The Religion of Marx: The Bad News of the Kingdom of Man

Cornerstone Church

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Thank you. Thank you very much for that very warm welcome. The Saints of Alabama send greetings.

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It's a pleasure to be here. It truly is an honor and I was just pleased that the article that I wrote fell on years that found it useful, and I'm just delighted to be here to talk with you about the content of that article and how it factors into the broader social justice movement that the church is dealing with now.

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I call this presentation that you're seeing up there over my right shoulder, the religion of Marx, and I call it the religion of Marx because we're going to get to a faith statement a little bit later in the article and you'll see just how much faith you have to have in order to believe that Marxism can actually work.

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Two thousand years ago, Jesus came to us preaching the good news of the kingdom of God.

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In the 1800s, Karl Marx decided that that wasn't working out so well, and so he came up with an economic system that he thought would basically be a substitute for faith in God, that it would bring peace and equality and harmony, and peace and justice and happiness, and probably some fluffy pink unicorns on rainbows as well.

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Because it was all going to be great if you just give him a chance. The result of his economic philosophy, and particularly his spiritual philosophy, has been the murder of hundreds of millions of people, and the starvation of millions of people, and the ruination of nations.

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It's the great destroyer of nations, his economic system. Every time that it is implemented, it fails and then its proponents stand up and say, well, the conditions weren't right for it just yet.

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You need to give us another chance. We've seen it in Rhodesia, we've seen it in Venezuela, we've seen it in the fall of communism, the communist block nations in 1989.

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We've seen it over and over and over again, the inability of the Marxist system to contribute to the well -being of mankind, to increase our well -being, our health, our life expectancy.

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It doesn't do what it promises it will do. It is bad news. That's why

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I call it the bad news of the kingdom of men, because Jesus came preaching good news, Marx came preaching very, very bad news.

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And what I want to do today as we walk through this, I'm going to walk you through, there's three main stages in the presentation

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I'm going to make tonight. One is to talk about the Pauline economic theory of wages and labor.

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I'm just referring to how Paul discussed economics and wages in his epistles. And what we find is that Paul said that coveting your neighbor's goods is prohibited.

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Compensation is related to productivity, as in if you don't work, you don't eat. And seizing thy neighbor's goods is unlawful, it's prohibited.

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Under Marxist economic theory, there we go.

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Under Marxist economic theory, there's something called dialectical materialism, and we're going to define that a little bit later in our presentation.

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But under that construct, coveting your neighbor's goods is perfectly valid.

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The cause of all the problems that required his solution was something he called alienation.

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And through his theory of alienation, he concluded that compensation should not be related to productivity.

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That's why you understand from the Communist Manifesto, from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs,

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Paul had a much simpler approach. He said to each according to his productivity. And the result of this economic system, because it is not typically embraced by the people who are the most productive members of society, is revolution and overthrow.

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We have to have the proletariat has to overthrow the bourgeoisie. The worker has to overthrow the capitalist.

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The end result has to be revolution. What's happening now is that theory, that Marxist economic theory is being introduced to the church and repackaged.

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So that inequality of income and material possessions is the real problem that the gospel is supposed to solve.

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And divorcing compensation from productivity is the solution, and forced redistribution of income and possessions is the desired outcome.

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And so we're going to cover this in those three stages tonight. Tonight we're going to start with Paul's economic theory of wages and labor.

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And I'm just going to quote some verses to you that should be very familiar to you. But as the pastor mentioned in the service this morning, the

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Bible is full of economic precepts that have to do with wages, labor, supply, demand, and profit.

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The Bible is not silent on these issues, so we don't need to turn to Marx for our answers.

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If we want to know about profit, and wages, and labor, and wealth, and private property, we can go to the scriptures.

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Paul, as we find in his epistles, there we go.

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He did not covet the private property of others. He said in Acts 20, 33, when he was addressing the

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Ephesian elders at Miletus, he said, I have coveted no man's silver, or gold, or apparel.

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Instead, he worked to provide for himself. He said, yea, you yourselves know that these hands have ministered unto my necessities, and to them that were with me.

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It's Acts 20, 34. He did not ask for handouts. For we behave not ourselves disorderly among you, neither did we eat any man's bread for naught.

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That's from 2 Thessalonians 3, 7 to 8. So Paul sets up in his epistles a systematic view of economics, and wage, and labor theory, and he considered it covetousness to want people to just give him something because he needed it.

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He converted his labor to money, converted his money to food in a fair market exchange.

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He, in 2 Thessalonians 3, 8, it says, we wrought with labor and travail night and day that we might not be chargeable to any of you.

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He exchanged his labor for wages. There we go.

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He exhorted the idle to repent. He said, if any would not work, neither should he eat. But rather, with quietness, they should work and eat their own bread.

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Eat their own bread. That's a reference to private property. It's private property that's actually been gained in a fair market transaction after monetizing their labor.

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This is pretty straightforward economics. It's something that we experience every day. And finally, Paul was not afraid to shame those who would not repent of their idleness.

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He said, withdraw yourselves. Have no company with him that he may be ashamed. That's 2 Thessalonians 3, verses 6 and 14.

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So, Paul's view of socialism and capitalism is also very straightforward.

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Socialism merely requires that you covet your neighbor's goods. Your neighbor has something that you want.

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That neighbor should therefore give it to you. If that neighbor does not give it to you, you can go get the government to hold a gun to his head and force him to give it to you at or below market value or sometimes even for free.

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That's all that's required, is man's natural proclivity to covet his neighbor's goods. Capitalism, on the other hand, requires that you value your neighbor's goods.

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If your neighbor has something that you want, you have to determine its value in a fair free market exchange.

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You have to somehow aggregate enough value through labor in order to purchase that from your neighbor.

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And if your neighbor doesn't want to sell it to you, he doesn't have to. Socialism is prohibited in the scriptures because it is an economic system that is foundationally based on covetousness.

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Capitalism is actually something that is supported in the scriptures. And in fact, the scriptures exhort us to accumulate capital.

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We're gonna actually get to some Bible verses where the Lord instructs the wise man to leave an inheritance for his grandchildren.

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You can't leave an inheritance for your grandchildren if you have not accumulated capital. And what we'll find is the accumulation of capital and the laws of inheritance were all anathema to Karl Marx and he wanted to get rid of them both.

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So, what we find when we study Paul in his economic theory, compensation is related to productivity, labor is monetized at market clearing rates, money is exchanged for needful things, goods are owed to the buyer, compensation is owed to the seller, financial transactions are voluntary.

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Seizure of thy neighbor's assets is covetousness and uncompensated acquisition is theft. Now, I don't think any of you are surprised to find out that this is what the

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Bible teaches. I don't think that any of you are surprised to find out that this is actually a godly economic system.

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The funny thing is that there are people today who think that this is terrible and needs to be replaced.

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So, why state the obvious? Why come to you tonight and say, everything you probably already believe to be true about economic theory in the scriptures is true?

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And it's because the generation that is coming up, that is learning to reject the

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Paulian economic theories. Marxism is a rejection of Pauline theory of wages.

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Socialism is a rejection of Pauline work theory. Communism is a rejection of Pauline theory on private property.

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Universal basic income rejects the Pauline productivity theory. Social justice, environmental justice, climate justice, all reject

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Paul's theory of covetousness. But I'm not just telling you this because those systems reject what the scriptures teach about economics.

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I'm telling you this because the church is being encouraged to embrace that very rejection. Communism and socialism are being repackaged as a

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Christian ethic. Covetousness is repackaged as the ideal of generosity. Capitalism is recast as unsustainable greed.

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How many of you have heard that, well, if somebody has a need, well, the government just needs to meet that need.

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It needs to give them some money. We need to be very, very generous with other people's money.

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That's what it is. That system of confiscating the goods of this person in order to meet the needs of that person without the approval of the property owner, it's just covetousness, it's theft.

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And yet it's being repackaged as if it's the very essence of generosity. To put it a little more simply, a generation that was raised on the

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Pauline theory as expressed in the little red hen, that is, if you don't work, you don't eat, has been replaced by a generation raised on the

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Marxist theory of the rainbow fish, which says if you want someone else's possessions, you're entitled to them, and the community needs to just badger that person until he finally gives up and distributes his wealth.

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Now, that's a very simple summary of the rainbow fish, but remember, in the rainbow fish, there's a fish with glorious and beautiful scales.

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Somebody else wanted them, and he said no, and that creates this conflict. And that conflict has to be resolved, and that conflict is finally resolved through redistribution of wealth.

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And what we find is that that is the essence of Marxist economic theory, is that there's a conflict between the haves and the have -nots.

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It has to be solved through redistribution, and because the owner of that property rarely gives it up without a fight, it requires revolution and major foundational changes in our society.

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So I want to go through a brief summary on Marxist economic theory of wages and labor, but first I want to just identify something that will probably be just helpful for you going forward.

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Communism is the implementation of Marxist economic theory. It's a political theory derived from Karl Marx advocating class war, leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works according to his abilities and is paid according to his needs.

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It is an economic system based on covetousness. It separates compensation from productivity.

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Socialism is simply an intermediate step on the road to Marxism. In fact, if you read

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Marx's critique of the Gotha program, he states that explicitly. Marxists are always happy for a socialist outcome, because they know that's just the next step in a transition to communism.

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But socialism is a political theory of social organization, which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

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The community owns the means of production, the community sets the prices. And again, this also is a system based on covetousness, and it also separates compensation from productivity.

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We're gonna get into that a little bit more as we go through. But I wanted to set up that we could talk about socialism, we could talk about communism.

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But in the end, the real problem is the Marxism that underlies that. Communism is the implementation of Marxism, and socialism is just an intermediate step to get there.

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Something that Marx himself stated. So Marxism, in fact, is the antithesis of Pauline economics.

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It is fueled by class struggle, the proletariat versus the bourgeois. And he states this, and I'm quoting from Marxist .org

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in their entry on class struggle. He says, classes emerge when there exists a surplus of production.

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In other words, when wealth increases, there becomes conflict between the people who have it and the people who want it.

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And as I mentioned, this system is based on covetousness. The conflict between the classes is founded in the division of social surplus.

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That conflict is founded in the division that's necessary for what do you do with all this surplus wealth?

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Well, it's in the hands of the person that earned it. Well, that's a wrong place for it. It needs to be in everybody's hands. So now there's conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeois.

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I don't know if you've ever read the book P .T. Bower's Equality in the Third World and Economic Delusion.

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It's from 1981. He states in that book the most concise summary I've ever heard of how socialism gets into place.

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He said, it is the institutionalization and organization of envy and resentment against economically effective people.

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The people who have been the most productive in society have wealth, and that wealth needs to be redistributed.

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And so socialism institutionalizes covetousness and implements and acts on the covetousness of the people.

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In the end, it divorces productivity from compensation. From each according to his abilities is the productivity, but to each according to his needs is the compensation.

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Compensation is separated from productivity, and there's a reason for that. They believe that without assuming that we can just set aside all incentives for hard work and all the punishments for failure and all the detriments and consequences of bad decisions, just set all that aside and everybody will keep on just working just as hard and there will be just as much wealth.

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And then without all the pressure to provide for yourself because you're really providing for everybody else. Everything is just gonna be happy and wonderful and the total productivity of the whole world will go up so far that there'll be so much of everything that we won't even need money anymore.

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That's amazing. It's amazing the idea that Karl Marx had. If you just implement this, everything is just gonna be fantastic.

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But in the end, it requires the seizure of thy neighbor's goods. That's the ultimate end. Marx talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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We have to have revolution. We have to cast off the private property owning bourgeois, and the proletariat needs to take over.

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And of course, in this transition to communism, we'll be required to have the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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The new sheriff isn't gonna be in town, and we're gonna be barking orders to all those awful people who've been running the capitalist system all this time.

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It's a revolution that's based on covetousness, and that covetousness is based on conflict between the haves and the have -nots.

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In the end, after the dictatorship of the proletariat, comes the final redistribution of wealth under communism.

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So when you study Marx, and then you study the scriptures, it's a really easy choice.

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You look at Marx and say, well, covetousness is prohibited in the scriptures. Compensation is related to productivity in the scriptures.

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Seizing of thy neighbor's goods is prohibited in the scriptures. We don't need an economic system based on your economic fairytale.

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And yet, the church is increasingly pressured to embrace Marx and his economic theory.

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So when we talk about Marx, and I wanna give an overview of his dialectical materialism and his solution to the problem of alienation.

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So we'll just talk briefly about what dialectical materialism is.

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It'll just take a minute to go through this page. But the dialectic, by definition, is simply the existence or action of opposing social forces, concepts, etc.

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So there's two entities in society that have different views of something. There's a dialectic that emerges between them, and the result is going to be conflict.

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Materialism is the doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications. So when you put those together, you have dialectical materialism.

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You have conflict between opposing social forces, and that conflict is centered on material wealth.

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So dialectical materialism, the Marxist theory that political and historical events result from the conflict of social forces that are interpretable as a series of contradictions and their solutions.

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The conflict is caused by material needs. What I want you to focus in is the conflict is based on contradictions, is interpretable as a series of contradictions and their solutions.

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Two opposing forces, they're in contradiction to each other. There's a dialectic between them.

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And the result, there's gotta be an outcome. And Marx saw that conflict as the means of social progress.

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All class struggle will be resolved in communism, he thought. There's classes, there's haves, there's have -nots, there's a surplus of the production of the manufacturing process that's in the hands of the bourgeois.

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And we're gonna actually advance to a better and better society through conflict. And that conflict will eventually be resolved in communism.

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And the nexus of that conflict is material needs, and the goal of that conflict is ultimately to overturn capitalism through revolution.

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Communism can be achieved only after a period of dictatorship of the proletariat. That's the working class, and that's what

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Marx was teaching about. And that's why long live the revolution.

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Che Guevara, you've heard of long live the revolution. Workers of the world unite.

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That actually is a call to arms to unite, to cast off the bourgeois.

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What I want to do now is to show you that this is what Marxism in theory looks like.

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Social progress is through conflict. And I want to just introduce you to a couple of terms that are relevant here as we talk through this.

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But the idea is that there is a thesis, somebody makes a statement, somebody makes a proposal, somebody has a precept, something that you might find in the scriptures.

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If you don't work, you don't eat. Then there's an antithesis, and that antithesis is, well gosh, there's hungry people, so well, okay, let's just synthesize, let's bring them together.

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There's a conflict, the resolution is going to be, well, we'll just give everybody free food, okay?

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So see, see, if you don't work, you don't eat, but there's hungry people, okay, let's synthesize those two, and now we've made some progress.

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Well, the synthesis is never the final solution, really.

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There's always another antithesis to that. And so there's a new conflict, because the synthesis is now the new thesis, and there's a new antithesis to that, and now there's conflict.

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And of course, there's a solution, there's a synthesis between the new thesis and its antithesis.

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But of course, that's never really the final solution either. There's an antithesis to that. And then finally, we arrive at the absolute idea.

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Well, to Karl Marx, the absolute idea was communism. So all social conflict was intended to end up with communism as its final glorious outcome.

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So we have a conflict, nobles and slaves. There's a conflict between the nobles and slaves.

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In that conflict, we have the synthesis, we have now feudal lords. Now they have vassals and serfs now, and there's conflict between them.

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So now we've got capitalists, the bourgeois. And there's a conflict between them and the proletariat, the workers.

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And finally, as we progress through thesis and antithesis and synthesis, we finally arrive at the end of the glorious conclusion of the revolution, socialism and communism is brought about, and there's peace and happiness and abundance on Earth.

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This is what Karl Marx believed that the purpose of history was.

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There is only social conflict, contradictions, a dialectic.

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There's material needs that is the source of that conflict or that dialectic. And through a series of conflicts and their resolutions, we end up at communism, which is the ultimate ideal.

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And I want you to, there's something I want to make sure that we understand is that when you're dealing with a Marxist, you might think you've come to an agreement.

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And he's just arrived at his next argument, because progress is through conflict.

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And so whatever you think you've agreed to to come to terms is just the beginning of the next conflict.

