burkeans. There are nuances of difference between the paleos and the neos on these issues. But I find that the paleos unfairly demonize the Novak/Acton/Neuhaus types as “extreme individualists” and by extension, absolutists on property rights. That’s wrong. It’s equally wrong for the liberal Catholic CST advocates who may well surround you at Seton Hall to play the “laissez-fair absolutist” card on Acton Institute and others like them.
Like I said, everyone except those at the very extremes of the spectrum accept some common good limits on property rights.
Our debates need to be about exactly what these limits are and how whether they have unintended consequences that turn what at first seems like a good, Christian, jubilee, common-good regulation into a different kind of exploitation of the marginal and poor.

Phil (#14 and 16) — well, I think you’re setting up straw men, then. I never said Acton was in favor of “absolute” property rights. I said they were “libertarian.” You equated “libertarian” and “absolute,” but now that you’ve backed off that view, I’m not sure what the argument is about.
Tyler (#15) said: “You suggest that using the violent force of the state to compel the labor of one organization for use by another favored group is a desirable end.”
I respond: I did? Where did I say that? Can you respond to my actual example: that of a patent granted to a pharmecuetical company? Recall that a patent is something that is always granted with conditions, including the Constitutionally-mandated condition that it be for a “limited time.” Is placing a “tithing” or “jubilee” requirement on a patent a form of state “violence?”

Phil (#16) said: “Our debates need to be about exactly what these limits are”
I respond: how do you respond to my specific example of pharmaceutical patents?

The captcha system messed me up. I wrote a response to Almond603 but instead of posting it, the captcha repeated my no. 8 as no. 12.
I can’t reconstruct my reply to Almond603 but did presuppose it in some of my later posts.
Basically, Almond asked for biblical basis for property rights and offers the Jubilee process as, unless I mistake Almond’s point, a denial of property rights.
My reply:
All through Scripture people are shown as owning and disposing over property and as enjoying the fruits of their labor. This is grounded in God’s granting of dominion/stewardship over all creation to man.
Jubilee does not deny the sort of non-absolute property rights I have advocated here and that Acton Institute advocates. Jubilee was a reminder to ancient Near East Hebrews of God’s having granted dominion in the first place.
Acton Institute accepts the original dominion as a “common good” limit on absolute property rights. So do I–it provides the floor for everything else that Rerum novarum, Centesimus annus, Laborem exercens say about common good limits and fundamental property and labor rights.
Where I disagree with Almond is that a “biblical” approach to these issues would use the Jubilee diachronic reminder of God’s stewardship as a key way to instantiate common good limits. I see no reason to make that particular application of a good principle that I and Novak and Acton Institute all accept to our particular socio-political situation.
Medieval Christian kings “owned” all land. They parceled it out in fief to vassals, who in turn parceled it out to peasants to work. The kings had no absolute right to property but had received it as stewards from God. The vassals obviously had no absolute right but neither did they have no fundamental rights. The peasants had no ownership at all but they did have rights use of the land, including for their descendents, so that they would have a means of supporting themselves.
I am not advocating a return to this but am simply pointing out that no one ever thought of absolute property rights, that everyone recognized, biblically, that all we own and our labor is given us from God and we are stewards of it.
Absolutist monarchs upset some of the safeguards, arrogated all power to themselves, provoked reactions from the bourgeoisie. In a very complicated process, land ceased to be the most important form of property and so the old reminders of stewardship and common good limits no longer applied. New wealth was increasingly in money capital that permitted ownership of means of production. New ways for Christians to remind themselves and society of the “common good” limits were needed. At first this was merely the obligation to philanthropy, which did not work and could and was used to rationalize unjust exploitation of workers. Utopian small-c communists and Marxism reacted, properly, against that. Centralized bureaucratic regulation of capitalist industry was the American reaction in the late 1800s, Social Democracy was the response in much of Europe. All of these are variants on how to apply the common good limits to the fundamental right to property. Leo XIII entered the fray with Rerum Novarum, criticizing the Marxist cure as worse than the capitalist disease but pointing out that laissez-faire capitalism also ignored the fact that our property ownership derives from God-given stewardship and is not absolute.
But almost no where in this history does one find an advocacy of absolute property rights. Where it is found, it’s roundly criticized from all sides, including the CST from which Acton Institute, myself, and Novak-Neuhaus operate.
All of us are biblical because we assume that God really meant it when he gave us stewardship/dominion, thereby rendering our ownership not absolute but common-good delimited. Natural law and common sense tracks this exactly.
Conceivably the Jubilee might be a way to remind us of and limit any claim to absolute property rights. I don’t think it’s a good way. But just because AI doesn’t think Jubilee is the way to assert the common good limits doesn’t mean AI is not biblical.
To make “jubilee” the key criterion for being biblical and not unchristianly Libertarian strikes me as misguided.

