Socialism and the Bible

Author:

Pastor Paul A. Bartz


Many people say that the Bible outlines no specific economic system for society to follow. Many church bodies are involved in promoting communism or various forms of socialism, even to the point of giving material aid to revolutionaries who are attempting to bring communism to their lands. It should be no surprise that the church bodies involved in these activities have long ago given up the Biblical teachings about creation and adopted evolution. There is a very real link between the abandonment of the Biblical teaching on creation and the support these church bodies have shown for communism and socialism.

It is also true, as some say, that certain Bible passages which refer to buying and selling reflect the social and economic practices of the day without meaning to say that these particular practices are to be universal. But when immorality is practiced in Biblical culture, it is always condemned by Scripture. If private ownership and wealth were sinful and in themselves oppressive of the poor, Scripture would condemn them. Scripture, however, never condemns wealth - it speaks of wealth as a blessing, and actually protects the concept of private ownership. We shall look at a few Biblical examples which show that those of a socialist or communist bent who use the Bible for support are actually reading their own cultural views into Scripture!

Exodus 20:15, which reflects universal moral law, protects the ownership of private property. This same principle is explained by example time and time again in Scripture. Deuteronomy 22:1 and Leviticus 19:35-36, for example, both protect the practice of private property by applying Exodus 20:15 to specific instances. Civilized societies today recognize the universality of this moral principle by upholding these principles, thus recognizing that they are not unique principles for Old Testament Israel.

Deuteronomy 15:1-11 also adds mercy to the economic order. These verses prescribe the periodical forgiveness of debts but also promise that this should not be a hardship on anyone because the people shall be prosperous. The secret of their prosperity is found in verses 4 and 5: listening to the Lord’s commands. This principle still seems to be valid today on a national scale. The closer a people draws to the Lord as a nation, the more prosperous that nation is.

Both the Old and the New Testaments point out the purpose of possessions. Ultimately they are to be used for the support of the Lord’s work. This is especially specific in the New Testament where it is clear that private property is to be considered a tool for Gospel outreach. Proverbs 3:9 tells us to “honor the Lord with thy substance.” 1 Corinthians 16:2 repeats what Deuteronomy 16:17 said, essentially that we are to give to the Lord as He has given to us. 1 Corinthians 16:2 adds that this should be done regularly, “the first day of the week.” It is a shame that many churches and ministries are so limited because while some of God’s people take this seriously, so many do not.

In Matthew 19:23-26 we find Jesus warning about the peril of riches, but beginning in Matthew 20:1, Jesus compares God to a wealthy landowner. If being a wealthy landowner was of itself wrong, then He certainly would not have chosen this kind of comparison for this parable. In Luke 15:12-21 we have the parable of the rich fool. But as verses 22-40 point out, the point of this parable is not that riches are sinful, but the man’s attitude was sinful. All people commit the same sin when they measure their security by how many possessions they have - or don’t have.

Many extremely rich men are presented as heroes of faith in the Bible, among them Abraham and Job. They were rewarded with wealth by God, and blessed by Him, even after they were wealthy because of their faithfulness. Job was even given two fortunes by God! This clearly shows that wealth, and the wealth needed to make even more money, is not against God’s order. Were there poor people in those days? You can be sure that there were. We can picture Abraham and Job as generous men on the basis of what Scripture tells us, but they did not feel that they had to distribute their wealth equally among all the people who had need. For one thing, this would have put all the people whom they employed out of work.

Scripture also deals with another curse in this regard. When Samuel was old, the people of Israel wanted a king, just like other nations. God warned them, through Samuel, of the problems this would bring to them in 1 Samuel 8:10-18. He warned that unlike the judges, a king would establish a huge bureaucracy which would require up to a tenth of the people’s income, plus property taxes (really - read it!) to support it. God considered this a burden too heavy for His people. This tells us something about the size, and therefore the functions, which God has in mind for government.

The problems with communism and socialism begin with their rejection of the creation in Genesis. With their totally materialistic measure of man and life these systems continue, from this point, to ignore the rest of the God-given order for the world. While communism has an interest in denying religious freedom to Christians, this is only a by-product of their faulty beginning which results in a faulty worldview. Societies in which socialism grows always encourage people to think in more materialistic terms.

