Marx and the Bible

Marx and the Bible. By Jose Porfirio Miranda. Orbis Books, 1974. $8.95 $4.95 paperback.

Of late, the following question is being insistently asked by a growing number of Christians: what has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Miranda adds his voice with great force to the chorus. The reader of his book might be forgiven for asking, however, what has Moscow (or Peking, or Havana) to do with Jerusalem? Miranda’s instant reply would be: much, in every way.

The attempt to answer the question positively could be made on several levels. Empirically, only Marxism and a biblical Christian faith seem to have the capacity to stir young people to reject the ideology of a technocratic society in favor of a society in which human, not mechanistic, values really count.

Miranda works on a different level: that of the interpretation of the biblical text. His purpose is not academic--to publish another highly refined dissertation on the theology of the Old Testament, but polemical--to demonstrate unambiguously the God who reveals himself in the prophetic word. “We are not concerned to find parallels between the Bible and Marx; simply to under stand the Bible,” he says. Rigorous, objective interpretation of the Bible, an eschewing of the method which uses the Bible to prove dialectical materialism, lack of interest in incidental similarities between the biblical message and Marx’s manifesto: such is Miranda’s declared policy in writing this book.

Then why bother to bring Marx in at all? What has socio-political analysis to do with the correct rules of biblical interpretation or Das Kapital with the Book of Isaiah?

According to Miranda, it is precisely the so-called objective rules erected in the academies of the West into a pretended science which have obscured the real prophetic content of God’s revelation. Studying Marx’s dialectical theory of knowledge will help us to recapture this content.

In a word, Miranda’s concern is to allow Marx to confront the biblical sciences’ pretended “ideal of objectivity” with the aim of demonstrating how they have distorted the true meaning of the text.

Marx understood that real knowledge had to be sought beyond mere facts discoverable by the sciences. Real knowledge has to do with human relationships in a state of present conflict due to the inherently unjust structures of the capitalist system. For example, the economic sciences, begun in the modern era by Quesnay, Adam Smith, and Ricardo, are simply the application of Western epistemology to a new object. But for all its objectivity, this economic science ignored the most important fact of economic reality: the crushing of human beings.

When we have understood the Marxist critique of the Hellenistic, rationalistic approach to truth, we have understood Miranda’s exegetical approach to the Bible and, equally, the main burden of liberation theology. Here is developed a theology of revolt against the academic purity and social irrelevance of traditional Western theology. From an evangelical point of view, Miranda occupies a special place among the theologians of liberation because he alone has dedicated himself to detailed study of the biblical text. The approach of many others, unfortunately, has tended to be pragmatic, anecdotal and inspirational. Miranda, therefore, de serves close attention.

He begins with a discussion of how it came about that the Catholic Church’s social encyclicals have consistently defended the right of private ownership of the means of production. He finds no basis for this position in the early history of the Church, for “before Christianity committed itself to the actual social systems, i.e. until the fourth or fifth centuries, there was never any distortion or evasion of the biblical witness concerning the inescapably unjust origin of differentiating property.”

Two long chapters are taken up with a study of the meaning of justice in the Old Testament. Miranda concludes that the prophetic denunciation of injustice is based on the fact that differentiating property (i.e. the unequal sharing of the nation’s riches) is only accomplished by violence and spoliation.

This radical conclusion, which undoubtedly conflicts with certain modern theories of the growth of accumulated wealth (e.g. the Protestant work ethic, liberalism, etc.), is based on detailed attention to a variety of passages drawn from the majority of the prophets.

Exactly the same conclusion is reached when Miranda turns his attention to the meaning of those word-groups used to translate justice and faithfulness in the Old Testament: hesed, sedeqah and mishpat. Basically, the judgment of God revealed through these words is a judgment which protects and saves: “right consists in ensuring, at last, that justice be done to the poor and oppressed in this world.”

In explaining the problem of the prophetic denunciation of the cultic rites, Miranda accepts an extreme solution: “the prophets . . . deny that the cult and prayer place the people in contact with God, as long as injustice exists on earth.” He thinks that it is clear that God requires justice in place of, and not as well as, the cultic structure.

Having drawn the conclusion from the Old Testament that justice is salvation in the sense of achieving of right for the oppressed, Miranda turns his attention to Paul. He discusses what he considers to be Paul’s central concern: how does God’s justice save?