Dopderbeck
“Phil (#14 and 16) — well, I think you’re setting up straw men, then. I never said Acton was in favor of “absolute” property rights. I said they were “libertarian.”"
Sigh.
You offered Acton as libertarian, as an illustration of an extreme, Enlightenment-based approach to property rights.
I pointed out that Acton is not that extreme and I used the distinction between fundamental and absolute to try to clarify why we were miscommnicating.
You then challenged me on the distinction.
I believe you are wrong to portray Acton Institute as maintaining extreme (Libertarian) views on property rights. When I challenged you, your proof text used the term “fundamental.” Was I wrong to infer that you thought it to be an extreme form of Enlightenment-secular individualism to assert that the right to property is “fundamental”?
My original point was that AI is not that extreme and, if you need an extreme individualism, you need to look elsewhere.
My argument for my claim was that AI accepts CST. CST does make the distinction between absolute and fundamental. In CST one can assert a fundamental right to property without denying some fairly strong “common good” limits on property rights. The spectrum from AI to Catholic Socialists depends on just what kinds of and degrees of “commmon good limits” they believe in and more than that, on just what mechanisms are best for applying common good limits (free markets rather than centralized bureaucracy, to be crude about it).
However, because AI does accept common good limits, it is not a good foil for your purposes. I was asking you to reconsider your choice of AI to illustrate an extreme position.
See, I’m with you in the need for common good limits on contract law individualism. The conversation you wished to stimulate is a good one. But I think you slipped into the common view, on the center left, that people like AI or the neo-cons are radical individualist, absolutists. AI is on your side. They have views about how the relatively less regulated markets do a better job of common-good limiting of absolute property rghts. You may think they are wrong about that and have better mechanisms to propose. But to portray them as the commmon-good-denying or even common-good-minimalizing libertarians is, I think, a rabbit trail.
They don’t deny common good limits. They differ radically from “progressives” regarding the mechanism for the common good. Progressivces routinely portray them as denying common good limits. This is unjust and misleading, but not surprising.
When I raised the issue of where AI fits on the spectrum, initially, your response was a prooftext with “fundamental” in it.
All I set out to do was point out that “fundamental” is perfectly compatible with even a fairly strong “common good” mortgage on property. I used the distinction between “absolute” and “fundamental” to explain my point because that distinction is found in CST and Acton does come out of CST, even if in a different reading of CST than “progressive” Catholic CST advocates, including most bishops.

Dopderbeck
“Phil (#16) said: “Our debates need to be about exactly what these limits are”
I respond: how do you respond to my specific example of pharmaceutical patents?”
I need to get back to my real work soon. I don’t see anything specific in your post about pharmaeceutical patents. Was it in one of your links? Or has the bizarre scrolling on this blogsite just obscured it?
Some form of patent rights is needed to encourage R and D. It can be abused. This is a legitimate place for government regulation.
I will be very, very, very, very surprised if Acton Institute denies that this is a legitimate place for regulation. I would expect AI would however be warning that much of what is offered in the guise of regulating abuse, in this case of patent ownership, is actually a form by which governments abuse power and manipulate.
The Devil is still in the details–that is, the details of patent law–the challenge is to write patent laws that protect a decent return on investment in R and D without creating loopholes to permit the abuse of ownership of patents.
I don’t know the answers to that. I can’t see that you were specific either.
Look, all I’m saying is that Berman’s “third-way” based on Christian principles is EXACTLY what some “free-market” democratic capitalist advocates like AI or Michael Novak offer. For the life of me, I can’t see the sort of extreme individualism, absolutist property rights even coming out of the Enlightenment, at least not in the American Founders.
Berman is the one who sets up a straw man–not frontally, but subtly, by exaggerating, caricaturing the “covenant”/”contract” distinction in the Enlightenment, then offering a Christian-based medieval communitarian Third Way.
He’s not entirely wrong–there were shifts etc. but he exaggerates, in something like the same way I think you exaggerated when you first located AI at the extreme libertarian end of things.
I have to get some real work done.

