My life-long friend, who lives in St. Louis–a guy I hold in high regard, a fellow-pilgrim and an important encourager in my life–in response to last week’s blog posting, he wrote: “I’ve heard others say that Jesus was a socialist. Please share an explanation.”
I had planned a different subject to write about this week, but am instead responding to my friend’s question for two reasons: 1) the subject is always timely, if not urgent; and 2) what are friends for?
The claim that Jesus was “a socialist” has a certain truth to it, depending on what one means by the term “socialist.”
The Bible’s, in general, and Jesus’ “socialism,” in particular–since for Christians at least, Jesus is the fulfillment of all scripture–such “socialism,” if you will: it is rooted in biblical ethics, in the spiritual morality/moral spirituality of all three monotheistic religions, rather than being a political program, or what is often termed these days, a form of “social engineering.”
In other words, whatever our “socialism”–for Christians at least–it is to be expressed, always, as voluntary rather than as coercive.
However diverse the various communities of Christian faith we encounter in the New Testament; much less, the difficulty one encounters in trying to re-construct any uniform depiction of the social and economic life of those first followers of Jesus: one thing is apparent.
Where economic and social factors are concerned, the New Testament is ambiguous.
On the one hand, the first Christians were clearly “socialistic” in how they related to one another. As in, for example, Acts 2: 44-45, where the Bible says, “And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need.” Essentially, the same description is offered, again, in Acts 4: 32.
At the same time, what is also described in such portions of scripture is an example of private ownership (“they sold their possessions”). Just as it is clear that the first institutional expression of “the church” (ekklesia) was in the form of oikos (“house churches”), i.e. personally and privately owned property. And that there were, originally, both materially wealthy, as well as less affluent disciples of Christ. The former being described, for example, in Acts 16: 14-15; the latter implied in I Corinthians 11: 17-22.
That the first communities of Christians would have reflected a communal pattern of economic and social life is, of course, no accident. Such an idea (ideal?)–they didn’t just “make it up.” Nor was it contrived as something politically expedient. It comes, rather, straight out of the Hebrew Bible (our Christian Old Testament), in general, and the teachings of Jesus, in particular, to which the Gospels of the New Testament bear witness. Not to mention, the influence of Paul in the shaping of authentic Christian community (koinonia) ever since. Paul’s letters being, in fact–in their first person originality–the New Testament’s primary sources.
First, with respect to Jesus.
Surprising as it may be–certainly, to so many of us rugged individualist, competitive-to-a-fault, “I got mine, you get yours” Americans; we who prefer to “eisegete” (trying, sometimes rather desparately, to get the Bible to say what we may want it to say), rather than embracing what it may more accurately say (“exegesis”)–it is concerning money matters that Jesus, in the Gospels, has more to say than on any other subject. [“eisegete” means “read in to,” whereas “exegete” means “read out of”]
This “eisegetic” tendency: I suspect it has more to to do with our “fallen-ness” (at least from the Bible’s perspective), than from merely the National Library Association’s 2005 unfortunate announcement that, according to the latest research, “only 31 per cent of college graduates are functionally literate.”
Indeed, if the Bible is, on the one hand, the easiest of books to read; on the other hand, it is, in another sense, not all that easy. Since the Bible is an anthology, a variety of different literary expressions (in both content and form), much of which was originally developed in oral tradition, only then, later, to be written, across some fourteen centuries of Near Eastern, Asia Minor and European history and culture, in at least four different ancient languages, before eventually being translated, finally, into what we read today.
In case you haven’t noticed, Christianity is paradoxical–a both/and, rather than an either/or religion. Nowhere is this characteristic of Christian faith more notably revealed than in Jesus’ declaration, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36, the “spirituality” of Christian faith). While at the same time teaching his followers to pray for such a “kingdom to come on earth . . . .” (Matthew 6:10, the ethics which Christians are called to practice on “material” terms in a “material” world.
In other words, according to the Bible at least, there is no morality without spirituality, and no spirituality without morality (Amos 5: 21-24, I Corinthians 13). Christians, in fact, live in two worlds–and both at the same time–one being spiritual; the other, material. The “spiritual” is ultimate; the “material,” penultimate.
In Matthew 25 alone, Jesus seems to embrace both the competitiveness and accomplishment of a free market economy (the “Parable of the Talents,” at least when interpreted literally; Christians call this “stewardship”) and the eternal priority of care and concern for “the least” in the human family (the “Parable of the Sheep and the Goats”). As it were, both the “haves” and the “have nots.”
