Sweet Social Justice

Social Justice as Marxist Victimhood and a False Gospel

What social justice has done in our culture, it has taken this Marxist understanding of the world, this worldview of victimhood, and pressed that across every point of difference that you can imagine.

How is this being implemented in the churches? How is this penetrating the church to become the economic ideal? It's through basically what I call the baptism of Marxism. And one of the chief proponents of that in today's church is Tim Keller.

And I saw the title of it was Woke Church. This was the name of the sermon. It was preached by Dr. Eric Mason, who lives and ministers in the same city where I ministered from 2004 to 2016, inner city Philadelphia.

In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. So herein is the issue with social justice. A rejection of the authority of God's word in favor of what is right in my own eyes.

What I feel, what I think, what I believe.

But by what standard is prostitution wrong? By what standard is any manner of sexual sin wrong? Father. So Samson was a judge, Jews of God. And there was something particularly masculine about Samson's role.

To grab a jawbone of a donkey and destroy Philistines was a particularly masculine role. To pick up the gate, the iron gate, and carry it a far distance. And then to overcome the enemy time and again, this was a particularly masculine role.

But you say, wait a minute, wasn't there a female judge in Israel? And her name was Deborah. Lord, it is so good to come before you and to open your word and to pray, to seek your face, to gather, and also to discuss things that are going on in the culture.

Lord, we know that you love the world so much that you gave your one and only son. And we pray that we would be a light to the world. That we would reflect the light of Christ to a lost world that's scrambling and doesn't know, up from down, right from left, bitter from sweet.

And we pray, Lord God, that tonight we would have clarity. That we'd be able to discuss these things and really identify what social justice is and what the danger it poses to the church and to the world.

So Lord, be with us in this conversation tonight. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. So we'll begin, if you have your scriptures with you, you can turn to Judges chapter 13. You can also look that up on your smartphone device or you're more than welcome just to listen.

I'm only going to read a few verses tonight and we'll focus in on those. But beginning with Judges 13, this is the familiar story of Samson. We know that they were unable to have children, Manoah and his wife, until an angel appeared and that angel of the Lord probably is Christ himself.

Pre-incarnate, making a kind of a theophany, an appearance of God in the Old Testament. But when this angel appears, he says something interesting in verse 4. Calling the child that will be born to Manoah and his wife a Nazarite.

He will be a Nazarite. The woman is told, therefore be careful and drink no wine or strong drink. And eat nothing unclean. Mark that. For behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor shall come upon his head, for the child shall be a Nazarite.

To God from the womb. And he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines. So of course we know the story of Samson. And he's born and he has just extraordinary supernatural strength. I mean he can lift up an iron gate and carry it a great distance.

He has power from God. So Samson also has long hair because no razor was ever taken to his head. Well, when he was young, there came a time when a young lion came running out of the woods to attack him.

And the Bible tells us here in chapter 14 that when this lion attacked Samson, he took it as one tears a young goat. Now, that puzzles me because I don't know how one tears a young goat. I would never tear a young goat.

That sounds pretty extreme. But he took a lion and treated it like it was a goat and tore it apart and killed it and left the carcass. Some time passed and he came back. When he got there, he found that the carcass of this lion was now filled with bees.

And the bees had made a honeycomb in the carcass of the lion. So there was honey in the lion. Remember the Nazarite vow. You shall eat nothing unclean. Now, a dead animal is unclean. And honey from the carcass is unclean.

We noticed this early in Judges 13 that it's repeated a couple of times so that the author here is setting us up to recognize eat nothing unclean. And right away, what does Samson do? He takes and eats.

The honey from the honeycomb is symbolic and can be applied to the rejection of God's word. The revelation of God. The Nazarite vow. Eat nothing unclean. Let nothing, no shaving of your head. All of this was the revelation of God that Samson was to live by.