Phil (#20) — you’re the one that wandered off the reservation with all this stuff about “fundamental” vs. “absolute.”
And I never used or implied the term “extreme.” Indeed, I said, “these are valid notions, but they are not the whole story.”
I think it’s a mistake, from the perspective of Christian theology, to think of property as a “fundamental right.” That is, in fact, a rubric that owes more to libertarian enlightenment thinking than to the Bible or the Christian tradition. There is too much rights-talk and not enough responsibility-talk in conservative Christian rhetoric about property and contract. We too often seem to take our cues from John Locke than from Moses or Isaiah or Jesus.
The quote from Berman on contract law illustrates this very well, I think. Berman is no left-wing crank, as you seem to think.

In subsequent centuries, many of the basic principles of the canon law of contract were adopted by secular law and eventually came to be justified on the basis of will-theory and party autonomy. It is important to know, however, that originally they were based on a theory of sin and a theory of equity.

Interesting, sure. Important? I dunno. Astronomy arose from astrology, and still uses a lot of its terms. The same applies to chemistry and alchemy. The historical basis for a phenomenon is not always terribly important to its manifestation today.
If there’s a “third way” that depends critically on a religious – and specifically Christian – basis for contract law, that case would need to be made…

Phil,
I’m not saying that the AI is “unchristian.” I really think we’re arguing more about semantic belief than really about fundamental and unarguable elements of the faith. when you say that “all we own and our labor is given us from God and we are stewards of it,” I firmly believe in that. especially when much of the land that is disputed over in the Bible was ordered not by property rights as we as humans know it, but rather by divine judgment (God basically saying to the Israelites, you can have this land that is by all human reasoning, not yours). I’m not saying that it was wrong of God to do this (though by human property law, it is), but rather that God is the ordainer and provider of our property, not us. so we can’t, as Christians, firmly hold to property laws that make no room for God, which I think you would agree with…
perhaps we will never fully agree on this, however, simply because I’m not one who believes in the existence of “natural rights,” and perhaps this is the larger discussion that is going on underneath this discussion on property. just a guess though…

Ray (#23) — I think it depends in part on what “depends critically” means. Obviously there are theories of contract law that “work” reasonably well without reference to specifically Christian / religous foundations. Law-and-economics does a very good descriptive job with Western contract law, and in many cases offers very helpful tools for policy analysis. (Remember, I often use law-and-econ methods in my scholarship). The question is whether this is “enough.” I (and many others) don’t think it is enough. Yes, we can go through the full argument about sociobiology and game theory again — and perhaps that at some point becomes and intractable disagreement. But I’d suggest that the burden of proof is on the sociobiology-of-contract crowd, since that is a very new discipline and offers a radical departure from what has been the norm in Western jurisprudence at least until the Enlightenment and in many ways after it.

almond (#24) — yes I was hoping to surface that question: what are “natural” or “fundamental” “rights”? What does the notion of “rights” mean in Christian theology? We do need to be careful about this term, I think — though not necessarily entirely dismissive of it, as it has a long pedigree particuarly in Reformed theology.

I, too, think there needs to be some clarification on what “rights” means. In relation to God, I’m at a loss to think of anything that we, as the created, could claim as “rights”*. But is that really the purpose of rights? Are rights not identified and reasoned out as part of defining our relationships with a fallen human population? Jubilee or gleaning may be excellent, biblical practices that Christians ought to embrace, but should they not do so voluntarily? Even God does not force obedience on his creation. Given the whole “if men were angels…” line of thought, the concept of rights seems to be a necessary construct that best enables us to manage living together this side of the new heavens and new earth.
*Perhaps there is an argument to be made along the lines of a “remember your promise, oh God…” or a “right” to claim the covenant promised by God, but I think that’s a stretch in the context of this conversation.

