Divine Institutions: Private Property Rights

From the Biblical Framework Series, Lesson 12

Charles Clough

We’ll start on page 39 of the notes where we deal with the so-called divine institutions. There are some observations I want to make from Genesis because in treating these divine institutions we’re still talking about the Biblical view of man.

We’re looking at the man/nature distinction and how man differs from nature. Last week we dealt with its structure, his conscience, with those characteristics of man that are in analogy with God’s attributes, man’s responsibility and choice in analogy with God’s sovereignty, man’s conscience in analogy with God’s holiness, man’s sense of love in similarity to God’s love, and man’s knowledge in similarity to God’s omniscience. We have these characteristics because we are made in His image.

We want to move to these divine institutions, as theologians have called them, because these describe man’s social structures. I want to introduce these with this note. These are absolute structures. Where we are going to get to see in our time, in our society is it’s quite vogue to interpret these things as conventions. Let me right away deal with two vocabulary words. The difference between a convention and how we’re using the word institution is the debate. Are these things, three things we’re gong to discuss tonight, are they conventions or are they institutions. The non-Christian world tends to hold that these things are mere conventions, and by a convention we mean something that is just arbitrarily selected. You may put on a green shirt or a red shirt or a yellow shirt, that’s an arbitrary decision. We all may agree to put a door there and say “hi” when you come in the door, that’s a convention; that’s something we have arbitrarily established. It’s not necessarily rooted in the way God made us. So the debate today is whether these are conventions, arbitrarily selected by different cultures and different times in history or are they institutions that God Himself built into the system, such that if man breaks these institutions there’s a price to pay. If they’re mere conventions then there may be frictions, disturbances when we move from one convention to another, but there are no real serious penalties involved. On the other hand if what we’re talking about are real institutions, then to violate these means that we violate the structure of how God created us, and there’s going to be consequences to pay down the line.

We want to tie all this together as the archetype of human labor. The first institution we find is that man is going to pattern this same thing, because Adam is going to do this. You have responsible labor. By responsible labor we mean that a person, the laborer plans, he chooses a plan, he’s responsible for that plan, after he gets the plan he executes the plan, and then the work and product of his labor is evaluated. Notice He says in verse 28, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule,” and part of that ruling is then amplified in chapter 2:25, God put man in the garden to do something. Notice that Gen. 2:15 precedes the fall. It’s interesting that labor is not the result of sin. Some people think it is, we’ll get into why they think that when we get into the fall. But initially labor was not considered to be a result of sin; labor was pleasurable, labor was an expression of a person’s creativity. Adam was put into the Garden to take care of it, there is his dominion, in a small little area of the earth, marked out, a garden and he was to take care of that acreage, however big it was. That was his responsibility, to take care of it because God told him to take care of it. Then He gave him certain instructions.

I want to show you that the Genesis text, all the Bible for that matter but particularly these fundamental chapters of creation, set up a framework for almost every area of life. Think of the areas we’ve thought about so far: we’ve talked about language, math, a little about science, philosophy.

We have talked about a number of these areas in the text, now we begin to talk about economics. The second divine institution, page 40, we come to what God set up in Gen. 2:18, marriage. God performed the first marriage. Marriage is not a conventional arrangement.

Let’s think of the picture you get of the second divine institution, and see if we can connect it with the first one. Let’s see if these two aren’t related structurally. The first one was responsible labor, man’s mandate was given to subdue the earth, he was given the garden to take care of; that was his project; that was his assignment. Given that fact, that the first man had an assignment, the fact that he needed a helper suggests that he never could have finished the assignment without the helper. Does this begin to fit? What this says is that both the man and the woman operating as a team is what accomplishes God’s project, and it starts out fundamentally, here is the first origin, the first social structure. Yet you can take sociology course after sociology course and they never touch this because marriage is considered to be a late development in the history of mankind, it’s a mere social arrangement, a convention, not an institution.

Marriage has its meaning in its productivity, and what comes out of a marriage, not just babies, they come out too, but it’s more than that, it’s a culture that comes out, it’s the produce of this marriage, this team. By the way, it is a division of labor that occurs first here. So we have the second divine institution.

We move to the third one, page 41, addressed in Gen. 2:24, the third divine institution is family. Family is the basic, most fundamental social unit in the Scripture. I want to make a point about this, we don’t have time to do this but if we get into the Mosaic Law I want to take you to some passages that are provocative for us because we’re not used to doing this. We’re used to going out and buying a car, for example, and titling that car to either the husband or the wife, sometimes joint ownership, but we tend to title property in our country to an individual. What is unique about the Mosaic Law is that property wasn’t entitled to individuals, it as entitled to families. Land was not held by individuals, land was held by families. The economic structure, the basic unit of legal possession was the family. We’ve gone a long way from that. Our basic fundamental unit of possession in our society is the individual; that’s the difference. And it’s clear in the Mosaic Law and where it’s really clear is when you get into today what is called inheritance.

There are no such things as inheritance taxes in the Bible because taxes are supposed to be when you change possession, the gain-or of a possession is supposed to pay tax on that. But if property is titled to family, then when the father and mother die and that property goes to the son or daughter, that’s not a change in ownership. Since it’s not a change in ownership there’s no taxation. There is no such thing as inheritance taxes in the Bible. Inheritance taxes came into our society, ironically, through Karl Marx, and he had a reason for it, not some benign revenue raising function, inheritance taxes were designed to crush the family; it was very clear Karl Marx’ reason for inheritance taxes. So there’s this agenda that operates in back of all these things and we just have to be harmless as doves, wise as serpents, as Christians living in our world. Let’s not be naïve about these little agendas that go on behind the scenes. The Bible says that the family is the basic ownership.

See how these flow, they all are hooked together. All these institutions are hooked together and the family is the way dominion spreads. This is a very unromantic view, I’m not knocking the romantic side, there’s a whole book written to the romantic side, called the Song of Songs. We’re not studying that now, all we’re trying to do now is to show that these institutions have an inherent mutual supporting structure, responsibility and choice, marriage and family are all part of the way man grows and dominates.