A Marxist's Jesus

Extract

Prague was once, and in time no doubt will be again, a crossroads of ideas, a carrefour of cross-fertilisation between Christians and Marxists. The effect upon such theologians as J.B. Metz and Jurgen Moltmann would not be difficult to demonstrate. In many respects now, so pervasive have a certain basic Marxist agenda and vocabulary become, Christians can no longer formulate their ideas or decide their course of action without more or less explicit reference to Marxism. This is particularly true in Latin America. It is noticeable also in Vatican documents on social policy—for example in the paragraphs on liberation in Pope Paul’s lengthy statement “Evangelii nuntiandi”, published some three weeks before the Declaration on Sexual Ethics, but, in contrast with the latter, destined to drop immediately into that oblivion of indifference reserved by conservatives and radicals in the Catholic Church for all utterances from Rome except those on sex. On a wider front, however, through the spread of sociology and allied disciplines as well as in response to urgent political situations, Christianity—and certainly Catholicism—has, willy nilly, absorbed a considerable amount from Marxism in the past twenty years, and sometimes even shown great critical resilience in the process. Doubt has remained, on the other hand as to how much a Marxist loyal to his atheism could learn from dialogue with Christians, or indeed as to how much serious work a Marxist would be ready to put into the study of Christian source-texts, in comparison anyway with the mushrooming industry of Catholic Marxologists.