Rejecting that, he ate. But the interesting thing is he then took some of that honey. I assume he put it in a pot or something. He might have just had a dripping handful of honey. I don't know. But he brought it to his parents.

And he gave it to them to eat. And it tasted sweet. They had no idea because we're told in chapter 14, verse 9, he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey from the carcass of the lion. Social justice is like Samson's honey.

It tastes so sweet. Many people think it's nothing more than to show love to an orphan, and a widow, or a migrant, or the poor.

That's sweet.

There's no one who could argue with being loving and kind towards the poor, or to the orphan, or the widow, or the migrant, the quartet of the vulnerable, as they've been called. But social justice is something more.

Where did that honey come from? What are the roots of social justice? We will be exploring that in this course. Short answer. Social justice. Here's the definition. It is the elevation of self to godhood through the elimination of disparities that would hinder the quest to absolute self-autonomy.

There's a lot in that definition, so let's break that down. It's the elevation of self. It's a person who's putting themselves in the place of God. How do they do that? Well, there's a quest to eliminate any disparities in society.

Disparities, differences, points of difference that might give one person an advantage over another. The end goal being that a person controls their own destiny. You see, so much of what determines what we have in life, let's say wealth, is determined before we're born.

If I'm born in America, it's because God chose that I'd be born in America and not in a slum in Africa, in a particular slum, in Nairobi, let's say. This is the sovereign plan of God. He determines the boundaries of a person.

So many of the things that define who we are are determined by God. A sovereign God decrees the things that come to be, but social justice will have nothing of the sovereignty of God. A person must be allowed to determine their own destiny, and so every difference and every disparity needs to be eliminated.

So the highest goal of this is equality, equity. Equity becomes the highest goal. That becomes the defining God of social justice. That's what people are after. Now, it's kind of vague at this point, so let's get a little bit more particular.

Let's push this down into kind of flesh and bones. What are the things that differentiate people from one another? Well, there's the level of wealth, economics. There's race, there's gender, there's sexuality, there's nationality.

All of these things are points of difference, and as the Industrial Revolution came about in the early 1800s, there was a heightened awareness of the difference between, quote-unquote, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Who coined those terms? Marx. Karl Marx, noticing those differences, said that there is fundamentally an oppressive class which is holding down a victim class. The rich versus the poor. And that construct of Marxism necessarily defined people according to either a victim status or an oppressor status.

What social justice has done in our culture, it has taken this Marxist understanding of the world, this worldview of victimhood, and pressed that across every point of difference that you can imagine.

So here's the definition of social justice. Cultural Marxism. It's Marxism applied to race. That it is fundamentally, by virtue of nothing more than the amount of melanin in a person's skin, it is fundamentally oppressive to be white.

Yes.

And there's even new definitions we can get into when we talk about race, about what whiteness is. It's not as you would think. It's a whole new definition of what whiteness is. Or we could talk about economics.

There's still the old classical economic differentiation, rich versus poor. The rich are oppressing the poor, and that's why the poor are poor. Sexuality. The heterosexual is oppressing the homosexual.

Necessarily. It's assumed. And you can talk about gender. Women are oppressed by men. Nationality. Build the wall. That's racist. Walls are racist. The very idea of having nation-states is even being called into question in our day and age.

So there is a fundamental victim-oppressor construct that's being built. Now, I was at a conference down in Atlanta. It's called Social Justice and the Gospel. And there were these great speakers that I admire very much.

And I noticed that the number of people that were attending this conference paled in comparison to the larger conference that was dealing with other issues. Very few people were interested in this question of social justice.

So one day I was walking around. That conference had ended, and now it was just a larger conference no longer talking about social justice. But I got in a conversation with a young guy who was about to plant a church in the inner city.

And I asked him, well, what did you think about that social justice conference? He said, eh, I didn't go to it. I'm not really interested. I don't really understand what the big deal is. And I said, I'll tell you what the big deal is.