I?m late to the conversation so I?ll try to play catch up
I share Phil?s frustration with your characterization:
?Many conservative Christians take an essentially libertarian approach to freedom of contract. For example, the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, a think-tank with strong Catholic ties, states on its website that “[p]rivate property and the freedom to contract are fundamental human rights, as each person is entitled to enjoy the fruits of his labor.” ?
I attended the four day Acton University in 2006 and again in 2007. I found seminars and lectures, as well as the hallway conversations, very engaging. Yes, there were some libertarian types wondering the halls but the mixture of people was diverse. I remember one seminar that was lead by guy from Acton and a guy from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Somehow we got on the topic of the military and the Mises guy made a libertarian case for why we don?t even need to fund a military through the government. At which point the Acton guy began contrasting his views against libertarianism. I?ve heard other Acton folks make these distinctions.
Both my experience at these events and my reading the publications by Acton, support Phil’s take on Acton. Phil is exactly right the Acton folks dwell heavily on the neglected notion of subsidiarity. They believe that the greatest justice and efficiency typically happens when individuals and institutions closest to issues address their own concerns and that government plays a supplemental role and sometimes a corrective role to unhealthy circumstances at the lowest level. They see this decentralization as a natural extension of human agency and God?s entrustment of stewardship to us. The burden of proof is on those who want to advocate for centralized bureaucratic solutions, not for individuals and local institutions to prove their legitimacy. The characterization of Acton as libertarian is incorrect.
As to ?fundamental? rights, I think all of us in the U.S. agree that there is a fundamental right to speech and religion but we also recognize that there are limitations on those fundamental rights for the common good. Those fundamental rights are not absolute. I concur with Phil. Their statement on fundamental rights is not Ayn Rand variety libertarianism.
As to Enlightenment influence, you are giving only half the picture. Yes there is the atomistic individualist side. But there is also the collectivist side ? the idea that through reason, science, and enlightened thinking experts can seize control of society and manage it toward more humanistic ends. All persons and property are extensions of the state used in its pursuit of the ?common good? of the people. Neither Enlightenment extreme is correct from a Christian ethical view but look back of the last century. Under which was there a near steady rate of human material betterment and flourishing and under which was their horrific oppression including the massacre and starvation of tens of millions? Popes have directly confronted this threat in their writings for at least the last hundred years and consistently preached the need for decentralization and subsidiarity. But the Catholic Bishops and Mainline Protestantism have consistently dismissed these concerns in favor a society managed by enlightened experts toward humanistic ends.
Some who are critical of championing property rights frequently make the case that our property rights are not absolute but are provisional under God?s ultimate ownership. That is true. But now having established that the rights are not absolute they then reason that government therefore has the right to appropriate whatever property it sees fit address whatever imbalances or injustices are perceived. That conclusion does not follow from the first conclusion. God, not the state, is the ultimate owner, and God is the one who entrusted ownership to the people. There is a disturbing drift toward substituting the state for the role of God.

As to the biblical basis for property rights, property rights are pervasive in the Bible. Consider the Ten Commandments: ?You shall not steal.? ?You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox , or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.? How can one steal or covet objects if they are not owned by another?
One of the central themes of the OT is that the land and all wealth are ultimately God?s. The OT law clearly envisions families owning their own land, animals, and other property as an act of stewardship before God ? not the collective owning the property and allocating as it sees fit among the people.
Many falsely characterize the jubilee as instrument of redistribution. In reality it was a guard against redistribution. Agricultural land ?sales? were more accurately leases. The buyer?s price was based on the number crop harvests between the transaction and the next jubilee. At the jubilee the land reverted back to family who had permanent ownership. The same with selling one?s labor. The labor lease was based on the harvests until the jubilee at which point the laborer got his labor back. Land and labor were the two primary means of production. God established a system that ensured that each individual family would be participants in the private stewardship of the land, providing for their own needs, and for exchange and sharing with others. I see this as a direct extension of the cultural mandate in Genesis to exercise dominion and stewardship of the land.
We see this value of decentralized ownership/stewardship evidenced in other ways. In response to accusations that Moses is lording it over the:
?Moses was very angry and said to the LORD, “Pay no attention to their offering. I have not taken one donkey from them, and I have not harmed any one of them.”? Num 16:15
Note the declaration about not taking their property ? not even an ass ? as evidence he was not violating their property rights as a ruler might.
Similarly, in Samuel?s fair well address he says:
?Here I am; testify against me before the LORD and before his anointed. Whose ox have I taken? Or whose donkey have I taken? Or whom have I defrauded? Whom have I oppressed? Or from whose hand have I taken a bribe to blind my eyes with it? Testify against me and I will restore it to you.”? 1 Sam 12:3
And when the people clamor for a King:
10 So Samuel reported all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; 12 and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. 15 He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. 16 He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. 17 He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. 18 And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the LORD will not answer you in that day.” 1 Sam 8:10-18
The people reject God as King and want an intermediary ? a centralized authority.
When we turn to the prophets, they do not denounce unequal distribution of wealth ? distributive justice. They attack the perversion of commutative justice ? honesty in transactions ? and remedial justice ? rectifying wrongs done and enforcing property rights. Look at the specific indictments that lead up to Amos? famous ?let justice role down? prophecy in Amos 5:18-24.
Amos 5:10-12, 15
?10 They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth. 11 Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. 12 For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins? you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. ?
15 Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate; ??
The ?city gate? was the place where disputes where heard and settled. The poor were being denied remedial justice. There land and produce ? their property ? was being taken from them. In verse 12 we see bribes mentioned, which is commutative justice. In other passages we read about dishonest scales and measures (Micah 6:11)
The NT has less specific to say about some of these issues but Jesus characterizes his mission as inauguration of the jubilee, harkening back to these OT values.
Nowhere in the Bible do we find evidence of a centralized entity using reason and planning to manage society toward the common good. That is an Enlightenment concept. Decentralized stewardship with appropriate structures that insure commutative and remedial justice is more in keeping with the biblical context.

