Was the Early Church ‘Communist’?
Whatever gives you that idea, Steve? It comes from reading the book of Acts, and in particular, two passages in Acts chapters 2 and 4. Without further ado, let’s look at them, with the salient parts highlighted:
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there was no needy person among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.
According to Britannica.com, communism is “a political and economic system that seeks to create a classless society. There is no … private property or currency, and the wealth is divided among citizens equally or according to individual need.” Hmmm. There certainly seems to be some correspondence.
What is the text wanting to tell us here? It’s an interesting example of how we read the Bible on something—what it’s “saying.”
If we approach these texts with prior commitments to particular social and political views—which I would suggest most of us do—then we will tend to see them as either a biblical affirmation of our views (in a version of ‘socialism’) or we will pass over them as anachronistic and impractical in today’s world (believing society to be better served by a capitalist model—recognising “That was then, but this is now”).
Leaving those prior social and political commitments to one side—which will be difficult, since most of us will already have our minds made up—if we are to determine “what it’s saying,” we need to ask ourselves some questions.
The first is whether the texts offer something descriptive or prescriptive. In other words, are they simply describing what was the case, there and then for them, or are they also prescribing what ought to be the case, here and now, for us? Are they time-bound, or timeless?
What makes this tricky to decide is that when we think about what’s called ‘authorial intent’ (what the writer had in mind —Luke, in this case, who also wrote the Gospel that bears his name), we can’t tell that from the text itself; and Luke is long gone, so we can’t ask him. But it’s important, because what we want to be discerning is the divine co-author’s intent; the passages are, after all, part of the Word of God. How are we to determine that …?
Whether a text is intended to function descriptively or prescriptively is important not just for these passages. There are many other texts in the Bible where we similarly need to discern whether they’re just describing something that was ‘the norm’ (taken for granted, at that time, in that society) or, if the Bible is saying it should be ‘normative’ (timelessly required of everyone in all eras and societies). And we need to be consistent—to be following a methodology. Otherwise, we’re simply picking and choosing for ourselves which texts and subjects we think should be in each category, based on our own preferences (and even, dare I suggest, our own prejudices).
Let me offer an important example (very important for the people it affects the most). Conservative evangelicals have recently shifted their arguments against same-sex relationships away from ‘The Bible says’ arguments based on the five so-called ‘clobber texts’ (Leviticus 18:22 & 20:13; Romans 1:25–27; 1 Corinthians 6:9–11; and 1 Timothy 1:9–10) towards what’s called a ‘creation order’ or ‘creation mandate’ argument centered in the Genesis creation account. This shift recognises the difficulty in determining what the clobber text authors were condemning (which many, if not most, contemporary scholars believe was the abusive and exploitative same-sex behaviours that were prevalent in those societal contexts at the time—far removed from the consensual relationships that we know today). The conservative argument is now being reframed around Adam and Eve’s opposite-sex marriage as the sole paradigm for human sexual expression—as how God has ordained human sexual relationships must function, prescriptively.
Clearly, these Acts passages are not in Genesis. But are they not also to do with ‘the divine ordering of society’? Why would they too not be considered as setting a normative biblical pattern to which all should thereafter conform?
The alternative reading of the Adam and Eve account is that the writer is simply describing what everyone in his day took to be ‘the norm’ in human relations. After all, it’s what’s true of most people, and always has been, and it’s where babies come from (rather an important component in a story of origins, as Genesis is). Since it would not have occurred to the writer that he was saying anything at all about 21st-century same-sex relations, either for or against, to see Adam and Eve’s opposite-sex-based relationship as prescriptive is something that conservative evangelicals are self-evidently ‘reading in’ to the text (rather than ‘reading out’ of the text). This is important because ‘reading-in’ to the text (what we call eisegesis) is the number one ‘sin’ in biblical (mis)interpretation.
The danger is picking and choosing what we think the biblical text prescribes as ‘normative’ based on what suits us (or to put it slightly more charitably, based on what we think anyway, text or no text).
And the more stridently we want to assert that the Bible is prescribing something, the more sure we need to be of our ground (and that we are following an objective, consistent methodology).
Now, of course, we could be slightly cynical and say that to take these Acts passages ‘literally’ (as normative for the Christian life) would be decidedly unpopular and hence is to be rejected on pragmatic grounds (we’d have to find a ‘more spiritual’ way of saying that, of course). I say ‘pragmatic’ because it would make it far harder for evangelists to get decisions for Jesus—“Would you like to go to heaven when you die? If so, just say ‘amen’ to this prayer …”—if sharing all your possessions, selling all your non-essential assets, and giving all the money away, was part of the required beliefs package. Good luck getting an ‘amen’ to that in the High Street on a Saturday morning.
