Why has Christian communism always remained a peripheral if persistent feature of Christianity? This study explores the origins of the idea in the biblical book of Acts of the Apostles, the foregrounding of such communism in the work of Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Kautsky, and how their work influenced, often in polemical response, biblical scholarship on early Christianity. In particular, this tradition of Christian communism has taken two forms, one concerned with communal living and “having all things in common” and the other with the revolutionary origins of Christianity. While Engels argued for the latter, Luxemburg and Kautsky argued for the former. Some of the basic assumptions of these arguments persist in biblical scholarship: the appeal of Christianity to the lower classes, the ground-shaking nature of the movement, but also the betrayal involved in becoming a religion of the state. But did Christian communism actually exist in earliest, first-, or even second-century Christianity? The evidence is exceedingly slender if not nonexistent. And so I take a dialectical line, arguing that the probable nonexistence of early Christian communism is precisely the basis for the political myth of Christian communism. Later this myth would gain historical traction through those who sought to emulate the myth. One question remains: why did this political myth not become central to Christianity? I argue that it was a regressive myth, attempting to hold on to a fading economic form rather than (like Paul) offering a mediation that enabled a transition to the newer, slave-based mode of production of the Hellenistic world.

In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance

The Fate of Christian Communism

Gewalt ist nicht das Zentralthema der christlichen Uberlieferung – genauso wenig wie sie das zentrale Thema des Glaubens Israels darstellt, in dem Judentum und Christentum wurzeln. Am Beginn der Welt steht nach dem Zeugnis der Schrift in der vorliegenden Redaktionsgestalt der Bericht von der Schopfung Gottes, in der alles sehr gut ist, in der die Tiere Gefahrten des Menschen sind und die Gewalt gegenuber den Mitmenschen fern.

Liebe und Gewalt

Second Thessalonians 3:10b offers the teaching that “anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” Both conservative and socialist readers have cited this teaching as an encapsulation of their mutually incommensurable worldviews. I conduct a historical-critical investigation of the situation in which this passage was written; I argue against recent historical reconstructions that posit that 2 Thessalonians is authentically Pauline, and articulate a Sitz im Leben for the text in line with the principles of historical materialism. Specifically, I contend that the Thessalonian community was a tenement church composed entirely of marginalized people who were particularly vulnerable to economic crises in the late first century Roman Empire; this community fit the criteria for what Marx and Lenin would later call first-phase communism. A lack of sufficient employment opportunities led many members to rely too heavily on the community’s agape feast, thus threatening the community’s viability. The situation at Thessalonica can thus be characterized as what Habermas calls a rationality crisis, whereby the community was forced to abandon the core principles of its agapaic communalism and revert to a regressive policy that Marx calls “bourgeois right.” I conclude that modern conservative uses of the text serve different class interests from its author’s and that, while socialist uses of the text share its author’s class interests, those uses starkly illustrate the precariousness of first-phase communism. This precariousness, then, demonstrates that Permanent Revolution is necessary to secure the viability of communist societies against the structural vulnerabilities to which they are especially susceptible in the context of hegemonic capitalism, and thus that Socialism in One Country is a fatally flawed doctrine.

http://novaojs.newcastle.edu.au/ojsbct/index.php/bct/article/viewFile/532/473

Bourgeois Right and the Limits of First Phase Communism in the Rhetoric of 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15

Abstract:This article argues that Luke's characterization of Saul as a god-fighter can be read as modeled on the biblical King Saul and on Pentheus from Euripides's Bacchae, and that the characterization of Paul in Acts 13:4–17:15 can be read as modeled on the Bacchae's Dionysus. My approach, appealing to the Bacchae as a literary model, avoids a weakness of similar interpretations of the name Saul, which date to the early church, that it is a reference to King Saul. Saul remains \"Saul\" after the Damascus Road experience in order to demonstrate the appropriate response of one found to be a god-fighter, emulating Pentheus's model.

Better Call Paul "Saul": Literary Models and a Lukan Innovation

Against the consensus that ‘peace and security’ in 1 Thess 5.3 is an allusion to a common Roman imperial slogan, it is argued that, while ‘peace’ does, in fact, evoke Roman propaganda's promise of a stable society to her loyal subjects, ‘security’ has its roots in the Hellenistic conception of the polis as the guarantor of stability. Paul himself combined these two catchwords, thereby promoting a counterclaim both to Roman imperial power and to Hellenistic visions of the ideal civic society. Neither can offer true security in the face of the apocalyptic cataclysm he is convinced is coming. That can be found, as far as he is concerned, only in identifying with the community of believers in Jesus.

In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance

Citations

The Fate of Christian Communism

Liebe und Gewalt

Bourgeois Right and the Limits of First Phase Communism in the Rhetoric of 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15

Better Call Paul "Saul": Literary Models and a Lukan Innovation

‘Peace’ and ‘Security’ (1 Thess 5.3): Roman Ideology and Greek Aspiration

Related Papers (1)

Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder