Theology Today - Vol 26, No. 2 - July 1969 - BOOK REVIEW - Openings For Marxist-Christian Dialogue

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Openings For Marxist-Christian Dialogue
Edited and with an introduction by Thomas W. Ogletree
174 pp. Nashville and New York, Abingdon Press, 1969. $3.75.

This is a book of unexpected importance. It is one of the very few significant contributions to the Marxist-Christian dialogue written in English and issued by an American publisher. Two American ethicists highly qualified to participate in the dialogue present here essays of striking originality: Paul Lehmann on "Christian Theology in a World of Revolution" and Charles C. West on "Act and Being in Christian and Marxist Perspective." Jürgen Moltmann's "The Revolution of Freedom: the Christian and Marxist Struggle" inserts a decisive element of Moltmann's thought into the American theological debate. The discussion is intelligently introduced by Prof. Thomas W. Ogletree of Chicago Theological Seminary. (These essays were originally presented as the Alden-Tuthill Lectures at Chicago Theological Seminary in 1968.) Sidney Lens contributes some journalistic impressions of "The Changing Character of Communism."

Paul Lehmann meets head on one of the most intractable problems of the Marxist-Christian dialogue: the significance of Leninism as revolutionary theory and practice. In addressing this question, Prof. Lehmann has provided a crucial supplement to his earlier essay, Ideology and Incarnation (Geneva: The John Knox Association, 1962); and he has surely given the uncritical Christian advocates of "revolution" something solid to think about.

In Europe in the early 1950's, certain theoreticians attempted to move beyond the ideological impasse of totalitarian Stalinism by going back to the sources of original Marxism, The humanist Marx of the early Manuscripts was rediscovered beneath the accretions of Engel's evolutionary naturalism and Leninist-Stalinism. Christian theologians (see Moltmann's essay) have found this Marx a stimulating debating partner, and revisionist Marxist philosophers in Communist societies have taken up again the themes of alienation and humanization. But in all this discussion, the hard though ambiguous historical reality of Leninism has been bracketed or simply ignored. Lehmann faces the reality of Leninism afresh.

In its Russian concretion Leninism has been, Lehmann asserts, a failure-but a failure of a significant kind. Lenin insisted (in The State

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and Revolution) that "revolution consists not in the new class commanding, governing with the aid of the old state machine, but in the class smashing this machine and commanding, governing with the aid of a new machine." Or in Lehmann's version of it, Lenin saw the "impact of power upon social change and of social change upon power" (p. 116), especially in terms of the control and transformation of the state apparatus. Lenin also contended, according to Lehmann, that "revolution" is in the interests of "humanization."

The present significance of all this is, Lehmann argues, that "Marxism Leninism is still the bearer of the revolutionary ferment of our time" especially in the "third world." Further, "despite the stresses and strains of power, of heresy and schism within the communist movement, the Marxist-Leninist account of the impact of power upon social change and of social change upon power is still the point from which to take our bearings in the revolutionary situation in which we live" (p. 116). Thus in developing a "theology for revolution," a strategy for Christian life and witness in the midst of revolutionary change (Lehmann rejects the vulgarities of a "theology of revolution"), Lehmann proposes to work within the "Marxist-Leninist occasion."

It is a little obscure how all this leads directly to Prof. Lehmann's joining Herbert Marcuse in identifying the "new victims of powerlessness: the students, the black peoples, the urban and the rural poor" (pp. 121, 127). In fact, the enthusiastic endorsement of the "revolutionary" events of May 1968 in France and the announcement that "Berlin and Berkeley and New York have joined Paris in signaling the displacement of the workers as the bearers of the vision and the dynamics of the classless society" appear a little overwrought in the cold light of day.

In the long run, in my judgment, the Christian conscience will be better instructed by Paul Ricoeur ("The Political Paradox" in History and Truth) with his clear awareness that the problems of politics have an independence not reducible to the economic-social. (Lehmann goes part of the way toward conceding this in his final paragraphs, pp. 135 ff.) I would commend, as an antidote to soft and hard Utopianisms, the sober observations of Paul Ramsey (The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility) on the limits of the political good which any government can be expected to accomplish. But Paul Lehmann knows how to make us think about the issues that really matter.