I was an inner-city missionary from 2014 to 2016. And by God's grace, and only by His grace, we saw more than 100 people come to faith and get baptized. In those years, people were coming and getting saved and growing in the church.

And I look back on that experience now, and I can count 12 people who profess faith in Christ who have now apostatized, who have turned away from the faith. And every single one of them left the faith because of social justice.

Now, two of them left for Islam. But they didn't turn to Muhammad because they read his teachings and found them compelling. They turned because in prison, getting locked up for a crime, they were told that Christianity is colonial racism.

That the white man, those white missionaries that came to Kensington, indoctrinated you in the white man's religion and turned them to Islam based on the color of skin. Identifying as victims of the white man, they then turned to Islam.

Others went off to college. And some of the ones who went to college, one of them began dating a social justice warrior. And before long, she turned and completely abandoned the faith for the same kind of reasons.

That Christianity, the Western colonial Christianity, is a fundamentally oppressive regime. And so social justice attacks the very root of Christianity. And I could go on and on about the different stories.

Some of them left because of lesbianism. Recognizing that it was the church that was holding them back from their true created design. They identified as victims and turned away from the faith they were taught when they were teenagers.

Over and over again, we've seen this story. And I look back on the years when I was a youth pastor in the suburbs from 2000 to 2003. And many of those who came to faith and were baptized at that time are still walking with the Lord.

But the ones who aren't seem to have found a different religion. And this is the point. Social justice has become a religion.

It's a religion.

It's a religion that has not so much a god, but an anti-god. The devil in the social justice religion is this nebulous thing called hate. And they see it everywhere. And to be born again in the social justice world is not to experience new birth through Christ.

It's to become woke. Wokeness is like being born again to a social justice warrior. Eyes open to see a reality just beneath the surface that they never recognized before. All of a sudden, they can see.

Social justice has a born-again fake experience. And there's many other parallels that we'll get into next week that equate social justice to a form of religion and what's becoming the majority religion of this country.

Where does this lead? How pervasive is it? In the culture, it leads to the destruction of a society. Marxism, wherever it takes root, think Venezuela. And we should care about human flourishing. We should care about people.

The degree to which this country turns in a socialist direction, a social justice direction, will be its undoing. But we should care even more in the church because social justice is coming into the church like a tidal wave, taking over entire denominations.

Entire denominations. When I was a youth pastor, I was in a PCUSA church, Presbyterian Church, USA. In 2013, they would not admit the song in Christ alone into their hymnal because it teaches substitutionary atonement.

The wrath of God is satisfied. Because of that line, they would not admit this great modern hymn. It's funny with hymns, by the way. My kids think that these songs that we grew up singing are hymns because it's a hymn to them.

They were born after they were written. So in Christ alone is an old hymn to them. But all it teaches is the old, old story. Christ and his blood shed for sinners. The wrath of God satisfied as a penalty was poured out on the Son of God.

Social justice hates the blood of Christ. It hates substitutionary atonement. It teaches the opposite. See, if I am responsible for my sin, born in Adam's race, and I'm a sinner who's turned my back on God, I need a Savior.

And when he grants me salvation, I live from a position of gratefulness, being thankful for the things that were given to me in Christ. You can look at the world and say, kind of like Dave Ramsey does, you know, the great financial guy?

Whenever someone calls in, how are you, what does he say? Better than I deserve. Or you can take the exact opposite and identify as a victim. I've been dealt a bad hand. Society is against me. And this religion of social justice destroys the soul.

And it blinds eyes. Ironically, those who are woke are blinded to their need for grace. Rather than looking to a Savior, they're looking for a society to come and rescue. Societal change. I'm here with Timothy Kaufman, who's flown up to join us from Huntsville, Alabama.

Timothy is a writer, apologist, author, writes for the Trinity Review, and that's where I was first exposed to your work and appreciated what you did. You know, I gave you a phone call, Timothy, and told you about this project that we're doing called Sweet Social Justice, where we're looking at social justice and sweet meaning deceptively sweet.