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And I'll give you an example of that. I remember there was a big bill to fund the education department on Capitol Hill in Washington, and I remember there was a big fight over it, and this was supposed to solve this once and for all.

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We're going to finally solve the education problem. And then there was a big spending bill to fund the education system.

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And one party thought that, good, that's finally behind us, we can just move on and solve other problems in the world.

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But the party that really wanted all that extra money for education, before the ink was even dry on the bill, they said, well, that's a good start.

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It's because it's never the final conclusion, it's just the beginning of the next conflict, because social progress has to come through conflict.

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The same thing happened when there was a big tax bill that was finally signed under the previous president, and that increased the taxes on the wealthy.

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It was a very, very progressive system. And all throughout the debate on whether or not we should increase taxes, the argument was the rich have to pay their fair share, the rich have to pay their fair share.

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And then finally, they just implemented this new tax system, and before the ink was even dry, they were back out on the street saying, but now the rich need to pay their fair share.

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Because you never arrive at a solution until you have perfect communism that's implemented, until then, it's just conflict, after conflict, after conflict, until you finally arrive at what they believe to be the perfect solution.

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So, conflict must have a name, and the name that was chosen for it is alienation.

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Marx's theory of alienation was that it occurs in society when private individuals or groups of individuals carry on their work independently of each other.

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What he's really talking about here is individual laborers who are in competition with each other for work, which tends to drive down their wages.

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And you have whole groups of, well, whole populations of individuals that are looking for work.

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Their wages end up becoming very, very deflated. And so, in his mind, if we were not alienated from one another, or perhaps we could be united in labor unions, or that sort of thing, then the workers of the world could unite, and then they could actually negotiate labor contracts where the productivity of the individual wasn't being discussed.

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It was just extracting whatever wages could be negotiated with the owner of the means of production.

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Now, the way he stated this also, though, was that because the individual laborer is required to work for his wages so that he can feed himself and his family, he ends up producing something that someone else uses, and he doesn't even know who that person is.

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There's no community between the producer and the consumer, because he might make a box on Tuesday, and then next

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Friday, somebody from another town buys that box. And so, he is alienated from the fruit or the product of his labor.

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So, he said, and I'm quoting now from Das Kapital, or just Capital.

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Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain myself the means of life.

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My work is not my life. This is him complaining that he felt that wage labor was demeaning because it required for him to monetize his labor in order to get money so that he could buy food to live.

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He thought that that was demeaning. He says, production has become a means of gaining a living.

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I have produced for myself, but not for you, just as you have produced for yourself and not for me.

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He thought that, well, there's this lack of community between the consumer and the producers, that you're out there producing so that you can gain a wage for yourself.

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I'm out there producing so I can gain a wage for myself, and the products of our labor being sold to someone we don't even know. And so, there's no real satisfaction in the knowledge that I've provided for somebody else.

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And it's just flat out demeaning for me to have to submit to wage labor in order to meet the needs of people that I don't even meet.

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And in the middle, there's this awful middle man who's actually collecting a profit on the transaction.

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And that's the most demeaning thing of all. This is what he did not like. He called it alienation.

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The workers are alienated from each other and from the product of their labor. And he considered wage labor to be the most,

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I can't get this to advance. Is there a, do we need to replace the battery?

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Cuz it's a, it is?

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Yeah. Oh, I'll stop, I'll stop then. Go to wage labor is the most profound form of alienation.

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This was made in PowerPoint 2019, and I think it's being played back to us in PowerPoint 2010, so that might be.

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And right now, you're alienated from the fruit of my labor. So, so we need to have a revolution.

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Okay, yeah, that's fine. So, so I wanna read this, and it'll come back up on the screen when he pulls it back up, but from, from marxist .org,

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you can look this up online. They've got their whole dictionary, their encyclopedia, all their interpretation of history there for you to read.

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Those first two that I was reading from was from the first one is from Capital.

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The second two are from comments on James Mill. The third one, wage labor is the most profound form of alienation.

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This comes to us from the glossary at marxist .org. We oh, there we go.

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So he says wage labor is the most profound form of alienation. And this comes from the

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Marxist webpage. But it says, since wage workers sell their labor power in order to earn a living, and the capitalist owns the labor process, the product of the worker's labor is, in a very real sense, alien to the worker.

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Now, he's complaining about something that's just life. I go to work,

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I do something, I get paid to do it. I use that money to pay for my family's needs, for their clothes, for their food.

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And Paul did that. He coveted no man's silver or gold or apparel. He did not covet their food.

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He didn't take it for free. He worked day and night in order to labor so that he would not be chargeable to them.

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Paul considered this just a matter of course. This is just what you do, and Marx is upset about having to do that.

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It's demeaning to Marx that he would have to work for a wage just so he could live.

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In other words, the biblical imperative for a man to work and provide for his family, to him, was reprehensible.

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Now, I look at this, and I don't think to myself, well, he does make a good point, and so I'm gonna have to blend this with Christianity somehow.

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I don't look at it that way at all. I look at it and say, he's teaching something that's contrary to the scriptures, and therefore

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I reject what he's teaching. So to take this the next step, though, is that, as I mentioned, the workers are alienated from each other, and that drives down the price of labor.

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They're alienated from the product of their labor, because the capitalist owns it and sells it to someone else for more than it costs to make it, in terms of profit.

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And in the end, that profit, Marx said, belongs to the laborer.

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And he said that all profit is unpaid labor unjustly extracted from the laborer.

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It's unjust wages that were extracted from the laborer. He says there is not a single atom of profit that does not owe its existence to unpaid labor.

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So how would you solve this in a just society? Well, in a just society, all profits must be returned to the laborer, which means that all businesses need to operate at zero profit.

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Every business in the world needs to be non -profit and not -for -profit, because to have profit is evil, because you have basically stolen money from the laborer.

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In a just economic system, we must surrender the means of production to the community. So the guy who owns the box manufacturing company has to hand that over to the community and let them run it.

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Now, let me tell you that this is why people starved after the

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Communist Revolution, because the landowners were experienced at working the land and optimizing the production of the crops to feed millions of people.

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And because Marx felt yucky about having to earn a wage to buy food, he brought about a revolution, took the land away from the landowners, distributed it to people who didn't know how to work it.

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Crops failed, millions of people died. But at least Marx felt better about himself. That's the important thing.

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Marx felt good about himself, even if it costs 100 million deaths. No biggie, Marx felt better about himself.

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I'm saying it in such ridiculous terms, because that is the fruit of his economic theory. All profit is unjust.

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The means of production needs to be confiscated from the private owner and given to the community. Profits need to be eliminated.

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Wage labor needs to be eliminated. And his solution to this is, it sounds as ridiculous as the summary

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I just made. Listen to what he says. A just economic system must eliminate wage labor.

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He says, and this is from his comments on James Mill, he said, compensation in the ideal society should be simply the pleasure of having looked at the object produced as a manifestation of my life, and the satisfaction of having served the needs of the community, instead of earning a wage.

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In your enjoyment, or the use of my product, I would have direct enjoyment, both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, and having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature.

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In the individual expression of my life, I would have directly created your expression of life. And therefore, in my individual activity,

34:23

I would have directly confirmed and realized my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.

34:31

Now, that's nonsense, that's crazy. And yet, the world embraced it.

34:39

And right now, today, in this country, politicians have embraced it. And what's worse,

34:45

Christians are thinking we should embrace it. Why should I have to feel yucky about working for a wage?

34:51

I don't like feeling yucky. I think I should just do stuff I like to do, and you should do stuff you like to do, and everybody should just feed us for doing it.

35:02

That's Marxism. That is Marxism, cuz he felt yucky about having to earn a wage.

35:08

Well, obviously the capitalist is not gonna comply with this voluntarily, and so it has to be done by force, which is why communism always requires a revolution.

35:18

And finally, finally, when the communist revolution is realized, we will have heaven on earth utopia.

35:28

This is what Karl Marx promised us. He said, finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain.

35:54

That's from the Principles of Communism, the Communist Manifesto, paragraph 18. You just think about that.

36:02

If we would just implement Marxism, all these problems go away, and we don't even need money anymore, there's just so much wealth.

