Is Marxism Compatible With Biblical Justice?

Marxism is an ideology of social redemption that’s regained prominence in the United States through modern adaptations, such as critical race theory and critical theory in general. While the modern adaptations have their own distinctives and departures from the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, the core philosophy and worldview is essentially the same. As a result, familiarity with the ideology of Marx has both historical value and modern applicability, for those engaging in political discussion and debate. To that end, this article will attempt to show that Marxism is not only incompatible with the biblical worldview, it offers a comprehensive false religion that is simply a modern expression of the ancient rival of Judeo-Christianity.

It’s important to note that Marxism exists, historically and today, in a broader context of Secularism, which grew over time to compete with the religion of Christianity that previously dominated Western civilization. As Christians today have analyzed this progression of ideas, classification of secular ideologies in relation to the greek (and earlier) concept of Chaos as the origin of all things has come into vogue.

Like Darwinism, Marxism bears the marks of a Chaos religion that views order as coming naturally out of a constant revolution of the modern against prior, less ordered entities. In Darwinism, the quality of new mutations and species improves over time, through an unending cycle of natural selection, guided by the survival of the fittest. For Marxism, it’s the quality of society that improves over time, through a cyclical revolution whereby the fittest class within the social order takes dominance and eliminates its predecessors, only to be eliminated by its succeeding class.

Unlike Darwinism, Marx and Engels did posit an end to the struggle. The entire goal of their Manifesto was to help people understand the current age (of their time), which supposedly granted an opportunity to reduce their two-class system down to a one-class system, thereby eliminating the class warfare. Nevertheless, their system still follows the ideological pattern of Darwinism and other modern theories of Secularism, in that it observes Chaos in some area of the world, and posits that order automatically rises out of it through natural means.

While some Christians try to build bridges to Chaos ideologies of the modern age, those with a well-developed understanding of scripture will recognize that this is the ancient enemy of biblical Judaism and Christianity. The Greeks and their Gentile predecessors saw order naturally rising out of Chaos (e.g. Hesiod’s Theogony). The biblical account of creation sees God speaking his word into chaos, and the elements obey his command to bring order (Gen 1). As a general rule, secular ideologies tend to view the world (in effect) as basically naturalistic, consisting of matter, energy, and perhaps spiritual or other elements. A Christian ideology, on the other hand, views the world as consisting of all these things, plus information that originates outside of the closed system.

For the secularist, information is a phenomenon of Chaos, something ordered that arose accidentally through natural, random, and impersonal means. For the Christian, information originates from the mind of a Person living outside of the material world, namely God. Secularism views ultimate reality as impersonal and random, whereas Christianity views ultimate reality as personal and intentional.

On the biblical worldview, God spoke into this world, and among other things, ordered it into plants and animals, whose DNA contains the information needed to reproduce them after their kinds. He also created man and other creatures with a mind capable of generating derivative information, thinking God’s thoughts after him. Information from God describes categories of things in the universe (e.g. humans), with unchanging moral boundaries that delineate their proper use.

To give an example of the impact of these two religions on morality, Christianity views it as morally acceptable to stab disorganized dirt with a shovel, but because God spoke meaning into particular mounds of dirt that are organized into human beings, it is considered wrong to stab those with a shovel or knife. Chaos religion, on the other hand, has no foundation for ultimate meaning, so it is never ultimately wrong to murder, rape, or steal from humans. It is only locally and temporarily wrong, according to the whims and opinions of particular authorities (like the state) that rise and fall in Chaos.

Thus for the Christian, order does not derive naturally from Chaos, as an ever-changing and amoral sea of meaningless matter and energy. Rather, it derives from the meaning, design, and intentions of God in his creation of this world. Because there is transcendent meaning and order sown into the universe, we have a philosophical foundation for universal morality, science, civilization-building, hope (etc.), things that depend on the existence of transcendent information and meaning, rather than phenomenal and evolving information and meaning.

Understanding these two ideological strains can help a reader of Marx’s Manifesto to recognize some of the subtle assumptions he makes about the nature of man and his society. The class struggle that he observes as a conflict between oppressor and oppressed is viewed as a positive struggle that will result in better ordering of society over time. Where the Christian would view this struggle as evidence of sin and decay in God’s originally good and ordered world, Marx would view this struggle as evidence of advancement toward equity for all. Where the Christian would view variations in economic status as being legitimate, such as due to varying degrees of human effort or sin (e.g. drug abuse accounting for much of the poverty we see in America), Marx would view all such variations as the root cause of society’s economic problems, something to be eliminated at all costs.