Ultimately, our goal as Christians on this earth is to support and be a part of the Gospel outreach to all men. We are to place first the witness of Christ’s innocent suffering and death on the cross for the redemption of sin-enslaved man. Christians who are homemakers, as well as those who are presidents, each have this charge as much as any pastor. Those of us who are blessed with a government in which we can participate should thankfully use our rights and powers as citizens to see to it that we continue to live in a society in which God can be openly glorified and served with all our hearts, all our souls and all our substance.





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at 02:02 PM ET, 08/12/2011
From Jesus’ socialism to capitalistic Christianity
By Gregory Paul
A truly strange thing has happened to American Christianity. A set of profound contradictions have developed within modern conservative Christianity, big and telling inconsistencies that have long slipped under the radar of public knowledge, and are only now beginning to be explicitly noted by critics of the religious and economic right.

Here is what is peculiar. Many conservative Christians, mostly Protestant but also a number of Catholics, have come to believe and proudly proclaim that the creator of the universe favors free wheeling, deregulated, union busting, minimal taxes especially for wealthy investors, plutocrat-boosting capitalism as the ideal earthly scheme for his human creations. And many of these Christian capitalists are ardent followers of Ayn Rand, who was one of - and many of whose followers are -- the most hard-line anti-Christian atheist/s you can get. Meanwhile many Christians who support the capitalist policies associated with social Darwinistic strenuously denounce Darwin’s evolutionary science because it supposedly leads to, well, social Darwinism!

Meanwhile atheists, secularists and evolutionist are denounced as inventing the egalitarian evils of anti-socially Darwinistic socialism and communism. It’s such a weird stew of incongruities that it sets one’s head spinning. Social researchers like myself ask, how did these internal conflict come about? And why are not liberals and progressives doing the logical thing and taking full advantage of the inconsistencies of right wing libertarianism by loudly exposing the contradictions?

To understand why the pro-capitalist stance of many modern religious conservatives is at odds with Christian doctrine we need to start with the Gospels.

Jesus is no free marketeer. Improving one’s earthly financial circumstances is not nearly as critical as preparing for the end times that will arrive at any minute. He does offer substantial encouragement for the poor, and warns the wealthy that they are in grave danger of blowing their prospects of reaching paradise, as per the metaphor of a rich person entering heaven being as difficult as a camel passing through the eye of the needle (a narrow passageway designed to hinder intruders). This caution makes sense: sociological research is confirming that the more securely prosperous individuals and societies are, the more likely they are to lose the faith. A basic point of core Christian doctrine is that the wealthy have no more access to heaven than anyone else (and in fact may have less), offering hope to the impoverished rejected by cults that court the elites. This remains true in Catholicism, in which being poor does not constitute evidence of a personal deficiency, and church authorities decry the excesses of unrestrained capital at the expense of social justice.

But to understand just how non-capitalistic Christianity is supposed to be we turn to the first chapter after the gospels, Acts, which describes the events of the early church. Chapters 2 and 4 state that all “the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need… No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had…. There were no needy persons among them. From time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.”

Now folks, that’s outright socialism of the type described millennia later by Marx - who likely got the general idea from the gospels.

The pro-capitalist Christians who are aware of these passages wave them away even though it is the only explicit description of Christian economics in the Bible.

To get just how central collectivism is to Christian canon, consider that the Bible contains the first description of socialism in history. Anti-socialist Christians also claim that the Biblical version was voluntary. Aside from it being obvious that the biblical version of God was not the anti-socialist Christian capitalists commonly proclaim he was, some dark passages in Acts indicate how deeply pro-socialist the New Testament deity is. Chapter 5 details how when a church member fails to turn over all his property to the church “he fell down and died,” when his wife later did the same “she fell down… and died… Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.”

Dear readers, does this not sound like a form of terror-enforced-communism imposed by a God who thinks that Christians who fail to join the collective are worthy of death? Not only is socialism a Christian invention, so is its extreme communistic variant. The claim by many Christians that Christ hates socialism is untrue, while no explicit description of capitalism is found in the Bible - not surprising because it had not yet evolved.

