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Communism in the Bible

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Along with another book on Liberation Theology I just finished a second reading of this book almost 25 years after first reading it while living in the Philippines. I am glad to have given this book a second go. Lot's of food for thought. I grew up in the US at a time when it was virtually impossible to have a discussion about communism. That is probably true today as well but for different reasons. Miranda approaches the subject from a biblical perspective rather than starting with Marx-Engels. Most interesting to me is the author's contention that God is not opposed to wealth but rather he is opposed to disparity in wealth, some with more than they need while other do not have what they need. Further to this, his elucidation of how capitalistic assumptions have even inhibited faithful interpretation and translation of the Bible is entirely plausible. I was disappointed but not entirely surprised that the author seemed to buy into the myth of redemptive violence as a way of rectifying economic injustice. This is a very worthwhile book for those who are reading and thinking about the impact of consumerism and other economic issues for the church today in 2010.

What was special about the message was it the narcissism of redemption and salvation of the self, or was it the selflessness of living for the other? Primacy of the poor, the poor are special because they suffer the most, or were the abdication of ethical responsibility by salvation through grace? Jose` Miranda answers these questions.

Communism has never been allowed. Miranda challenges all those who accept previously unquestioned beliefs and challenges people to think for themselves. We are being conned by popular religion, Miranda aks us to think again.

Fascinating book. Communism is an idea as old as the bible (older, actually, if you count the Mesopotamian variety, Native Americans, etc). But in the West, communism was a Christian movement. The early Christians and monks knew it, and later there was Thomas More's "Utopia," and soon the New World became peppered with experiments in Christian communism, like the "Bible Communists" of Oneida New York, with their commune dictator, Father Noyes. Wasn't Paraguay founded as a communist experiment by Jesuits? Socialism was, as the original socialists explained, "Nouveau Christianisme."

When Marx came along with his irreligious "scientific socialism," he extracted the basic kernel of the idea, but tried to offer a new, secular rationale for it. Basically, Marxism was a failed attempt to give a scientific facelift to an irrational, unscientiific, hare-brained religious idea.

It's a simple idea: everybody will share everything, or own everything, collectively somehow, as common property. Ownership being the exclusive right to control and dispose a thing, the very idea is inherently contradictory. If we all own it, we all control it, and there's nothing left but to fight over it. "Public property" is nobody's property, it's either neglected or abused, and usually both. (As Aristotle observed hundreds of years before Christ, "We observe much more quarreling among those who hold all things in common.")

What shall be done, and not done, with the common property? Somehow, a myriad of conflicting wills must yield to one, unified will. Enter the dictator. Or the apathetic bureaucracy. The problem with communes is they entail both tyranny and poverty, and so the inmates soon flee. Every voluntary commune faces this problem. That's why socialism needs the State, because a government is, by definition, that body in any society which enjoys a virtual monopoly on the initiation of force.

But the thing is, if you're a real Christian---a true believer---then the fact that communism entails grinding poverty and totalitarianism seems somehow beside the point. How can it behoove us to worry about our own selfish freedom and wealth, when we're supposed to be just waiting around for the Messiah's return, and spending our time studying the highest truth, which is the teachings of a man who said "sell all you have and give it to the poor," and "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven"?

Miranda is a true believer all right: a chillingly pure and consistent Christian Communist----ready to marry the two evils of theocracy and socialism into a new and perfected totalitarian state.

After reading this book, you might clean your palate with something by the classical liberal Ludwig von Mises, the opposite of and antidote to Miranda.