36:12

We don't even need money. Money just goes away, private property disappears, and everything will just be super, everybody will be happy.

36:22

And yet, it has led to the misery, misery of millions of people. Venezuela is an example of Marx's utopia.

36:32

Zimbabwe is an example of Marx's utopia. It never works, and the reason it doesn't work is because it's based on covetousness, and it divorces productivity from compensation.

36:44

So I wanna give you some examples of how Marxist theory permeates our world. You've probably heard the term, hey, you need to give back to your community.

36:56

I'm all about giving. I think we should give. I think we should give above and beyond, above and beyond 10%.

37:02

I think you should give of your wealth to take care of the widow, the poor, the stranger, the orphan, the fatherless.

37:10

Help them. The scriptures call us to do that. I don't need Marx to tell me to do that. But I'm not really giving back to them.

37:18

I'm giving. Now, I'm giving back to the Lord, because all things came from the

37:24

Lord. And then the Lord instructs me to give that to the widow, the stranger, the fatherless, but I'm not giving it back to them.

37:31

One of the economists I'm gonna quote later on today talked about the ideal business model is that when a business comes to town and hires a lot of people, it's taken those people from the community, and therefore, it owes the community something.

37:50

Because it's taken all that productivity out of the community. Well, the problem is the company pays for their labor.

37:58

It pays wages to them. You come work for me, I'm gonna give you money. And yet, this economist

38:03

I'm gonna be quoting later talked about, well, when a company comes to town and hires all these people, it's taken from the community.

38:10

Therefore, it needs to give back. What that implies is that the wages that you pay the laborer is not enough.

38:18

You owe more than the wages. The fact is that you owe nothing more, nothing less than the wages you agreed.

38:24

That's what a free market exchange is. But this language sneaks into our vernacular, and we start talking about giving back to people that we didn't take anything from.

38:34

I'm about giving. I'm just thinking we should be careful about saying give back. We've probably heard the language, putting profits ahead of people.

38:41

That's just code language for we want to set the prices for what you're producing, and we want to tell you what to do with the means of production.

38:50

I think that people ought to put the best product on the market that they possibly can at a price that is market clearing price.

39:00

And then if you feel that's too expensive for that person to buy, go buy it for them. But don't tell the manufacturer that they have to give it away because you feel bad about that person's economic situation.

39:13

Another one, living wage, universal basic income, minimum wage, just wage, wage theft, distributive justice.

39:21

It all implies that we need to separate productivity from compensation.

39:27

It implies that surplus profit is stolen from the laborer. It's a

39:32

Marxist theory. I'll tell you this, this is quoting from Frederick Engels, The Principles of Communism.

39:40

Factory owners must be obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state. You want to know what the motive is for the continual increase of the minimum wage?

39:52

The minimum wage being set by what it takes for a man to live for a day. Separating competition from productivity.

39:59

No matter what they do, you have to pay them this bare minimum amount. That separates productivity from compensation.

40:06

It doesn't matter what they do or how productive they are. You have to pay them this much. The motive behind that is rooted in Marxism.

40:15

The thought that if the state can pay higher wages and compete with the private sector, the private sector's gonna have to lift its wages too.

40:22

And that's what happens. This is something that was built into the Communist Manifesto and is actually implemented in American society.

40:30

I am against the minimum wage. The reason I'm against the minimum wage, because it gives people no incentive to increase their productivity and therefore increase their compensation.

40:40

I want to talk about this one, the public option. You probably heard about the public option. Very quickly, when healthcare was being renegotiated in the

40:50

US and the government was going to take over the healthcare system of the whole country, one party that was in favor of the government -run healthcare system said that no matter what we do with this pool of different companies that provide healthcare, we want to maintain the public option.

41:07

Because it'll force private sector to keep costs low. Because if there's a public option that's really cheap, well then the private sector is gonna have to lower its prices too.

41:16

Well, read the Communist Manifesto. One of the key planks in the transition to Marxism, according to Engels and the principles of communism, is the gradual expropriation of private industry through competition by state industry, forcing private sector to compete with state industry that's subsidized and has no profit margin.

41:34

The public option that was proposed for the healthcare system is fundamentally a Marxist precept.

41:42

Price gouging, obscene profits. Obscene profits, obscene is just a subjective term.

41:48

Profits is just a measure of the efficiency of an economic transaction. And I think the more efficient you can be, the better for you.

41:54

Good on you. It makes other people inspired to be more efficient in their production too, and ultimately drops prices.

42:00

But to call them obscene is just a subjective term that assumes it's based on covetousness and assumes that somebody has too much because they've actually produced.

42:11

Price gouging, there's a moral abhorrence to price gouging. Anytime there's a natural disaster.

42:18

And we hear about this guy over here is charging too much money, that guy is over there charging too much money. I wanna tell you, this may be a surprise to you,

42:26

I'm in favor of price gouging. I think it's immoral not to raise prices when demand goes up.

42:31

I'll tell you why, I'll just give you a quick illustration. If there's a hurricane coming to town, what's everybody wanna get?

42:37

They wanna get plywood. Gotta go down to the Home Depot or do -it -yourself store, buy yourself some plywood, cover your windows for when it makes landfall, right?

42:46

Now, because demand suddenly is going through the roof, do -it -yourself shop doubles the price of plywood.

42:52

Well, it turns out there's a guy named Bobby, Bobby who makes little dog houses out of plywood. And he wants to buy some plywood too.

43:01

So he goes downtown and he buys up all the plywood because he's gotta make some dog houses for some customers that might want dog houses next month.

43:08

Meanwhile, all the other people who have windows that need to be covered can't get their plywood because Bobby's bought it all, because the price is so cheap.

43:15

Well, if do -it -yourself shop raises the price of plywood because there's a hurricane coming to town, Bobby says to himself,

43:22

I'm not gonna buy plywood when it's this expensive, I'll lose all my profit, I'll wait for the cost of plywood to go back down, and there's plywood for people who need to put plywood on their windows.

43:31

But there's more than that. If the plywood has cost so much because the hurricane's coming to town, demand's gone up, every

43:39

Home Depot in every neighboring state is loading up trucks of plywood to deliver them because they're gonna make a killing on plywood.

43:45

Guess what happens? The price mechanism of the free market actually increases the supply of necessary goods to save people's private property for a storm.

43:54

But if you have the government come in and say you're not allowed to raise prices, there's no disincentive to consumption and there's no incentive to production, which leads to scarcity, which is why people starve to death under Marxism.

44:06

I think price gouging is fantastic, and I'll tell you why. I needed to get to Atlanta once right when there was the

44:14

Hurricane Katrina disaster. I got to the gas station and guess what it was out of? It was out of regular, but it wasn't out of premium, it wasn't out of premium.

44:23

And I paid premium because I needed to get to Atlanta. I was happy to pay the higher price because the higher price meant there was a disincentive to consumption.

44:30

And if there's a higher price, there's an incentive to productivity, more product enters the market, driving the prices down.

44:37

And overall, private property is saved, people get to make their meetings. And Bob, the doghouse builder, doesn't even need the plywood till next month anyway.

44:46

And he'll buy it when the prices go back down. But when the government gets involved in fixing prices, people die.

44:53

And they mask it in this moral abhorrence to price gouging and do research. Well, we heard the price of oil has gone back up.

45:00

We've got to go find out what's behind that because it's always a conspiracy. And guess what they always find out? Demand went up or supply went down, so let's move on to the next topic.

45:10

But they make a big show, we've got to find out what's all this price gouging. I'm in favor of price gouging. To be against it is to fall right into this idea that the community sets the prices for commodities, that's socialism.

45:22

Okay, so I can complain about climate justice and the robot tax and the progressive tax system, but I don't want to get caught up too much on this slide.

45:29

My point is that what we're finding in society is the principles of Marxism become part of our regular communication and we start thinking like Marxists and not even realizing it.

45:41

So I want to introduce you to some influential Marxists of the last 50 years. And this is important to us because we're going to find how their teachings are being brought into the church as if they're the

45:53

Christian economic ideal. So Saul Alinsky, you've probably heard of his book Rules for Radicals from 1971.

45:59

It was written to empower the have -nots in their war against the haves and to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people through revolution.

46:08

You've probably heard of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Daniel Bell, remember when

46:13

I talked about conflict? The dialectic is a series of conflicts and their contradictions and solutions.

46:21

Well, he wrote a book called The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, and it was written to address the contradictions inherent in the bourgeois society and its focus on accumulation of capital.

46:30

That was written in, I don't know when that was written, so. Okay, I think it was 1973.

46:36

So Robert Bella, author of the now famous Habits of the

46:42

Heart, written in 1985 to address the problems of the cancerous effects of individualism by which

46:48

Americans isolate themselves from one another. Remember what Marx thought was the fundamental problem in society is that all these individuals are alienated from each other, working separately from each other,

46:58

Robert Bella believed that the fundamental problem in society is alienation, and his solution was the same as Marx's solution.

47:06

Christopher Jenks wrote a book in 1972 called Inequality, a reassessment of the effects of family and schooling in America.

47:13

And he concluded that the equality of income, not the equality of education, was the solution to America's inequality problem.

47:22

But notice that what they're all coming down to is there's a problem with capital and the conflict that results between the haves and the have -nots and the need for revolution.

47:36

They're all Marxists. Okay, Marxism is being repackaged as the

47:42

Christian economic ideal. And so I want to introduce to you some notable Christian Marxists of the last 50 years.

47:50

You've probably heard of Dorothy Sayers. She inspired the classical school movement and criticized wage labor, productivity -based income.

48:00

She thought that that was demeaning and an outdated mode of a work theory.

48:08

Reinhold Niebuhr, a professing Christian philosopher, criticized the private ownership of property.

48:14

He believed that the Ford Motor Company was too big to be privately owned and needed to be confiscated. Gustavo Gutierrez, a

48:20

Roman Catholic priest, founder of liberation theology, vocal advocate for radical change, ending private ownership and the means of production.

48:29

Ending private ownership of the means of production. Michael Schluter, an economic Christian economist, he criticizes pay disparity based on productivity, says that companies should focus on relationships and not profits.

48:43

And read the Communist Manifesto. Read what

48:48

Karl Marx said in his comments on James Mill. The productivity should based on, or the work of the labor should be based on relationships and not profits.

48:59

Vinoth Ramachandra, a Sri Lankan scholar, he criticizes free market competition and income inequality.

49:05

And this is the one that's always a surprise to everybody. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York.

49:11

He's the most prominent voice in the Presbyterian Church in America. And he criticizes alienation of the worker through wage labor.

49:19

And I'm a member of a PCA church in Huntsville, Alabama. So I'm not throwing stones at other people's denominations.

49:26

This is something that's going on within my denomination, and I'm aware of it. So I wanna run through a couple things.

49:31

I've introduced these Marxists from the last 50 years. I wanna cover just some of their thinking.

49:38

Dorothy Sayers advanced Marx's theory of alienation. And listen to what she says.

49:43

She says, the modern tendency seems to be to identify work with gainful employment. Parish, somebody get my vapors,

49:52

I'm gonna pass out here. Can you believe it? The idea that you would identify work with gainful employment?

49:58

The fallacy being that work is not the expressions of a man's creative energy in the service of society.

50:05

But only something he does in order to obtain money and leisure. The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is wrongly ingrained in us.

50:14

Where did we get that? Where did we get that teaching? That we should monetize our labor to buy food?

50:23

We got it from Paul. Got it from the Old Testament. She advanced Marx's solution, which was to separate compensation from productivity.

50:32

And listen, what she says here is straight from Karl Marx. What a revolutionary change it would be to think about the work instead of, think about work instead in terms of the work done.

50:43

To do so would mean taking the attitude of mind we reserve for our unpaid work, like hobbies, leisure interests, and things we make and do for pleasure.

50:50

And making that the standard of all of our judgment about things and people. So long as society provides the worker with sufficient return and real wealth to enable him to carry on that work properly, then he has his reward.

51:03

For his work is the measure of his life, and his satisfaction is found in the fulfillment of his own nature, and in contemplation of the perfection of his work.

51:12

Which is exactly what Karl Marx said about wage labor.

51:17

You gotta end wage labor so I can just have the reward of knowing that I've provided for the needs of somebody else.

51:27

And she of course embraced Marx's theory of revolution. It's almost comical to read it, but I'm gonna just hit the highlights.

51:37

We could, you and I, bring down the whole fantastic economy of profitable waste down to the ground overnight without legislation and without revolution.

51:46

Merely by refusing to cooperate with it. Whatever we do, we shall be faced with grave difficulties that cannot be disguised.

51:53

But it will make a great difference to the result if we are genuinely aiming at a real change in economic thinking.

51:58

And by that I mean a radical change from top to bottom, a new system. Not a mere adjustment of the old system to favor a different set of people.

52:07

That's Dorothy Sayers in her letters to a diminished church, recommending that we take down capitalism.

52:13

Organize and cooperate among ourselves and take down capitalism. Because it wrongly ingrains in us a connection between productivity and compensation.

52:22

So Reinhold Neiber embraced Marx's dialectical materialism. I'm reading from Ronald Stone's biography,

52:29

Professor Reinhold Neiber. He argued that socialism, social radicalism and Marxism owe their existence to Christian inspiration.

52:37

He embraced Marx's view of the confiscation of private property. An entity the size of the

52:43

Ford Motor Company was in fact public corporation. It should no longer be privately owned. Private ownership of the means of production was the basic cause of periodic economic crises.

52:52

This is Marxism. Society must destroy the kind of power which resides in economic ownership.

52:59

In other words, we have to end private property. Reinhold Neiber advanced

53:05

Marx's view of class conflict. Marxism, again quoting from Stone's biography of him,

53:11

Marxism furnished an analysis of the economic structure of society that was essentially correct. It correctly perceived the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as inevitable.

53:21

Marxism was right in its judgment that the communal ownership of property was the prerequisite of social justice.

53:28

He advanced Marx's view of the dialectic resulting in revolution. Capitalism must come to America. It will inevitably,

53:35

I'm sorry. Capitalism in America will inevitably be followed by the emergence of the American Marxian proletarian and socialism must come to America.

53:44

He believed with all his heart that all these economic crises and social crises we face were because of private property.

53:52

And Marx was right in his solution. We have to end the alienation, end the wage labor, end the capitalism.

53:59

Gustavo Gutierrez, a founder of the Marxist liberation theology movement, Roman Catholic priest.

54:05

For some, participation in this process of liberation means not allowing themselves to be intimidated by the accusation of being communist.

54:13

On the positive side, it can even mean taking the path of socialism, because he knew very well that socialism is just that intermediate step between capitalism and Marxism, communism.

54:23

He embraced Marx's theory of revolution. This transformation ought to be directed toward a radical change in the foundation of society, that is, the private ownership of the means of production.

54:34

Michael Schluter, he's the one I was talking about earlier who said that companies that come to town and employ the people and produce a good and sell it for profit needs to give back to the community.

54:46

Fundamentally, it's the assumption that those profits are stolen from the laborers and need to be given back to them. So he advanced

54:52

Marx's theory of alienation, and he talked about how a company needs to exist not to seek profits, but to develop, achieve relational goals.

55:02

And he says that rather, the stakeholders in a company need to get to know each other and become, in a limited sense at least, a community.

55:09

Characterized like all communities by conversation, a shared story, mutual respect, and alignment of interests and common direction.

55:16

This is all fluffy language for a company doesn't exist to actually deliver a product, sell it, and make a profit, and make more.

55:26

I know what companies are for. I've worked with companies. I know what they do. And he says, no, no, they really ought to be focusing on the truly human relationship of it all, which is what

55:35

Marx advocated for. So you need to stop having companies that focus on profit and companies that focus on restoring human relationships to the manufacturing process.

55:46

It's just Marxism. He had advanced Marx's solution to separate compensation from productivity.

55:56

He said, is it fair that the contribution to the business of the lower paid employees is regarded as so insignificant as to be valued in this way?

56:05

He was complaining about the pay disparity between the highest paid employees and the lowest paid employees.

56:11

And yet, I've worked as a secretary, and I've worked as a CEO of a company before. I understand very well why they get paid differently.

