Eighth Commandment

Theft

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Lesson: Theft

Genre: Speech

Track: 75

Dictation Name: RR130AP75

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture is Ephesians 4:28, and our subject: Theft. “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.”

The eighth commandment declares Thou shalt not steal. It prohibits theft or stealing. Theft or stealing is the taking of another man’s property by coercion, or fraud, or without his {?} coerced consent. Coerced consent, therefore, does constitute theft.

Theft is also any cheating of another, harming his property, or destroying its value. It is not necessary for the robbed person to know of the theft for it to be a sin. Thus, to ride on a train or a bus without paying the fare is theft, even if the bus company does not know that you have done it.

Now, theft can be accomplished in three ways basically. First, there is direct theft. You put a gun to a man’s ribs and you rob him, or if you put your hand in the till and steal, or you doctor his books, or you defraud or cheat him directly.

Second, as against this simply theft, complex theft is when we are one of a group robbing another. This means more than a member of a gang. It can be that we are party to it in that we are the receiver of the stolen goods, or we have knowledge and do nothing about the prospective theft, or it can mean that we are someone who profits by the theft, even though we take no part in it, and we knowingly profit from it.

The third form, whereby theft can be accomplished is by indirect or legal means. This means passing laws which steal from the rich or the poor, or the middle classes. In such cases, the state then becomes the agency of theft under a pseudo moral cover. Again, indirect or legal theft, is when we utilize the law to accomplish or destroy anything that is contrary to God’s law, so that any step we take, however legal it may be, whereby we destroy the established order of God in the state, in the business world, in the church, in the home, in the community at large, is indirect and legalized theft.

Theft is not only expropriation legally or illegally or another man’s property, against his will and by fraud, but it is also the destruction of another man’s property by willful act or accident. Thus, if you deliberately commit arson, lighting a match to a building to burn it down because you are hostile to that person, it is, of course, theft, but it is also theft if, by carelessness, you set fire to a building or to a field. Incidentally, this means, too, the obligation of restitution which we shall consider on another day. The one area of theft where restitution does prevail for most of us is in damages in car accidents. The law there still requires restitution. It is curious that the old law should be retained in an area of a new invention.

Again, we must speak of inflation as theft, in that it robs a person of his accumulated value and wealth. We shall deal with the theft of inflation on another day. Any form of fraud is theft. Watered milk is theft. Therefore, the Pure Food & Drug Law is valid, in that it is designed to prevent fraud or theft. The fact that this law and other laws have been abused is not due to the fact that the principle of the law is wrong, but because of the fact of sin. A corrupt people begets a corrupt state, which cannot enforce even the best of laws without corruption.

In dealing with the subject of theft, we must further say that necessity does not justify theft. Necessity can never give any man priority over God’s law. On this point, unfortunately, Roman Catholic theology has gone sadly astray. It has justified theft in the name of necessity. Let me quote from the article on theft from the Catholic Encyclopedia, which reads, “Thus, when in danger of death from want of food or suffering any form of extreme necessity, may lawfully take from another as much as is required to meet his present distress, even though the possessor’s opposition be entirely clear. Neither therefore would he be bound to restitution of his fortune subsequently were notably better, supposing that what he had converted to his own use was perishable. The reason is that individual ownership of the goods of this world are, according to the natural law, yields to the more stronger and more sacred rite conferred by natural law upon every man to avail himself of such things as are necessary for his own preservation.” In other words, survival takes precedence over the law. This is, of course, a very dangerous statement, because it gives every man’s life priority over God’s law.

Thus far, we have defined theft, but omitted the basic aspect. Our definition of theft, as we have given it thus far is incomplete, because it must be added that theft is one form of violation of God’s fundamental order. So that theft is not merely a humanistic relationship, or a violation of relationship between man and man. It is first and foremost a violation of God’s order. God has created and established a fundamental order whereby man is to be secure in the possession of his property, and theft therefore strikes not only at the man robbed, but at God’s fundamental order. It is thus more than an offense against another person. It is an offense against God. God requires us to respect the life, the marriage, and the property of our neighbor and enemy. They may be evil, but God’s law is prior to man’s nature, even as it is prior to man’s needs.