And I gave you a call and told you what we were working on and offered to come down and visit you in Huntsville, Alabama to get a quick interview. I was going to be in the vicinity anyway. And instead, you told me that you would be willing to come up and spend some time with us here.

So last night, we recorded a two-hour presentation and we are entitling it The Religion of Marx. The Bad News of the Kingdom of Men.

We will make that available,.

But what we want to do today is just introduce you, and I wanted to ask you a couple of questions to help us with this project, Sweet Social Justice. See, my theory is that behind social justice is Father Marx.

Marx wedded with Roman Catholicism and the teachings of Taparelli, and we'll get into that in different parts of this movie. But Marxism is kind of the root, and the root can be exposed in different areas of culture.

So wherever there are differences between people, this idea that there is a victim class and an oppressor class, whether the issue be race, gender, sexuality, nationality, being able-bodied or not able, being disabled, in any of these cases,.

This construct of oppression,.

Where one is the oppressor and the other is the victim, and this victimization is assumed at many points, this is the essence of social justice. And so what I wanted to do with you today, Timothy, based on the work that you've done with the Trinity Review, and since we're so blessed that you, of your own accord, flew up here to work with us, I want to ask you two questions.

Number one, just to clarify, for all those watching, what is Marxism? And then number two,.

Where do you see it.

Entering into the church? Where do you see Marxism, through social justice, as an ideology, where do you see that entering into the evangelical church?

Okay, so first I want to say thank you for allowing me to come up. I enjoyed fellowshipping with your congregation, and I especially enjoyed teaching with them last night, and just a delightful group of people, and I was so thankful for the opportunity.

The question that you had about what is Marxism is a very good question to ask, especially since you just described the conflicts that exist between social classes. The haves, the have-nots, the able to the disabled, and different races, and so forth.

It all comes back to a conflict that is engendered by a desire for something. It's called the dialectic of Marx, or dialectical materialism. And what dialectical materialism is, is a philosophy that social progress occurs through conflict between social classes, and that conflict is usually over material goods.

So the dialectic is the conflict, the material goods are the flashpoint of the conflict, and the use of those material goods is what Marxism is all about. The idea of Marxism is that there is a class that has access to those material goods and a class that does not, and this has to be resolved through conflict and ultimately through revolution.

The way this manifested in Clark's philosophy of economics was that there was a capital class that owned the means of production and owned the capital of society, and then there was the working class that did the labor.

In his terms, it was the bourgeois and the proletarian. So the bourgeois had the capital, and the proletarian did the work. The way Marx described this conflict was what he called alienation. He said that the workers have to compete with one another, separately from one another, in order to find work with the bourgeois, and therefore they're alienated from one another, and on top of that, they end up producing products that end up getting sold to somebody else.

So they never get to know the person that buys them, and the person that buys those products never gets to know the person that manufactured them. And in fact, in between those two entities is the capitalist, who owns that means of production, pays the wages of labor, and then takes the product of manufacture and then goes and sells it to someone else for a profit.

That alienation between the laborer and the product of his labor was something that Marx thought needed a solution. He felt that it was unjust for the laborer to be alienated from, not only from other workers, but also from the product of his own labor.

And on top of that, the capitalist, who took the product of his labor and then sold it to the consumer, took a profit in the exchange, and in Karl Marx's mind, that profit really belongs to the laborer.

And so the laborer is alienated from the profit that he's entitled to. So Marx believed that because of the dialectical materialism as a philosophy, that social progress is made through conflict, the most obvious conflict that needed to occur was between the bourgeois and the proletarian, and once that conflict was resolved, it would be resolved into socialism as one step, and then finally Marxism, communism as its final step.

That was the absolute ideal of what social progress should result in, and social progress results in conflict between classes, and the flashpoint of that conflict is material goods. So the term that Marx assigned to the cause of that conflict was alienation, and he believed that wage labor was the most profound expression of alienation, and so wage labor needed to be eliminated.

