Apostles of Revolution? Marxism and Biblical Studies

Religious Studies Review, 2006

Bulletin for the Study of Religion, 2011

The issue of ideology is one which is still in need of discussion in biblical studies. In this article I will map the way that the various strains of social approaches to New Testament have started to address this issue, though often indirectly. I will then move to an explicit discussion of the issue making reference to the Marxist tradition focusing on Marx, Althusser and Žižek. I will argue that rather than the more traditional view which focuses on a non-ideological space like science, a better approach is one championed by Žižek which looks for gaps and cracks in the social world which then lend themselves to ideological criticism.

2016

Contemporary study of the New Testament and of Paul more specifically shows symptoms of avoidance of basic categories of Marxist analysis such as economic class, class struggle, and mode of production. The result is that discussions of economic and social realities are often so abstract and sanguine as to be misleading – an expression, from a Marxist point of view, of the shadow cast over biblical studies by capitalist ideology. The medical metaphor in my title is somewhat misleading. My topic is the remarkable rarity of explicit reference to Marxism or Marxist categories in New Testament scholarship and Paul scholarship especially. But in the following remarks I do not so much offer a single diagnosis as I observe a range of symptoms and propose several possible diagnoses for consideration. Marxist interpretation of any part of the Bible has been scarce.1 Even today – when, after the dramatic dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Eastern Bloc in Europe, we might expect...

A paper submitted for doctoral course credit. Socialism, Marxism and critical theory have had a great impact on recent American politics. This is due to an increase in the popularity of these ideologies. This paper explores what those ideologies fundamentally are and their recent impacts on American politics offering a critique from a Biblical Christian worldview.

Reading Scripture as a Political Act: Essays on the Theopolitical Interpretation of the Bible, 2015

The broad aim of this volume is to highlight the significance of theological readings of scripture for contemporary political theology. Indeed, theological readings of scripture—especially premodern theological readings of scripture—have great potential to illuminate the sociopolitical issues at the center of political theology. Yet political theology tends to neglect this font of resources. Although divine revelation is recognized as a key concept in political theology, and biblical scholars increasingly understand scripture to contain political dimensions, scripture is often marginalized in most scholarly discussions of political theology. As a corrective to this problem, the contributors of Reading Scripture as a Political Act attempt to demonstrate how scripture functions in the “theopolitical imagination” of theologians from the earliest Christian centuries to the present day.

European Journal of Theology, 2008

The Marxist ideology in former Eastern Europe is not so completely dead as some would us to believe. Marxist attitudes lurk under various disguises and they tend to surface especially in discussions with Christian missionaries from the West. The argument of this article is that a Christian worker in Eastern Europe still needs to know the basic philosophical theses of Marxism if he/she is to get the message across to the hearers.

Church History, 2014