The Golden Ass

"We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our knee-jerk response to such a significant critique of Capitalism, if we are even willing to admit of the legitimacy of it - that is, if we are, in a moment of ideological sanity, willing to admit of the flaws of our own system - is to either wonder whether or assume that, given the particular critique, Communism is the only alternative. Don't we all know how spectacularly that failed in modern history?

"Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, 'Come, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who is seated upon many waters, 2 with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and with the wine of whose fornication the dwellers on earth have become drunk.' 3 And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast which was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. 4 The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and bedecked with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication; 5 and on her forehead was written a name of mystery: 'Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of earth’s abominations.' 6 And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus." - Revelation 17: 1-6

As Christians, we might be tempted to read Rev. 17: 6 as a warning against Communism. After all, the most blatant mark of her failure is the murder of those who couldn't accommodate to her vision for the world. Below, I've simply recorded a significant portion of J.H. Yoder’s, The Politics of Jesus, Ch. 12, "The War Of The Lamb," on Revelation. From it, I will mostly let the reader draw his or her own conclusions on whether or not we, as Christians, are really able to maintain our hold to Capitalism because of the horrors of Communism.

I would like to gently suggest that, perhaps our problem runs deeper than we imagine. What if my rational judgement between Capitalism and Communism is really a temptation? What if the very urge to even begin thinking about that choice places me in a position that is foreign to that of a citizen of the Kingdom of God? Maybe the problem is our attachment and resulting attempts at presiding over any world system whatsoever. Is our attachment to those world systems the "drunkenness" of the kings of the earth as we bow before the Beast? Are we habituated into a normalized idolatry?

At the very least, I think Yoder succeeds in opening our imaginations to that image. He enables me to being to imagine myself in the position of a king worshiping the beast when I do what is simply reflexive. And, I do it often. In fact, it was my first instinct when I read the above quote from MLK.

So, here's the portion of Yoder's chapter by which I hope to draw our attention to the question of our relationship to Capitalism or Communism in the first place. I'd like to suggest that it would do us good to remember whose voice it is when we hear the call to "Worship me, it shall all be yours.”

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Selected excerpt from J.H. Yoder’s, The Politics of Jesus, Ch. 12, "The War Of The Lamb," on the book of Revelation:

"One way to characterize thinking about social ethics in our time is to say that Christians in our age are obsessed with the meaning and direction of history. Social ethical concern is moved by a deep desire to make things move in the right direction. Whether a given action is right or not seems to be inseparable from the question of what effects it will cause. Thus part if not all of social concern has to do with looking for the right 'handle' by which one can 'get a hold on' the course of history and move it in the right direction..."

Paraphrase / too-brief summary of the next paragraph:
Che Guevara's "handle" was the peasant. The Black Economic Development Conference's "handle" was denominational administrators. Conservative evangelicalism's "handle" is the will of the individual. "For still others it is the proletariat or geopolitics that explains everything."

Continued later in the chapter:

"If we look more analytically at this way of deriving social and political ethics fro an overview of the course of history and the choice of the thread within history that is thought to be the most powerful, we find that it involves at least three distinguishable assumptions.
1. It is assumed that the relationship of cause and effect is visible, understandable, and manageable, so that if we make our choices on the basis of how we hope society will be moved, it will be moved in that direction.
2. It is assumed that we are adequately informed to be able to set for ourselves and for all society the goal toward which we seek to move it.
3. Interlocked with these two assumptions and dependent upon them for its applicability is the further postulate that effectiveness in moving toward these goals which have been set is itself a moral yardstick."

He generally has a lot of beef with Reinhold Niebuhr but goes on to positively note his concept of "'irony: that when people try to manage history, it almost always turns out to have taken another direction than that in which they thought they were guiding it. This may mean that we are not morally qualified to set the goals toward which we would move history. At least it must mean that we are not capable of discerning and managing its course when there are in the same theater of operation as those of other free agents, each of them in their own way also acting under the same assumptions as to their capacity to move history in their direction....

