Eyre Lines

I’ve been reading “All Things in Common” by Roman Montero recently, and have changed my mind as a result. (I can’t think of a better endorsement of a book!).

Not about whether following the economic prescriptions of Jesus would result in an effectively communist society; the author there merely confirms what I have come (reluctantly) to believe, that to follow Jesus’ instructions fully would mean effectively communism; holding what you actually possessed for the benefit of the community at large, if necessary selling it and providing for the poor and if not, sharing the property itself or its produce with others without preference between yourself and them, or between them – and that “the community” and “others” there means the widest possible interpretation; no-one, irrespective of whether they are of your family or another, of your race or another, of your ethnicity or another, of your nationality or another, of your sexual orientation or another, of your socioeconomic class or another or even of your religion or another should be excluded.

No, the point on which I have changed my mind is the question of whether the early church practiced this for an extended period. We know from Acts 2 and Acts 4 that this definitely was practiced, notably by the early Jerusalem church. but I have tended to take the view, widespread among scholars (including, as Montero points out, such heavyweights as James Dunn and John Dominic Crossan) that this was a fairly short-lived experiment. After all, from our 20th-21st century viewpoint, it fails miserably to conform to our indoctrination, which tells us that anything other than free-market capitalism will fail, and communism will fail quicker and more spectacularly than other deviations from the gospel of Hayek and Friedman. I have blogged in the past suggesting that Paul’s collection on behalf of the Jerusalem Church was evidence that the experiment had not worked, and that they therefore needed bailing out, and urged that we follow Jesus’ commands despite their impracticality. After all, I’ve argued, this pacifist business is pretty impractical, but nonetheless Christians through the ages have considered it at least counsel of excellence, and some denominations (for example Mennonites and Quakers) have actually followed the route of non-violence fairly completely.

The thing is, Montero shows pretty conclusively from a study of a large body of material up to and including the fourth century that actually, it was not just the first-century Jerusalem church doing a short-lived (and failed) experiment, this was a characteristic of Christian communities which was widespread through the Roman Empire, and it was still going strong in the Fourth Century, some three hundred years later. He also picks up a lot of refererences in Paul and the other writers of epistles to indicate that this was not a set of commands of Jesus which were already being subverted by his first and second century followers, but something which can legitimately be regarded as a general New Testament viewpoint.

And, of course, clear commandments from Jesus to his followers.

So we should all become communist…

Yes, I recoiled at that too. However, Montero makes the excellent point that what Jesus (and the other NT writers) were advocating was not at all State control of all property, and was not a centralised command economy, so it was not communism as it has typically been put into force in (for instance) the Soviet Union or China. It’s the kind of communism where you freely lend stuff to a friend, or give your neighbour a cup of sugar when they ask for it, without running an account. The kind where you buy a beer for someone without there being an obligation on them to buy you one in return (nor an implicit acceptance that they are of greater status than you because they are providing for you).

But it is also the kind in which, if you have a homeless person in your town and you have accommodation, you provide it without asking for rent, and where if you find someone hungry, you buy them a meal or a trolley of groceries, or invite them round for a meal. And, if the system is working well (as it seems from the accounts Montero has consulted it did for at least three centuries), there will be no homeless and no hungry people in your town, because they will all be being provided for by you and your other Christian neighbours. Or Islamic ones, or Jewish ones, or those of any other faith tradition which follows Jesus without necessarily thinking of it in those terms.

If you love him, follow his commandments…