For Marx, the worker is an oppressed victim of the business owner, due to his lower economic status. He has little acknowledgement of differences in character – people of industry working their way up the economic ladder, versus lazy people remaining at the bottom. Every difference is a problem external to the worker, and establishing equal economic standing is the only solution to the class struggle he sees. On these presuppositions, the worker’s revolution and seizure of production is justified.

Christianity and Marxism therefore hold two very different views of the problems Marx observed in the industrial revolution. And because the biblical worldview actually is true, and God really is the foundation of all truth (Jhn 14:6), Marx’s departure from God’s word produces a number of challenges that undermine the intellectual cohesion and success of his program of social improvement.

As illustrated above, one important implication of naturalism is the elimination of ultimate morality. Morality is a set of ideas which describe what personal beings should do in particular contexts. In contrast with natural laws, which describe what will always occur given particular conditions, moral laws describe what should occur, when a personal being is making decisions in an appropriate (“good”) manner. Social collaboration relies on such a moral code to defines boundaries for human behavior, and only an ultimate moral code can justify and inform the lesser laws and collective actions of societies.

We’ve seen that for Chaos religion, the products of Chaos are subject to eternal revolution rather than submission to order, and therefore morality also is subject to eternal change. So whereas rape, murder, and theft might all be considered wrong in one culture and era, it’s conceivable that such things would be viewed as morally good and right in another culture and era, to the extent that the finite source of morality (human society, the state, etc.) finds such things to be profitable. Marxism does this in particular with theft, eliminating the meaning that God spoke into private property through the dominion mandate (Gen 1:26-30, Deu 32:8), and thereby justifying its seizure by revolutionaries. And as we’ll see, it also eliminates the meaning behind family, converting God’s covenant relationship between husband and wife to one of mere economics, through the legitimization of prostitution.

Such changes in morality are entirely consistent with the beliefs of Chaos religion in general, and Marx’s view of social revolution in particular. When we make morality the product of society or any other phenomenal result of Chaos, it becomes impossible for one culture or context to criticize another. Modern Americans tend to look critically at Nazi Germany and antebellum America because the racist ideologies that pervaded those societies created systems of oppression that we view as being immoral. However, if morality is the product of societal consensus, then those societies were acting morally according to their own beliefs or law codes.

Without an objective standard of morality that transcends the cultures and eras produced by natural history, morality loses all value as a tool of measurement and societal advancement. The murderer in prison might only be a more advanced human who is simply ahead of his time. Who are we to judge, punish, sanction, or advise on any course of action that other humans choose to take? When morality is relative, it becomes nothing more than a description of a person’s or society’s individual opinion, rather than what it is meant to be – a prescription of how persons and societies should conduct themselves.

The erosion of morality is a criticism that Marx himself responded to, though his answer to the objection leaves much to be desired. He begins by quoting the objection,

“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

Taken in the broader context of the Manifesto, his response demonstrates a view of morality that classifies it as an aspect of particular classes’ social identities. He seems to focus his response on the point of Communism’s contradiction of historical experience rather than the more forceful aspects of the accusation, that all truth, religion, and morality is abolished. But in the end he acknowledges the accusation as the intended aim of Communism.

For Marx, truth, religion, and morality are all aspects of the dominant part of society imposing its views on the oppressed, future successor of the next era. The commonality we see in moral ideas therefore comes from this transfer of social consciousness from oppressor to oppressed, prior to the liberation of the oppressed, and therefore this social consciousness (i.e. truth, religion, and morality) “cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.” By establishing the victory of a one-class society through elimination of private property, Communism will gradually do away with the perceptions of truth, religion, and morality that thrive on the oppressor/oppressed relationship of historic human experience.

Marx elaborates on the expected dismissal of morality etc. with the advent of the one-class proletariat, a little earlier in the Manifesto.

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

The impact of Communism on morality isn’t the focus of Marx’s Manifesto, so the subject isn’t as developed as one might wish. But from what is present, it’s clear that Marx views morality as a mere product of social constructs, rather than a transcendent law by which society is judged. Thus as society changes along the lines he draws, so do the moral codes. It isn’t man’s perception of morality that changes, but morality itself, because morality (like all information) is a mere product of Chaos and revolution.

