We often think of private property as merely material: land, money, possessions, or wealth. Because of this, debates over property rights are usually framed as economic arguments about greed, capitalism, or inequality.
But historically, the idea of private property was never merely about possessions. It was about stewardship, responsibility, accountability, and the boundaries surrounding the human person.
Stewardship Begins in the Garden
The right to private property is predicated on the foundation of the right to life. Life, self-ownership, and property form a single chain: if a person has a right to his own life, he has a right to himself, and if he has a right to himself, he has a right to what he produces by his own time, energy, and labor. Property, then, is not a separate right standing on its own. It is the extension of the right to life, worked out in what a man builds, creates, or is entrusted with, whether material or immaterial.
The right to your life is the right to yourself: to own your time, your energy, your intellect, your conscience, and your soul. We come to own these things not by our own merits, but by the merits of the One who made us and gave us His ownership rights for us to steward.
The pattern begins in the garden, where God places stewards and entrusts them with many things, including themselves. (Genesis 1:26-28; Genesis 2:15) That same pattern of entrustment reappears throughout Scripture, most explicitly in the Parable of the Talents, where a master distributes his property to servants and later returns to require an account of what was given to them. (Matthew 25:14-30) What they are given responsibility for, they have the right to steward, so a just society works to ensure that no one takes from or trespasses onto what was entrusted to another steward.
Our ownership is not absolute or self-originating. It is delegated ownership. The Master entrusts His property to individual stewards and grants them the authority and responsibility to possess, cultivate, protect, and give an account for it. Within the realm of human affairs, we are entrusted to function as owners under His ultimate authority.
The Chain from Life to Property
This whole idea of private property is predicated on this relationship between the Entruster, the entrusting, and the entrusted. It is predicated on the idea that the Master will return and that each individual will give an account for the things with which he was entrusted to steward.
The things we are to steward can be parsed down to each breath, to each individual heartbeat. Each moment we are given is an opportunity to invest what we have been given in service to the Master. This includes both the concrete and the abstract.
And how does the Master define successful investment? Seek first the kingdom of God. (Matthew 6:33) Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37-39) Take care of your family. (1 Timothy 5:8) Take care of the orphans and the widows. (James 1:27) The interest we gain on our investments will not be measured by this world’s standards. It will be measured by the degree to which we store up treasure in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy. (Matthew 6:20)
This is why the right to private property cannot be severed from the right to life. Life is the first entrustment. Property, whether concrete or abstract, is simply what a man does with the life he has been given, and the right to steward it responsibly flows from having been entrusted with it at all.
The Western tradition of natural rights and private property emerged largely from a biblical understanding of mankind as created by God and entrusted with stewardship and moral responsibility.
Property in Rights
So to that end, you belong to you: body, soul, and mind; time and energy; thoughts and actions; relationships and reputation; words and other expressions; labor and the fruits of labor; freedom and what you do with that freedom; faith and the expression of that faith. Not because you are worthy, but because the Master who did the entrusting is worthy. And also because no other human is worthy to take from or trespass onto what another has been given to steward.
Everything we are or have is merely an extension of the life we have been given.
You Belong to You
John Locke wrote, “Men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker… they are His property, whose workmanship they are.” And from that same understanding came this idea, “Every man has a property in his own person.”
This understanding deeply shaped the Western conception of rights and liberty. Rights were not viewed as permissions granted by the state, but as protections surrounding what God had entrusted to the individual.
William Blackstone likewise wrote that “These rights… are founded on the law of nature and reason… dictated by God Himself.” And that “The principal aim of society is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights, which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature.”
A Right of Property
This is why James Madison, in his 1792 essay “Property,” argues that fundamental liberties such as free speech, conscience, and bodily integrity are personal possessions just as surely as land or money. Madison asserted that protecting a “property in rights” is essential for a free government.
It is this idea that gave way to the quote within that essay: “In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.” While this idea was incongruent with the practice of slavery during Madison’s day, it was also the truth that animated the abolitionist movement.
This idea of private property is rooted in this paradigm. Is it any wonder that collectivist ideologies reject a paradigm rooted in divine stewardship and individual accountability to God?
The Collective and the Individual
If you do not have a right to the extension of yourself, then carried to its logical conclusion, you do not truly have a right to yourself. The individual becomes merely a functional unit of the collective, expendable whenever the collective deems it necessary for the greater good.
This idea starts with denying you the rights to the fruits of your labor, the words that give life to your thoughts, the freedom to worship and give expression to your faith: your private property rights.
In our generation, the narrative around property rights is being rewritten. The idea is being recast as a byproduct of greed, rather than as something rooted in the dignity and stewardship entrusted to mankind by God. Property rights are being viewed through the lens of self-service instead of in service to the Master.
“The selfish scheme called ‘property rights’ has superseded human rights and created four times more useless work than is required to produce and distribute all the comforts and luxuries of life.” —Lucy Parsons, radical activist and writer
Have No Other Gods Before Me
Scripture teaches that God is the One who gives and takes away. “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)
But when societies reject God as the ultimate source of authority, provision, and ownership, they do not cease looking for a giver. They simply look for a replacement.
This is why collectivist and totalitarian systems so often seek to centralize property, provision, and dependence within the state. The state begins to assume the role that belongs to God alone: the entity from which all things flow and to which all things ultimately belong.
Under such systems, property no longer belongs ultimately to God and is no longer stewarded by individuals under His authority. Instead, all things become functionally subject to the collective, administered by the state, dispensed by the state, and taken by the state.
Could the commandment “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:3) be about more than carved idols? What if this command speaks to recognizing ultimate authority, giving ultimate allegiance, and surrendering ultimate ownership? Could the state itself become a false god?
Freedom and Stewardship
Even from day one in the garden, God knew that granting humanity freedom and authority over the exercise of that freedom would allow humanity to use that delegated self-ownership and stewardship for evil and not for good. Still, He allowed them that degree of delegated authority and responsibility.
And who are we to tell God that He was wrong to entrust mankind with that stewardship?
To deny private property is ultimately to deny the sacred stewardship that God has entrusted to the individual.
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