Category Archives: Marxism

Karl Barth’s Karl Marx: On the University Protests and Globalism

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Economic materialism, more commonly known as Marxism is, of course, the philosophy/ideology that Karl Marx constructed; that is, to the world’s demise. It’s doubtful that Marxism is actually at play in what we are currently seeing take place at America’s Universities; that is, in regard to the recent and ongoing protests. There are clearly ideologues behind the scenes who are pulling strings in a way that might be somewhat Marxist in orientation, but I’d say that really it is just straight anarchic action with the goal of creating some type of internationalist revolution (which of course is pretty Marxist, eh). The talking points of a Marxism are certainly present, but if anything, those are being touted in order to give the useful idiots something to hang onto.

I want to drill down a little further on what Marxism entails from Karl Barth’s reading of this phenomenon. I think he offers a valuable insight, and even critique towards Marxism that many of his followers might benefit from reading. So Barth:

This is where what is called “historical materialism” comes in. For it, what we have hitherto spoken of under the name of materialism is only a necessary weapon and an indispensable apologetic and polemical ally. The doctrine of Karl Marx, which is identical with this historical materialism, is undoubtedly materialism in the sense in which we have used the term, and in practice it stands or falls with the fact that it is so. Yet is so only per accidens and not per essentiam. It is certainly one of the historical limits of Marxism that it has bound itself so closely with the dogma of ostensibly scientific materialism. But we quite misunderstand it if we take it to be grounded on this, or adopt the view of older theological polemics that it is one of its evil moral fruits. The very opposite is the case, namely, that ostensibly scientific materialism, at any rate in the 19th century, acquired weight only as it was discovered, appropriated and employed by historical materialism. Over against it, historical materialism is a construction with its own origin.

In face of the modern development of community, historical materialism is 1. the affirmation in which the child at last acquires a name, namely, that the whole history of mankind at its core is the history of human economy or economic history, and that everything else, the achievement of civilisation, science, art, the state, morality and religion, are only phenomenal accompaniments of this one reality, expressions of the current relations of economic forces, attempts to disguise, beautify, justify, and defend them, occasionally perhaps even expressions of its discontent, instruments of its criticism, means of its alteration, but at all events secondary forms or ideologies form which economics is differentiated as true historical reality. The figure of man which arose in the 19th century seemed unambiguously to prove this. At any rate, this is how it was interpreted and understood by Karl Marx.

Historical materialism is 2. a critique of the previous course of human history interpreted in this way. As economic history, it is the history of a struggle between the ruling and ruled strata or classes of the community, i.e., between the economically strong and the economically weak, between the invariable possessors of the earth and all the other means of production and the others who invariably do the work which is economically productive in the true sense. In this struggle, the latter, the workers, have always been the losers, and, under the characteristic modern dominance of anonymous capital striving only for its own increase, they are the losers with an accentuated necessity—the expropriated and exploited. Those ideologies have in fact shown themselves to be only accompanying phenomena which can neither render impossible nor stop the class war which is waged with such unequal weapons, but in different ways can only confirm and further it. How very differently does Karl Marx view what the Idealists only a few decades before had celebrated as the victory of the spirit over nature?

Historical materialism is 3. a prediction concerning the future course of the history of mankind. The dominance of the possessors, which has to-day become the dominance of anonymous capital, will necessarily lead to continually new crises of production and consumption, to warlike developments and revolutionary catastrophes. Thus with an inner necessity, it moves towards a final upheaval. The proletarianisation of the masses becomes sharper and sharper, and encroaches upon greater and greater levels even of the modern middle class. The class of the oppressed, thus increasing, will gradually be automatically compelled to unify itself, and to recognise and seize the power which really lies in its hands, in order to finally and conclusively to make political, and if need be forceful, use of it, and to set up its own dictatorship in place of that of the anonymous tyrants. It expropriates those who have so far expropriated. It erects the economic and welfare social state in which there are no more exploiters and therefore no more exploited, in which all other social sicknesses vanish with their common cause, and in which morality, which in the present class-state is possible only in the form of hypocrisy, can become a genuine reality. Again, it will not be ideologies that will lead mankind to this end, but only economic material development as this is rightly understood and therefore directed at the right moment by the right intervention. This was the hope, the eschatology, which Karl Marx gave to his followers as the supreme good and as the appropriate driving motive for socialist action on the way to it.[1]

It isn’t hard to see how some people have seen in Marxism a type of a Christian heresy. The difference, of course, between Marxism and Christianity, is that the former immanentizes what classically was understood as God into the brute economic and thus materialist forces at play in an absolutely horizontal and pure nature (purus natura). A Marxist materialism presents the closed material world in an apotheosis wherein the centraldogma of all reality is a crass mechanized world wherein Utopia obtains in an abstract and atheistic way. Economic inequity, and thus classism, or sin in the Marxist lexicon, is finally vanquished by the indomitable economic spirit of production over matter. Within this production economic equity is brought into a totalized equilibrium wherein the people might experience the leisure and rest that such material production ostensibly produces.

