The Sabbath School Quarterly this quarter, entitled “The Cosmic Messages,” will be focused on the Three Angels Messages, as indicated by the cover. The principal contributor is Mark Finley. I’m not sure who wrote the introduction I reproduce below, whether Finley or Clifford Goldstein, but I like how he is thinking, whoever he is:
“In 1844, a week before the Great Disappointment, Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Germany. He would become one of modernity’s most influential atheists.
“For Nietzsche, modernity needed to get beyond notions of “good and evil.” In fact, a character in one of his books declared, “Smash the old law tablets!” (a reference, of course, to the Ten Commandments).
“The year 1844 was also important for Karl Marx, the founder of communism. It was the year that Marx wrote the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” These manuscripts show the early development of his ideology in which he argued for a totally materialist reality that moved through various economic stages until the workers of the world would unite, overthrow their capitalist oppressors, and create a utopia on earth.
“The year 1844 had been important for Charles Darwin, too. Darwin wrote “Essay of 1844,” one of the earliest expressions of his evolutionary theory, although it had not been made public.
“The year 1844, however, was also the fulfillment of the 2300-day prophecy of Daniel 8:14, and the same year that, out of the leftovers of the Great Disappointment, seeds were planted that would burgeon in a worldwide movement whose core message would repudiate the ideology of Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin.
“Amid these destructive ideologies, God did not leave the world without a witness to His truth. He raised up the Seventh-day Adventist Church to proclaim His last-day truth to the world—the three angels’ messages. These messages, at their core, refute the errors and misconceptions promoted by Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin.
“The three angels’ messages—this quarter’s study focus—are, in a sense, the marching orders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. At their core, they are the gospel, pure and simple, but the gospel in the context of “present truth” (2 Pet. 1:12, NKJV).
Last September, I wrote on this same theme—that 1844 was a key year, not only in the birth of the SDA Church but also in the birth of Marxism and Darwinism, the opposing of which should be, and must be for the foreseeable future, a major focus of our church. Nice to know I’m being read at GC headquarters.
Is this a sign that the people in Silver Spring are waking up to the fact that we are in a Marxist revolution, and if we do not stop it and launch a successful counter-revolution, no one is going to care which is the biblically correct day of Christian worship?
I certainly hope so, but I’ve scanned this quarter’s lessons, and I do not see anything relevant to the ongoing Marxist revolution. Maybe when I start carefully digging into each week’s lesson, I will see some connections.
The Problem of Ideological Sin
How might the SDA Church make itself useful in leading an anti-Marxist counter-revolution? How would we begin to do this?
We would have to begin by acknowledging the reality of ideological sin, that certain ideologies are so wrong and destructive that believing them is sinful, an intellectual sin. The church is never going to oppose something that is viewed as perhaps misguided or mistaken but not sinful, not morally wrong. Many, if not most, Adventists tend to view Leftist ideology as being in that category of perhaps mistaken or misguided (or perhaps not), but not sinful. I think it very clearly is sinful, and I will explain why.
First, we must define our terms and describe what an ideology is. A dictionary definition of ideology is “a system of ideas and ideals, especially [a system] which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.” I would define an ideology as a set of axioms, assumptions, beliefs, and principles about the nature of reality that are used to interpret the data of human society.
In other words, the ideology is employed to organize and interpret data about human societies and human interaction. There is far too much information to try to respond to every issue with a unique set of assumptions and principles, so people tend to apply their core set of beliefs and principles—their worldview (weltanschauung in German) or their ideology—to decide how to interpret and respond to each new issue they encounter.
Human beings are organizing and systematizing creatures. This behavior is basic to the human intellect, so it would not seem that the ideological impulse by itself is wrong or an intellectual sin. How, then, do we recognize that an ideology is sinful?
False Assumptions
One criterion is whether the ideology’s assertions are contrary to what is taught in Scripture. Let’s apply this criterion to a couple of prominent ideologies, Nazism and Marxism.
National Socialism, as developed by Hitler and his party, was a worldview in which the world’s problems were blamed on Jews, who tend to dominate finance and many other industries and professions. National Socialism asserts that if we could only get rid of the Jews, then everything would be good, and society could enter a utopia, or re-enter a hazily recalled golden age asserted to have once existed.
Marxism is a worldview in which the world’s problems are blamed on private ownership of business and industry. Marx asserted that if only the capitalists could be dispossessed of ownership of the means of production—the factories, industries, businesses, capital goods and equipment, etc.—and those things could be held in common by all the citizens of a state, then, again, everything would be good, and we could enter a new utopia.