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I’d also draw your attention to an article I posted last week, Are Christians Called to be ‘Stewards’ of Creation?, by the late economist and theologian Paul Heyne.
He opens this way:
“The King James translators opened the door to confusion when they chose the English word steward to render two entirely different Greek words. An epitropos is a person to whose care of guardianship something has been turned over, the custodian of what actually belongs to someone else. An oikonomos is literally the manager of a household or estate. While this might be the managers own household, so that an oikonomos is not necessarily an epitropos, in New Testament times it usually meant the household of someone wealthy enough to turn managerial responsibilities over to an agent. These two meanings have been blended into the concept of stewardship that prevails among church people. We are to be good managers of the resources with which God has entrusted us as His agents. …
…While I readily concede that we Christians are epitropoi, custodians of the resources that God has entrusted to us, and that we are all called to be oikonomoi, good managers of the households under our care. I cannot agree that any of us is capable of being an oikonomos [in the context of viewing the planet or an economy as "the household.]”
There is the idea in the in the Scripture of creation as God’s temple and were are his functionaries in the temple. But there is no oikonomos of the temple managing the household on behalf of the rest of the functionaries. That vision of oikonomos is a melding of Enlightenment notions of progress with biblical images.

Michael,
Aren’t most of the discussions on stewardship related to the Old Testament, in which case, we’d be dealing with Hebrew, not Greek? I confess, I didn’t read his entire article dealing with this, but he seems to have just used this argument you posted as a springboard to talk about economics as a whole, and not necessarily stewardship of creation…but perhaps I’m missing what the point of bringing in that article is…?

Michael (#29) — I think it’s incorrect to suggest that “property rights were pervasive in the Bible.” The system of land tenure recognized that all the land first belonged to God and was supplied by God to the Tribes, clans and families. The Jubilee and gleanings laws reflect this social dimension of property ownership. Check out David Baker, “Tight Fists or Open Hands: Wealth and Poverty in Old Testament Law” for a good overview.
You are certainly correct that the Jubilee and gleanings laws were not “Robin Hood” redistribution schemes. However, neither were they consistent, IMHO, with modern instrumentalist views of property, nor even with natural law views derived from Locke. After all, God didn’t say to Israel, “you own this land because you have added labor to the state of nature — you deserve the fruits of your labor.” Quite the opposite: God reminds Israel again and again that He brought them out of Egypt and gave them the land by His strength (e.g., Josh 24:13: “So I gave you a land on which you did not toil and cities you did not build; and you live in them and eat from vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant.”)
On the question of Israel’s experience with kings, that’s another subject. I don’t think there’s a straight line from that narrative to today’s debates about “small” vs. “big” government. One thing we might want to keep in mind is that the Davidic Covenant is a promise of a ruler, which is fulfilled in Christ. This suggests that “decentralized stewardship” is not necessarily the Biblical ideal.