56:19

And when I was a secretary, I was probably overpaid at that, because they had to pay me the minimum wage, and I wasn't very good at it. But the government required them to pay me more than I was worth.

56:27

The point is, yes, it's fair to pay employees based on their productivity. That's what

56:33

Paul thought was fair. He thought that was perfectly fine. But Michael Schluter is this Christian economist who's saying, hey, we gotta be focused on people and human relationships and not profits.

56:43

And why do we have such pay disparity? In fact, he said, in a relational environment, the dignity of all employees is respected by minimizing remuneration differentials within the business.

56:55

And in the end, he says, the heart of our proposition is a Copernican revolution. In looking at the basis for corporate enterprises, our current way of looking at the world needs to be turned on its head.

57:05

You notice the consistent theme here? Is that wage labor is wrong, profits are bad.

57:12

Corporations ought to exist to restore truly human relationships and pay differentials should be set, or pay rates should be separated from productivity and just based on the fact that you're there.

57:23

And I look at this and I think, I know exactly what happens to companies when they implement this, and I know what happens to countries when they implement this, cuz we've seen it happen over and over and over again.

57:34

Vinath Ramachandra is the next one I want to look at. He advanced Marx's theory of alienation. Instead of placing diverse localities in competition with each other, for business opportunities, he was complaining about, hey, that's not fair that in this global economy, everybody has to compete for everybody else's work.

57:51

It shouldn't be that way. He says, instead, we should have this view of redistribution, which is really just the gospel, right?

57:57

The gospel ought to ensure that the benefits of globalization are more equitably distributed. Did you know that?

58:05

Did you know Jesus came preaching the good news of equitable distribution of private property? Okay, so he continues saying that Christians should follow the lead of Occupy Wall Street and communist leader

58:18

Camilla Vallejo and learning what it means to follow Christ. He embraced Marx's theory of revolution.

58:25

What we need is a transnational mobilization of grassroots movements to effect a necessary change in the social order.

58:34

So, guess who is taking all these Christian and atheist economists and repackaging them to your children, to teach you the biblical work ethic?

58:48

Well, Tim Keller is doing that, and I wanted to talk to you about why Tim Keller is doing that. And the reason is that Tim Keller, at his heart, is a very, very good

58:59

Marxist. He saw a thesis. He was raised in a conservative church in a small

59:05

Methodist denomination. He says this for us in The Reason for God, Belief in an Age of Skepticism. But he also saw an antithesis.

59:13

He said, then I went off to one of those fine, liberal, smaller universities in the Northeast. The history and philosophy departments were socially radicalized and were heavily influenced by the neo -Marxist critical theory of the

59:25

Frankfurt School. In 1968, this was heady stuff. The social activism was particularly attractive, and the unique,

59:32

I'm sorry, the critique of American bourgeois society was compelling. But its philosophical underpinnings were confusing to me.

59:39

So what do you do when you're a Marxist and you know that social progress is through conflict? Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

59:50

I seemed to see two camps before me, and there was something radically wrong with both of them.

59:55

The people most passionate about social justice were the moral relativists, while the morally upright didn't seem to care about the oppression going on all over the world.

01:00:05

Well, Keller found the synthesis, the spiritual third way. Marxism, incremental change through conflict, thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

01:00:19

That's Tim Keller's approach to finding that there's a difference between what he saw in the behavior of Christians and the behavior of Marxists.

01:00:28

So what do you do? It's easy, you just blend them together. Isn't that what Jesus did?

01:00:34

He said, well, there's some stuff my father told me to say to you, but then there's this wisdom that I find in the world. I need to blend them together.

01:00:41

Because my dad said some stuff that's neat, but I see some stuff in the world that's neat, too. Let's blend them together.

01:00:47

Of course not. Of course Jesus did not say that, and the Apostle Paul did not say that. Jesus came to teach us what his father told him to teach us.

01:00:56

And what his father had taught him from millennia past was, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods.

01:01:03

But he also said you should feed the poor, you should take care of the poor. Don't harvest the edge of your field, God has set it aside for the poor.

01:01:10

When you find that Christians aren't satisfactorily focusing on care for the poor, you don't go to Marx, you go to the scriptures.

01:01:19

But Tim Keller goes to Marx, and I want to show you how he does it. Using his dialectical spiritualism, he takes his

01:01:31

Methodist Christian upbringing, he sees that Marx is concerned for the poor, he synthesizes and baptizes

01:01:37

Marxism in order to feed it to the next generation of eager young minds.

01:01:43

We're going to look at Tim Keller's vision for the church. And I'll tell you, this is something that's particularly near and dear to me, because I have a co -worker whose daughter is off at college, and she attended a weekend retreat with Reform University Fellowship.

01:02:02

She came back and asked her father, who's Tim Keller? Everybody's talking about Tim Keller.

01:02:08

I'm about to send my son off to college in a couple years, and I'll probably get him involved in the campus ministry.

01:02:15

But I'm very, very concerned about Reform University Fellowship, because they're shoveling this down the throats of the next generation, as if this is the biblical work ethic.

01:02:25

Well, we're going to look at Ministries of Mercy from 1997, Generous Justice from 2010, and Every Good Endeavor, Connecting Your Work to God's Work from 2012.

01:02:35

What we find in Keller is a consistent call for a transition from a capitalist economy to a socialist economy through class struggle based on Marxist principles, all cloaked in the language of biblical

01:02:48

Christianity. In his 2012 book, Every Good Endeavor, there we go, he billed it as a

01:02:59

Christian view of work, a book that could expound on the

01:03:05

Christian work ethic. But in reality, it was actually just based on Robert Bella's book.

01:03:12

You remember Robert Bella, Habits of the Heart? Robert Bella, actually in Habits of the

01:03:22

Heart, said some things that really resonated with Keller, because Keller, in his heart, is a Marxist, and Bella was actually teaching

01:03:29

Marxist principles. And he says, in his book, Every Good Endeavor, he says, Robert Bella's landmark book,

01:03:35

Habits of the Heart, helped many people name the thing that was and still is eating away at the cohesiveness of our culture, expressive individualism.

01:03:44

You can read alienation there, okay? Near the end of Habits, the author proposes one measure that would go a long way toward reweaving our unraveling culture.

01:03:53

To make a real difference, there would have to be a reappropriation of the idea of vocation or calling, a return in a new way to the idea of work as a contribution to the good of all, and not merely as a means of one's own advancement.

01:04:06

That is a remarkable statement. This is all quoted Tim Keller from Every Good Endeavor. And then he says, if Bella is right, one of the hopes of our unraveling society is the recovery of the idea that all human work is not merely a job, but a calling.

01:04:22

And so, taking our cue from Bella's challenge, in this book we will do what we can to help illuminate the transformative and revolutionary connection between Christian faith and the workplace.

01:04:33

But there's just one problem. Bella was not talking about a

01:04:39

Christian view of faith in the workplace. Bella was Marxist, and he admitted it.

01:04:45

In his letters to the editors of the New York Review of Books, he said, yeah, yeah, I'm Marxist. I was in the

01:04:51

John Reed Society in college, and I studied Marxism there. It turns out he carried that into his work in sociology.

01:04:59

Listen to what Keller was quoting from Bella as the basis for his book on a

01:05:06

Christian work ethic. Quoting from Bella, this is Bella, if we are right in our stress on a revitalized social ecology, then one critically important action that government could take in a new political atmosphere, in Christopher Jenks' words, would be to reduce the punishments of failure and the rewards of success.

01:05:26

Reducing the inordinate rewards of ambition and our inordinate fears of ending up as losers would offer a possibility of a great change in the meaning of work in our society, and all that would go with such a change.

01:05:38

To make a real difference, such a shift in rewards would have to be a part of a reappropriation of the idea of vocation or calling, a return in a new way to the idea of work as a contribution to the good of all, and not merely as a means to one's own advancement.

01:05:53

This is straight from Marx. Alienation is the problem.

01:05:59

Separating compensation from productivity is the solution. And communal work for the society instead of to provide for your family is the solution.

01:06:11

That's Marxism, and Keller based his book on the Christian work ethic on that quote from Bella, and said we need to take up Bella's challenge.

01:06:22

And Keller also agreed with Marx that the worker's alienation from the product of his work through wage labor is the fundamental problem.

01:06:30

This is Keller. This is Keller in Every Good Endeavor. Karl Marx was the first, it's just funny to read, because he's selling you

01:06:39

Karl Marx, and he's not even trying to hide it. Karl Marx was the first person to speak of alienated labor in the heyday of the early 19th century

01:06:49

European industry. Today, people in low -paying service sector jobs experience the same alienating disconnectedness from the fruits or products of their work.

01:07:00

Did you know that the fundamental problem in society is alienation? Did you know that?

01:07:06

Karl Marx has a solution, so does Tim Keller. Okay, so Dorothy Sayers, as I showed you earlier, she embraced

01:07:14

Marx's theory of alienation. She embraced the solution. She thought that work ought to just be done for the satisfaction of knowing that you provide it for somebody else.

01:07:23

Your wage should simply be whatever society decides you need in order to keep on doing your job. Marxism.

01:07:30

That was Dorothy Sayers, but listen to Keller. I've been getting ahead on you, haven't

01:07:37

I? This is Keller. I'm just quoting from pages 38, 74, 75, 76, 110, 111, 229, 241 from his book.

01:07:46

Over and over and over again. So Dorothy Sayers could write. Dorothy Sayers recounts. Dorothy Sayers writes.

01:07:52

Dorothy Sayers explores this point. Dorothy Sayers helps us understand. This is what Dorothy Sayers meant. And he's pulling from her essays to a diminished church, where she's talking about this new way of looking at the economic society.

01:08:08

And walking away from this outdated and primitive view of working in order to get a wage to provide for your family.

01:08:16

Tim Keller also agreed with Marxist Daniel Bell's assessment of capitalism. This is from his quote.

01:08:23

This is quoting from Tim Keller in Every Good Endeavor. Even in the most successful capitalist societies like that of the

01:08:30

United States, Daniel Bell recognizes the cultural contradiction that consumerism tends to undermine the very virtues of self -control and responsibility on which capitalism is founded.

01:08:41

Marx is the one who first said, hey, capitalism is internally contradictory.

01:08:47

Daniel Bell, you read his biography, his first love was Marxism. His greatest regret of the last century was the failure of socialism in so many different countries.

01:08:56

And that's who Tim Keller quotes to convey to us that even people in capitalist societies agree with this problem.

01:09:04

And the person he's quoting in a capitalist society is a Marxist, who's against capitalism.

01:09:10

He also agreed with Reinhold Niebuhr's call for separating compensation from productivity. Just to give you some highlights.

01:09:18

Niebuhr answered, first said Niebuhr, Niebuhr recognized, Niebuhr argued, Niebuhr taught, Niebuhr believed, Niebuhr said,

01:09:24

Niebuhr argues, Niebuhr points out. If Niebuhr is right, it was all about Niebuhr. And Niebuhr writing about the problem with capitalism and private ownership of property.

01:09:34

And Keller's drawing on a Marxist to tell you what the Bible says to us about the work ethic, it's

01:09:42

Marxism. So continuing with Every Good Endeavor, he agreed with Michael Schluter's criticism of alienation in capitalism.

01:09:52

Michael Schluter sums up the criticisms that Christians and others have leveled at capitalism in its present day form.

01:09:58

Nearly all the problems usually cited stem from the loss of primacy of human relationships.

01:10:04

Guess who was the first to write about the loss of human relations in the manufacturing and production process?

01:10:10

Karl Marx. Michael Schluter talks about, we need to set aside profit as the objective of businesses and just focus on truly human relationships.

01:10:19

Remember, Karl Marx, mediating process of exchange should be human relationship, not the abstract relationship between private property and private property.

01:10:32

That principle that Michael Schluter advances in his book on economics, straight from Marx.

01:10:42

So let's look at some of his other books, Generous Justice. He agreed with the socialist Vinoth Ramachandra's call for redistribution.

01:10:49

He cites him and says Sri Lankan scholar Vinoth Ramachandra calls this scandalous justice.

01:10:56

Remember, Vinoth Ramachandra from the slide that I showed you earlier, the gospel ought to ensure that the benefits of globalization are more equitably distributed.

01:11:05

He agreed with Gustavo Gutierrez in his characterization of God's justice. He says, this emphasis in the

01:11:11

Bible, that is, the Bible's occasional references to care for the poor.

01:11:17

This emphasis in the Bible has led some, like Latin American theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, to speak of God's preferential option for the poor.

01:11:24

Well, Gustavo Gutierrez's preferential option for the poor is actually, it's not God's preferential option for the poor.

01:11:31

It is Gustavo Gutierrez's preferential option for communism. The Bible speaks about caring for the poor, but also says the poor shouldn't steal from the wealthy.

01:11:41

Naboth Vineyard, he owned the means of production, and the state took it by eminent domain.

01:11:49

Because the state didn't agree with the ownership of private property. And the Bible condemns the confiscation of someone's private property, confiscation of the means of production.

01:11:59

Gustavo Gutierrez was in favor of it. So, wrapping up on his Ministries of Mercy from 1997.

01:12:07

He proposed two models of the ideal church. Allen Temple Baptist Church in California, and quoting from his book,

01:12:15

Ministries of Mercy, a model of a full service church. He said, Allen Temple Baptist Church is a model of a full service church.

01:12:23

Read about Allen Temple Baptist Church, a socialist church dedicated to Marxist liberation theology in the spirit of Saul Alinsky's revolution.

01:12:32

East Brooklyn Churches, that's his other ideal model. He had a California model and a New York model. He says, the

01:12:38

East Brooklyn Churches is a coalition of churches in Brooklyn, New York, founded in the early 1980s.

01:12:45

Just talks about how great they are. But then, in reality, you find out it's a citizen organizing project, affiliated with the

01:12:52

Industrial Areas Foundation training network that Saul Alinsky and his associates established in late 1968.

01:13:00

So, that's Tim Keller. Tim Keller, Allen Temple Baptist Church, East Brooklyn Churches, Vinath Ramachandra, Gustavo Gutierrez, Reinhold Niebuhr, Dorothy Sayers, Karl Marx himself,

01:13:15

Michael Schluter, Robert Bella, Marxist, Marxist, Marxist, Marxist, Marxist. Is it any surprise at all that Keller is making the same arguments?

01:13:27

Going back to Engels and the principles of communism. The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition.

01:13:34

Jenks, who I referred to earlier. We would have to change the rules of the game to reduce the rewards of competitive success and the cost of failure.

01:13:43

Robert Bella from Habits of the Heart. Reducing the inordinate rewards of ambition and our inordinate fears of ending up as losers would offer a great change in our society.

01:13:53

And then Tim Keller wraps up every good endeavor. Those who grasp this Marxist understanding of work, because that's what he has advanced, will still desire to succeed, but will not be nearly as driven to overwork or made despondent by poor results.

01:14:06

Notice that in the end, the objective is to separate productivity from compensation, or separate compensation from productivity.

01:14:14

And he quotes Marxist after Marxist after Marxist to make the point. The data that I have presented to you tonight was actually presented in that 2014

01:14:23

Trinity Review article that Pastor mentioned at the beginning. It was called Workers of the Church Unite, the

01:14:28

Radical Marxist Foundation of Tim Keller's Social Gospel. So to give Tim Keller a fair chance to respond, someone actually engaged with him by Twitter to say, hey, look what

01:14:40

Tim Kaufman says about your Marxist economic philosophy. And his response was, well, basically, he just says that I cite

01:14:48

Robert Bella and Dorothy Sayers, and we know what they were really about, which was Marxism, so I'm the same.

01:14:54

Guilt by association fallacy. We need to be able to cite people we don't 100 % agree with and not get skewered for it, oh well.

01:15:01

So that's Tim Keller responding to someone who said, hey, you should check out Tim Kaufman's article on your Marxist economic philosophy.

01:15:07

But you know, the problem is not that he merely quotes them. I quoted them tonight.

01:15:15

And I encourage you to quote them as often as you possibly can to show that so many practices, policies, and philosophies in our current society are based on Marxism.

