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The Church and Socialism
CHAPTER VII — THE CHURCH AND SOCIALISM
BY PROFESSOR CHARLES R. ERDMAN, D. D., PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, PRINCETON., NEW JERSEY
Montana Church Pledges to Leave SBC Over ERLC's Promotion of Social Justice at MLK Conference
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“The Fellowship Baptist Church in Sidney, Montana … announced Monday that they plan to withdraw from the [Southern Baptist Convention] ‘due to the ongoing social justice promoting, leftist progressivism, and mission drift away from the Gospel by the denomination’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.’” CPost
Jim Wallis and Michael Wear: Is Gov't Aid Christian Charity?
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“My objection to Wallis was and is that he teaches and many of his followers repeat that support of socialist redistribution policies is synonymous with obedience to the call of Christ to care for the ‘least of these.”’ CPost
Pope Francis: "inequality is the root of all social evil"
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An argument that it’s not that simple: “Inequality as such, especially when understood as a reflection of a diversity of talents, dispositions, and gifts, is not an evil, but is rather the source of rich social strength.” Panem and the Polis
The Bible, Government, and Social Justice, Part 3
Read parts Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provide a helpful case study in the inherent limitations of government. Their landmark publication, The Communist Manifesto (hereafter, TCM), was first printed in 1848, and offered to some the hope they had been desperately seeking. Before asserting the solution, though, the TCM delineated with specificity what its authors believed to be the root problem. All of societal history is ongoing class struggle, with oppressor and oppressed standing against one another. This has taken place throughout four epochs of world history, all representing the struggle between oppressor and oppressed: (1) primitive and communal, (2) slave, (3) feudal, and (4) capitalist. TCM made the case for how a fifth era, a socialist and communist epoch, could right the wrongs of societal history. At the time of TCM’s writing, the world advanced deep into the fourth (capitalist) epoch, an era in which the ills dominating the previous ages were coming to a climax. It was the right time, thought Marx and Engels, for the working class of the world (the proletariat, the oppressed) to unite and cast of the shackles of the ruling class (the bourgeoisie, the oppressors). The goal was the “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”1
