Thinking Biblically About SOCIALISM As the Answer to Injustice

How would you answer your teenager who said, “I think American capitalism is based on evil greed and that socialism is more biblical?” This episode examines God’s design for economic flourishing, identifying the biblical principles that might be important in giving him or her an answer.

Today’s Christians should be confronting the evils of poverty, racism, and economic oppression. I’m glad the rising generation in my denomination is much more concerned about poverty in our cities, confessing past racism, and pursuing economic justice than my generations has been. Christians, today, are drawn to the idyllic society promised by socialism—a just and equitable society and guarantee of a basic standard of living for everyone. Didn’t Paul say, the love of money is the root of all kinds of evils (1 Tim 6:10)? Isn’t free market capitalism’s whole motivational system based on love of money that fosters greed, which the Bible condemns? In contrast to the selfish capitalism of the West, socialism brings mental pictures of picturesque Scandinavian villages, farmers’ markets, smiling people working together for a common cause, an idyllic Camelot where everyone has his needs met, lives in harmony, and prospers. Certainly, the socialist ideal of sharing with others is to be preferred over the pursuit of the almighty buck under free market capitalism. And, isn’t that the picture of the early Church in Acts? We read,

And no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common… There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need (Acts 4: 32-35).

Based on this example, shouldn’t Christians support economic systems like communism or socialism which redistribute wealth? Actually, NO. Here’s why.

• The property was voluntarily, freely sold, not forcibly confiscated, which is what socialism does.
• The economic sharing of wealth was not done on the basis of class warfare, as socialism is. There is no hint that private ownership is deemed immoral in the NT or OT.
• The state is nowhere in sight. No government is confiscating property and collectivizing industry. Socialism is government ownership of the means of production and control of the distribution of goods.
• Acts 4 is an example of voluntary generosity to meet a temporary crisis, not a state-run economy. Scholars estimate that Jerusalem’s population swelled by 100,000 as Jews from around the Mediterranean returned to Jerusalem to celebrate The Day of Pentecost. When Peter stood up and preached 3,000 came to faith in Christ. A few days later the number came to 5,000 just men. The only source of teaching about this new life was in Jerusalem. So, thousands decided to extend their stay in Jerusalem—putting an enormous burden on their hometown brothers and sisters in Christ to provide hospitality for them.
• Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5) were condemned for lying to the Holy Spirit, not for holding back some of the money from the sale of the property, which Peter said they had a right to use as they saw fit.
• There is nothing about the generosity of the hometown believers doing everything they could to take care of their brothers and sisters in Christ who overstayed the shekels they had brought on their trip to Jerusalem to suggest the state confiscating property or crushing the market economy that allowed the believers to sell their privately owned land and give the proceeds to care for their brothers and sisters. That would have been socialism.

Many Christians, today, confuse the utopian idea of everyone sharing and being guaranteed a job with the term, socialism. They have a misunderstanding of the term. The Oxford dictionary defines socialism this way:  a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that 1) the means of production, 2) distribution, and 3) exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole. That means government control. The definition of socialism continues, (In Marxist theory) it is a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism. Socialism is government control of the economy. The utopian dream of fairness has been used repeatedly by political leaders to take over ownership of the means of production—and that has never led to utopia but always to enormous human suffering.

The twentieth century was one giant lab experiment. Political leaders, Lenin, then Stalin in Russia, Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, and Fidel Castro of Cuba, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela played on class envy (the hallmark of Marxism), fomented rage by the poor against the land, business, and factory owners (the Bourgeoisie), promised a utopia of justice, and took over government control of the economy. In every case, it was a disaster, leading to enormous slaughter and human suffering—THE KIND OF SUFFERING THAT EVERY CHRISTIAN SHOULD OPPOSE. Here are some of the stunning, brutal facts:

