In the United States nowadays we are used to seeing liberal Protestant churches that carry out what looks like Marxist approaches to the church’s mission. These types of churches are all about fostering social justice. They categorize individuals into groups based on color of skin, ethnicity, and sexual gender; “This person is a white male, and that person is a black female.” They assume generalizations about each group as oppressor or oppressed. And then their theologians try to come up with a theology that will empower the oppressed group, and their churches seek ways to promote various economic, political, and social causes that seek to unmask and undo the systemic oppression. According to this entire model, a crucial part of the church’s mission is promoting social justice in America.
I have been reading old essays by Martin Scharlemann. Already in 1971, on a broadcast given over KFUO radio on March 11, Scharlemann was anticipating what we now see as common among some churches in America. The piece is entitled, “A Marxist View of the Church.” Here are some salient paragraphs from that piece in The Making of a Theologian: Selected Works of Martin H. Scharlemann, edited by Richard P. Lieske with an introduction by Richard Klann (Concordia Seminary Student Association, 1984) pages 146–148.
Scharlemann quotes from an article about the church in a Hungarian Marxist periodical and then comments:
While such theology starts from social-ethical problems, it “arrives at the view that progressive changes in society have a theological relevance” . . . .
[The article] can be simplified to say that the church must adjust her program to the social and political needs of society. That is another way of saying that the world must set the church’s agenda.
Let us suppose that the early church had started out this way. What problem would these Christians have tackled first? These were Jewish Christians, remember! The most pressing problem was the Roman military occupation of Palestine, the Promised Land of Israel. We could, then, have expected Peter and James and John to exhort their converts to organize themselves into guerilla units and begin the struggle against Rome.
Fortunately, these apostolic leaders worked with a different set of priorities. Under the tutelage of their Lord they had come to see that the real hardcore problem among men is the individual’s rebellion against God as Creator and Redeemer. This blight had settled on both Jew and Gentile; and from this all men—including Jews—needed to be set free. They must be brought to repentance. That’s what the Church proclaimed.
There is not a whisper in the book of Acts about “effectively cooperating,” let us say, with Herodians or Romans “in the fields of morality and social ethics.” Instead, the earliest Christian communities are described as going about their own business of proclaiming and living a radically new kind of life. They had a program of their own and they did differentiate themselves from the society around them, inviting men to enter a new community by Baptism and so become part of a people that even now transcends all distinctions of race, color, economics, politics, and social structures. That is how the early Christian groups saw their responsibility of being the serving Church—even to the point of suffering unjustly as her Lord had done!
And so the Church outlasted the political and social structures of that day. Her adherents devoted their time and energies to tasks set by the Church’s awareness of a destiny beyond history. The Magnificat, which worshipers recited, turned out to be infinitely more radical and revolutionary than the Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
The Gospel proclaimed by the Church in her infancy required no outside validation or approval. Its message prepared its own way and led men to ask those questions which really matter.
“The main trend of Hungarian theology,” says the author of the article under discussion, “. . . is first of all social ethics. In view of its social-political experiments and solutions, it provides a realistic model, among others, for the cooperation of the church and Marxist socialism in the questions of society and morality.”
Compare that with Saint Paul’s statement (Phil. 3:20ff.): “We, however, are citizens of heaven, and we eagerly wait for our Savior to come from heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ” (TEV).
You can hear the difference, I would suppose. One is Marxist; the other is apostolic.
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