This is important to the practicality of Marx’s social program, because the abolition of morality brings with it the abolition of moral consequences. Maintaining consequences for immoral decision-making is necessary to production, because production depends on man’s decision to work. If a man chooses not to work (i.e. what Christians would call “laziness,”) his decision has implications for the success of the social order; it reduces the total output of its production, and thereby threatens its survival.

A social order that maintains a Christian moral code will check laziness by bringing consequences for it. Specifically (and with nuance for e.g. those who cannot work), a man’s daily sustenance is dependent on his willingness to work, because food is the basic product of work (Gen 2:5, 3:17-19). As the apostle Paul wrote to prevent parasitic abuse of the Church’s call to hospitality,

For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. (2Th 3:10-12)

If you take a man out of society, and place him alone on a remote island, his survival will depend on his willingness to work in the production of food. Because man is commanded by God to work for his food, and God has created appropriate natural consequences for disobedience to that command, man has a moral duty, a moral consequence (judgement), and a natural consequence related to survival that occurs when judgement is delayed. Starvation is the natural consequence for an immoral decision to engage in laziness. Therefore most people will engage in work independent of a belief in God’s judgement, because most people do not wish to experience the consequence of starvation.

However, if you place man in the context of a society that removes both the natural consequence for laziness and a belief in ultimate accountability, you remove two important motivations to work. These aren’t the only motivations for work; love of God and love of a neighbor would motivate consistent Christians to work regardless, due to the impact of the Holy Spirit on human character. But by removing the consequences for immoral decision-making in the area of work, you introduce into society a strong temptation to consume without contributing. As Solomon observed,

Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil. (Ecc 8:11)

Therefore because man actually is sinful, and given the choice will often prefer his own comfort to the good of all society, some kind of “moral code” and enforcement mechanism will be inevitable in communistic societies, even if all class conflict were to be eliminated. The victorious proletariat will be just as concerned with morality as the bourgeois, and possessing just as much prejudice toward certain ideals, as is evidenced by the presupposed value they place on removing oppression from society. Practically speaking, the Marxist state will produce sanctions of some kind for at least the “immoral” (unlawful) unwillingness of some men to work, or else the resulting poverty will revolutionize the whole order into a different, non-communistic form of government that actually functions.

The inevitability of morality as at least a social construct ensures that the stratification of society into multiple “classes” will also be inevitable, even on communistic terms. At the very least, society must break down into classes of those who will work, versus those who will not. These two classes will necessarily be treated differently in the long-term, rewarding the workers, and punishing the non-workers, to protect the social order from collapse. The reward and punishment dynamic will in turn necessarily stratify the economic outcomes provided to one person versus another.

Those who bear the power of enforcement – who can bring sanctions against the class of non-workers and reward the workers – then compose a third necessary class with its own distinct capacities, privileges, and powers.

This structure of “good people,” “bad people,” and “judges” aligns with the seminal and ultimate structure of society described in the Bible. In the beginning, God (the judge) set a standard for mankind – that he would work, multiply, and take dominion over the earth, while avoiding a particular tree of testing. Man then broke this standard, and instilled law-breaking into human nature, creating a variety of “good” and “bad” actions and people.

There is of couse much more to the story. The good people are not sinless. They are those who repent, who trust in God/Christ to take the punishment for their sin, and who then grow into the standard of righteousness that God requires. But this structure of good and bad behavior and people being judged by an ultimate throne, and the lesser thrones of man, is a recurring theme throughout scripture and human civilization.

To put it another way, mankind lives and breathes in a context of morality, real and perceived. Just as a fish naturally lives and breathes in water, a human lives in the context of authority, and standards set by that authority. To remove a fish from the water will kill it. In the same way, to remove a human being from authority and its consequent standard of morality, is to remove the human being from his/her preconditions of life. Legitimate authority defines the proper boundaries (moral or derivative) that must constrain man’s liberty in a context where multiple personal beings are interacting with each-other. Interpersonal interaction relies on morality, and morality is mediated by authority. Freeing man from authority therefore frees man from a necessary precondition of interpersonal relationship, and therefore undermines the possibility of collaborative civilization.

We see this dynamic in the fall of man. Adam and Eve accepted the serpent’s philosophy of moral autonomy, that they could be God and set their own personal standards of behavior. Rather than submit to God and obey his command to avoid the forbidden fruit, they took the fruit in a demonstration of rebellion against their higher authority.

This led to two forms of death. One came through outright judgement, God removing his presence from man as his source of life. The other came through gradual decay, both of man’s body, and of his society. Their children began to murder each-other as a more egregious forms of self-exaltation over morality. Eventually the wickedness of man became such that God had to destroy all but eight people in another act of outright judgement to prevent the whole of civilization from collapsing.

Marxism makes this fatal mistake of attempting to remove man from a context of authority. By removing all class distinctions in society, Marx and Engels situate man in a context of moral anarchy, as a societal expression of fallen man’s ultimate ambition. This can be accomplished in theory if every man is still accountable to God (the judge in a class of his own), but in practice, and in light of God’s post-flood commandment toward human judges (Gen 9:5-6), removal of human judges from society is itself an act of anti-God rebellion and social suicide.

The stratification that Marx sees between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is in fact an authority structure, one that Marx seeks to remove. While it’s true that not all authority structures are moral and legitimate, many are. Children are legitimately intended to live in the context of parental authority, until the point of emancipation. Citizens are intended to live in the context of civil authority, until the point that civil government is no longer needed (i.e. in the sinless state). Etc.

By viewing all of history through the lens of a class struggle that must ultimately devolve into a single class, Marx is waging war against authority as a concept in human civilization. He is waging war against the very preconditions of our existence as a species. His focus on economics and the destruction of private property targets the laws against theft most clearly, but his philosophy at its core eliminates all moral categories, and all accountability for immoral action. Thus it is legitimate to say that consistently applied, Marxism will lead to things like legalized rape and murder, both as a fruit of his secular worldview, and of his attack on authority.

Rather than destroy authority itself, Christian approaches to reform will acknowledge legitimate authorities (good and bad), and measure the authorities’ actions against their own natural moral contexts. Human authorities do not exist autonomously, though some may think they do. Rather, they exist within the moral context and standards of higher authorities.

For example, in the United States, a county official is obligated to obey county law, as well as the higher laws of the state and federal governments. Then the state and federal governments are themselves accountable to God, who gives them permission to exercise authority over other people. When the highest authority in a land does good and judges righteously, the nation prospers. When it does evil and judges unrighteously, the nation is eventually judged.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.

For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. (Rom 13:1-5)

While Romans is often cited to justify total and unlimited obedience to human authorities, it actually constrains authority to only ever be considered legitimately applied when it rewards good and punishes evil, according to God’s definition of these terms. And the rest of the Bible plays this out in various examples of civil disobedience, to provide recourse when the judge becomes the oppressor.

The authority of God that mediates ultimate morality and derivative law codes is the prerequisite consensus that unifies civilization, and that keeps both authorities and subordinates in check as we deviate from it. When humans attempt to seize autonomous (unlawful) authority by severing ourselves from God’s authority at any point in that chain of command, we likewise sever ourselves from other humans with different conceptions of moral boundaries (autonomous or submitted), undermining the consensus and unity of God’s civilization founded in Adam. The natural decay and revolution that we see in man’s civilization is therefore a product of sin’s effect on man’s willingness to submit to lawful authority. Like other Chaos religions, what Marxism postures as the cure for various evils (revolution against lawful authority), Christianity views as the very cause of evil and its destructive impact on civilization.

So Christianity gives us a robust theology for knowing right and wrong, for responding to wrongs done in any higher or lower class or authority, and for measuring authorities against higher standards, leading ultimately to God, the highest and infallible judge. While we acknowledge the impact that sin has on rulers, leading them to reward evil and punish good, the goal of Christianity is to reform or replace evil rulers and authority structures, not to abolish authority itself as a social construct. Because universal morality and universal authority to enforce morality actually exist on a Christian worldview, we have a non-arbitrary standard by which the rulers who set social standards can be measured and targeted for reform, imbuing civilization with the prerequisite consensus that prevents revolution on the basis of personal opinion. We may debate the content of ultimate morality as a matter for human discovery, but Christian presuppositions make civilization possible, whereas Marxism must live inconsistently with its own philosophy to deal with the inevitable problems that come from eliminating authority through the equalizing of all men.

