Conclusion of a New Book

 I will soon put a new book on Kindle Direct Publishing, accessible on amazon.com. Its title is: How Can I Be a Christian? Here is the conclusion to that book.

Conclusion

 

So how can I sum up my Christian faith? This whole book is an effort to express my faith, but summing that faith up is not an easy task. To me, faith is a very complex thing. It starts with ontology, that is, an understanding of the nature of being. It includes an understanding of the nature of human language and proceeds from there. Most Christians, indeed, most people, assume an understanding of being and of language unconsciously. They can’t articulate their understandings, but they have them nonetheless. I believe that we must discuss and decide about them openly, consciously. Here’s how I understand them.

Being is multidimensional. There is physical, material being, or at least we assume that there is and act as if there is.[1] We take material being as real. Since the European Enlightenment, much of western culture has assumed that this material reality is the only reality there is. Western culture is wrong about that. There is another dimension to reality. It is the dimension of the spiritual. Spiritual reality permeates material reality. It is the depth dimension of reality. All human cultures, though not all human beings, have recognized the reality of the spiritual. Even the materialistic culture of western Europe has never completely lost awareness of the spiritual.

Human language is incommensurate with the task of speaking about the spiritual. The spiritual both inheres in everything that is and utterly transcends everything that is. We humans can speak meaningfully about the spiritual only in the language of symbol and the mythic. Most people take their words about the spiritual literally, that is, factually; but the spiritual cannot be reduced to fact. Factual truth is important in its own realm, but it is unavoidably superficial. The language of symbol and myth connects us with the spiritual in a way mere fact never can. I understand all statements about God and Jesus Christ as symbols not as statements of fact.

I believe that spiritual reality is a higher reality than material reality. It is ultimate reality. It is the reality on which all other reality depends. That is what we mean when we call God the Creator of all that is. Our call as humans is to conform our lives to the ways of spiritual reality. None of us will ever do that anywhere near perfectly. That doesn’t mean we are not called to do what we can to live according to spiritual values not material ones.

My primary symbol for the spiritual is the word God. God is Spirit. As Spirit, God both inheres in everything that is and totally transcends everything that is. God is not a person, but we can relate to God personally through the use of symbolic language. Though God is not a person, we can relate to God as a person as long as we don’t reduce God to humanlike personhood.

I believe that God has God’s ways of being, has God’s own values, and that those ways and values are totally different from the ways and values of the world. God has thoughts, but they aren’t like our thoughts. God has a vision of the world transformed from the way it is to the way it would be if it operated according to God’s ways and values rather than its own corrupt ways and values. God’s ways and values are so grounded in love that we can truthfully say that God is love. God’s ways are the ways of nonviolence and radical, distributive justice for all of God’s people. God calls all people to the work of creating a transformed world through nonviolent action against the powers of the world and for the wellbeing of all people. The first step in doing that is inner transformation. God calls us to rid our minds and spirits of the worldly ways we have internalized so that we can better conform to the ways of God.

I believe that all profound truth is paradoxical. That God both inheres in all created being and utterly transcends created being at the same time is a paradox. It is something that isn’t possible, it’s just true. The Incarnation is also a paradox. It is simply impossible that Jesus could be both fully human and fully divine at the same time. It isn’t possible, it’s just true.

I believe in the Trinitarian conception of God symbolically. We cannot say anything that is directly, factually true about God. God is too transcendent for that. We can speak of God in the language of symbol. That’s what the Trinity is, a symbol for one way to understand God’s reality. The great virtue of the Trinity is that, because it makes no rational sense at all, it preserves the ultimate mystery of God. It is a paradox. It is impossible but true. Nothing can be three and one at the same time, but God is. I believe that the trinitarian conception of God gives us a mysterious, dynamic, and active God.

I believe that Jesus of Nazareth is God Incarnate. The Incarnation is another paradox. It is both impossible and true. No mere human could possibly also be all of God, but I confess that Jesus was. He was fully human and fully God at the same time. In this sense my Christian faith is quite conventional. I accept both foundational doctrines of traditional Christianity, Trinity and Incarnation, though I understand them symbolically not literally.

I believe that in Jesus as God Incarnate we humans see and can learn as much about God as our finite minds are capable of learning. I believe that if you want to see God, look at Jesus. As God Incarnate he was born, lived, and died as a human being; and in everything he did God was fully present and doing it with and in him. In Jesus we see God entering into as much of human life as any one individual can, even, or especially, the difficult, painful parts of human life. In Jesus’ death we see the death of God. Yet God is paradox. On the cross of Jesus God dies, but God remains the infinite, immortal God at the same time. That, of course, is another paradox. It’s impossible, but it’s true.

I believe that in Jesus Christ we see how God relates to us humans, to human suffering, and human sin. God does not scorn human suffering and death. God enters into them with us. No matter what happens with us during our lives and even after our deaths, God is with us and for us. Human sin no doubt angers God, but God does not punish it either in this life or after this life. God is infinite, universal, unconditional love; and divine love could never punish anyone because doing so would make God’s love conditional and therefore far too human.

I accept Jesus Christ as my Savior, but I do not believe that the Christ event (the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ) brought anything new into being. It did not get God to forgive sin God had never forgiven before. It makes no sense to me to say that it did. I see Jesus as Savior because he shows us in the most direct and powerful way possible that we’ve always been saved because God scorns none of human life. Rather, God enters into human life and thereby sanctifies it. All of it.

I believe that after Jesus’ death his followers had a powerful, life changing experience of Jesus’ continuing presence with them. We call that experience the Resurrection. It has great symbolic meaning and power. It means that with God death is not the end. It wasn’t the end for Jesus, and it isn’t the end for us. At least, it allows us to trust that death is not the end for us. Jesus’ Resurrection is another thing that isn’t possible, it’s just true.

I believe that Jesus calls us, as God does, to a nonviolent revolution on earth to make real what Jesus called the kingdom of God. In Jesus we learn that the values of the kingdom of God are basically the values of the world turned completely upside down. The kingdom of God is totally nonviolent. In it, people never resort to violence for any reason. In the kingdom of God those the world calls first are last and those the world calls last are first. In the kingdom of God the rich are brought down and the poor are lifted up. In the kingdom of God everyone has enough because no one has too much. In the kingdom of God the spiritual life and values are more important than material life and values. In the kingdom of God we humans relate to each other in love rather than in the world’s ways of competition, one-upmanship, oppression, and dominance.

I believe, as I believe Jesus did, that transformation of the world begins with the transformation of the self. The world will change when enough of its people change. Change their ways from violence and domination to the ways of nonviolence, justice, and peace. To attack the world for its faults without having first discerned and dealt with your own faults is just the way to more violence and domination, not the way to true peace.

I believe that morality is grounded in God’s unconditional love not in codes of laws and commandments. We can never reduce God’s love to ten commandments or even to the six hundred thirteen laws of the Torah. Morality is situational, and that is moral which facilitates wholeness of life for the people involved in the situation. Morality is always nonviolent. It says “thou shalt not kill” and means it. Always. In every situation. What is moral in one situation may be immoral in some other situation. Morality is always judged under the rule of love, not by whether or not an act conforms to some rigid code of conduct.

I believe that Christianity is far more about how we are to live this life than it is about how we are to get our souls to heaven in a next life. Jesus said almost nothing about how we get our souls to heaven.[2] I believe that if our souls do go to heaven, we have nothing to do with it. We don’t save ourselves. Whether there is any reality for us after death, and what that reality is, is entirely up to God not to us.

I believe that salvation is more about this life than it is about a next life. Jesus spent his ministry calling people to be people of the kingdom of God in this life not to be people in heaven in some afterlife. Salvation in this life is coming to know God’s unconditional love. It is to rest our minds and our spirits in that love. It is to live out of that love and to share it with as much of the world as we can.

I understand faith as trust not as the acceptance of unproven factual assertions. I know that everything I believe about God may be wrong. The possibility of error is unavoidable when we speak of that which transcends our ability to speak about it. Yet in faith I trust that what I understand about God is not false, or at least that not all of it is. I don’t know anything about God. I try to understand God as best I can, then live in trust under that understanding of ultimate reality.

I do not believe that Christianity has the only truth or that it is the only way to a proper relationship with God. Both Christianity and other faith traditions are true to the extent that they connect people with ultimate reality, which a tradition may or may not conceive of as God, and false to the extent that they connect people to something else. It’s obvious, if we’ll just open our eyes and our minds, that people all over the world find their connection with God in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Sikhism,  Baha’i, and a great many other faith traditions. We Christians have no right to condemn them just because they don’t find their connection with God the way we do. We should thank God that we humans can find God in so many different ways.

I believe that the Bible is a purely human product. It was written by men (sadly not by any women) who were people of their own times and places. Their writings express their understandings of God, which are not necessarily God’s understanding of God, nor must they be our understanding of God. I see the Bible as an invitation into dialogue with its ancient authors. There is much wisdom in the Bible, but there is also much that is false, some of it appallingly false. One of the challenges of faith is to discern which Bible passages express divine wisdom and which express earthly error. The Christian’s standard for making that distinction is Jesus, and therefore it is love.

The basics of my Christian faith are then these: God is real. God is Spirit. God is love. Jesus Christ is God Incarnate. God calls us to lives of love. God calls us to transform the world into one ruled by love, and God demands that we do it nonviolently. I believe with Jesus that transformation of the world begins with transformation of the self. Without individual transformation away from the ways of the world and toward the ways of God, transformation of the world is not possible. I believe that God’s grace is universal and unconditional. I believe that we humans are called to behave ourselves not from fear of punishment but in response to God’s love for us. So my bottom line is this: God is real. We know God in Jesus. Love is the standard for everything.

I don’t live a life of love better than anyone else, but I know that God has forgiven my failures and everyone else’s before we even commit them. For that greatest of all of God’s gifts, for God’s universal and unconditional grace, I say with all my heart: Thanks be to God!

---

[1] For a much longer discussion of this issue see Appendix 1 of my book Liberating Christianity.

[2] A couple of parishioners once attacked me for not telling them how they could get their souls to heaven. I didn’t say this to them, but I never told them that because I don’t believe they had to do anything to get their souls to heaven, not that they would have believed me had I said that to them.

                                                                    On Love and Anger 

June 16, 2026 

Yes, there is Matthew 11:28, where the Gospel reports Jesus as having said that his burden is easy and his yoke is light. Frankly, I’ve never really understood that saying, for it seems to me that the life of following Jesus, which, after all, is what the Christian life must be, is hardly easy. One reason it isn’t easy is that the texts it is based on contain contradictions that make it seemingly impossible to carry out both sides. The most basic commandment for the Christian life is the Great Commandment. In Matthew’s version is reads: “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. this is the greatest and the first commandment The second resembles it: You must love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets too.” Matthew 22:37-40. New Jerusalem Bible (italics sic). The demands of the faith get no more foundational than these verses. 

On the other hand, there is no doubt that Jesus also calls us to witness for the realm of God, for God’s demand that we do what we can to reform this corrupt world from its own ways to the ways of God. Jesus calls us to work for a world of distributive justice achieved through nonviolent resistance to evil. And frankly, it is very hard if not impossible to work for that world in this world without getting awfully angry. Without feeling a deep righteous indignation over how wicked the world and the people who support its ways can be. We see that wickedness in our country today in Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that continues to support him despite his failings, which are more numerous than we can count. I must confess that Donald Trump, MAGA, and the advocates of “Christian nationalism” who are such a big part of the MAGA movement make me madder than hell. They are destroying my country. They are perpetuating precisely the kind of evil Jesus condemned. They are grounded in and perpetuate the evils of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, economic injustice, and world empire maintained through military violence. They are, in other words, nothing short of American fascists. They seek to destroy democracy, and they bastardize Christianity at every turn. Surely the Holy Spirit calls me to oppose them in every nonviolent way that I can. How can I not be madder than hell at them? 

Yet, as I must conclude from the Parable of the Good Samaritan, these people too are my neighbor in the sense of the Great Commandment. And, as hard as it is for me to do it, I must confess that they too are beloved children of God. So I have to ask myself: Do the facts that these American fascists are my neighbors and that God loves them even though I can’t mean that I can’t oppose everything they stand for? Does it mean I can’t be angry with them? Does it mean that I can’t feel righteous indignation toward them? These are questions with which I’m struggling today. 

One way to get at an answer to those questions, I think, is to ask: What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself? And to answer that question I have to start, I think, with asking: What does it mean for me to love myself?1 More specifically in today’s context: Does loving myself mean I have to love myself even when I’ve thought or done something that is terribly wrong? Is there a distinction between myself and what I might think or do that is terribly wrong that will help answer my questions here? 

I think that there is, but before I get to what I think that distinction means for me, let me dispose of a cliche we’ve all heard. Self-proclaimed Christians who condemn God’s LGBTQ+ people are fond of saying that they “love the sinner but hate the sin.” These so-called Christians have used that cliche to justify the way they hate something that actually isn’t a sin, that is actually so much an intrinsic part of some people that you cannot legitimately separate the person from it. Thus, no matter how much they deny doing it, they actually hate the person and not just the person’s sex life, whatever that sex life may be. That is not the situation I’m dealing with here, as I hope to explain below. 

I don’t know that I am capable of hating what American fascists say and do and still love them. I can, however, confess that I do not love them and remain aware that, although I cannot and do not love them, God can and does. I don’t know how does that. I, after all, for all of the personal arrogance I sometimes feel, am not God. I don’t know how God does it or how God is able to do it, I just know that God is able to do it and does indeed do it. For that divine, transcendent truth I guess I can say, however reluctantly: Thanks be to God! So, just as I could not and would not love myself if I acted or thought like them, I don’t and can’t love American fascists. I’m content to confess my sin of not loving them and to leave the loving of them up to God. 

I am convinced, however, that I am not only free to feel righteous indignation toward them, I must feel righteous indignation toward what they say and do if I am to be true to my own Christian faith. And I am convinced that I must feel righteous indignation toward what they say and do if I am to be true to Jesus Christ as we learn of him in the four canonical gospels of the New Testament. Jesus Christ taught, lived for, and died for everything American fascists reject; and he rejected everything they stand for. Jesus preached love not hate. He preached nonviolence not violence (though not passive acceptance of evil), he preached distributive justice not the gross economic and political inequity of empire that we have in our country today. He could have saved his life by kissing Pilate’s ass the way American fascists kiss Donald Trump’s ass, but he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t give in to the power of empire and its acolytes like Pontius Pilate. 

I won’t either. Jesus didn’t often get angry, or so it seems, though he did once call the Pharisees a “brood of vipers.” Matthew 12:34. He got mad at Peter when Peter said that Jesus’ prediction of his coming execution must not happen. Mark 8:31-33. Yet Jesus was in many ways a reappearance of the ancient Hebrew prophets. The Judaism of Jesus’ time had reduced itself essentially to the book of Leviticus and all of the laws that book contains. But Judaism had, and has, a much older tradition than the tradition of the law. It is the tradition of the prophets, especially the eighth century BCE prophets like Isaiah of Jerusalem, Amos and Micah or the sixth century BCE prophet Jeremiah. Jesus clearly associated himself with those prophets, as we see when we read of him associating himself with Isaiah at Luke 4:16-21. Those ancient men of God (sadly, they were all men) were nothing if not angry at the way the powerful in their world bastardized the Jewish faith by oppressing the poor and other marginalized people and by putting the Torah law above distributive justice. 

So yes. I am mad as hell over what our American fascists are saying and doing today. I will condemn what they are saying and doing until I take my last breath. And I will do so because I am convinced that my Christian faith not only justifies me in doing so, it requires me to do so. Anger can be justified. Indignation can be righteous. Anger is justified, and indignation is righteous, when they are reactions to hatred, violence and, and injustice, that is, when they contradict the kingdom values for which Jesus lived and died. Jesus insisted that we be nonviolent, but he never called us to be passive in the face of such evils.2 I will never be violent nor will I ever advocate violence, but neither will I be silent. Neither will I be at peace with the evil I see before me. I believe that words are my tools more than physical protest is, and I will keep writing words against Donald Trump, MAGA, and Christian nationalism for as long as I am able to do so. I pray that perhaps you too, dear reader, will do whatever nonviolent thing you can to bring down Donald Trump’s fascist regime, restore our precious American democracy, and build the realm of God on earth. May it be so. 

D-Day Reflections 2026

D-Day Reflections 2026

June 6, 2026

On Democratic Socialism

 

On Democratic Socialism

I consider myself to be a Christian democratic socialist. I am, of course, fully aware that most American Christians find “socialism” to be a scare word and not to be at all Christian. I am also fully aware that they are wrong about that. Democratic socialism is in fact, the only political structure that at least approximates Jesus’ Realm of God on earth. Yet democratic socialism is the best available form of social, political, and economic structure not only for Christians but for everyone. I want here to consider the history and advantages of democratic socialism both from a secular point of view and from a Christian one.

What is democratic socialism? The first thing to insist about it, and something few Americans understand about it, is that it is democratic. It is not an authoritarian system. It is not imposed from above on anyone. Rather, it arises and is created democratically by a people who have come to understand the evils of insufficiently regulated capitalism and who want their government and their society to work for the benefit of everyone not just for the benefit of those with enough money to buy politicians and election results as happens all the time in the US. The people create it, and the people are free to abolish it any time they have votes to do it through legal electoral processes.

Yes, it is of course true that systems that called themselves “socialist” have been authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes imposed on a country’s people by force. The classic example is Soviet Russia. Between 1922 and 1991, the Russians were the dominant nation by far in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.[1] Though nearly all Americans think of the Soviet Union as communist, which it was when we understand the term “communist” to mean a country ruled by a communist party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union never claimed to have creates a communist nation. It had, rather, in the terms of the country’s official Marxist-Leninist ideology, created a socialist nation. Late in its existence that party claimed that the country was “transitioning to communism,” but it never claimed to have achieved communism.

To understand that that the Soviet Union considered itself socialist not fully communist, we must understand Marxist political ideology, the ideology by which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union claimed to rule and to have the right to rule. It is also the theory out of which democratic socialism, though it is today not Marxist at all, grew. In Marxist theory, a workers’ revolution created not a communist state but a socialist one. This meant that the role of the state was to transition a society from capitalism to communism. It was the stage of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” It functioned to end the private ownership of property, especially of the means of economic production, that characterizes capitalism. As the ownership of such property changed from private ownership to public ownership, the classes that had distinguished capitalism, in particular the classes of the capitalists and the workers, would begin to disappear. They would disappear because they were created by the class tension between capitalists and workers. In theory, if there were no capitalists there would be class tension and hence no classes. Again inn theory, the role of the state was to facilitate that disappearance. In practice, Marxists regimes generally did much of that work through violence against supposed enemies of the state, but for Marx, it would happen more or less of itself once the country’s economy was no longer capitalist.

True communism was the goal of this transitional period. In a truly communist society, there are no classes. All people are equal because private property is owned collectively not individually. In addition, because there are no longer any socioeconomic classes, the state withers away and disappears. In Marxist theory, states are all about class dominance. In capitalism, the capitalist class dominates the working class in part through the state which it creates and controls. In socialism, the working class dominates the capitalists class through the state which it creates and controls. When that class distinction disappears, as Marx believed it would do, there is no need for a state. There is no function for a state, so there is no state.

It is quite obvious to anyone who knows anything about it that the Soviet Union never came close to being a classless, stateless society. It was rather a nation ruled dictatorially by a small class of privileged elite who used Marxist-Leninist ideology to justify their position of privilege and of control of all aspects of the nation’s life. At different times between the 1960s and 1980s the Communist Party made differing claims about where the country was on the supposed transition of communism it was overseeing, but it never claimed actually to have created a communist nation. The nation was rather, in theory, at some point in the stage of socialism, the stage not of communism but of transition to communism. That’s why the country’s name was The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics not The Union of Soviet Communist Republics.

There is no denying that “socialist” is a dirty word for most Americans. Americans’ intense dislike of anything called socialist probably results from the fact that nations like the USSR that called themselves socialist were in fact, at least at times in their existence, ruled by unspeakably tyrannical and brutally violent regimes. Those regimes claimed to be free and democratic while in fact they were oppressive and dictatorial in the worst possible ways. The Soviet Union named itself socialist, but it was ruled by an entity that called itself the Communist Party. It became essentially unavoidable for Americans, taught to despise the Soviet Union (mostly for good reason), to equate socialism and brutal, dictatorial Soviet communism.

Yet Americans’ aversion to the concept of socialism has long been facilitated by the ignorance of most Americans about the history of socialism not only in the totalitarian Soviet Union but in democratic Western Europe. The German Social Democratic Party (known as the SPD) is a good place to start with understanding that history. It was founded in 1875 and adopted its current name, “Die Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland,” in 1890. At its founding, it was a Marxist political organization. It worked to bring about a Marxist workers’ revolution in Germany. It wanted to do essentially what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did in Russia in November (NS), 1917.[2] It actually attempted such a coup in the aftermath of World War I but failed badly. The party functioned as an opposition party under the Weimar Republic. The Nazis, of course, suppressed it violently, but it did somehow survive.

After World War II, the German Social Democratic Party kept its name but changed its tune. It no longer advocated violent revolution. Rather, it came to function as one of the two major political parties of the Federal Republic of Germany, that is, of West Germany, during the years of German division between democratic west and undemocratic east. It continues to operate in that way today. It is what we could call the more liberal or progressive of the historically two major German political parties. It does not call for revolution. I certainly does not call for violence. Rather, it works to create a Germany in which the interests of the country’s workers are advanced and protected. It has at times been the country’s ruling party. Willi Brandt, once the mayor of West Berlin and then Chancellor (the head of the government) of the Federal Republic of Germany, was a member of the SPD as have been other Chancellors of the German republic. It advocates policies that are considerably more progressive than those of the Democratic Party in the United States, but, in the German context, it is a mainstream, democratic, peaceful organization. It is indeed a democratic socialist party.

Democratic socialism, or, as we could also call it, socialist democracy, has made great strides in creating societies and economies of radical equality in the Scandinavian countries, most particularly in Sweden. Taxes in Sweden are high, but they finance things Americans can only dream of. Things like free education at all levels. Free universal health care. Meaningful retirement benefits. Meaningful parental time off for all workers. They finance the Swedish military, but Sweden’s military budget absorbs a much smaller percentage of the country’s national budget than does the US military. Essentially all of the countries of western Europe have social welfare systems that are far more extensive than anything we have in this country. Those countries are, in other words, to some meaningful extent democratic socialist.

Democratic socialism is not something for Americans to fear. Its origins may have been Marxist, but it isn’t Marxist today. A century and more ago socialists advocated violent revolution. True democratic socialists do no such thing today. They work within their country’s legal and political systems for the benefit of the people rather than for the benefit only of the people with money the way the American Republican Party and, to a lesser extent the American Democratic Party, do. That is what we American democratic socialists, Christian or otherwise, want to do in and for our country.