The means of production, in order to solve the problem of alienation, the means of production needed to be publicly owned. The wage labor needed to be eliminated. In fact, to solve the problem of alienation, Marx believed that the compensation of the individual should simply be the satisfaction that he knows the person that consumed his product, and that he met the need of another person in society through the manufacture of his product, and that person should find his satisfaction, his reward, his wage, in the knowledge that he had manufactured something for Karl.

So, Karl gets to know the person that's consuming the goods that he manufactures, and the person that consumes it also gets to know Karl, and they know each other in a truly human relationship that eliminates the capitalist as that middle step who is stealing the wages of the worker by taking profit in the exchange.

So, the question that we should ask ourselves, first of all, is this biblical? Wage labor is not prohibited in the scriptures. In fact, in many places in the scriptures, it is spoken of in favorable terms as if it is the norm.

Paul himself, in 2 Thessalonians, talked about how he converted his labor into wages so that he could procure bread to eat. To Marx, that was monumentally offensive that he should have to earn a wage in order to get food to eat.

He should get food to eat anyway, and then just enjoy the satisfaction of having provided for someone else. Marx believed that if people would simply implement this philosophy, confiscate capital and the means of production from the bourgeois, distribute it to the proletarian, there would initially be a proletarian dictatorship, but afterward, there would be a utopia in which there was a surplus of all material goods, there was no need for wage labor, there was no need for private ownership of property, and everything would be fantastic.

There would never, ever be scarcity, and there would never be oppression. And that is an absolute fantasy when you look at what has happened whenever Marxism has been implemented. So, it's a fallacious system.

It's not based on the scripture. But there's another question that I should ask, is that, do we really believe that our society is falling apart because I don't know who manufactured the pencil that I used at work today?

And is his world collapsing on him because he doesn't know what I'm using that pencil for? And it's a ridiculous precept on which to build an economic theory. This idea that I have bad feelings because I don't know who used the pencil that I manufactured, and the person who's using that pencil doesn't know me, and in the process, there's this guy in between who took a profit in the exchange.

It's a ridiculous precept. I don't lose sleep at night wondering who picked the orange that I ate for breakfast this morning. And I don't think he's losing sleep at night not knowing who's going to eat that orange.

And yet, to Marx, that was the central of his economic theory, this principle of alienation. And so, he implemented something that would solve that, or at least he thought it would solve it, get rid of wage labor, get rid of wage labor, get rid of private property, and suddenly, there's a surplus of material goods and nobody has to feel bad anymore, right?

Well, the exact opposite is what happened. Under the Marxist economic theory, there is no incentive to produce because there are no extra rewards for adding efficiency to the manufacturing process or adding efficiency to the production to increase the productivity of the soil or the productivity of the industry.

And, in addition to that, there's no disincentive to consumption. So, people can eat as much as they want and use as much as they want because it's free, costs them nothing. Well, what happens in a society when there's no incentive to productivity and there's no disincentive to consumption?

The result is scarcity because nobody wants to bring something to market because there's no extra rewards for bringing more of it to market and nobody wants to stop consuming too much because there's no penalty for overconsumption.

The result is absolute scarcity, which is why famine is the natural result whenever Marxism is implemented. And we've seen that in Venezuela. We've seen that in Rhodesia when it became Zimbabwe where Marxism was implemented as the economic theory and the result is people die.

And the utopia that Marx promised never materializes. Every time it is tried, it fails. And yet, there is, within this current generation, a call to go to Marxism, to socialism, as our economic system.

And remember, socialism is simply the intermediate step that Karl Marx thought we needed to take to get from capitalism to communism. So anytime there's somebody that's talking about we just need to implement socialism, they're just doing what Marx wanted.

Marx wanted there to be conflict resulting in a new system, which would be socialism, which would still retain some of the conflict of the old system, which would ultimately have to result in communism.