To summarize the difference then between Marxism and Christianity in this regard, the former views oppression as the product of differences in authority and power, whereas the latter views oppression as the result of corruption in legitimate forms of authority. Marxism seeks to reform social conditions to remove the existence of authority from man’s environment, whereas Christianity seeks to maintain authority within civilization, reform its law codes and (as needed) its authority structures to conform to higher authority (ultimately God), and cultivate greater degrees of faithfulness to authority among the people (from the individual and corporate social units), through God’s provided means of corporate and personal sanctification.

Because authority of some kind is necessary to provide civilization with consensus, Marx’s revolution against authority becomes revolution against civilization itself, reminiscient of Adam’s fall, with the worker’s revolution devolving into chaos rather than building order. Socialism therefore rises from the ashes to create the missing authority, with the state claiming the autonomy that was meant for the worker, but that can only be truly possessed by an ultimate judge and god. The worker is thus enslaved to the new and corruptible god of the state who arose from the Chaos of revolution, and he is less free to live in peaceful submission to the incorruptible God of creation, being forced to now choose between two beings who claim ultimate authority over his life.

Another critique of Marx’s Manifesto is its undue focus on economics as the exclusive source of power in class conflicts. His argument centers around the idea that older means of production are run by older classes, which create through technology the preconditions of a new class that will eventually overthrow them. The guilds from the middle ages birthed more efficient means of production. This in turn gave industrious merchants the ability to mass-produce products to an extent never before seen. Through this dominant improvement in production, this new bourgeoisie class destroyed the old guilds, and created the proletarian workforce that would ultimately be their own undoing.

As part of this rise and fall of classes, Marx does recognize the seizure of political power as integral to the process. However, this is always downstream from the economic revolution, as a byproduct of it. Rather than acknowledge political power as an independent source of power that influences economics as much as it is influenced by it, politics is simply derivative of economics.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation.

Religious power is similarly derivative. Marx said of his current age,

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

For Marx, religious power and authority is something that is ultimately up for purchase. He sees no category of religious figure who operates independent of economics in the exercise of his authority. In contrast to this, the great men of scripture often spoke and acted in ways that contradicted their economic success, and reproved those who were mastered by money.

(Jesus said,) “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Mat 6:24-26)

Now when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money, saying, “Give me this power also, so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.” But Peter said to him, “May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money! You have neither part nor lot in this matter, for your heart is not right before God. Repent, therefore, of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you.” (Act 8:18-22)

It’s true that economics is a core dynamic of human society. It dates back to God’s command to Adam to tend the garden and work the field, food being the foundational source of economic power in human civilization. But economics isn’t the only dynamic introduced in the garden. Man’s relationship with God (religion) and man’s capacity to judge other men (politics) feature prominently in Genesis as cornerstones of human civilization.

While there may be other forms of power at play in human society (e.g. familial love and loyalty), these three at least feature prominently throughout scripture’s account of human history and its various struggles. To raise economics as the ultimate force and source of class struggles is a naive and simplistic view of human civilization.

Importantly, economics is highly dependent on and subject to the political forces at play in the world. The militant polis is the source of protection for agriculture, industry and trade routes, and its creation and enforcement of laws produces the context within which economic forces operate. For example, as we saw in the global COVID lockdown, the ability to produce and transport goods is highly dependent on the protections and constraints brought by the dominant political force in a region. Businesses were shut down, often permanently, because of the decisions and commandments of political leaders who held the power of enforcement (Rom 13:1-7). Whatever back door dealings and forces may have been behind COVID, political enforcement is a real and clear power source that contends with economic power. Politics depends on economics, but economics also depends on politics. These are complementary powers that check one another; they do not all ultimately roll up under the dynamics put forward by Marx.

An example of this is seen in the Bible’s account of Egypt’s centralization of economic power under a single political ruler.

So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh, for all the Egyptians sold their fields, because the famine was severe on them. The land became Pharaoh’s. As for the people, he made servants of them from one end of Egypt to the other. Only the land of the priests he did not buy, for the priests had a fixed allowance from Pharaoh and lived on the allowance that Pharaoh gave them; therefore they did not sell their land. (Gen 47:20-22)

In this short passage, we see the three powers already discussed, namely the political, the economic, and the religious. Unlike Marx’s summary of past conflict, where the economic forces used their capital to purchase political and religious power, Pharaoh through Joseph used his political power of taxation and social planning to sieze control of the economic powers of society, while leaving the religious powers still independent.