#32 Almond603
My unstated connection is that stewardship means you have been entrusted with resources. NT writers explicitly use stewardship metaphorically to indicate non-material stewardship of truths and wisdom that have been entrusted to us by God. But the general theme of the entire Bible is that God is the ultimate owner of all that is and whatever we have we hold because God has entrusted it to us. Thus, stewardship is inextricably linked to private property. Our understanding of stewardship is critical to our understanding of private property.
I?m maintaining that the OT and NT see stewardship as something that occurs with individuals and families not with collective entities. Thus, when others can ? by whatever means ? arbitrarily take resources from others , stewardship is thwarted. Stewardship means that what you have isn?t ultimately yours because it was entrusted to you by God. Stewardship also means that what you have isn?t anyone elses, because it was entrusted to you by God.
With collapse of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Empire, the Caesars needed a way to legitimize their total control. Under the Republic there had been many households that ? in theory ? worked cooperatively but had independence. Augustus began to portray the Empire as a single household with himself as the paterfamilias. The Palestinian peasant?s version of the ?American dream? was to live self-sufficiently and undisturbed in the land. Jesus steps into this context announcing the inauguration of the jubilee with its imagery of God as the head of the household and stewardship is restored to the people. There is no question that this was key theme that Jesus? hearers would have identified with in his teaching.
In essence, what we have is an Enlightenment version of Caesar?s strategy. The world is the human household and a cadre of experts and elites lead by reason, science, and enlightened humanism will be the paterfamilias for humanity. While some Christians have bought into the idea of humanity as a centrally managed household, they reject the absence of God in the equation. They frame it in theological terms. God is postulated as the paterfamilias and the cadre of experts and elites become the oikonomos who will manage the world toward the common good from a biblical perspective. I?m arguing that these Christians are right to reject the godlessness but there is no biblical warrant for a planetary or national oikonomos. God is the paterfamilias. We are entropoi of resources God has entrusted to us and we are each the oikonomos of our households, but there is no collective oikonomos in view. Israel collectively has the responsibility to care for the land and the people but it is accomplished through decentralized stewardship.

#33 David
I hear you saying that the concepts of “property rights” and “stewardship” … resources held in trust for God … are mutually exclusive. I’m saying there is no stewardship apart from property rights.
If God has entrusted resources to you, then that also means God has not entrusted them to me or to anyone else. You have become God’s agent in the management of those resources and in that agency you have “the right” to use that property as you discern God would have it used. Without this right, the concept of stewardship is meaningless.
Yes, God places communal demands on the Israelites in terms of offerings and gleaning. But the big thrust is that the people chose of their own free will to live with generosity toward each other. The focus here is not on achieving shalom through a centralized entity managing society toward a common good. The focus is on people individually acting as stewards of God’s resources, freely choosing to act with ever expanding generosity toward each other. The institution of these communal obligations is supplementary … not central … to the larger vision of a community of generosity.
My point about the appointment of a king is to illustrate what Samuel is indicating what will be lost. The presumption is that the people would value the things being lost and this tells us something about what they valued. I suspect that if we could talk to the First Century Palestinians about a restored Davidic Kingship it would be about a king who kept the borders safe. Who insured the commutative and remedial justice were fairly executed. Who made it possible for the peasant to live self-sufficiently and unmolested on his land. It would not have been a King who managed every facet of us subjects lives through laws and edicts, and confiscated significant portions of their produce to finance his projects.
All that said, I’m not saying we can build a modern economic system out of the Bible. Economic concerns in the Bible deal primarily with consumption and distribution. Production was at fixed level. It could not significantly be altered. Therefore, addressing societal problems was primarily a function of redistribution.
Over the past two or three centuries we have discovered ways to exponentially increase productivity. A key component to that has been amassing capital for productive purposes. That has had enormous impact on how we see property. It posses a number of challenging questions for what constitutes economic justice.
We can’t live as a decentralized agrarian society. Yet I do think the concept that each of us are stewards, acting as agents on God’s behalf, remains an essential ethical concept. And I think attempting to justify extensive interference in the stewardship of families and individuals on the basis that they don’t have absolute property rights … in the Enlightenment secularist sense of property rights … serves as a back door to the other wing of Enlightenment sensibilities where an enlightened cadere of experts and elites directing society is envisioned.

David – you write,

The question is whether this is “enough.” I (and many others) don’t think it is enough.

Enough for what?