Is democratic socialism Christian? Can a Christian be a democratic socialist? Can a true Christian be anything other than a democratic socialist? The answers are definitely that democratic socialism can be Christian and that a Christian can be a democratic socialist. I will leave aside for now the question of whether a true Christian can be anything other than a democratic socialist. The main thing to understand is that democratic socialism advocates values and policies that are in fact far more Christian than are the values and policies of either major American political party and far, far more Christian than the values and policies of the most vociferous American self-identified Christians, of Christian Nationalists and MAGA supporters of Donald Trump. And, of course, we must begin defending that claim by describing what we mean by “true Christian.”

The tragic truth of far too much of Christian history is that most Christians have been anything but Christian. Yes, they have said that they believe in Jesus Christ confessing him to be their personal Lord and Savior. They’ve mostly done it because the church has told them that they have to do it to avoid spending eternity in the horrific torments of hell. That claim is, of course, inane theological nonsense; but it characterizes most of Christian history, at least in the west.

The truth is that it in only one of the canonical gospels does Jesus say anything about believing in him, and nearly everyone has misunderstood what the Greek word translated as “believe” actually means.[3] The other three synoptic gospels are actually about something else entirely. We see most clearly what Jesus was actually about in the gospels of Matthew (which tragically also contains a lot of horrific anti-Jewish error) and Luke. To make the point, I’ll just focus just a few passages from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

The Gospel of Matthew begins the collection of Jesus sayings we know as the Sermon on the Mount with nine sayings that begin “Blessed.” See Matthew 5:1-11. They’re called the Beatitudes. Not one of them is about believing in Jesus. They are, rather, about how we are to live and how we are to be in the world. They bless the poor in spirit, the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful, and others. They notably do not bless those who merely believe in Jesus. They certainly do not bless those who oppress or use violence against anyone.

There are beatitudes in Luke too, though they are less well known than those in Matthew. You’ll find them at Luke 6:20-22. They bless not the “poor in spirit” as Matthew does but simply you who are poor, you who are hungry, and you who weep. It’s a much shorter list of beatitudes than Matthew’s, but notice what it emphasizes. First, is says that blessed are the poor, the hungry, and those who are weeping without mentioning (or excluding) any reason for their weeping. It then blesses you “when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.” Luke 6:22. Because it appears in the context of the Gospel of Luke not the Gospel of John, I take the saying “on account of the Son of Man” to mean those who are hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed precisely because neither Jesus nor God does any such thing with anyone, precisely because they are the ones God most loves and works to lift up and relieve of their distress.[4]

Then we come to something quite startling that is not in Matthew at all. Luke’s Jesus follows his few beatitudes with sayings that begin “woe.” You’ll find them at Luke 6:24-26. They say “woe to you are rich,” “woe to you who are full, “woe to you who are laughing,” and “woe to you when people speak well of you.” We can conclude that Jesus is blessing those the world harms and condemning those the world honors and who cause others harm. He is, in other words, turning the world upside down to tell us that God’s ways are precisely the reverse of most of the ways of the world.

Do you want more proof of that truth? Consider something else that is in the Sermon on the Mount and that follows the Beatitudes and woes in Luke. In Matthew we read: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Matthew 5:43-44. Luke’s Jesus puts the same idea this way: “But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, and do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Luke 6:27-28. Talk about turning the ways of the world upside down! Doing that was what Jesus was about more than he was about anything else.

Then, of course, there is the famous scene at Matthew 25:31-46 and the famous saying that comes from it. In this scene, Jesus first tells some people that they had seen him hungry, thirsty, as a stranger, naked, and imprisoned, and they had taken care of him. These people don’t know what he’s talking about, so he says to them: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Matthew 25:40. Then Jesus says to others that they had also seen him in various forms of distress and had done nothing to help him. Like the others, these people don’t know what he’s talking about. So he says to them: “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” Matthew 5:45. The text tells us that God blesses the first  group of people but punishes the second.[5] Once again we learn here not what to believe but how to live. Live by caring for “the least of these,” for those most in need not by kowtowing to those least in need the way so many American politicians do today.