Even if we know how effectiveness is to be measured - that is, even if we could get a clear definition of the goal we are trying to reach and how to ascertain whether we had reached it - is there not in Christ's teachings on meekness, or in the attitude of Jesus toward power and servanthood, a deeper question being raised about whether it is our business at all to guide our action by the course we wish history to take?...

In recent centuries debate around the question of the meaning of history within that meaningfulness, has generally been a conversation of the deaf, with some so committed to pre-Enlightenment understanding of the stability of the proper social order that any sense of movement is only a threat, and others committed with an equally unquestioning irrationality to progressivist assumptions of post-Enlightenment Western thought, according to which the discernible movement of history is self-explicating and generally works for good, and therefore is the only terrain of significance from which ethics should self-evidently be derived. From neither direction has there been any expectation that light might be thrown upon the question from the New Testament. What medieval Christendom, with its vision of the divine stability of all the members of the corpus christianum, has in common with post-Enlightenment progressivism is precisely the assumption that history has already moved us past the time of primitive Christianity and therefore out from under the relevance of the apostolic witness on this question....

For a sense of the apostolic perception of the meaning and course of history and especially of the interplay of trust and coerciveness within history, we shall find that the most immediate resource comes from that segment of the biblical literature from which we are least accustomed to learn, namely from the liturgical literature which is embedded in the New Testament at certain scattered points, but which especially dominates the book of the Revelation of John.

In his first vision (Rev 4-5) the seer of Patmos is presented with the image of a sealed scroll in the hand of ‘the one that was seated upon the throne’ (a circumlocution for God himself, who cannot be looked at directly, but whose presence is known as Light).

The question laid before John by his vision of the scroll sealed with seven seals is precisely the question of the meaningfulness of history. This is a question that, the vision says dramatically, cannot be answered by the normal resources of human insight. Yet is by no means a meaningless question or one unworthy of concern. It is worth weeping, as the seer does, if we do not know the meaning of human life and suffering…

[T]he answer given to the question by a series of visions and their hymns is not the standard answer. ‘The lamb that was slain is worthy to receive power!’ John is here saying, not as an inscrutable paradox but as a meaningful affirmation, that the cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determines the meaning of history. The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience (13: 10)…The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but of cross and resurrection.

We have observed this biblical ‘philosophy of history’ first all all in the worship life of the late New Testament church, since it is here that we find the most desperate encounter of the church’s weakness (John was probably in exile, Paul in prison) with the power of the evil rulers of the present age. But this position is nothing more than a logical unfolding of the meaning of the work of Jesus Christ himself, whose choice of suffering servanthood rather than violent lordship, of love to the point of death rather than righteousness backed by power, was itself the fundamental direction of his life. Jesus was so faithful to the enemy love of God that it cost him all his effectiveness; he gave up every handle on history…

Thus early Christian confession means two things for our present concern. Speaking negatively, it means that the business of ethical thinking has been taken away from the speculation of independent minds each meditating on the meaning of things and has been pegged to a particular set of answers given in a particular time and place. Ethics as well as ‘theology’ (in the sense in which in the past they have been distinguished) must, if it is to be our business as Christians to think about them, be rooted in revelation, not alone in speculation, nor in a self-interpreting ‘situation.’

But still more important is the other side, the positive side of this confession. This will of God is affirmatively, concretely knowable in the person and ministry of Jesus. Jesus is not to be looked at merely as the last and greatest in the long line of rabbis teaching pious people how to behave; he is to be looked at as a mover of history and as the standard by which Christians must learn how they are to look at the moving of history.”

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"And the devil took him up, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, 6 and said to him, 'To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. 7 If you, then, will worship me, it shall all be yours.'" - Luke 4: 5-7

So, if we ask whether we can legitimately correspond Acts 2 with a Christianized Communism, I'd simply like to highlight the Devil's word "ALL." Acts 2 is what the church did rather than a proposed way of structuring the whole of society. The rest I would like to tenderly and gently leave to my reader.