01:15:25

Quote them, quote them, quote them, quote Marx. Show the evil origin of some of the teaching that's being foisted on Christianity today.

01:15:35

The problem isn't that he quoted them. Problem is that he believes them. Look at all the people he relies on.

01:15:40

Karl Marx, Saul Alinsky, Daniel Bell, Robert Bella, Christopher Jenks, Dorothy Sayers, Reinhold Niebuhr, Gustavo Gutierrez, Michael Schluter, Vinoth Ramachandra, Allen Temple Baptist Church, East Brooklyn churches.

01:15:53

Marxist, Marxist, Marxist, Marxist, Marxist, Marxist, Marxist, Marxist. And then someone points it out to him, and he goes, hey, that's just guilt by association.

01:16:01

I just want to feed poor people. Well, the revolution is already underway.

01:16:12

Remember what they said. This is what all these people were advocating for. Dictatorship of the proletariat.

01:16:19

Create mass organizations to seize power. Capitalism is unsustainable. Reduce the rewards of success and the penalties of failure.

01:16:25

Equalize distribution of income. Radical change from top to bottom. Socialism must come in America. End private ownership.

01:16:31

Turn capitalism on its head. Mobilization of grassroots transnational movements from below. Social gospels through liberation theology.

01:16:39

Gospel of change through seizing people's properties. One thing I forgot to mention about the East Brooklyn churches is when you read about them, you find out that what they really do is agitate for the government to condemn other people's private property.

01:16:50

So they can acquire it at below market values and then give it to people that they think need it more. East Brooklyn churches actually engages in eminent domain in condemning the private owner, private property of other people.

01:17:01

So they can take it and give it to somebody that they think it ought to belong to. It's Marxism. So, in preparing for this article, and I'll wrap up on this,

01:17:11

I read this interesting article called, it says, the end of capitalism is already starting if you know where to look.

01:17:18

And it's from September 18th, 2017, and it says, hey, the glimmering hope of Marx's utopia is just on the horizon.

01:17:26

It's very, very exciting because, and you know where we can find it now? We can find it in worker co -ops. You can research this article, and I'll provide a link to past it.

01:17:35

You can look at it later, but basically a co -op really just serves to move a product to market, leaving out any profit at all.

01:17:47

Operating costs is paid to the people that manage it, but it reduces the profit, and therefore reduces the price, and therefore people that are in the co -op, they put in some work, they also get some out of it.

01:17:57

And it results in utopia and happiness, right? Well, a year later, an interesting article came out called,

01:18:04

The Trouble with Co -ops. Well, I'll save the punchline, I'll just give you the punchline up front. The problem is, the co -ops never really can work very long or very effectively.

01:18:16

And most economies that have co -ops, they only ever rise to maybe 1 or 2 % of the total economic power of that economy.

01:18:26

Cuz in the end, they separate productivity from compensation. There's no incentive to actually grow.

01:18:32

There's no incentive to keep down costs. There's no penalty for failure. And what was most surprising to me when

01:18:38

I read it, actually shouldn't have been surprising at all, is in the end, the people who are managing the co -op end up managing it for their own benefit.

01:18:44

They increase their holidays, they increase their pay, they reduce their work hours, because they can't help the temptation to start operating the means of production for their own benefit.

01:18:55

And this is the problem with Marx's utopia. The people who are gonna take over were subject to the same temptations to covetousness as everybody else.

01:19:04

And that was the thing that he left out of the equation, was the people that wanted to bring about the revolution, struggled just as much with covetousness as anybody else.

01:19:12

And when they finally get control of the power, they'll use that power and leverage it against their fellow human beings.

01:19:19

Sometimes, obviously to their detriment. So what I wanted to wrap up on tonight is there's no reason for us to think that we have to synthesize the communist revolution with reality and try to make it make sense.

01:19:32

We just need to look at all of its different failures in the world. Even the socialist economies that seem to be working, like Sweden and Norway, are very, very much reliant on capital infusions through profit, through capitalism.

01:19:45

And when that runs out, their economy's gonna fall apart too. And what's happening in Sweden is that because productivity and compensation are completely separated from each other, guess what's happening?

01:19:55

Millions of people coming into Europe, heading for Sweden, because free handouts and you don't have to work.

01:20:02

You can just show up and they'll give you all that you want. So what can you do? You can understand the biblical teaching on covetousness, industry, family, labor, and private property.

01:20:13

Scripture says, thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbor's. If any provide not for those of his own house, he is worse than an infidel.

01:20:20

Teach your children the biblical connection between productivity and compensation, as in 2

01:20:25

Thessalonians, if you don't work, you don't eat. Teach them the biblical connection between supply and demand.

01:20:31

In 2 Kings 7, there's a very interesting case where the prophet tells the king in a famine that tomorrow food is gonna be so cheap that you could buy a whole basket of bread for a nickel, basically.

01:20:41

And the king doesn't believe it. Well, the truth is that the next day, supply so exceeded demand that price is dropped.

01:20:49

It's right there in the scripture, supply and demand. Read what it says in James 5, if the

01:20:54

Lord's will, we shall buy and sell and get gain. Don't just do get gain for the sake of gain, do it to glorify the

01:21:01

Lord, but get gain, get profit, buy low, sell high. Scripture doesn't condemn that at all. Appreciate the rewards of hard work, innovation, and thrift, and understand the consequences of bad decision, prodigal living, and laziness.

01:21:13

Give back to the Lord by caring for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. Understand that accumulation of capital is a perfectly legitimate exercise.

01:21:23

The children ought not to lay up for their parents, but parents for their children. Parents can't lay up for their children if they're not accumulating capital.

01:21:30

Go to the aunt which provided her meat in the summer and gathereth her food in the harvest. In other words, she's accumulating capital to get through the winter.

01:21:39

A good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. A good man can't leave that inheritance if he's not accumulating capital.

01:21:46

Do you want your grandchildren to care for the poor? Good, leave an inheritance to your grandchildren so that they'll have something to give to them.

01:21:55

Scriptures say you should pay your employees promptly. You should pay debts according to the agreed terms.

01:22:02

Follow what the scripture says. You don't need marks to tell you that. Read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.

01:22:10

Marx absolutely hated it. But also read the Communist Manifesto. I'm gonna read this to you, tell me if any of these sound familiar.

01:22:18

Limitation of private property through progressive taxation and heavy inheritance taxes. Gradual expropriation of private industry through competition by state industry.

01:22:28

Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.

01:22:35

Education of all children from the moment they can leave their mother's care in national establishments at national cost.

01:22:41

Construction on public lands of great palaces as communal dwellings. I'm sure you've all walked through the projects lately to see how that works.

01:22:50

Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock. Get familiar with what they want to accomplish.

01:22:59

Abolition of marriage. The revolution will transform the relations between the sexes into purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved.

01:23:08

That sound familiar? Abolition of the family. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeoisie family, based?

01:23:15

On capital, private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeois. Must be eliminated.

01:23:22

Abolition of America. In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, listen carefully, the communists must make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeois.

01:23:37

Abolition of religion. The communist revolution makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance.

01:23:45

And most importantly, we don't need to respond with weapons of the flesh.

01:23:55

I'm going to go through this and not cover our, we need to take on the armor of God. And the last one that he lists of all, take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.

01:24:09

We don't need to do what Keller did, find something good in Christianity, thinking he found something also good in Marxism, and then baptize

01:24:18

Marxism. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. We don't need to blend the two of them together because there was perhaps something lacking in what

01:24:25

God revealed to us in his scripture. There's nothing lacking at all. If you want to know about care for the poor, go to the scriptures.

01:24:31

If you want to know about profits, go to the scriptures. If you want to know about managing debt, go to the scriptures. If you want to know about converting, monetizing labor into wages.

01:24:39

You want to know about covetousness, private property, go to the scriptures. You don't need Karl Marx to tell you these things. And this is really the fundamental problem, is

01:24:45

Tim Keller, when he saw a cultural contradiction between Christianity and Marxism, he didn't turn to the scriptures, he turned to Marx.

01:24:56

And that's what he's offering to the next generation. And unfortunately, the next generation is eating it up.