Despite such ambiguity concerning matters “material”–on the part of Jesus at least–the weight of his teaching in the Gospels clearly reveals a priority for the less affluent (“Blessed are the poor,” Luke 6:20) and a concern for, if not an indictment of the moral and spiritual burden inherent when one is wealthy (as in, for example, Mark 10: 17-24, where Jesus explains to a “rich man” that if he wants to “inherit eternal life,” he must “sell all that he has and give it to the poor”). Even if not interpreted literally, but rather as merely representative, or even hyperbolic (exaggerated for emphasis), the meaning of such statements seems, nonetheless, hardly ambiguous or confusing.
Contrary to “popular religion” in the consumptive and commodified culture of contemporary America, in Christian theology and ethics, the relationship between material wealth and moral and spiritual health is inversely proportionate (Matthew 16: 24-26).
In the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, where Jesus declares, “If someone sues you for your coat, give him your cloak also” (Matthew 5: 40), is this comparable to John the Baptist’s similar declaration (in Luke 3:11) that if one has two coats, s/he should give one away to someone who has none; and that this same ethical principle should be applied, as well, in the sharing of food? If John the Baptist is, in fact, announcing the ethical demands of a “kingdom” that Jesus is meant to introduce into and incarnate within a material world, is this then not a fairly obvious example of Jesus’ “socialism”?
As for Paul, even though he worked in the secular world as a “tent maker,” which suggests that his ministry took place in the context of a competitive, market-driven economy, he nevertheless consistently emphasizes the cooperative “one-ness” of authentic Christian community (as in, for example, I Corinthians 12 and Galatians 3:28). Is this not, as well, a form of “socialism”?
Indeed, this “one-ness” concept which Paul espouses, it is rooted in the self-understanding of ancient Israel (as expressed in the Old Testament), where Jacob is Israel and Israel is Jacob; the one being the many and the many the one; the individual as the group and the group as the individual. It’s a unique Hebrew concept called “corporate personality.” ‘Though I can’t imagine anything more foreign to our modern/post-modern American hyper-individualism and competitiveness.
In other words–in Hebrew-Christian ethics at least–if it isn’t good for everyone, it isn’t good for anyone. And vice versa. Is this yet another example of “socialism”? At least when you read the Bible? At least when you “don’t miss the forest for the trees”?
And, of course, the ancient Hebrew prophets promote a principle of Jewish social ethics which seems to have combined a market driven economy (the producing, buying and selling of material commodities and services) with a form of “socialism”; indeed, an apparent “welfare system” which provided for the least successful or fortunate, for the most economically and socially disadvantaged, marginalized and vulnerable. As in, for example, Jeremiah 7:6, where the prophet condemns the exploitation and oppression of “widows, orphans and aliens” (immigrants?).
In fact, this ethical principle forms the background to an interesting account, in Acts 6, of how the earliest of Christian communities developed a procedure to provide, materially, for the care of widows in what by then had become a multi-cultural church. Specifically, if the “Jewish widows” were benefactors of a centuries-old “welfare system,” what about the “Gentile widows”–since both were now confessing Christians? A form of “socialism”?
Come to think of it–and this is a “big picture” reading of the Bible–compared to other civilizations (nations?) which are mentioned in the Old Testament (Egypt, Syria, Assyria, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks); and later (in the New Testament world of Jesus’ day), the Romans–ancient Israel was, frankly, by all objective accounts, a second-rate “nation,” if you will; “the least,” as it were, among the other more prominent, powerful, more affluent and influential “players” on the stage of world history.
As in, for example, Moses’ reminder to those Hebrew pilgrims on the Exodus: “It was not because you were [greater] than any other people that the Lord set his love upon you and chose you, for you were the [least]” (Deuteronomy 7:7).
Does such an ethos, after all, lend itself to the kind of “socialism,” in its unique biblical form, which one finds emerging throughout the whole of scripture–especially in the life and ministry of Jesus?
Was Jesus “a socialist”? It’s not an easy question to answer. At least when one seeks to interpret scripture both fairly and faithfully. And it does, obviously, concern what one may mean when using the term.
Still, I’d say: to claim that “Jesus was a socialist”–such a claim–it is closer to being true than otherwise. At least when you read the Bible.
