My Reply

Another reply on Bill Muehlenberg's Culture Watch. This is a reply to Muehlenberg's reply to my post.
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With all due respect Bill Muehlenberg, there is evidence that I did read you comments. I quoted your essay in the middle of my reply. However, I believe you misread my response.

The soccer score line title flavours your essay. My point is that fashions come and go and being triumphant over an election victory is transitory. All things change over time! On this my life experience has re-enforced Qoheleth’s teachings. As you know, Qoheleth is the Hebrew title for the writer of Ecclesiastes.

Nor did I make a positive Biblical case for neither socialism nor Marxism. You might have concluded such from my negative framing of my questions. Your reply made Biblical assertions about capitalism, Marxism and socialism. I am not so brave as to draw any such conclusions. The Biblical references were illustrating the American journalist conclusions about the welfare state could be question within the context of Christian ethics.

I must disagree with you on the Acts. My view is that Luke believed that the Church had replaced the Israel as the people of God. Given this, what happens in Acts 4 and 5 is not emergency provisions or a voluntary society but the permanent expression of the new Kingdom of God. I am aware with the potential anti-Semitic problems with this interpretation of Luke. I also agree that other texts could be brought to support a “capitalist” interpretation of a Christian understanding of the state.

However, Luke 16:1-8 is not one of these. Under the Western Australia Criminal Code the ‘manager’ could be charged with s.378 stealing as a servant and s.407 fraud. I would be surprised if Victoria did not have similar laws. The basis of capitalism has always being the appropriation of wealth and calling it private property. Or are you taking the line that property is theft?


Some other replies to your article have argued that Christianity leads to conservatism labelling Christian socialism as an oxymoron. Like the Great Methodist Christian socialist Donald Soper, I wounder how a conservative can be a Christian. Christian socialism is the oldest of the modern Christian political movements. From them came the trade union movement and the Labor Party. Both Rudd and I claim that tradition for ourselves but with different policy outcomes. Unlike Rudd, it leads to the mistake of joining the Communist Party in the mid-eighties and my current membership of the Greens from the mid-nineties. Marx derided Christian socialist as ideal socialists. Marx advocated a ‘scientific socialism’.

I have always thought that the compassionate conservative as the great modern oxymoron. Will Wilkinson is right, welfare handouts are demoralising. However, begging for charity from the wealthy is both demoralising and ineffective. Australia prior to Medibank Public or the current state decay of Australian teeth illustrates the ineffectiveness of charity! It is interesting that the Old Testament did not help the poor or disposed by either method. The second harvest was for the poor to take. This suggests that the Biblical Israel had different views about private property.