Charles West's essay on "Act and Being in Christian and Marxist Perspective" points a promising way forward. He adopts a conception first given general currency in Christian theological debate by the Latin Americans at the Geneva Church and Society Conference in 1966: the notion of "ideology" as a consciously constructed theory for guiding social

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change. He urges men in various social situations (Western, communist, and "third world" alike) to recognize that the old ideologies are "broken" now and all the prospective ones are limited though indispensable instruments. None is to be invested with absolute significance.

West opens up new avenues of approach to the original Marx and commends the insights of the Eastern European revisionary Marxists. He convincingly locates Marx in the tradition of Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism and notes the ambivalence of Marx's immediate precursor Hegel, that last of the great Christian philosophers who can also be claimed by Garaudy as the proponent of the "death of God." (Prof. West is a far more subtle and reliable guide on the relation of Hegel and Marx than Prof. Robert Tucker whose Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx West appears to endorse in passing.) West shrewdly observes that the Marxist revisionists have made out of "Marx's basic revolutionary impulse" a "methodology of permanent self-criticism"; for that reason some men in the third world, including influential Christians, do not find Marxism in its Russian Communist or revisionist forms revolutionary enough! West espouses a healthy pluralism in assessing the claims of various ideological schemes and one gathers there may even be something to be said for a "broken" and chastened Western democratic liberalism.

In Moltmann's essay, we get a hint of the excitement generated by Moltmann and Johannes Metz in their dialogue with Ernst Bloch and that esoteric Marxist tradition summed up in the "principle of hope." A proper "political" theology of hope, Moltmann contends, will show that Christians believe in the "Coming, creative God, who will create out of the misery of the living creatures the kingdom of his glory, a new being in which he himself will dwell" (p. 52). In their faith, Christians "participate in the creative freedom of God." In expounding the import of this religion of freedom, Moltmann appraises the "history of revolutions for freedom," including, the revolutions against the Constantinian impulse in Christianity. He passes in review the medieval struggle for libertas ecclesiae; the Reformation call to be "a perfectly free lord" yet "dutiful servant to all"; the 18th century revolution for the rights of men and the freedom of the citizen; and the Marxist proposal to complete the liberation of man by renovating the economic and social base of modern society. In my judgment, the libertarian aspirations of original Marxism need to be fully credited; but one can surely ask with Hannah Arendt (On Revolution) whether the Anglo-Saxon and American political tradition does not have an independent integrity not easily assimilable to a dialectical movement from Reformation to French Revolution to original Marxism to the humane world of the future.

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Thomas Ogletree's introduction sketches with unusual clarity the consensus about communism reached in American Christian social ethics under the guidance of Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1950's. Ogletree insists that we now need a Christian social theory more aware of historic possibilities as well as of the limits of historical action. He, like Lehmann and West, looks expectantly to the Christian-Marxist dialogue. Prof. Ogletree seems to assume that Marxism is unambiguously and exclusively a "humanism" and that a Roger Garaudy is typical of contemporary Marxist intellectuals. A close look at the French Marxist Louis Althusser's biting critique of "Marxism as a humanism" in his Pour Marx (1965) might provide a useful dash of cold water. At the level of historical interpretation, Ogletree appears to accept the conventional account of the relation between Feuerbach's passionate atheism and Marx's position. What really needs to be explored is the provocative possibility that Marx was in fact, like, let us say Heidegger, not a passionate God-denier, but rather a-theistic, one for whom the God-problem was no longer consequential.

Sidney Lens' description of "The Changing Character of Communism" presents some neglected historical and economic data. Its interpretive scheme, however, is a cheerful collection of the banalities which passed for wisdom in some sectors of the New Left in 1968 plus a few of the hardier pieties of the very far left of the 1930's. It is hardly a worthy companion to the other distinguished essays in this volume.

Wendell Sanford Dietrich
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island