Dopderbeck wrote:
“I think it’s a mistake, from the perspective of Christian theology, to think of property as a “fundamental right.” That is, in fact, a rubric that owes more to libertarian enlightenment thinking than to the Bible or the Christian tradition. There is too much rights-talk and not enough responsibility-talk in conservative Christian rhetoric about property and contract. We too often seem to take our cues from John Locke than from Moses or Isaiah or Jesus.”
Do you honestly think that those, like John Paul II and Leo XIII, who say that property ownership is a fundamental right limited by the common good do not include responsibility with the right? Only if you read “fundamental” as equalling “absolute” would it be devoid of responsibility. I did not introduce a straw man.
Do you believe that John Paul and Leo XIII get their “fundamental but common-good-mortgaged right to property and contract” from John Locke?
What makes it a “fundamental” right is God’s giving stewardship over goods in Genesis (as well as natural law).
What makes it a non-absolute fundamental right is the same passage–this fundamental right which is part of our being created in God’s image is nonetheless under the umbrellla of accountability to God.
What’s not to like about that?
Surely the idea that God made us to be able to use our _own_ minds and bodies and the goods and services they produce as our own, giving us dominion over ourselves and the goods of creation (and therefore made us responsible to him for how we use ourselves and our minds and bodies and fruits of minds and bodies) is not derived from John Locke but from Scripture and natural law.
Unless you distinguish between fundamental and absolute you will end up denying property rights and that, it seems to me, is unbiblical and contrary to natural law (I could say that you have to have gotten it from Marx, in order to parallel your false claim that any use of “rights” has to come from Locke, but I won’t go there).
Unless we have some individual, fundamental (but not absolute) ownership of the products of our minds and bodies, of goods and services, we lose the God-given and natural law incentive to use these things responsibly, as God wants them used.
1. If they are not ours to use (fundamentally but not absolutely, that is, we can’t do just anything we want with them, we may not kill ourselves or reduce other humans to slavery or use employees as _mere_ instruments of profit), if they are not in some sense truly ours (fundamentally our property) we cannot be held responsible or acountable for use of them.
2. On the other hand, if they are ours to use absolutely with no common good mortgage on them, then likewise we would no longer be responsible or accountable to God but only to ourselves and might would make right.
One can assert the fundamental right to property without being irresponsible. That’s exactly what Catholic Social Teaching does. It’s biblical and it’s common sense.
Its source is not John Locke. Even if Berman were right to blame Locke, what he’s blaming Locke for would be some sort of irresponsible absolute right to property (laissez-faire capitalism) which I too would reject. But I rather suspect that Locke merely asserted a fundamental, not absolute right.
Your reading of “fundamental” as absolute and thereby your assertion that asserting fundamental right to property necessarily leads to irresponsibility is fallacious and is the source of our disagreement, far from being a straw man.

Regarding point 2 in comment 37, when we empower politicians and bureaucrats to determine what level of confiscation they deem appropriate, “might makes right” is certainly the result. It is not logical to argue that if everybody respected the rights of everyone else that it would result in “might makes right.” Respecting the rights of everyone else is what the libertarian argument is fundamentally about. When people use might to confiscate or injure or murder, that is departure from libertarian principles.
The highest common good occurs when the property rights are protected to the highest degree. There is a high degree of correlation between economic freedom and well being of the people. That is not an argument for pollution or any other item that are called an externality. By polluting, the polluter is infringing on the health and property of other people. Polluters need to be held accountable because they destroy rights.
Thou shall not steal and thou shall not covet are the explicit recognition of property rights. Christians don’t need Locke or even Berman to recognize property rights. They are pretty obvious throughout much of the
Bible, even if they were not explicitly stated.
Certainly much of the Bible, the old testament particularly, describes confiscations, mass murders and such by the powerful rulers and warriors, but that is what Christ came for. There is no justification for them, and Jesus requires recognition of the rights of all, even the weakest and poorest.
Even in the communal settings describe in the New Testament, often pointed to as justification of socialism, the surrounding verses make it clear that even among those who voluntarily joined the community, the individuals periodically sold their own personal property and donated the proceeds to the community as they were in need. The donation was a voluntary act of charity.
True charity is necessarily voluntary. Forced charity, even for the common good, is the foundation for confiscation and the principle that might makes right, as we have seen so many times throughout bloody annals of history.