In fact, the Marxist approach to social progress is to foment that conflict. And to put it in terms of the dialectic, there is a thesis that exists and then there is a counterpoint, the antithesis to that.

The result is conflict and the resolution is achieved through synthesis. The new synthesis that results from the conflict of the thesis and the antithesis simply becomes the new starting point, the new thesis for the dialectic.

And so now there is an antithesis to that thesis resulting in conflict and now synthesis, which becomes the new thesis. And in Marx's ideal, that continuous chain of conflict, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, would result ultimately in the conversion from capitalism to socialism and finally to the economic ideal of communism.

So in the end, we can understand at least that Marx's objectives were to foment conflict and the way to foment conflict is by making material goods the flashpoint of the conflict and suddenly you've got a war between the haves and the have-nots, between the classes, and it's about material goods, calling for revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally implementation of communism is the final solution and because the capitalist will not do this voluntarily, of course his goods need to be seized from him by force.

So you look at what happens with Marxism. It's the elimination of private property, the elimination of wage labor, conflict over material goods. But the scriptures militate against this strongly. Wage labor is perfectly fine and justified in the scriptures.

Coveting your neighbor's goods is prohibited. Private property is a right that has to be respected. And you look at what the scriptures say about private property and wage labor and covetousness and you realize that the scriptures actually prohibit Marxism as an economic theory and therefore it prohibits the steps necessary to get to Marxism, including socialism, which is just that intermediate step that even Marx advocated for.

He believed that in America we need to convert to socialism so that we can end up Marxist. Now your second question about how is this being implemented in the church, is how is this penetrating the church to become the economic ideal, it's through the, basically what I call the baptism of Marxism.

And one of the chief proponents of that in today's church is Tim Keller. And Tim Keller has advanced the same theory, the same Marxist theory, of thesis, antithesis, joining them together for a new synthesis which is the ultimate solution.

And the illustration of that is really from his own words from his book The Reason for God. And he explains that he was raised as a Methodist, in the conservative Methodist denomination, but when he went off to college he found the Marxist dialectic in the new school, the Frankfurt School of Marxism.

And he thought to himself that the people from his upbringing who adhered to the Christian faith were morally upright, but they didn't have a great concern for the poor. And then he met the Marxists who were not morally upright, and they were moral relativists, but they had a great concern for the poor.

And so instead of simply rejecting Marxism because it's prohibited in the scriptures, and then instructing the Christians that they are to care for the poor, because the scripture actually teaches us that we should, instead he synthesized, he did exactly what Marx would have done.

He took the thesis, which is his Christian upbringing, the antithesis, which was Marxism, and he synthesized, in fact he states plainly in his book that he found a spiritual third way. It's the synthesis, it's the dialectic, and Tim Keller is using it to bring Marxism into the church.

When you look at his book Every Good Endeavor, he states plainly, in that book, that alienation was first identified by Karl Marx as the cause of the unraveling of our society, and wage labor is one of the things that's causing that alienation.

And so when Tim Keller writes a book called Every Good Endeavor, that is ostensibly the Christian work ethic expounded for the consumption of the church, he says in that book, well really the real problem is alienation, and we have to solve a problem for alienation, we have to solve the problem of alienation, and Karl Marx identified it.

Well, what's interesting in the book is that as you walk through the book, you realize he is starting with Marx's problem, alienation, and concludes with Marx's solution, which ultimately is confiscation of goods through higher taxation, elimination of wage labor, elimination of the incentives to working harder, and elimination of the penalties for not working harder or for making bad decisions, and he actually ends up restating by the end of the book that if people will just adopt this new way of looking at it, people won't be nearly as incentivized to work so hard, and they won't be so disappointed at the result of, I'm trying to think what he said there, Jeff, he said they won't be so disappointed at failures, that's what it was.

