Radical Lutheranism is Bad, but its Not Necessarily Communism

Radical Lutheranism, aka Fake Lutheranism, says things like “[King] David’s sin was that he didn’t have a preacher”.

I say: “It is a sin to despise the word of God and Christian preaching. Nevertheless, don’t buy the line “David’s sin was not having a preacher” because sometimes having a preacher – even a good one – won’t make a difference. We become those determined to trample good preachers underfoot https://t.co/XxpKCqK20o”

Never comfort yourself with thoughts like these because now, not tomorrow, is the day of salvation.

Now is the day to live and walk in, with, and through Christ.

You are His, you are baptized.

I’m glad to see young Christian apologists seeing through the reductionist, anemic, shallow, and unsatisfying Radical Lutheran lines. Thomas Lemke certainly has some provocative things to say in this short post!:

https://twitter.com/ThomasJLemke/status/1079123174816653312

Really, take a long, thoughtful look at Lemke’s recent provocative post above.

And only then, feast on this thoughtful response to Lemke’s article from a whip-smart Facebook acquaintance:

To be an unhelpful purist, I would say that, strictly speaking, Marxism is less about the oppressor/oppressed paradigm as the possessors of capital/workers paradigm. Marxism as articulated by both Marx and Lenin is impressively amoral and almost entirely obsessed with economics, relegating such things as morality, and even ‘power’ as such as ‘epiphenomena’ which appear and take men merely because of the economic system that all, both capitalist and worker, are enslaved to. Strictly speaking, capitalists, in Marxism, are not evil, or even oppressive, they too are ‘victims’ of the system, which itself is a necessary step to the next economic step in human civilization.

But I have a feeling that is not at all what you are getting at. Rather you are getting at the Adorno/Marcuse reworking of Marxism into, effectively, a political theology of power. I do think this has strong roots in our society, though I think the reason why this ‘Neo-Marxism’ is so appealing to Americans in a way that the old Marxism was not is because suspicion of power and hatred of those who concentrate it is deep in the American character. The revolution was largely inspired by such a desire to remove power from people, and, interestingly, both the Democrat party, in defending slavery, and the Republican party, in wanting to abolish it, both framed their ideology as ‘ensuring that power cannot be aggrandized by a handful of elites.’

I think the article is partly right. But the part it misses is that the Bible, as all of humanity before the US, has assumed that to possess power is good if good people possess it. It is an American innovation to argue that possession of power is, as such, an evil. Perhaps one could argue that it is a Puritan heritage. Regardless, it has been informing our theology for long before Marxism. Neo-Marxism appeals to both us and our theology because it appeals, in some sideways manner, to our Americanism.

Discuss.

FIN