Marx thus errs in reducing the fundamentals of human authority to those with the greatest capital. It was a dynamic in his era, which he extrapolated into the past. But it isn’t a universal dynamic that holds true in every society and historical context.

Similarly, religious power influences economics as much as it is influenced by it. The famed “Protestant work ethic” of earlier American history was a product of the belief system profferred by pastors and Protestant teachers who focused on the Bible’s teachings toward the importance of hard work. The religious leaders of the nation substantially influenced the economics of the nation by creating workers with the character to produce more than what the lowest bar required. While it’s true that many of these pastors also benefitted from economics, being paid for their services in preaching and counseling, many Christian leaders throughout Church history have gone unpaid, receiving no earthly compensation for their exercise of religious authority (1Co 9:8-15). To reduce the “priest” or other religious leader to a mere wage earner is a failure to recognize the significance of religious conviction in the human experience, and the power of those who hold sway over it.

On this point one may object that Marx’s comment about the priest was a mere observation about the bourgeoisie’s reduction of all other classes to the proletariat wage earner. It wasn’t an elucidation of his own view, but rather a critical comment about the dominance of the bourgeoisie over all of society and its historic classes.

This may be true as far as it goes. But in asserting this dominance, Marx fails to recognize that whatever economic subjugation the priest experiences at the hands of the bourgeoisie, he still retains a very potent form of influence on his own. Yes, the bourgeiosie may use its money to influence the politician and the priest in the exercise of political and religious power. But they still have power that operates according to non-economic dynamics, and these dynamics are not accounted for in Marx’s view of society.

This critique of Marx should, of course, be given with a significant dose of humility on the part of the biblical Christian. While we may be critical of Marx’s reductionism, evangelicals should recognize and repent of the reductionism present in our own view of God’s universe. We tend to elevate religious and spiritual aspects of man’s experience to the exclusion and denigration of other aspects, such as his political and economic life. Rather than bring all of man’s personal and social dynamics under the authority and influence of God, we focus exclusivistically on the new birth and sanctification of his character, and leave the rest of life to be governed by the Secularists. Like Marx, we fail to provide a worldview that explains and redeems the whole man, rather than one component, and this needs to change if we are to compete with the other isms that do speak to these aspects of creation, albeit falsely.

Perhaps the most glaring blindspot in the Manifesto is that it provides a universal ideology to explain the whole of human history and struggle, while explicitly undermining the very possibility of universal ideology. Marx writes,

All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic modes of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you…

He goes on to then discuss the abolition of family, and the establishing of a communistic community of women to replace prostitution. By reducing all relations to economic relations, Marx clearly holds in view a revolution of man’s total terms of existence, including an elimination of all moral categories.

He makes his moral relativism explicit a little later, along with a restatement of his relativistic view of ideology generally. The relevant passage is cited above, in the section on moral consequences, but I’ll recite it again in its broader context of the abolition of ideology.

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.

“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.”

“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc. that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

Marx, in proffering this naturalistic view of history and reality, quite consistently postures knowledge itself as being an evolutionary product of self-ordering Chaos. Truth is merely a product of human production, not something which exists in its own right, and that speaks ultimate meaning and order into chaos. As classes rise and fall in society, the “truth” of the old order is replaced with the “truth” of the new, because truth is merely the opinion of the dominant class, ideology of the fittest. So there are no ultimate categories of thought, such as morality, laws of logic, laws of nature etc., because these are merely a phenomenon of the current state of self-ordering Chaos.

This assault on knowledge is an achilles’ heel shared by all Chaos religions. Any attempt to define universal ideological categories will be a self-refuting activity, because information and the laws that operate upon it (e.g. logic) is necessarily made to be a phenomenon of the present state of Chaos, such as in the highly evolved human consciousness. In his version of the ancient cult, Marx attempts to situate ideas like class antagonism and oppression as eternal, unchanging concepts in every society that may be eliminated only through the elimination of class distinctions. But these are ideological claims that, on his own stated view, are subject to revolutionary overthrow.

For example, by eliminating moral categories in particular, Marx undercuts all justification for Communist activity. The moral reason that the proletariat should attempt to seize the means of production is their own oppression at the hands of the bourgeoisie. But if morality is no more of a universal category than private property, family relations, or other targets of Marxist reform, then there is no ultimate justification for advancing the Communist cause, because oppression is simply a phenomenon of the present state of the material world, organized so that humans exist and care about how they and others are treated.