Both these worldviews, these ideological assumptions, conflict with the biblical worldview. According to Scripture, the world’s problems are caused by the fact that the world is fallen and sinful, and hence can never be made perfect this side of the eschaton. Sin affects all of us as individuals, families, organizations, businesses, governments, and even churches. Our world will never be perfect, but neither the Jews nor private ownership of the means of production are to blame. Sin is to blame. The best we can do is follow the moral law, the Ten Commandment law, in all its implications and permutations, and the society we will build will be as good as it can be made on this side of eternity.
Wrong Thinking and Actions
A second criterion is: what are the backers of this ideology asking of us? Is what they are telling us to do consistent with our calling in Christ and with our Christian/biblical worldview?
If they are asking us to hate a specific group of people, then that is a clear indication that the ideology is sinful. If we are supposed to hate Jews, that is a problem. If we are supposed to hate business owners, that is a problem. If we are supposed to hate landowners or landlords, that is a problem.
If we are supposed to hate white people just because they are white, that is a problem, and with Marxist Critical Race Theory, that is where we are. As Gerry recently noted, the CRT rhetoric against whites is now pre-genocidal, comparable to what the National Socialists were saying about Jews in the 1930s.
In a recent Rasmussen poll, only 53% of black people responded that it was “okay to be white.” Not to be a white racist or a white supremacist, but merely to be white. Twenty-six percent said it was “not okay to be white,” and 21% said they weren’t sure. In other words, almost half of blacks were not sure if it is okay for white people to be allowed to exist.
This is the result of making critical race theory the official ideology of American education. Marxist Critical Race Theory teaches that white people are all white supremacists, irredeemably hateful and oppressive, merely because they were born into the white race.
The last time I wrote on ideological sin, about four years ago, I emphasized that socialism involves expropriation of capital, hence violating the commandments against theft and covetousness. But cultural Marxism, which was formulated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, does not teach Marx’s belief in common ownership of the means of production. Instead, Marxist Critical Theory is a broad-based attack on many aspects of our civilization, including an attack on our epistemological norms and beliefs. Marxist Critical Race Theory is blatantly racist, an attack on the white race very reminiscent of Nazism’s attack on the Jews. Shouldn’t it be easier for us to recognize that this is sinful?
Wrong thinking inevitably leads to wrong actions; the rhetoric of dehumanization is designed to prepare you to carry out the atrocities. First, they tell you that Jews are subhuman, then they tell you to march them into the gas chambers.
Horrific Results
The results of sinful ideology are horrific.
A National Socialist program of intentional genocide led to the murder of six million Jews. But socialism of the non-nationalist variety has a far larger body count, having led to the death of some one hundred million people, including 65 million in communist China, 20 million in the Soviet Union, 2 million in the Cambodian genocide, 2 million in North Korea, 1.7 million in Ethiopia, over a million in Afghanistan, etc.
Various means of mass killing have been used, including man-made famine, such as the Ukrainian famine, or Holodomor, of 1932-33 that Stalin used to kill some 5 to 10 million “Kulacks,” family farmers prosperous enough to hire laborers. Forced relocation from urban settings to rural agrarian settings has killed many million; Mao’s cultural revolution killed some 20 million people, and the Cambodian genocide carried out by Pol Pot targeted educated city dwellers for relocation to rural camps, where most of them were killed.
How is this Not Sinful?
Obviously, any ideology that has already led to mass murder, mass starvation, mass labor camps, concentration camps, internment camps, mass arrests, purges, etc., is a sinful ideology. If we cannot acknowledge that an ideology that has killed multiple millions of people is a sinful ideology—a set of beliefs and principles that it is sinful to hold, agree with, promote, vote for, etc.—then we are not even serious people, much less Christians.
And yet, as a church, we cannot seem to agree on this. The last time I wrote on this topic, people came out of the woodwork to defend socialism and attack freedom and free enterprise. I was a bit taken aback. With respect to my friend Clifford Goldstein, who famously coined the term “Seventh-day Darwinian,” I think we have at least as large a problem with Seventh-day Marxians as with Seventh-day Darwinians, probably a much larger one.
Thanks to our unique eschatology, which revolves around Sunday worship being enforced against us by other Christian groups, we’ve been trained to so mistrust and fear other Christian groups that we have come to identify with the enemies of Christianity—the secular, atheistic Left—on the principle that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend. But this impulse needs to be recognized as profoundly misguided and dysfunctional. Blatantly evil atheistic mass-murderers are not really our friends, even if they sometimes kill Roman Catholics.
It is long past time to acknowledge that ideological sin is real, that it is extremely serious, and that we will corporately condemn it as a church, just as we condemn idolatry, murder, theft, adultery, perjury, covetousness, etc. This would a good starting point, should the SDA Church decide to address the ongoing Marxist revolution.