So by the end of the book, he said basically if people will simply adopt this new way of looking at work, they won't be nearly as tempted to overwork and nearly as disillusioned by failures. Well, what exactly does he mean by that?

And to understand what he means by that, we have to go back to the foundation of his book, and he says at the outset that he wants to answer the challenge that was issued to society by Robert Bellah in his book from the 1970s, Habits of the Heart, in which Robert Bellah tried to deal with what is causing the unraveling of American society, and Robert Bellah felt like the unraveling of American society could be traced back to our expressive individualism, all these people working separately for their own advancement, or alienation as Marx would say it.

And so in Every Good Endeavor, Tim Keller starts out with Bellah's challenge. Bellah's challenge was to change our work ethic and change our society by looking at work as a calling to meet the needs of society rather than a means to our own advancement through wage labor, okay?

So go back to Robert Bellah's book, Habits of the Heart, and he actually takes that from Christopher Jencks' book, Inequality, and in Inequality, Christopher Jencks talks about the problem with unequal outcome in American society.

And there are some people that believe that the inequality in American society is because of inequality of education, and ultimately Christopher Jencks concludes that the real problem is not inequality of education but inequality of income.

And so both Jencks and Bellah advocate for government intervention to reduce the rewards of ambition, to reduce the penalties of failure, and to equalize people's income in order to conquer this problem of expressive individualism or alienation.

And Tim Keller says at the outset of his book, this is the challenge from Bellah that we need to address as Christians to solve this problem of alienation that Karl Marx identified. So Tim Keller continues through his book and so he calls on Reinhold Niebuhr and says, well, here's a guy who had a lot to say about this.

What did he have to say? And then he calls on Dorothy Sayers and her writings on the work ethic and why work and creed and chaos. These are all essays in her book Letters to a Diminished Church. She talks about wage labor and how it's been so ingrained in us as we work in order to get money so that we can get food to eat when instead we should be working just for the good of our fellow man.

And our reward is simply in the knowledge that we have provided for the needs of another man. And all this is from Marx. And if you continue through the book, he finally concludes with Michael Schluter, a Christian economist, who says that, you know, businesses shouldn't focus on profits.

They should rather be focusing on restoring truly human relationships to the manufacturing process. And they should eliminate the pay differentials between the lowest paid person in a company and the highest paid person in a company.

In other words, we should separate compensation from productivity and diminish the significance of wage labor and instead we should just focus on truly human relationships instead of profits, which is just simply to recapitulate Marx's economic theory.

And what you find throughout Tim Keller's books, whether it's in Every Good Endeavor or it's in Prodigal God or The Reason for God or Generous Justice or Ministries of Mercy, he continually is appealing to classical Marxists and neo-Marxists to develop an economic theory.

You go back to Every Good Endeavor and you've got Robert Bella who's relying on Christopher Jencks. They're both Marxists. Dorothy Sayers, Marxist. Michael Schluter with his Marxist economic theory. Marx himself is quoted in Every Good Endeavor.

And you walk through this and you say, well, that's interesting. He seems to rely on these Marxists a lot. Reinhold Niebuhr, another Marxist who believed that it was wrong for the Ford Motor Company to be privately held.

It ought to be a public company. Who believed that private ownership of goods was the cause of all these crises in societies that need to be solved. He believed that socialism must come to America and eventually the American proletarian would rise up and cast off the bourgeois.

And then in Generous Justice, Tim Keller defers to Vinoth Ramachandra who's a Sri Lankan scholar who actually, as it turns out, is against the accumulation of capital which is what Karl Marx was against and talked about how demeaning and dehumanizing it is to force people in different work sectors to compete with one another for business and that the gospel teaches us that the benefits of globalization need to be equitably distributed.

He defers to Gustavo Gutierrez, the Latin American theologian who speaks of God's preferential option for the poor but in the end he's really talking about the need to end private property, seize the means of production and bring about communism by the intermediate step of socialism.