Understanding “What Belongs to God” in a World of Human Constructs and Political Control

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

My English class has just finished reading the book 1984, and as a thought exercise I asked them to pick a problem, propose a utopian solution and then explain how that solution would evolve into a dystopian society because that is the danger we face whenever we attempt to achieve utopia. They chose a variety of topics including homelessness, racism, and poverty. All of their solutions were some form of communism, socialism, or controlled capitalism. In all of them there was a genuine desire to solve the problem and in all of them they recognized that the systems would quickly breakdown due to lack of resources or lack of will on the part of the citizens to follow through with the vision. In 1984, Orwell envisions a central government, known as “Big Brother” who attempts to stamp out opposition by monitoring everyone’s movements, thoughts, and actions along with the continued rewriting of history and over simplification of language to force everyone to believe the same things. If you have not read 1984, you should because it is not just a dystopian novel about the threat of authoritarianism in the wake of the second world war, it is a commentary on humanity and our insatiable desire to be in control.

We have all heard the story of Jesus telling the Pharisees and their buddies to give God the stuff that belongs to God and the emperor the stuff that belongs to him and I suspect we all feel relieved when we hear this story because it is so simple. The emperor’s image is stamped on the coins, so we can return them to his sphere of authority and turn our attention back to God. Simple, right? Except, what exactly belongs to God?

Identifying the coin as belonging to the emperor is easy because his face is on it and everyone knows that it is his government that made the coin. Likewise, in the 21st century we know who the dollar bills belong to, we know who the roads and the bridges belong to, but when we add modern concepts of liberty and individualism to the equation things begin to get messy.

We claim that we have a God-given natural right to life, liberty, and happiness, but where in scripture does it explicitly say so? That does not prove these rights are incompatible with scripture, but it does mean we should not present our modern formulation as a direct quotation of creation. Genesis does not say that God created the birds and then granted them a natural right to live. It says that God saw creation and called it good. That suggests that life is good because it comes from God, not that life is ours to define or dispose of as we please. It says nothing about freedom or happiness, though one could argue it is implied because presumably every creature was created to freely roam the earth as it pleased. Here’s my point, we cannot claim that God intended our concept of equality, which is the word we generally use to describe the demand that people receive equal rights to life, liberty, and happiness, as a part of creation because there is no evidence of that, what we can claim is that God created life and therefore life is accountable to God. The same is true of love: scripture presents God as love, and therefore our obligations concerning love are accountable to God.

I am by no means attempting to shatter our belief in natural rights, I am a firm believer in them and will continue to teach and defend them until my dying day; my purpose here is to caution us against the assumptions many seem to make when applying faith to the modern world, which is that because we believe equality is a good thing then it must stem from God; but its modern formulation is a human construct. That does not make equality worthless or opposed to God, but it does mean we should be careful about calling it a direct feature of creation. It is something we created to combat the millennia of poor treatment of large groups of people by other people.

If you are confused, I understand, so let me attempt to be clear. If life and love are from God, then what we owe God is to honor life and practice love, toward God and toward the people whose lives God has created. If we wish to claim that equality is something that God would want us to pursue then we have to connect it to either life or love. Equality becomes a matter of life when unequal systems deny people the conditions necessary to live, and it becomes a matter of love when we recognize that no person’s life is more valuable than another’s. In that sense, equality need not be understood as a command handed down from heaven in its modern vocabulary. It is a human principle that follows from taking God’s gifts of life and love seriously. To deny another person equal dignity is to deny the value of the life God created and the love God asks us to give.

And this brings us back to where we began. We read 1984 and recognized the danger of placing too much faith in our ability to design a perfect society. We saw how easily the desire to protect people becomes a desire to manage them, and how the desire to create order becomes a desire to control every thought, word, and action. We are capable of doing the same thing with God. We take our own ideas about liberty, equality, justice, and order, then attach God’s name to them as though our convictions came directly from heaven. In doing so, we may not be giving God what belongs to God. We may be trying to make God belong to us.

The question, then, is not simply whether our politics are compassionate or whether our systems promise equality. The question is whether we are honoring the life and love that come from God, or using God to bless our own desire for control. We cannot build heaven by force, and we should be wary whenever our attempt to serve God begins to look like an attempt to speak for God. Perhaps giving God what belongs to God means surrendering our certainty, practicing life and love, and admitting that the line between faithfulness and control is one we must continually examine.