This point, we see how modern Protestantism has joined hands with Roman Catholic theology in justifying theft. Thus, one leading modern Protestant commentator on the law, Thou shalt not steal, writes: “Thinking men strive toward an application of this commandment which will ensure that the products of industry will be fairly divided, that the rules may ensure that each man shall have his fair share of the good things of this life.” In other words, what he is here saying is, Thou shalt not steal, meaning socialism. Everyone must have his fair share of the good things of life, and who establishes this fair share? Thinking men, he says. In other words, the intellectual elite. So, for him, Parks, who wrote this in The Interpreter’s Bible, thinking men are now the ultimate source of justice, replacing God, but God’s law can never be defied in this manner. Those who despise God’s commandment and its very plain meaning, Thou shalt not steal, whether for necessity or out of charity, Thou shalt not steal. Those who do it suffer the consequences.

There’s a very telling old Spanish proverb which says, “He that spits up at the sky will get it on his face.” In other words, what the proverbs means: Those who despise God will get it in return. God’s order is very clearly, according to scripture, private property and godly wealth. It is significant that the word “wealth” in Hebrew, which we have translated throughout the Bible as wealth, the English word, in Hebrew it means what we mean by wealth, but it also means strength, resources, good, prosperity, so that wealth very clearly means strength and goodness. This is the meaning of wealth, godly wealth, in scripture, and over and over again we are told that wealth is one of the good things of life, not to be despised, that godly wealth is something to treasure and prize. We are told also, in Proverbs 13:11 “Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished, but he that gathereth by labor shall increase.”

The warning of scripture is not against wealth, but against the proud, who because of their wealth, forget God. Over and over again, scripture says that one of God’s blessings on the faithful for obedience to his law, is wealth. Moreover, we are told in Proverbs 10:22, “The blessing of the Lord it maketh rich, and he added no sorrow with it.” Over and over again, we are told, as in Proverbs 13:11, which I just read, that the means for gaining wealth is labor. Our text declares, “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.”

In other words, St. Paul very clearly opposes two things as contradictory: work and theft. The man who will not work ends up a thief. Moreover, St. Paul tells us that the way to be charitable is to work. There is no goodness in giving to men by theft, so “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him work, that he may have to give to him that needeth.”

Work and stealing thus, are differing approaches to property, and work is commended in scripture as the goal, in order that a man might become prosperous and self-supporting, and might be charitable. That{?} is a shortcut to property which seeks to bypass work and which denies God’s law order.

Now, according to scripture wealth can be gained in three ways: by work, by inheritance, and by gift. A thieving social order will oppose all three, so that a thieving socialist order will penalize work. It will seek to eliminate, progressively and ultimately, totally, inheritance, and third, it will deny the right to be charitable, to give gifts. One of the most fearful sins in the Soviet Union is charity. Strict laws prohibit any individual or any group of individuals, or any church to relieve anyone’s distress, so that if we were in the Soviet Union and we were a group of neighbors and one of our number were seriously ill and could not work, and in need, if we were charitable to that person, we would be in serious trouble with the law. We would be guilty of counter-revolution activity. A thieving order seeks to break any relationship between man and man, and between man and God, and therefore says, “We will be everything, total man, total God, in the situation.” A thieving order justifies itself always by pointing to the sins of others rather than to its own sin. This is Phariseeism. It is, of course, to document the sins of capitalists and capitalism, to document the sins of the wealthy and the poor and the middle classes, but this is irrelevant, and this is why all the arguments against Marxism which try to justify a price{?}, the capitalists, or the middle classes, are invalid. The point is not whether the capitalists or the middle classes are good or bad. If our neighbor is a thief, this does not give the right to us to steal from him, does it? If capitalists are thieves, or if the middle classes are thieves, it does not give the poor or the state the right to steal from them.

