Aug
8
The More You Study Marxism…
The following insightful remarks are from Dr. Owen Strachan, Provost and Research Professor of Theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary. I’m not certain, but they may be excerpted either from Strachan’s latest book, Christianity and Wokeness, or an upcoming one. Regardless, I think he drops some much-needed truth bombs (as one FB commenter put it).
“The more you study Marxism, the more you realize it is a giant con job to gaslight the free West into committing suicide while whitewashing the murderous policies of many of history’s most evil overlords. Marxism is the doctrine of demons. It is nihilism with a fancier glossary.
Marxism does the killing, but accuses the free market of all the crimes. Celebrity intellectuals do the same: they breathe fire against “capitalism” and stunt for Marxism, but they make very nice capitalist livings, drive fine capitalist cars, and drink fine capitalist wine. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
It is truly amazing how Marxism destabilizes thriving “capitalist” countries by alleging they’re full of (nonexistent) “oppression” while the governments of Marxist countries ruin the lives of their people through actual public oppression and pretend such suffering isn’t real.
In light of such obfuscation, here’s a shot at a rule to sum up the aforementioned relationship. Let’s call it The Rule of Diminishing Oppression (2021):
The more oppression is alleged to be in a free-market society promoting free speech, the less there is.
The less oppression is said to be in a repressive Marxist anti-free market society, the more there is.
Invented rules aside, this is an age when everything is flipped. Reality is profoundly destabilized today. It is hard to think straight. We all feel that: just thinking accurately seems to take three times more effort than it used to. But the church exists in part to help people do just that: think rightly. Know the truth. Spot the lies. (They’re everywhere.) In our time, the church needs to be the dread foe of Marxism once more. We must not seek a compromise with Marxism. We must not let it take over our free society, or what remains of it. We certainly must not cheer as the West darkens, foolishly thinking this will surely mean automatic triumph for the church. God will do his work in any conditions, yes, but historically, the collapse of civilizations is not something that merits Christian applause.
The church should actually be a force against collapse. We will preach Christ in free settings or in prison cells — that won’t change. But nowhere in the Bible is the Babylonian captivity, for example, presented as a wonderful event. Yes, it became clearer who was an Israelite. But the collapse of a once-solid civilization, one founded on God in formal terms, was the calamity of calamities.
The church is not dependent on the state. But the gospel often advances most rapidly in free and open societies, societies that come relatively closer to the biblical ideal for humanity. Christians today should resist Marxism at every turn. We should be a moral force against it. We should support freedom, liberty, and principled societies where we can. We should pray that America will not fall to its Marxist blood-enemies, that this republic will not commit suicide, that the light of Christ will shine very brightly in our present darkness, and in whatever darkness is to come.”
Yes, indeed.
(H/T Scott Klusendorf for sharing this on FB)