So how did so much of Christianity come to reject socialism? That is not hard to figure out. In the early Protestant Netherlands, Switzerland and England capital became the dominant economic driver. Of course members of a religion want to think that God approves of what they are up to. So many (but not all) Protestants began to cherry pick those Biblical passages that could be massaged to seemingly support laissez-faire markets while pretty much ignoring those that clearly don’t. This works because, as surveys show, most Christians don’t actually read the bulk of the Bible, and people are mentally skilled at dismissing the awkward passages they do come across. Christians really took the theory that God is pro-capital to its extreme in what has be come the least socialistic and most Jesus-following of the advanced democracies, the USA, where many see the nation as an exceptional, God blessed “Shining City on the Hill” they think stands as the exemplar of Godly capitalism to the world.

In Puritan doctrine only the few destined for heaven can enjoy earthly wealth - that’s why there aren’t many rich folks - and poverty is the widespread sign of being destined for hell. But Puritanism was too dour for most Americans, so the notion that God wants his many followers to become as well-heeled as possible really took off with the emergence of the celebratory, self help oriented evangelical and Pentecostal Prosperity Christianity that the likes of Amy McPherson began to promote at the same time the modern corporate-consumer culture arose after the first world war.

The intellectual foundations for the alliance between capital and God were laid after the second world war by Catholic William Buckley, who, like some others contrived to maneuver around their churches’ skepticism about mercantile interests, worked to convert frugal church goers into materialistic consumers who spend their Sundays watching spectator sports and charging up interest loaded debt at the mall.

Back in the 1800s the non-theist Herbert Spencer adapted the evolutionary science developed by Darwin into what has become known as social Darwinism -- even though the biologist had little interest in socioeconomic issues, as well as a live and let live attitude about religion. It was Spencer who coined the term “survival of the fittest” that Darwin worked into later editions of his biology texts. Many Christians - logically concerned at the threat that a naturalistic explanation of human origins posed for popular belief in a supernatural creator - reacted by blaming harsh Darwinian biology for creating the similarly harsh “Darwinian” socioeconomics that they saw as responsible for the ills of the modern world.

At the same time socialists and communists were adapting those aspects of evolutionary science that they liked (a god-free origin of our world) while rejecting those they did not (the anti-egalitarianism integral to survival of the fittest free markets caused Marx and Engels to denounce evolution as a “bitter satire” on man and nature, and Stalin would ban pre-deterministic genetics for contradicting the blank slate theory of communism). While the communists drove the reasonable concept of social equality into the ground, Ayn Rand did the same with individual liberty. Because she hated the teeniest expression of the socialism, and because the concept was in the archaic Bible long before some non-theists decided it was the wave of the future, she promoted an anti-Christian, pro-evolution atheism so extreme that even most atheists including myself reject her claim to have philosophically absolutely disproved the existence of any god. But many influential conservative Christians have embraced her expressly atheistic theory of Objectivism that in her books such as The Virtue of Selfishness, they propose that government must be shrunk to a bare minimum so socially Darwinist that it dances with anarchy. Only then can entrepreneurial greed have the free run that liberty demands. Hence Rand’s more nobly titled Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are required reading for the staff of Paul Ryan.

Reagan’s economic advisor, Milton Friedman, was an anti-religious Objectivist Rand devotee. So is Alan Greenspan. Skeptics Penn and Teller and Michael Shermer are atheistic libertarians. In the Randian hyper-materialistic world those who are on the financial make are the exalted makers, the impoverished that accept tax payer assistance are parasitic takers who need to fend for themselves. A radical modernist ideology in greater antithesis to the traditional scriptural favoring of the poor over the rich can hardly be imagined. Yet the economics of the plutocratic Republican Party that embraces the Christian, anti-Darwinist creationist right are essentially those of the uberatheist, anti-creationist, Darwin-adoring Christianity-loathing Ayn Rand. So we have Christian creationists like Jay Richards writing books titled Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem. Can a stranger amalgam of opposing opinions be devised?

