Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

by N.T. Wright

On the one hand, Communism is too Christian in that it constitutes an over-realised Christian eschatology, trying to bring heavenly justice to earth by violent revolution, attempting to manufacture the conditions where ‘the last will be first, and the first will be last’.13 Such a Communist utopia can only be created, Marx said, ‘by despotic inroads’,14 so that the road to paradise runs through several caverns of hell. We cannot forget that ‘the Kharkov famine [of the Soviet Union] and the Killing Fields [of Cambodia] were perpetrated by atheists in an attempt to realise the most lofty ideals of human perfection’.15 On the other hand, Communism is not Christian enough because it lacks a doctrine of total depravity. In Marxism, evil is what capitalists do, what the bourgeois do, what the factory owners do, but it cannot accept that evil lives in the hearts of Communists too. Marxist leaders believe that they ‘are exempt from error and can therefore arrogate to themselves the exercise of absolute power’.16 That is precisely why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his Gulag Archipelago that ‘the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts’.