I think some of these themes are being deployed currently on the younger minds of the world in an attempt not to bring a utopia of Marxist delight, but to simply elevate the elite few to the heights of mammonic ejaculation. Things, as I see it, are indeed that nihilistic. It turns out, after all, that people, post-Enlightened or not, are simply slaves to their base affections to the point that they will seek those first, and their own righteousness, even as that leads them into the abyss of their final dissolution; that is into the non-being their base affections are formed by.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. The Doctrine of God III/2 §46 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 180–81.

Critical Theory Living in the Grand Hotel Abyss versus the Gospel in the Living Christ

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Critical theory (and its subset: Critical Race Theory [CRT]) is all the rage these days, even for many Christian traditions. A denomination as evangelical and American as the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has recently adopted CRT as a “critical tool” to help analyze how racism functions within their denomination, in particular, and in the world at large. But this post is not about the SBC, per se, but instead I simply intend on juxtaposing the necessity of the Gospel, as God’s “analytical tool,” over-against CRT as that tool. This is a bloggy blog post, so don’t expect too much. But I want to highlight the origins of critical theory, and its origins in the Frankfurt School, and dip into what its intention was all about back in the day.

Walter Benjamin, the catalyst for the development of what came to be known as the Frankfurt School, was one of the early and formative “founders” of this school of thought. Here is how Stuart Jeffries describes Benjamin’s work:

Writing his childhood memoirs, then, was for him part of a more general literary project that was also a political act. A political act that was the basis for the Marxist-inflected, multidisciplinary work called critical theory that Benjamin’s fellow German Jewish intellectuals would undertake during the twentieth century in the face of the three great (as they saw it) benighted triumphalist narratives of history delivered by the faithful proselytisers for capitalism, Stalinist communism and National Socialism.[1]

The ideology that stands behind, and that is intertwined with the development of critical theory is Marxism; which we know is an atheistic ideology which attempts to think reality in terms of a crass materialism. As such, any theory developed out of this type of soil will necessarily find its nourishment therefrom, and any insights it might be able to garner about the status of ‘reality’ will be formed in the crucible of a purely horizontal world that is necessarily antagonistic to the economy of the God of the Bible. Jeffries goes further, and describes just what critical theory’s goals are, per the Frankfurters:

If Critical Theory means anything, it means the kind of radical re-thinking that challenges what it considers to be the official versions of history and intellectual endeavor. Benjamin initiated it, perhaps, but it was Max Horkheimer who gave it a name when he became the director of the Frankfurt School in 1930: critical theory stood in opposition to all those ostensibly craven intellectual tendencies that thrived in the twentieth century and served as tools to keep an irksome social order in place – logical positivism, value-free science, positivist sociology, among others. Critical theory stood in opposition, too, to what capitalism in particular does to those it exploits – buying us off cheaply with consumer goods, making us forget that other ways of life are possible, enabling us to ignore the truth that we are ensnared in the system of our fetishistic attention and growing addiction to the purportedly must-have new consumer good.[2]

We might be able to read that and think as a Christian: wow, that doesn’t sound so bad, in fact it sounds an awful lot like what Christians would like the world to understand about what the Kingdom of God has brought, and will bring.

But the ‘abyss’ is always in the details, isn’t it? As Jeffries notes, critical theory’s aim is to offer an alternative universe[s] for the world to potentially think from, and live within. Yet, as we alluded to earlier, critical theory’s north star is really formed by the super nova of an abstract (i.e. godless) nothingness. Jeremiah, as a mouthpiece of the living God, describes that this way: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” This is the abstract humanity, and attendant noetic capacity, that critical theory has to work with as it attempts to imagine and offer the world a different way to think about how life ought to be lived as a society of people. In other words, the way forward, for the critical theorist can only get as far as an unredeemed, slavishly horizontal imagination can take it. It is building a bridge to nowhere, because it fundamentally and intentionally starts from nowhere.

My question to Christians who are attempting to appropriate critical theory as a critical tool for discerning what has gone wrong with the current systems in the world system is: why have you doubted the power of God; more pointedly, why have you doubted the sufficiency of the Gospel (Rom 1.16)? God already has a plan, an economy, a societas that He has given for us, of Himself in Jesus Christ. The prophet continues: “I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.” If God alone searches the heart of humanity, if He has done so in great concentration in the humanity and cross of Christ, what does critical theory have to offer; that is as far as discerning the fault lines of a fallen humanity that He hasn’t already sought out and destroyed in the broken, and now resurrected and ascended humanity of Jesus Christ??