What I do not get from a sociological perspective is why -- rather than letting the right avoid being called out for decade after decade -- progressives from pious to atheist (most being liberals) as well as the mainstream news media have not been exposing the fascinating incoherence of the right wing’s anti-Darwinian biology, pro-Darwinian economics? Logically Stewart, Maddow, Olbermann, Maher et al. should on a regular basis challenge Christian libertarians on how Palin, Bachmann, Coulter, Beck, Limbaugh, Gingrich et al. can reject as ungodly evil the hard line socialism that is explicitly enforced by their God in the Bible they profess to read and believe? And how can those libertarians who manage to be devout Christians fawn over Ayn Rand whose entire philosophy is a condemnation of Christian doctrine? Also that O’Reilly and Bennett explain how they can continue to be in opposition to their pope who issued the newest encyclical reaffirming the churches opposition to libertarian economics. And ask if a person opposes evolution because it leads to ungodly societal chaos then how can the same person endorse the economics that most closely replicate biological evolution? It does not make practical sense for progressives to fail to use the deep, hypocritical conflicts that mar the right to try to split the movement at its weakest links. The right cannot reply in kind because progressives are less internally conflicted; although liberals too range from devout to atheist they share a secular sense of social tolerance, concur that the gospels are economically progressive, and agree that organisms have evolved over deep time.

In educational terms mainstream press coverage of the issue would be a public service giving the public the information it needs to decide whether or not current conservatism is fatally disingenuous. In a Washington Post column liberal Catholic E. J. Dionne Jr. got things rolling by pointing out that the Rand whose books so many Christian conservatives treat as scripture was a flaming atheist.

It’s a start.

And why are progressives not regularly putting forward the fast growing body of technical research proving that it is the most secular, liberal democracies that are enjoying the overall best socioeconomic circumstances in history, including lower rates of homicide, incarceration, juvenile and adult mortality, STD infections, abortion, teen pregnancy, mental illness, illicit drug use, and so on compared to the more libertarian USA, and superior levels of economic security, upward mobility and education?

And finally, if you don’t like socialism and communism stop blaming atheists and other secularists for concocting egalitarian collectivism backed by fear of death. It got its start long ago in the Good Book.

Gregory Paul is an independent researcher in sociology and evolution. He wrote this article for washingtonpost.com/onfaith.

Apparently, Gregory Paul didn't read chapter 5 carefully, if he read it at all. In it, Ananias and Sapphira pretended to give the entire proceeds of a land sale to the Apostles. As Peter stated, the land and the proceeds were Ananias', and thus, he was free to do with them as he wished. However, he wanted to pretend to do one thing while actually doing another. It was the lie that got Ananias and Sapphira into trouble.

Chapter 4 describes the disciples of the Messiah giving their material possessions to the Jerusalem congregation, but nowhere does chapter 4 say that the giving of their material possessions was mandatory. Indeed, the communal living of the Jerusalem disciples was voluntary.

Folks, the Christian faith is not an economic system. The Gospel isn't a message about capitalism or socialism.

AMEN...

Very well stated!

I'm happy to agree with you.

Although I did hear somewhere that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a wealthy man to get into heaven

Exodus 22:25-27
New International Version (NIV)

25 “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest. 26 If you take your neighbor’s cloak as a pledge, return it by sunset, 27 because that cloak is the only covering your neighbor has. What else can they sleep in? When they cry out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.


Psalm 15
New International Version (NIV)

Psalm 15
A psalm of David.
1 Lord, who may dwell in your sacred tent?
Who may live on your holy mountain?
2 The one whose walk is blameless,
who does what is righteous,
who speaks the truth from their heart;
3 whose tongue utters no slander,
who does no wrong to a neighbor,
and casts no slur on others;
4 who despises a vile person
but honors those who fear the Lord;
who keeps an oath even when it hurts,
and does not change their mind;
5 who lends money to the poor without interest;
who does not accept a bribe against the innocent.

Whoever does these things
will never be shaken.


Luke 12:32-34
New International Version (NIV)

32 “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.