I think today a very good case could be made against businessmen. One very well-to-do businessman here in Los Angeles told me this past week, he said the new morality of the hippies on the Sunset Strip is also the same morality you find downtown among businessmen, and he said there isn’t a nickel’s worth of difference as far as their basic morality is concerned. I’m ready to agree. I think there is a moral rottenness in all classes today. This does not justify socialism. It does not justify robbing the rich because they are thieves. If my neighbor is a thief, it does not give me the right to steal from him. The corrective to theft is not theft, rather it is God’s law. The socialist’s answer to theft is theft. Man’s need is made central, and man always needs what his sin dictates. How many sinful men, how many men have ever said they needed judgment? How many spoiled children have ever said they need discipline? If you put it on the basis of man’s need as the Catholic Encyclopedia does, man’s need as the Protestant Interpreter’s Bible does, man’s need as the socialists do, then what you do is to establish a thieves paradise.

John Calvin, in dealing with the commandment, Thou shalt not steal, and with St. Paul’s words in Ephesians 5:28, “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth,” declared that the basic charity is to live in faithfulness to law, and so he said, Do you want to be charitable? Then obey the law, be a God-fearing citizen. That’s the first and the basic charity. You’re not interfering with every man’s business. You’re obedient to your parents. You’re a godly husband discharging your duties and a godly wife discharging hers. You’re a law-abiding citizen doing that which your citizenship requires. The basic charity, Calvin said, is to labor with your hands and to be dutiful where duty is required. There is no greater charity you can give to your neighbor and to your enemy than to fulfill the law in relationship to him.

Then, to supply his needs as God’s law requires is a further charity, but the basic charity is to fulfill the law in relationship to him, so that charity as against that, is first of all, “rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good,” and let him fulfill his duties and her duties under God, for anything less is not only not charity but is theft. Duty to whom duty, honor to whom honor, service to whom service is due. This is keeping the law. This is refusing to steal.

The law protects all men in God’s order, all men are protected by this commandment. Why then do men attack God’s law concerning property, Thou shalt not steal? Concerning duty, Thou shalt not steal, by defrauding another person of the services, the honor, the duty that is due to him or to her? Over a century ago, in 1959, E.C. Wynes{?}, on writing on the law and its importance in the United States, biblical law, declared, “There are two principle sources of political as a personal power. Knowledge and property.” He put his finger on it. Property is a form of power, and thus, whenever men claim power, total power for the state as totalitarianism, as socialism does, their private property will be under attack, and this attack takes two forms. On the one hand, it denies God’s law, and powerful individuals despise the property rights of weaker individuals. Between the Civil War and World War 1, we had the robber barons in this country, the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, and the others, who ruthlessly defrauded others, who espoused an anti-Christian social Darwinianism which said the struggle for survival means that the weaker ones must be destroyed, and therefore, we will only be serving the welfare of America by running out everyone who cannot stand, so by fair means and foul, they worked in terms of this social Darwinianism to destroy everyone that was weaker.

The other form of the attack is that of the modern evolutionary premise, which emphasizes not so much the struggle for survival but the plasticity of man. That is, that man can be molded into anything you want. Behaviorism was one form of this. Man can be molded into anything you choose to make him by remaking his environment. Remake the environment and you remake man. Property therefore, is a power which must be taken over by the state in order to remold the total environment and remake man into a super man. The property is a power indeed, but a power which God entrusts to man as his steward, because it is man who must exercise power unto the end that the earth be subdued, and man’s dominion under God established. Property is power, and it is given to man to be used under God, and to his glory.

Therefore, the commandment, Thou shalt not steal summons us to respect property under God, and to respect all position, authority, and honor, all duties, and rob no man of that which is his due. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that thou hast entrusted us with the power that is property, and we pray, our Father, that thou wouldst make us valiant in the defense of these things which are of thee. Arm us, O Lord, by thy law-word, that we may do battle successfully against a world that is given to evil, a world that is given to theft, a world which seeks to strip thy people of honor, of property, of all things that are our due, and to make of us pawns of the state. We thank thee, our Father, that it is not Washington, nor Moscow, nor London, Berlin, or Paris that rules this world, but thy {?}, and therefore, in this continence, our Father, we come to thee, to cast our every care upon thee knowing thou carest for us. Teach us to so walk, this day and in the days ahead, that we may set aside our will and seek thy will, and rejoice therein. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all, with respect to our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] You’re right. Work is not only physical work and intellectual work, but it is the application of knowledge, and the application of knowledge does include the work of the speculator. The speculator is using his knowledge and his study to speculate, and thereby, he does provide an incentive to labor, in that speculation is that which promotes free enterprise and labor, in that the speculator is saying I believe that this is going to be a form of labor that is going to be profitable, and therefore, I’m ready to invest in the future in terms of it. So, that which he has accumulated which represents his labor, plus his intelligence and knowledge, which again represents his labor, he apprised the marketplace. It is a form of work. A lot of sweat in it, too, sometimes. Yes?

