social justice and liberty as an optional extra to the Gospel or as principles which Christians should only apply if, at some stage, they turn their attention to politics, but rather as the core of the Christian message itself. That God created the world and gave it to humanity – whether the Genesis account is understood literally or figuratively – proves that it is not for a few to own and exploit the natural resources of the world or oppress others with their privilege and dominant perspective. The prelapsarian world of the Garden of Eden was a place of co-operation and equality – ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?’ – as well as a situation in which everything was done justly and God’s children enjoyed perfect liberty.
The Exodus account – so crucial for theologies of liberation – was God breaking into history, bringing liberty to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. The Egyptian rulers and slave-owners are made to represent the capitalist class, the global centre, the one per cent, the white supremacists, the patriarchy. God chooses to identify rather with the exploited. The rest of the Old Testament bears witness to the freedom with which God sets his people free – the land laws of Israel, such as the year of jubilee, are designed to prevent those who have recognised the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man from slipping back into unequal, oppressive relationships with one another:
When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God.
You shall not oppress your neighbour or rob him. The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning. You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.
You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbour.
(Leviticus 19:10–11, 13–15)
The prophets who followed – ‘fiery publicists of the description we should now call Socialists or Anarchists’, according to UK Labour Party founder James Keir Hardie – were fierce in their denunciation of Israel’s failure to measure up to this standard.7 ‘Woe to those who devise wickedness […] They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance’ (Micah 2:1a, 2). ‘But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream’ (Amos 5:24).
This ‘prophetic-liberating tradition’, as feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether referred to it, reaches its culmination in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.8 In the Christian Left understanding of the Gospel, Christ comes to proclaim and to inaugurate a new order in which economically and socially oppressive relationships are abolished, the first become last, and the world is turned upside down. ‘My soul magnifies the Lord’, sings Mary upon hearing the news of the miraculous conception. ‘He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty’ (Luke 1:46, 51–3). The British Anglo-Catholic Stewart Headlam regarded this Magnificat as ‘the hymn of the universal revolution’, ‘the Marseillaise of humanity’, the heralding of God’s Kingdom of righteousness and justice upon the earth.9 This Kingdom, those on the Christian Left argue, is not a distant eschatological promise – ‘pie in the sky when we die, by and by’ – but, as exemplified in Christ, something to be fought for and won in the here and now.
Christ – the lowly carpenter, Jesus of Nazareth – befriended the poor and the outcast, acknowledging the worth and dignity of those crushed and oppressed by the selfish and individualistic world. He warned his followers not to seek material gain – ‘You cannot serve God and money’ (Matthew 6:24) or, in the more familiar King James translation, ‘Ye cannot serve God and mammon’ – but rather to love and to serve others as themselves (Matthew 22:39). The followers of Christ were not to lord it over their companions, nor to place burdens on each other, for they were to regard one another as brothers and sisters (Matthew 23:4–12). The Sermon on the Mount, in which Christ raises up the poor and the meek and the peaceable, is, according to Keir Hardie, ‘full of the spirit of pure Communism’.10 Christ’s radical, revolutionary mission is summed up, it is argued, in the synagogue sermon in which the liberative nature of the Old Testament year of jubilee is explained and applied: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4:18–19). ‘In the Bible,’ maintains Peruvian liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, ‘Christ is presented as the one who brings us liberation […] Christ makes man truly free, that is to say, he enables man to live in communion with him; and this is the basis for all human brotherhood.’11
Christ’s death, in this understanding, was a result of his radical mission, which was opposed by the religious and political authorities of his day. Labour Party leader George Lansbury declared Christ to be ‘the greatest revolutionary force of His times’, ‘the lonely Galilean – Communist, agitator, martyr – crucified as one who stirred up the people and set class against class’.12 Theologian Robyn J. Whitaker, responding to Donald Trump, links the death of Christ to systemic racial injustice, describing Jesus as ‘a brownskinned Jew killed by the Roman State’.13 The folk singer Woody Guthrie summed up this perspective in his 1940 song ‘Jesus Christ’:
Jesus Christ was a man who travelled through the land
A hard-working man and brave
He said to the rich, ‘Give your money to the poor’,
But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave.
When Jesus come to town, all the working folks around
Believed what He did say
But the bankers and the preachers, they nailed Him on the cross,
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.
This song was written in New York City
Of rich man, preacher, and slave
If Jesus was to preach what He preached in Galilee,
They would lay poor Jesus in His grave.14
There are certainly questions arising from this summary of a Christian Left biblical theology, particularly from a theologically (but not necessarily politically) conservative perspective. An understanding of God’s absolute holiness and the sinfulness of people is absent, as consequently is an understanding of how the sinner can be reconciled to God. The substitutionary theory of the atonement, supported by two millennia of church history and a plain reading of the Bible – ‘that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures’ (1 Corinthians 15:4b) – has been replaced. In a justifiable attempt to broaden the scope of the Gospel beyond individual piety, the Gospel itself has arguably been pushed aside in favour of economic collectivism and social liberation.
Radicalism and socialism in the church
It would be an anachronism to attribute the term ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ to movements active long before modern political ideologies began to develop throughout the long nineteenth century. The term ‘radical’, being less precise, can be employed
