A Clash of Ideologies

Marxism, Liberation Theology, and Apocalypticism in New Testament Studies

Randall Reed

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781556355141
  9781498250344
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630878078
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Marxism is one of the revolutionary social-scientific theories that has come to have a prominent place in New Testament studies in the United States. It is often combined with liberation theology and applied to apocalyptic texts. This book argues that the basic presuppositions of these three ideological systems are ultimately at odds with one another. The study then traces the kinds of moves scholars in New Testament studies have made to overcome this problem.

1

Religion and Marxism

The understanding of religion within Marxism might, at first glance, appear to be self-evident. At least since the 1950s and McCarthyism, the cliché “godless communists” has been part of the national lexicon. Yet several theologians have recently tried to argue that Marxism is actually compatible with religion; certainly this has been an interesting trend in Liberation theology.1 Thus the question: How does Marxism understand religion? In this section, I will explore this important question. I will do so by looking at the tradition of Marxism, starting with Marx and working through a number of important thinkers in the Marxist tradition. My sample will of course be selective. There undoubtedly will be those Marxist thinkers who could be included but are left out.2 Still my goal here will be to try to determine a general trend or line of argument that we can see in the Marxist tradition vis-à-vis religion.

Marx

In beginning this type of survey, one must begin with the founder: the work of Marx himself. Marx’s position on religion is best known in the famous “opiate of the people” quote. Like that quote, the majority of Marx’s work on religion stems from a fairly early, but prodigious, period in his publishing: the 1840s. I will examine his argument about religion in some detail in this section. I will then turn to his references to religion in his later works. These comments are far less extensive but seem to presuppose the argument of his early works.

Even before the “opiate” statement, Marx had advocated the criticism of Religion earlier in an article on censorship in 1842 where he argues that religion functions to underpin the authority of the state. “Christianity does not decide whether the constitutions are good, for it knows no distinction between them. It teaches, as religion is bound to teach: submit to authority, for all authority is from God.”3 The position Marx takes here is interesting as it highlights the use of religion for the purposes of the state. Marx’s larger point in this article is that the adherence to religion does not separate a good state from a bad state. A theocratic state can be bad (he suggests the Byzantine state as an example) regardless of its piety. The determination of a state as good or bad can only be determined by reason not by religious purity.4 Thus he concludes, “you will have to admit that the state must be built on the basis of free reason, and not of religion.”5

The relationship between the state and religion is in fact a major subject of consideration in Marx’s early work. In “On the Jewish Question” (1843), Marx sees the Christian state’s persecution of Jews as rooted in a problematic opposition of Christianity to Judaism. The solution? “By making it impossible. And how is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion.” But Marx goes on to make a comment which is very provocative, “As soon as Jew and Christian come to see in their respective religions nothing more than stages in the development of the human mind—snake skins which have been cast off by history, and man as the snake who clothed himself in them—they will no longer find themselves in religious opposition, but in a purely critical, scientific and human relationship.”6 The important point made here is that humanity has already passed the point where religion is an asset to society. Instead science has replaced religion as the way to understand and live in the world.

When Marx begins “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1844) with the sentence, “For Germany, the criticism of religion has largely been completed; and the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism,”7 we understand Marx as stating a fait accompli; religion’s usefulness has ended; it has been dethroned by science. For Marx, Feuerbach’s criticism which saw god as a projection has issued the final verdict. Thus Marx states, “The basis of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion; religion does not make man.”8 Marx’s comments must be seen as a part of his teleological understanding of history; the intellectual basis of religion has already withered away. It may have had a place in the past, but now human development has advanced to the point where religion is irrelevant at best, or as “On the Jewish Question” showed, destructive at worst.

It is in “Contribution” that we find the “opiate” saying. The passage comes early in the work and begins with an analysis of religion as a “general theory of the world.”9 Thus Marx sets up religion initially as a system of thought, emphasizing the idealist characteristic of it. He then continues: “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

“The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion, therefore, the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”10 Religion thus indicates the profound problems that the capitalist situation has produced. It is in effect the symptom of the disease (Marx: condition) of capitalism. The criticism of religion, then, is a salve on the symptom, but does not produce a cure.

Thus Marx does not spend much more time engaged in an analysis of religion. Having unmasked religion as a human production, the matter for him is settled. Religion has functioned as a “theory,”11 as a way of justifying and offering solace in the face of the oppression of the real world. The criticism of religion, then, is the starting point that, however initially important, must be dispensed with. This is because the criticism of religion is the criticism of something imaginary. There are real things in much more need of criticism. “Thus the criticism of heaven is transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.”12

The early Marx, then, saw religion as the illusory construct of the human mind. In “The German Ideology” Marx goes on to link the development of religion to the effect of material production: “Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”13 The ideological nature of religion means that real change cannot happen by making changes to the ideology. Religion is epiphenomenal to the mode of “material production” and “material intercourse.”

This all becomes explicit in Marx’s “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859) when Marx articulates his base/superstructure model.

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the cons...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Religion and Marxism
• Chapter 2: The Logic of Liberation Theology
• Chapter 3: The Logic of Apocalypticism
• Chapter 4: Marxist New Testament Interpreters
• Chapter 5: Richard A. Horsley
• Chapter 6: Ideological Criticism
• Chapter 7: The Critique of Biblical Studies
• Conclusion
• Bibliography