Rather than eliminate religion, morality, and ideology, Marx asserts a new religion, morality, and ideology to justify communist revolution and activity, then attacks the foundation of it – the categories of thought on which it stands. Marx proffers his own set of ultimate values (generally a reduction of the Judeo-Christian ethic), such as opposing oppression, selfishness, and hypocrisy, etc. But he assumes these to be universally true without a defense, then arbitrarily waves away all other views as phenomenal human inventions, treating them by a different standard of evaluation (special pleading).

In this way, Marxism requires a person to think illogically, denying the laws of logic on the one hand, and being persuaded by them on the other. To be considered “true,” Marxism should properly compete with other ideologies in a “traditional” evaluation of truth claims through consistent logical debate and persuasion. But it undercuts this process by granting arbitrary ultimacy to its own presuppositions, and treating all others according to a different standard — reducing their competition to one of economic power rather than the intrinsic quality of an idea. Marx therefore circumvents the need for a philosophical defense of his religion, morality, and ideology only by sheer ignorance of the fact that his own belief system falls into the category of human endeavor that he seeks to abolish.

In short, like all Chaos religions, Marxism is self-refuting in its denial of ultimate truth, and should therefore be disregarded as proffering anything that is ultimately true.

To this point, we can see that Marxism is not in any way compatible with biblical justice ideals for society in its theory of social reform. For the Christian, human justice is grounded in ultimate morality that flows out of God’s own character and nature, whereas for Marx, justice for oppression is grounded in the opinions of the dominant class. Whereas Christianity can stand on God’s word as the justifying foundation for our goals and methods of social reform, Marx’s reliance on naturalism over supernaturalism undercuts his system, bringing its value for human equality to be destroyed along with all other moral categories, through the ever-shifting sands of revolutionary Chaos (Mat 7:24-29).

In terms of the practical products of Marxism and Christianity, perhaps the most striking difference is the kind of society that each intends to produce — a monolithic social order versus a cellular one, respectively. Where Marx eliminates the family and all other social institutions in favor of statist control as an equalizing force in society (leading to a theoretical, non-political “association” of workers to replace socialism), Judeo-Christianity localizes society and its means of production around the family unit.

The difference flows out of the diagnosis of what causes oppression in society. For Marx, oppression is the natural product of class distinctions, because he sees an unending, seemingly darwinian class conflict in the nature of reality itself. Because creation is conflicting and revolutionary by nature, the only end to social conflict is to eliminate all but one class under the management of union leaders, creating a monolithic end result.

For Christianity, the problem is sin, an unnatural perversion of human nature and the society it produces. Thus the solution is to eliminate sin from human nature and the universe at large, to restore the edenic paradise. Because this happens over the long ages of history, while sin and death ravage the human race, God grants the state authority to restrain oppression and other criminal activity through various degrees of punishment. But He does this without eliminating other, competing authority structures.

To put it another way, sin affects all levels of government, whether self-government, family-government, business, church, or state, etc. Until sin is eliminated from existence, all of these authority structures will exhibit sinful and ultimately oppressive tendencies, from time to time, whether there is only one (the state) or many (the Christian cellular model). Thus the “class warfare” that Marx decries is really one expression of a multi-layered, multi-faceted conflict between and within many diverse forms of government that are all poisoned by sin. God relies on this conflict to keep the sin of each in check until the total elimination of sin is accomplished, making a cellular approach more preferable and practical than Marx’s monolithic approach.

We see the importance of class/group antagonisms, for example, in God’s solution at Babel. Man united into a single, worldwide government that stood in sinful defiance of God. God’s gracious solution was not to immediately destroy man’s civilization, as he had done in the recent flood. Rather, he confused man’s language so that we broke into several distinct cultural and national groups that would continue in competition and rivalry to this day, rather than unite into a one world totalitarian government. Thus we see Israel used as a tool of judgement against the prolific sin of Canaan, and later Babylon used as a tool of judgement against the prolific sin of Israel, etc. The rivalry of diverse groups serves as a check against sin and oppression, so that God does not ultimately need to judge us with another universal flood when sin and oppression grow to full maturity in one group or another.