• Communism did not come to Russia as the result of a popular uprising: it was imposed on her by intellectuals hiding behind slogans of “equality.”
• Vladimir Lenin led his Bolshevik Party to victory in a three-year civil war. Then he began to centralize large chunks of the Russian economy.
• He discovered that bureaucrats in Moscow were neither motivated nor competent to manage distant factories and farms. Disaster ensued.
• Restrictions on trade created a black market bigger than the economy.
• His regime dumped bank notes into the market causing catastrophic inflation. In 1923 prices were 1 million times greater than prices before Lenin’s revolution. The starvation that ensued was horrific.
• After Lenin took over the economy, the largescale industrial production in 1920 was 18% of what it had been in 1913 causing enormous suffering.
• Lenin first slaughtered the wealthier peasants, then tried to force the poorer peasants to sell their grain below market prices ending in massive starvation.
• Stalin continued Lenin’s policies of taking over large sectors of the economy.
• Under Stalin, the livelihood of workers was decimated, while millions of peasants died from a forced famine in 1932 and 1933.
• An unfathomable 20 million Russians perished as a result of Stalin and Lenin’s socialist takeover of the economy.
• In China, Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” led to the slaughter of millions of landowners by his brain-washed teenaged Red Guard in the 1950’s.
• Mao’s utopian promise, “We shall create a new heaven and earth for man” was catastrophic: 20 million Chinese died in the famine that resulted from this “heaven on earth” construction project, alone.
• An astounding 65 million Chinese died through Mao’s socialist policies.

There are similar statistics about Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, and other socialist regimes. I won’t take time for more of these details. Suffice it to quote Frenchman, Stephane Courtois, whose group documented the socialist atrocities of the 20th century. “Between 85 million and 100 million human beings lost their lives to communist experiments in the twentieth century. Never has an idea had such catastrophic consequences” (Money, Greed, and God, Jay Richards). Were the leaders of these regimes’ evil? Yes! By any measure you use. But they were also deluded about what brings about poverty and economic flourishing as were the followers who handed them their political power. Let’s turn to Scripture to identify God’s design for economic flourishing.

GOD’S DESIGN FOR ECONOMIC FLOURISHING

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen 1:28). God’s design to provide humans with the sustenance they need to flourish was not just a lush garden full of fruit trees; it was a plan for them to “subdue” the earth. The command “to subdue” implies that, although all that God made is good, it is, to some degree, underdeveloped. God left creation with deep untapped potential for cultivation that humans are to unlock through our labor. Tim Keller elaborates: 

We are not to relate to the world as park rangers, whose job is not to change their space but preserve things as they are. Nor are we to “pave over the garden” of the created world to make a parking lot. No, we are to be gardeners who take an active stance towards their charge. They do not leave the land as it is. They rearrange it to make it more fruitful, to draw the potentialities for growth and development out of the soil. They dig up the ground and rearrange it with a goal in mind: to rearrange the raw material of the garden so that it produces food, flowers, and beauty. And that is the pattern for all work. It is creative and assertive. It is rearranging the raw materials of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people, in particular, thrive and flourish (Every Good Endeavor).

The development of creation’s potential is built upon and requires shalom—the OT word for harmony and flourishing in relationships. As we saw last week, God’s design for economic flourishing as described above in Genesis 1 requires harmony in the four basic relationships of life:

• Right relationship with GOD—My mission is to exercise dominion over all of life for him, out of love for him.
• Right relationship with SELF—My worth and dignity are eternally assigned to me by God who made me his image bearer and equipped me with the abilities to do the good works he planned for me to do from eternity.
• Right relationship with OTHERS—My responsibility is summed up in the second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” As Martin Luther pointed out, one of the greatest ways to love my neighbor is through my vocation—as society works together within the economy to meet needs.
• Right relationship with CREATION—I am to be its steward developing the potential God placed in it for God’s glory.

In his book, Walking With the Poor, Bryant Myers describes the fundamental nature of poverty, “Poverty is the result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable. Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meanings “(When Helping Hurts, Corbett and Fikkert). Last week, we saw that the best approaches to alleviating poverty were holistic, addressing all four aspects of brokenness. But we might ask, what is required for an economy to flourish.

REQUIREMENTS OF AN ECONOMIC SYSTEM THAT OPTIMIZES FLOURISHING

A. God’s design is an economic system that gives humans the freedom and motivation to create wealth—God’s original intent from Genesis 1. One economist writes,

We now know that market economies work because they allow wealth to be created, rather than remaining in a fixed place. Economies need not be zero-sum games in which someone wins only if someone else loses. We have discovered an economic order that creates wealth in abundance—the free market accompanied by the rule of law. And only the creation of wealth will replace poverty in the long-term….Wealth is created when our creative freedom is allowed to prosper in a free market environment undergirded by the rule of law, and suffused with a rich moral culture. This creative freedom should be no surprise to Christians. We believe that human beings are made in God’s image—the imago dei. Our creative freedom reflects that divine image (Money, Greed, and God, Jay Richards).