Interpreting the Acts passages as normative concerning money and possessions would give the Church a major problem, since many people would walk away, just as the rich young ruler walked away from Jesus. In contrast, however, in insisting on Adam and Eve in Genesis as normative for human sexuality, conservative evangelicals can comfort themselves that the impact will be limited only to a small (dare I say, expendable?) minority.
There are, of course, other ways that commentators read these Acts passages to avoid the need to see them as prescriptive. One is that Luke is painting an idealised picture which can be an inspiration to us, but need not necessarily be copied (and by ‘not necessarily’ they mean ‘not on your life’). So much for the evangelical concept of the supreme authority of Scripture on that one! Another is that the early church giving away all of its money and possessions was a commendable act of enthusiasm for Jesus, but in hindsight was rather naive, because once you’ve given everything away you’ve nothing to invest to generate more money to give away (it’s only a one-off solution to needs at the time). That one is a capitalist perspective, but there is something to it. However, there’s no getting around the fact that both these observations subvert the authority of the text in a 'plain reading’ per the usual criteria that conservative evangelicals insist on (at least on paper). And surely it’s hard for charismatics and pentecostals to argue that the early church in Acts presents a normative golden age for Christianity that we should want to see revived in terms of Holy Spirit signs and wonders, while seeing nothing to want to see revived in the rest of those Acts 2 and 4 passages. Not least because although we need God to be the instigator of the first aspect, it’s entirely within our power to bring about the second.
Going back to ‘authorial intent’, although we can never know for sure what the writers meant by what they said—even when we apply the standard interpretive tools of context, genre, and so on—what we can try to do is to ‘allow Scripture to interpret Scripture’ per the traditional Protestant principle. In other words, to bring to bear what the Bible says elsewhere about such things (given that we would expect the divinely-inspired text to be consistent, all things being equal). In this context, we are best served by looking elsewhere in the New Testament, and perhaps especially in the letters to early churches. Tell me if you think I’m wrong, but I don’t see anything directly comparable to those Acts passages. I see generosity praised, and meanness criticised, but it’s quite generic. I see some things that Jesus said, which can be read in one way or another (for example, whether what Jesus said to the rich young ruler is intended to be normative).
If I were looking for a noncontroversial ‘third way’ of reading what the Acts passages can teach us, I would start from ‘worldview’ (how people in different eras see differently what’s ‘obvious’ in life). The Ancient World worldview of the biblical era was ‘collectivist’. This is not identical with ‘communist’. It means prioritising the interests of the group over the individual. It means seeing our identity primarily as a function of our membership and role in the group (be that family, work, nation, or church). It's believing that the success of the group, in the first instance, ensures the well-being of the individual—in other words, that we benefit ourselves through prioritising the needs of others.
A collectivist, community-centred culture emphasises values such as a strong sense of duty, interdependence, harmony, and prioritising what is best for the group. This biblical ‘Ancient World’ worldview sits in contrast to the individualist ‘Modern’ worldview that has reigned in western society since the Enlightenment (which coincided with the birth of Protestantism in the Reformation—this is why individualism is the prevailing worldview in today’s evangelicalism). The Modern worldview, which continues into Postmodernity, prioritises the interests of the individual. A person’s primary duty is to themselves, their independence, and achieving their personal goals (personal fulfilment, and so on). All of which sits in stark contrast to the Ancient World worldview, where the primary duty was to the group, to interdependence, and achieving the group’s goals (even at the individual’s expense).
The thing about worldviews is that most people don’t even realise that they have one. It’s simply the sum of what we take for granted to be ‘obvious’ about life (so obvious that there’s nothing to talk about). Just like a fish doesn’t know what water is, because nothing else has ever occurred to it.
Whatever we instinctively feel about those Acts passages, and however we choose to ‘interpret’ them in normative or non-normative terms, it behoves us to reflect on the difference between the group-centred collectivist worldview of the biblical writers and the individualistic worldview of today’s Bible readers—how these starkly different perspectives should impact our understanding of what the Bible was ‘saying’ and why.
The biblical writers wrote what they wrote with one worldview as to ‘the way things are’ and ‘the way things should be’.
We are reading what they wrote with another.