[Audience] {?} people {?}

[Rushdoony] Of course it is a theft. The takeover of countries such as the Soviet Empire, has taken over Central Europe and other areas, is theft. First of all, it’s a theft of liberty from the people. Secondly, because socialism is a parasite and it cannot support itself, it involves a further theft of their labor. In other words, the Soviet Empire like every socialist state, needs capital. It cannot get capital from the work, because it penalizes work. Work, in socialism, is under a continual penalty. So, it has to have fresh labor, as it were, to rob, and so socialism is inescapably imperialistic. It continually has to expand and confiscate somebody’s labor. This is why socialism is always progressive confiscation. We’re seeing it here in our country as we’re getting creeping, and now galloping socialism. It means more taxes. It means more printing of paper money. It means more controls. In other words, progressive confiscation or theft of your labor, and the percentage of the theft is continually increased. Socialism has to do this, because it cannot produce.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, not biblical slavery. Yes, non-biblical slavery. In other words, when men are stolen, and taken captive, and enslaved, it is theft. It is a theft of the person’s liberty and of their labor. In biblical slavery, slaves were slaves because of two reasons. First, they didn’t want freedom. They didn’t want the responsibility, and so they wanted the security of being another man’s slave, which meant cradle-to-grave security. They could then voluntarily go into slavery and voluntarily leave.

And second, if a man ran up debts or damaged someone’s property, he had to make restitution. If he could not, he then became a slave until he paid it off. We had this in this country in the form of bond servants. A bond servant was someone who was paying off a debt. Now sometimes, the debt was a sum of money contracted in advance, and a great many people came to this country as bond servants, in that they did not have the funds to come here, so they borrowed it from someone and then paid it off by being a bond servant. Bond servants could also be people who had robbed or contracted debts they could not pay off. That is not theft. Yes?

[Audience] What can a Christian do about it right now.

[Rushdoony] Right now what can a Christian do about it? and that’s a big question. Well, first of all, we can avoid theft of {?}. This is our first and foremost duty. We must avoid being thieves and being party to theft by refusing to vote, for example, for anything that does involve theft, and most of our bond issues today involve theft. A good deal of our politics today is simply organized theft. We make a stand against theft by our voting. We make a stand against it by our daily life and the conduct of our business and our affairs. Most important then, we work to propagate the word of God, because it is only as men are no longer thieves that you will not have a thieving order, and today, the problem is that most people have lusting in their hearts because they don’t have Christ in their hearts.

One of the best books I’ve ever read on the whole subject of inflation was published in 1936, and the author began working on it very soon after FDR was elected, and he foresaw then everything that’s come to pass and much more, and the point he made then was that inflation does not really begin to work until people have larceny in their heart, and he could see that this was coming, and that this was what our society was moving toward, a society in which most people have larceny in their hearts and then, he said, you’ll see inflation stepped up and socialism stepped up. So, as against larceny in our hearts, we’ve got to have Christ in our hearts. Yes?

