I know many (most) of you read here for strictly theological posts, so you might have become off-put by all the ostensible “political” posts you have seen here over the last few months. The way I blog, ever since I started blogging (2005) has typically been to post wherever my reading takes me; not to mention, where certain cultural moments take us. This should help explain the character of my posts over the last bit of time. Beyond that, and more importantly, I don’t see “politics” as an apolitical or separate category from theology, per se. Politics operate in the theater of God’s glory, i.e. in creation, as such, anything political is going to also be a reality that is deeply theological. So, when I post on political theories, and politics on the ground, it is because I am a Christian who believes that the whole world is implicated by the cruciform life of God in Christ for the world. As such, my political posts are intimately related to my so called ‘Evangelical Calvinism,’ and its belief that The Holy Trinity is the Absolute Ground and Grammar of All Epistemology, Theology, and Worship. If God’s life for the world, in Christ, is the covenantal inner reality of all that is, and will be, then engaging with political theories in the world cannot be an unrelated facet of this theological thesis about who God is.

With the aforementioned noted, a sort of ground-clearing exercise, let me focus this post, indeed, on what Marxist theory is. And not just on what it is, but why Marxists must be intent upon radical revolutionary activities in order to usher in their materialist eschaton of Utopian and classless bliss of equality and equity for all (as that is determined by their self-referential materialist conception of reality). In order to get a better insight into these things, let’s read along with Michael Gillespie as he offers one of the better sketches, that I’ve seen, of what Marxist theory and activity entails:

The first and certainly most politically significant of these Hegelians was Marx. In Marx’s view there is not distinction between history and nature or facts and values. In this respect he remains within the Idealist horizon. His thought, however, takes a distinctly materialist turn. History in his view is the “interpretation of things as they actually are and have occurred” and consequently “every profound philosophical problem dissolves into an empirical fact.” The historia rerum gestarum is thus merely the reflection of the truly real res gestae. Actual history, however, is understood not as the reconciliation of human freedom and nature but as the concrete development of the means of production that will ultimately allow man to master nature and establish a realm of perfect human freedom and creativity. In this sense Marx returns to the Enlightenment idea of progress. This doctrine in his hands, however, is radicalized even further through the subordination of philosophy to history. Whereas the Enlightenment and Idealism had both recognized that philosophy is prior to history, i.e., that the eternity of reason first makes the actual comprehensible, Marx believed that history as the res gestae determines the character of all philosophy. Philosophy for Marx is ideology, and far from revealing the truth about man and values only reveals the prejudices and desires of a particular age and class. Marx, however, does not thereby fall into relativism. History gives man direction. Indeed, it alone is the source of truth and it alone can tell us what we ought to do: it is “our one and all.

History directs man by indicating what is to come next, thus presenting him with a moral imperative to join the avante-garde and prod his slower-moving contemporaries into action. But since history is dialectical, its ultimate goal only appears on the threshold of its actual completion. Marx, like Hegel, recognizes an absolute moment in which the whole course of history and its final destination become apparent in contradistinction to Hegel, however, this knowledge arises in Marx’s view before the actual completion of history and thus serves not so much as an explanation but as an instigation to action. Marx, however, radicalizes the Enlightenment idea of revolutionary acceleration. For the Enlightenment, revolution may be necessary if all efforts at reform fail; for Marx, revolution is an inevitable and unavoidable aspect of progress. Marx thus views revolution not as a lamentable necessity but as a positive duty, not as a course that man can enter upon only with a heavy heart and deep distrust but as the most noble and glorious of human deeds.[1]

Having a better grasp of Marxism has descriptive value, which in itself can bring a much needed perspective. It is interesting, the idea of a ‘materialist-turn,’ in the real world there is no such thing as a purely “materialist” world. But this is what Enlightenment rationalism brings us: i.e. a turn to the subject as the measure of all reality, by definition, results in an disenchanted world, that only our material eyes can observe and ponder. This is one of the greatest deceptions the angel of light has perpetrated on his kingdom of darkness: i.e. making the world believe that the he does not exist, and that all there is is a reductive-physicalist world that humanoids have the capacity to control and manipulate to their own desired ends. Marx, in my view, was a purveyor of satanism in its most vile form; as his theory has been applied, world-over, we can see, how indeed, his theory coheres with the Destroyer’s mode of stealing, killing and destroying. We see this deception being lived out now on the streets of Portland, Seattle, and other streets around the US and the globe.

There is no possible convergence, no critical appropriation of Marxist theory, with the Christian vision of the cosmos. God is the antecedent reality that logically and chronologically precedes the physical world and its given economy. Marx wants to flip this taxis or order on its head; unfortunately for Marx, he has been flipped on his head as he has come, and will come face to face with the risen Christ on that great day of White Throne judgment. My hope and prayer is that many caught under this Marxist (and globalist) delusion will quickly repent, and realize that ‘today is the day of salvation.’

[1] Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History(Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 17.