"Do Not Steal" (Ten Commandments Podcast Series)
Slow Theology Episode 62
Over at Slow Theology podcast, Dr. AJ Swoboda and I (Nijay Gupta) are continuing our Ten Commandments series. We are now at Exodus 20:15: “Do Not Steal.” Go back and listening to the earlier episodes if you want to follow along and need to catch up. If you are enjoying the series, please like, subscribe, and rate on your preferred podcast app.
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This was a great episode! Thank you. I certainly want to listen to the whole series now.
So much to think about! I was once very close to a Catholic missionary community that struck a beautiful balance between having possessions of their own and sharing everything (else) communally. It felt profoundly Christian to me.
Proverbs 30:8–9 is one of my favorite parts of the Bible! I have lived in societies where wealth does seem to get people to drift away from God and away from faith in general. I now live in a society where there is so much dearth that I wonder, along the lines of the difficult Calvin quote you brought up in the podcast, if every act of stealing would, in fact, count as commandment-breaking or only—or at least mostly—as a way in which the law was being used by the wealthy as a tool of self-protection. (The extreme case of the latter is called state co-optation.) I was stolen from recently—and violently—and it's not a good feeling, but who the law is meant to protect, and who God sides with, seems like an open question in many cases.
This is one point I would have loved to see you two cover some more in this very interesting episode. And there are other instances in which power seems to push definitions of "property" in ways that don't seem to benefit the public good, such as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act in copyright law. Thanks for posting about the podcast on your Substack!