[Audience] {?} anathema, and I told him that I didn’t appreciate {?} and he said {?} get together {?} so he said to me {?} and he said, well then, {?} if then the majority, the great majority of the people want this money taken from them to do {?} then {?} if you don’t want to take it, then you have to ask one other person {?} drafted {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, but you see, what he was doing was to make en invalid comparison. An army is a legitimate exercise of government, a part of its police power to protect the citizenry, because the state in scripture is the ministry of justice, but what justice is involved in going to the moon to find out something about evolution. It’s no jurisdiction of government, you see. It is in the jurisdiction of science and private enterprise, and the like. I was interested in hearing the reaction of a man who was in on the entire project and regarded it as a joke. He is one of the top men, and had something to do with the investigation of the rocks they brought back, and of course, he regarded the whole thing as a solemn and pretentious joke, because he said, “What are we going to learn about evolution and the age of the moon, and the age of the earth from a bucket full of rocks from the moon when we’ve got the whole earth under our feet and we can’t find out anything from that, but he thought he had to go through with a procedure of examining the rocks when they were flown{?} here. So, enough of that. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, of course a good deal of the government’s activity was brought about by the decline of morality in the people, first of all. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, in a sense it is, because it’s a theft of the children from the family, and this is why it was fought for a long time in this country by Christians, and it’s a sad fact that most of the documents from the battle have disappeared. They have been destroyed. The Christians for a long time fought the idea of public schools, because it was robbing them of their children. It was an unjustified intrusion of the state into the family, and it was borrowed, definitely, from the socialist regime of Prussia. Horace Mann made Prussia his model. The answer of some people, “Well, how are you then going to then educate those who can’t afford it?” The answer is that in those days, of course, you were having the massive migrations of European peoples to this country, so that New York, and Boston, and other big cities were having, every year, shipload after shipload, day in and day out, discharging people from Europe who couldn’t speak, read, or write English, and their children were all educated by missionary societies. In those days, you had not only missionary societies to propagate the faith, but to teach. Christian schools would be established in the migrant communities. It was all done very, very thoroughly and very ably, and some of the work was really quite remarkable. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, here you get into a more complex situation. First, we can {?} that a socialist regime establishes a principle effect. However, we are also required to obey all godly authorities. Therefore, when a regime is set up, we work to replace it, but we live with reality. That’s why I am not under social security, but since you are, you are duty-bound to accept it. You cannot fight it morally. You have to be obedient to the state at this point. Now, when it is a voluntary situation, there under God, you have a choice. God doesn’t say you are forbidden to do this. Now I don’t feel I can say to the ministers who are under social security that they are in sin for so doing, because while the fundamental principle of socialism is theft, it isn’t quite as sinful when it comes to a situation where a man has a great deal of his income taken continually from him, and then he’s simply saying, “Well, I’m going to take back a portion of it.” So, a good deal of the money that does go into these health plans and the like is your money to begin with. You’ll never get but a fraction of it back. In terms of actuary or principles, social security for anyone today is the poorest investment, because the likelihood of anyone getting all his money back is very, very slight.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No. This they will not permit. It’s the same principle as in the Soviet Union where private charity, or religious charity, is a counter-revolutionary activity. You’re a counter-revolutionary when you propose things like that. The idea is, of course, that man is to be dependent on the state, and that the state is to be the one to whom we are grateful to look to.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, I recognize that. Yes?

[Audience] {?} what the purpose of inheritance is?

[Rushdoony] The purpose of inheritance? The purpose of inheritance is for man who has earned property to pass that property on to his family. Since property is basically family-based in terms of scripture, it is to maintain that in the family. The state, when we were dealing with the laws of inheritance, now claims to be the basic heir. In other words, in terms of the law of God, the firstborn is the heir, and the firstborn gets a double portion and prior claim on the estate, unless the firstborn is not a believer, or is morally derelict, the firstborn can be set aside, but under normal circumstances, the firstborn has a double portion.

Alright. Today, the state claims that privilege, of being the firstborn, of having first claim on the estate. So the state says we are both the father, we’ll take care of the children through welfare, and we are the firstborn and the heir of every parent, in that we will have prior claim on the estate. So, it is intruding on the family in a way which is entirely anti-biblical.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Right. An interesting sidelight here on heredity, I know a number of Armenian and Russian families who, in the old country, were wealthy and lost everything, and came here with nothing but the clothes on their back, and it’s interesting that those who were commercially successful and built up a sizeable inheritance for their children, even though they brought nothing over here, brought over that heredity, so they made it here, which I think would be a good study sometime for anyone who is interested in genetics, to follow say, the Russian Revolution gives us a tremendous field of investigation. The émigrés who fled, how those who were able there were able here, and those who were poor there remained poor here, a very interesting correlation.

Well, our time is up and we are adjourned.

End of tape