A Contribution to Christian Materialism

Abstract

The debate between Christians and Marxists has been under way now for more than a decade. Christians are admitting that they have in the past been too wrapped up in the institutional forms of religion, and that they have perhaps been seduced from the Gospel by the success of the institutional Church. Marxists, in similar vein, admit that they have in turn been too ready to castigate the outward forms of religious organization, and too little prepared to give consideration to the central message of the Gospels and the prophets. Here too the exigencies of party organization have brought about the same displacement of goals found in the Church. Each declares that the other has far more to offer than they had previously either suspected or been prepared to admit. The unhappy feature of the Christian/Marxist dialogue is that in ten years or so it does not seem to have progressed very far beyond ‘programme statements’, or declarations of intent, of this kind. The concrete and substantive advances made in debate appear to have been quite disproportionate to the expectations held of it. In particular, the development of a really coherent ‘Christian materialism’, hoped for by many participants in the debate, has not been realized.One is compelled to ask why such an initially promising line of philosophical enquiry should have provided such meagre results. Is it that we were mistaken after all in thinking that progress could be made here? Is it that Christianity and Marxism in fact have nothing to say to each other beyond that which has already been said? Are they, in the last analysis, incompatible systems of thought?