Apparently, Christians who are into critical theory are first into natural theology. Ironically, I know plenty of people, Barthians even, who think critical theory offers a viable way forward for Christian engagement with culture. What if critical theory, itself, is so tainted with the primal problem of humanity, you know “fallenness” and everything, that it needs to be put to death, right along with the rest of the broken creation? Indeed, it clearly is part of the creation that has been put to death in the flesh (sarx) of Jesus Christ (Rom 8.3). I have no idea how Christians, of any stripe or tribe, believes they have the ontological and epistemological wherewithal to chew up the ostensible “meat” of critical theory, and spit out its “bones.” Where is its meat derived from; from the eyes of faith, or by sight? I say by sight! And Christians don’t walk by sight, but by the faith of Christ! So, let it be written, let it be done.

[1] Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London/New York: Verso, 2017), 21.

[2] Ibid.

The Materialist-Turn: And Why Do Marxists Revolutionize?

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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.

A Sketch of Critical Race Theory and its Incoherence with the Christian Reality

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I just wrote the following for Twitter. It turned into post length, so I thought I would post it here too. It is my sketch of what so called critical race theory entails, and why it does not cohere with the Christian reality.

The folly of critical theory is this: it maintains that reality is simply a construct that has been built on a collation of ideas and ideologies that are either good or bad (to oversimplify). Thus, it is possible to *critically* identify these constructs; adjudicate whether they have produced a greater good for the flourishing of society, or not; and if they haven’t, we then ought to deconstruct these ideas, and re-construct a better society with equality and equity for all as its raison d’ etre or end. When this is applied to race, understood as an enlightenment construct, society looks at the apparent inequities that are present in the world, with particular reference, of course, between white and black relations, and believes that it can deconstruct the bad ideas that have produced these inequities and replace them with ideas that will produce an absolute equity and equality between the white and black races.

Maybe how critical race theory is related to Marxism is becoming more apparent to you. Here are two features that bring Marxist ideology and critical race theory together: 1) An atheistic or absolutely naturalist understanding of what humanity is; 2) The idea that the ultimate goal of humanity, and its greatest flourishing, comes from a classless society. The Achilles heel, of course, is that the constant ground and hope in this schema, is the deification of humanity. I.e. That humanity has the wherewithal in its collectivist self to discern what the bad ideas are, and then knows what the good ideas are in order to bring about a classless, non-racist utopia of rest.

The ultimate problem with this whole basket is that it is purely naturalist, horizontal, and godless at its very foundation. There is nothing in this paradigm that correlates with Christianity. In fact, Christ puts the very core of the Marxist (and critical theory) premise to death; a sinful and sinister humanity who thinks it is God. Only the Gospel has the power to re-create reality. And it is only in this re-creation, in the resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ, that the world has been, is being, and will be ‘flipped upside down.’ Only God alone has the capacity to search the mind and the hearts of humanity. He did, and recognized, that moment by moment, humanity needs to constantly be refreshed by His mercy and grace in order to point people to the eschatological hope of beatific vision and consummate reality of His Kingdom come and coming in the eschatos of the Son. The Christian’s job isn’t to search the heart and mind of the world, of other humans, it is to agree with God in the Gospel, that what is required is that our heart of stone be replaced with His heart of flesh (II Cor 3); one that has the capacity to live in the bond of fellowship that has eternally been in the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and bear witness to this, so that the world might know that we are One in the Love of the triune God. A love not of this world, but one that has broke and breaks into this world bringing the life abundant that all desire and hope for as their God given purpose for being. Hallelujah

The Parody of Light in Marx’s Theology: How Marx’s Leisure Displaces the Sabbath-Rest of the Living God

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*As in many instances, I was going to write a post on Marxism, and why it ultimately SUCKS, but then I looked in my archives and I’d already written something. I want to write some fresh posts on this in the days to come, with more application to what’s going on in the churches and the culture vis-à-vis this demonic doctrine; but that will have to wait till later. The following post, I personally thought, was a good one; which is why I want to reshare it now. If you don’t think neo-Marxism, in its various iterations, is not behind what is going on in the streets, you aren’t paying close attention. There is a revolution underway, or the people of CHAZistan and elsewhere think so; but what they don’t realize is that they are the proverbial useful idiots being played by their invisible master[s]. Unfortunately, many in the churches are being deceived right along with the rest of the culture, in this regard. They’ll look to the academics they know, and many of these Christian academics, mostly youngish, will tell them Marxism, Liberation Theology, Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, Social Justice so on and so forth is nothing to worry about. That the Christian can “evangelize” these pagan ideologies and put them to use in order to make a more just and equal and equitable world. I’m here to tell you that that is bullshit (excuse my lingua).*

