In a church in the suburbs of Belfast, there is a stained-glass window which takes its title and its subject matter from a line in one of this week’s lectionary readings (from chapter 22 of the Book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse of John): “The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations”. At the time of its installation (1920, one year before the partition of Ireland into North and South), this window – along with other works by the artist Wilhelmina Geddes – caused a stir by its Arts-and-Crafts Movement modernism. “Her glass is quite unlike that of most other stained glass workers”, according to the Irish Times; “the religion which it reflects is the religion of power and fighting, not the religion of peace and restfulness”.1 I saw this window on a brief trip to Belfast last October….
As on so many issues that divide left-wing and right-wing Christians, the Bible seems frustratingly pliable when it comes to the issue of property rights. Conservative Christians like to assert that the Bible takes private property for granted, that the Eighth Commandment demonstrates it to be a “divine institution” or a “sacred right,” and that the many examples of wealthy patriarchs prove not only private property, but large accumulations of it, have divine sanction. Those more inclined toward some kind of Christian socialism like to point out Jesus’s very harsh strictures on the accumulation of wealth and the assertion of private property rights, and the early Jerusalem community’s practice of “having all things in common.” As so often happens, we seem to be faced with something of an Old Testament/New Testament divide, in which the Old Testament bolsters a conservative agenda, and the New Testament a liberal one. Is the Bible thus divided against itself?