Because Marx fails to acknowledge the reality of sin as a threat to his social order, he assumes that workers will collaborate in perfect unity with each-other when all external group conflicts are resolved. Christianity views this in the opposite way, arguing that group conflicts are intrinsic to man’s nature, with disunity being a problem of sin and selfishness in man’s character (Jas 4:1-2). Therefore unity apart from a true answer to man’s sinful condition can only be achieved through tyranny, and only on a surface level. Rather than resort to corrupt totalitarian power as the source of man’s unity, as Marxism is forced to do, God uses group antagonisms to keep sin in check, while pursuing true unity through the gospel of Jesus Christ that resolves our character issues.

With that said, many of the distinctions within human society — while practically useful to God as tools of restraint on evil — are also often in place for a legitimate reason that would exist with or without the presence of sin. Family in particular serves as the cellular nexus of economic, political, and religious activity. Rather than centralize such activity around a monolithic state, Christianity decentralizes it around a plurality of cooperating and specialized families. This mimics God’s design for the human body, has many practical benefits in terms of effective management over the monolithic alternative, and is reflected as well in the spiritual family/ies of the Church (cf. 1Co 12:12-31, Gen 1:26-27, 2:22-24, 4:21-22).

Use of a monolithic superstructure is actually a feature of both Marxism and Capitalism, and Christians should recognize that scripture would reform both systems in this regard. For the Christian, the primary offense of Capitalism is its permanent centralization of economic power in the hands of the elite, this same reduction of the many into the one. Marx identified a real problem, but in his denial of sin and ultimate truth, he prescribed a remedy that only created more oppression by furthering this centralization of economic power.

God’s design for Israelite society under Moses was to imbue it with a regular anti-trust mechanic that redistributed the means of production across society, rather than centralize it totally under the State, without at the same time robbing the capitalist of reward for his ambition. While capitalists could acquire and consolidate the means of production for a short while (50 years), reaping the monetary benefits of that risk and investment, the anti-trust mechanism would regularly return the means of production into the hands of distributed families, while leaving the generated wealth in the hands of the capitalist.

This of course is a reference to the tradition of Jubilee, which would liberate the slave and consolidated land purchases. Jubilee notably addresses both of the central concerns for Marx, namely the oppression of the working class, and the consolidation of the means of production under the capitalist.

On the former point, it should be noted that slavery in Moses was different in character from the slavery of American history. There are distinctions in Moses which are controversial enough in their own right, but slavery was generally a matter of willing and temporary servitude in line with the wage laborer of Marx more than the African American stolen from his people and abused by the slaveholder. Moses generally afforded a variety of protections to the slave, including a prohibition against returning runaway slaves to their masters (Deu 23:15-16). As part of this, every fifty years, in the year of Jubilee, every slave (i.e. hired worker) who was part of the covenant people of God would go free. Similarly, for the more regular cadence of life, the seventh year after a Hebrew entered into slavery, s/he was to be liberated and generously paid (Deu 15:12-15).

In addition to liberating the worker, Jubilee also liberated land from the capitalist, returning it to the original family that owned it. In the agrarian society of Israel, land was the economic means of production, where sunlight was converted into food, which in turn drove all of man’s varied forms of work. Thus Jubilee offers in principle a comprehensive foundation for anti-trust dynamics in society.

Like the liberation of the wage earner, Jubilee’s regular, bloodless “revolution” was matched with lesser rights that permitted repurchase of the means of production at any time, by those who held original rights to them. In modern society, this would be the original owners of a company, or their natural heirs. Jubilee would thus enforce a regular redistribution of production from the capitalist to the original owner, but a right of repurchase also allowed the original owner to reacquire sold rights through repurchase.

Thus rather than a true sale of the means of production, Jubilee ensures that they are given in terms of a lease, calculated by the expected return between the point of sale and the year of Jubilee (Lev 25:14-17). Ultimate ownership of land/production therefore rests in the hands of the distributed families in society, with the capitalist consolidating power only on a basis of a temporary lease.

Much can be written about how the principles of Jubilee etc. should apply to Gentile countries in the modern day, but such an endeavor would be outside the scope of this article. But here we have enough to see that Marxism and Christianity offer two very different solutions to the problems of injustice and social organization, stemming from two very different religions with two very different gospels and diagnoses of the human condition. Marxism is not compatible with biblical justice; it is a false gospel that Christians should fight against and replace with the true answers of Christian social theory.