Jesus’ beatitudes, woes, and words about caring for “the least of these” are nearly perfect descriptions of the world democratic socialism seeks to create.[6] That world is one in which all people have equal rights, dignity, and legal and social protection. No exceptions. Period. It is a world of peace in which the powers, such as they are, use the world’s resources for the good of the people not for the good only of the wealthy like those currently in power in the United States do. Use them for the ways of peace and never, ever for the ways of war. It is a world in which “enemies” are approached not in a spirit of hatred and destruction but in a spirit of reconciliation and nonviolent conflict resolution. Because the world will always be the world and not heaven, some people in a democratic socialist country will insist on the country maintaining armed forces though others of us will disagree and will work to make doing so unnecessary. Still, the commitment of a democratic socialist government is to nonviolence, with violence being at best an absolute last resort and, ideally, being no resort at all.

So. Is democratic socialism Christian? Yes it is, though it is not only Christian and imposes no religious belief on anyone. Can a Christian be a democratic socialist? Yes, absolutely. The ideals of democratic socialism are essentially the ideals of Christianity properly understood. I consider myself to be a Christian democratic socialist. Many of my progressive Christian friends and colleagues do too. Marxism was and is atheistic. Many democratic socialists may be atheists, but many others of us are people of faith. We will happily work together with people of faiths other than ours and with people of no spiritual faith to bring about the world of peace and justice of which we and all democratic socialists dream.

Now to that question I said above I was putting aside. Can a true Christian be anything other than a democratic socialist? I suppose I have to answer that question yes, a true Christian can be something else. Most true Christians do not consider themselves to be democratic socialists, though we can hope that that will change in the future. A true Christian can pursue peace through Buddhism, which is a way of being more than a religious faith and tends to be apolitical. In my country, many true Christians, myself included, usually vote Democratic. We do that not because the Democrats get everything right. Far from it. They do, however, get a lot more right and a lot less wrong than the Republicans do, and our country just isn’t prepared to elect many politicians like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani who declare themselves to be democratic socialists. Still, democratic socialism comes much closer to advocating the values of Jesus’ Realm of God than does any other human political ideology. That’s why I and a great many other Christians today consider ourselves to be Christian democratic socialists. We hope and pray that democratic socialism is the wave of the future. May it be so.

---

[1] The Bolshevik coup took place in 1917. The USSR was created only in 1922.

[2] At the time of the Bolshevik coup d’etat, Russia used the Julian calendar not the more modern and accurate Gregorian calendar. Thus, the coup took place in October on the Russian calendar but in November on the western calendar. After the Bolsheviks took control, they switched the country to the Gregorian calendar. Thus, the Soviets celebrated “The Great October Revolution,” as they called that coup, on November 7.

[3] It means something more like trust or give your heart to than it does accept as true certain asserted but unprovable facts about Jesus, the latter being what nearly everyone takes it to mean.

[4] “The Son of Man” is one of Jesus’ common ways or referring to himself.

[5] Your humble author does not believe that God punishes anyone, but the author of the Gospel of Matthew, unlike essentially any other New Testament author, did. I do not think that Jesus believed any such thing. If he ever said some of the things Matthew has him say about God punishing people, surely he used that image only as a metaphor not as a literal truth.

[6] This parallelism between the gospels and democratic socialism is not a coincidence. Democratic socialism is no longer Marxist in any meaningful sense. As a matter of its history, however, it did arise from a Marxist movement. Marx’s “communism,” as I discussed it above, is in a real sense the Realm of God with the . religious and spiritual elements removed from it. See, for example Acts 4:32. Democratic socialism doesn’t insist on religious and spiritual elements being part of the solution to the world’s problems either, though it doesn’t exclude those of us who believe that they must be.