I am continuing to read Terry Eagleton’s book Why Marx Was Right, he offers some interesting commentary on what Marx believed the ideal of a communist system ought to lead to: leisure. Not that leisure would come from being lazy or non-work but that it would produce a society where wealth was so prevalent and self-sustaining—based on the cultivation of prior systems of production—that the ideal of leisure would be reached. Here is how Eagleton describes these things in Marx’s ‘theology’:

Yet only the economic in the narrow sense will allow us to get beyond the economic. By redeploying the resources capitalism has so considerately stored up for us, socialism can allow the economic to take more of a backseat. It will not evaporate, but it will become less obtrusive. To enjoy a sufficiency of goods means not to have to think about money all the time. It frees us for less tedious pursuits. Far from being obsessed with economic matters, Marx saw them as a travesty of true human potential. He wanted a society where the economic no longer monopolized so much time and energy.

That our ancestors should have been so preoccupied with material matters is understandable. When you can produce only a slim economic surplus, or scarcely any surplus at all, you will perish without ceaseless hard labour. Capitalism, however, generates the sort of surplus that really could be used to increase leisure on a sizeable scale. The irony is that it creates this wealth in a way that demands constant accumulation and expansion, and thus constant labour. It also creates it in ways that generate poverty and hardship. It is a self-thwarting system. As a result, modern men and women, surrounded by affluence unimaginable to hunter-gatherers, ancient slaves or feudal serfs, end up working as long and hard as these predecessors ever did.

Marx’s work is all about human enjoyment. The good life for him is not one of labour but of leisure. Free self-realisation is a form of “production,” to be sure; but it is not one that is coercive. And leisure is necessary if men and women are to devote time to running their own affairs. It is thus surprising that Marxism does not attract more card-carrying idlers and professional loafers to its ranks. This, however, is because a lot of energy must be expended on achieving this goal. Leisure is something you have to work for.[1]

As a general axiom I’d think it safe to say that all human beings desire more leisure and less work. But what’s not surprising, given Marx’s atheism, is that his prescription for human flourishing is generated by ‘under the sun’ thinking; as if the horizontal is all there is. For the Christian is leisure the ultimate goal? No; we’ve been recreated in the risen humanity of Jesus Christ for good works that we might live in them, in him. For the Christian in this in-between leisure is not the telos, is not the aim of our lives; instead, the aim is to live in the work of the Father in Christ ‘overshadowed’ by the Holy Spirit resulting in the completion for which creation was always already commissioned—for koinonial existence living in the shared life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by the grace of God for us.

We might see a sort of parody between Marx’s vision and the Holy vision of God in Christ. Work is indeed required if the ‘pleasures at the right hand of the Father’ are to be enjoyed forevermore. But the work is not a self-generated or self-realizable reality; it is not something that is immanent within an isolated individual or isolated community (even of the global sort). The work that God envisions is only something that he alone can (and has) accomplish[ed] for us in our stead in Jesus Christ. The end goal of God’s vision for what it means to be genuinely human and flourishing is what that looks like in Christ’s vicarious humanity for us before the Father; a humanity that finds its source, or ground in the divine life itself (anhypostatic/enhypostatic); a humanity that God has seen fit to seat next to himself in the Son’s assumed humanity. There is eschatological leisure for the Christian, but it is a leisure that finds resplendence only in the all-sufficient all-sustaining work of God for us in Jesus Christ. Marx seeks to displace God’s place with an abstract conception of humanity thus giving humanity a divinity that it could never have of itself naturally (Gen. 3.5). God indeed wants humanity to sabbath-rest in his presence, and find utter enjoyment as we live and move in the space his triune life provides for us as he graciously has brought us into that mediated through the humanity of Jesus Christ; but this is not something that our work can produce, only his for us.

As I continue to read about Marx’s theology (that’s what I’m calling it) it certainly has a sort of parasitic reality to it; I mean it is easy to see why Marx’s thought has been called ‘Christian heresy.’ It reminds me of the Beast in the book of Revelation; he attempts to parody the reality of God’s triune life by way of offering a kingdom that replicates God’s Kingdom in Christ without having God in Christ at the center. I can see why some Christians are attracted to Marx’s thought precisely because it has wicks in it that look like the light of Christian critique; i.e. in regard to political theory. But ultimately since the source has more in common with the angel of light rather than the true Light of the world, the trajectory it will ultimately set, if ingested, cannot be one that honors the living Christ. Any system of thought that does not START with Jesus Christ, as far as I am concerned, can only produce rotten fruit; even if in the mean time it might appear to be producing wheat.

[1] Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven&London: Yale University Press, 2011), Loc 1426, 1433, 1440 kindle version.