Our faith, he concludes, and with it our justification, is to believe that with Christ, “the new age has already been (fully) established, and that we are therefore free from the law to practice that real justice (i.e. that love of the neighbor) which, through our commitment to our fellow human beings, will eventually bring in the eschatological kingdom.”

In his final chapter, Miranda takes up, once again, the question of the relation of Christian faith to Marxist dialectic. He gives the impression that biblical and Marxist hopes are practically identical, and that faith in the dialectical process is equivalent to biblical faith in God. What for Marx is possible through a conscious understanding of history as dialectic is possible for the biblical Christian through faith which acts on the assumption that the new age is already here? If Marx has a basic problem, says Miranda, it is not his atheism, but his lack of faith in the unlimited possibilities of the dialectic.

Miranda’s entire thesis is, without doubt, highly controversial. Certain parts are not particularly new. For example it would be impossible today to read the prophets honestly and continue to deny that the biblical God is concerned with social justice, or that he is anything but implacably opposed to ritualistic Christian observance divorced from a thorough-going examination of all our ethical commitments, our style of life, and our attitude to the oppression of the poor.

Then again, it is becoming more commonplace to understand God’s righteousness in Paul’s argument in an active rather than a judicial framework; although, in the light of Paul’s exposure of the depths of human sin and guilt, the success of alternative structures would militate against the fullness of the gospel.

Other parts of his study are original. His conclusion that the private accumulation of wealth is due wholly to exploitation will, no doubt, be ferociously resisted, presumably for the same ideological reasons that he UN covers in his attack on the Western theory of knowledge. Having made study of the biblical evidence for myself, I believe he is almost right.

There are significant passages, mostly in the wisdom literature, which teach that riches may come as a result of God’s blessing in response to man’s faithful stewardship of creation. However, recognition of the fact that we are stewards of what essentially belongs to God means that wealth cannot be used for selfish ends to multiply personal possessions, but must be used in the service of others. The love of money refers to the accumulation of excess wealth which is then used to manipulate power and buy privileges.

The testimony of scripture is that personal or dynastic accumulation of wealth leads inevitably to oppressive structures.

The main reason why Miranda is unbalanced in his exegesis of the Old Testament and in his treatment of Paul is that Marx is basically an unreliable guide to biblical interpretation. We thoroughly agree that the Bible places acquiring knowledge in the framework of obedience to God’s self-revelation. God’s ethical demands are non-negotiable.

However, biblical revelation speaks of more than a stern call to justice. It shows more than humanity whose nose is constantly being rubbed in the dirt of its own guilt. It manifests salvation which springs from the free grace of a God who continually invites people to be liberated from their bondage to self-glory through the death of Jesus Christ. And, because of the depths of human alienation, this salvation is indispensable to the realization of true justice.

It is unfortunate that Miranda does not really explore the radical nature of sin in the teaching of the Bible. He remains on the same plane as Marx, viewing sin as injustice among people. This is correct, but superficial. Thus he does not comprehend the failure of Marx to understand the true sub structure of man’s ideological projections rebellion against the truth of revelation.

The book as a whole displays all the strengths and weaknesses of the Marxist approach to reality. Adopting Marx’s romantic view of human nature, Miranda believes that it is possible, simply by believing that it is possible, for people to fully produce among themselves that justice that God re quires. Thus he does not recognize the eschatological reserve; the ‘not yet’ of the coming kingdom.

Miranda takes over Marx’s Hegelian heritage, speculating that the new age must spring from the inherent contra dictions of the old: “history itself moves towards justice, towards the love of one’s neighbor. Not by a deterministic process, but creating an intolerably acute conscience of its necessity, possibility and urgency.”

Wherein lays the necessity of history? Not within itself. This is the mystification of progress, and the “iron laws of history”, sprung on a suffering humanity by the Enlightenment. It only adds to its false conscience and to its illusions.

The necessity of history is totally contained in “the mystery of the kingdom of God,” a reality irretrievably tied to the historical revelation of liberation in Christ alone.

Marx’s basic problem, and Miranda’s too in following him at this point, is not his lack of faith in the unlimited powers of the dialectic, but the fact that, being a child of his time, he believed that the dialectic was the totally adequate key to unlock the secrets of the kingdoms of this world.

Andrew Kirk was an Anglican minister when this article appeared. He was a founding member of the Latin American Theological Fraternity as well as of the theological community Kairos in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At the time he was writing a book on the theology of revolution. His review of Marx and the Bible is in the Spanish edition of the book.