Think of the economy as a stage where people connect with each other and the created world. It is the place where individuals, families, businesses, and all kinds of other institutions interact with each other to exchange goods and services. As individuals create new products, because of God’s enormous creativity, humans assign different value to different products. One man puts his money into a new car, another into a nice house. Maximizing the economic value for everyone, requires a free market. A free market encourages and allows the most flourishing to happen, i.e. humans obtain the most economic value from the products sold.

Economist Jay Richards illustrates, this principle by going back to his 6th grade class. His teacher passed out a different toy to each student, things like silly putty, a paddle ball, Barbie trading cards (This WAS awhile ago!) She then asked each student to rank their toy. If they really liked their toy, they gave it a ten. If they hated it, a one. Most started out somewhere in the middle. The teacher then added up the total of all the points given to the toys and wrote it on the board (This was the total economic value to society). Then, the teacher allowed them to freely trade their toy with anyone else in their row. Some kids traded and some didn’t, but everyone had the freedom to if they wanted to. She then asked the students to, once again, rank whatever toy they had from one to ten. When the teacher wrote the new total on the board, it was a higher number even though it was all the same toys. (The total economic value increased). Then she allowed the students to trade with anyone else in the entire classroom, as many times as they wanted. Lots of toys started changing hands. And, you guessed it, when everyone ranked their toys after this round of trades, the total number went way up this time. The total economic value to this society skyrocketed.

This little exercise with a bunch of silly toys demonstrates the value of a free market. Almost everyone ended up better off than they started, and no one ended up worse off. All of us experience something similar each day. We buy groceries when we want or need them more than the money they cost. And the grocer will only sell them to you if he wants the money more than he wants the groceries. Both sides benefit. A free market is the economic structure that best allows producers of products to focus on meeting the wants of consumers. It does not guarantee that everyone wins in every competition. But, it allows many more win-win encounters than any alternative.

B. Because of the fall, God’s design for creation prosperity will allow the strong to oppress the weak without The Rule of Law. Here is a brief list of just some of the biblical principles that need to accompany a free market.

1. Protection of Private Property

• The proper functioning of the market requires protection of our stuff,  our labor, our time, and our ideas. There must be laws against theft, kidnapping and slavery.
• Exodus 20:15 You shall not steal. Since the moral law of God is written on every heart, the concept of private property is written on every human heart.
• Peruvian economist, Fernando De Soto argues conclusively that there is a very strong link between the wealthy countries like the US, European Countries, and Japan and their strong property laws, while poverty-stricken nations have virtually no laws protecting private property.
• The poor in Israel were provided for NOT by taxing landowners or forcing a redistribution of wealth, but by requiring that landowners not reap to the edges of their fields, or strip their fields bare through multiple harvests—but to leave a portion behind for the poor and the alien. (Lev 19:9, Deut 24:9-22).

2. Honesty in Business Dealings

• Prov 11:1 A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.
• Leviticus 19:36 You shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin.
• Prov 20:10 Unequal weights and unequal measures are both alike an abomination to the Lord

3. Material Reward Being Linked to Work

• Prov 13:4 The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied
• Prov 22:29 Do you see a man skillful in his work?  He will stand before kings;
  he will not stand before obscure men.
• Prov 28:19 Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits will have plenty of poverty.

4. Protections for the Poor Against Oppression

• Prov 13:23 The fallow ground of the poor would yield much food, but it is swept away through injustice.
• Deut. 24:15 You shall give him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets (for he is poor and counts on it), lest he cry against you to the Lord, and you be guilty of sin.
• Prov 29:7 The righteous is concerned for the rights of the poor; the wicked does not understand such concern.

To be honest, brothers, I hope I have not just given you justification for spending your money just like the rest of middle-class America. I think it is likely that if we are to live like Jesus, he would tell a lot of us in the middleclass that we should intentionally lower our standard of living so that we can make as much money available for missions and EFFECTIVE ministry to the poor as possible. But God’s plan to alleviate poverty is NOT socialism—which has proven to be a great, great evil in our time.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. How would you answer someone who said that the Bible teaches socialism, especially in the New Testament?
2. Do you think that those you are responsible for guiding realize that between 85 and 100 million people died in the 20th century where the experiment of socialism was tried?
3. Why might our sons and daughters be attracted to the socialist ideologies they hear about online or at universities?