It is a question, moreover, that Christians cannot avoid. Admittedly, the social and institutional history of the church gives one little hope that very many Christians have ever been acutely conscious of this. But, whether or not they care to acknowledge the full implications of their faith, Christians are still obliged to affirm that this eschatological judgment has indeed already appeared within history, and in a very particular material, social, and political form. In many ways, John’s Gospel is especially troubling as regards the sheer inescapable immediacy of God’s verdict upon every worldly structure of sin. There eschatology becomes almost perfectly immanent. There Christ passes through history as a light that reveals all things for what they are; and it is our reaction to him – our ability or inability to recognize that light – that shows us ourselves. To have seen him is to have seen the Father, and so to reject him is to claim the devil as one’s father instead. Our hearts are laid bare, the deepest decisions of our secret selves are brought out into the open, and we are exposed for what we are – what we have made ourselves.

But it is not only John’s Gospel, really, that tells us as much. The grand eschatological allegory of Matthew 25, for instance, says it too. In John’s Gospel, one’s failure to recognize Christ as the true face of the Father, the one who comes from above, is one’s damnation, here and now. In Matthew’s, one’s failure to recognize the face of Christ – and therefore the face of God – in the abject and oppressed, the suffering and disenfranchised, is the revelation that one has chosen hell as one’s home. All our works, as Paul says, will be proved by fire; and those whose work fails the test can be saved only “as by fire.” Nor does the New Testament leave us in any doubt regarding the only political and social practices that can pass through that trial without being wholly consumed.

Whatever else capitalism may be, it is first and foremost a system for producing as much private wealth as possible by squandering as much as possible of humanity’s common inheritance of the goods of creation. But Christ condemned not only an unhealthy preoccupation with riches, but the getting and keeping of riches as such. The most obvious example of this, found in all three synoptic Gospels, is the story of the rich young ruler, and of Christ’s remark about the camel and the needle’s eye.

Deborah Batt, Dwelling 10, detail

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But one can look anywhere in the Gospels for confirmation. Christ clearly means what he says when quoting the prophet: he has been anointed by God’s Spirit to preach good tidings to the poor (Luke 4:18). To the prosperous, the tidings he bears are decidedly grim: “Woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full; woe to you who are full fed, for you shall hunger; woe to you who are now laughing, for you shall mourn and weep” (Luke 6:24–25). As Abraham tells Dives in Hades, “You fully received your good things during your lifetime… so now you suffer” (Luke 16:25). Christ not only demands that we give freely to all who ask from us (Matt. 5:42), with such prodigality that one hand is ignorant of the other’s largesse (Matt. 6:3); he explicitly forbids storing up earthly wealth – not merely storing it up too obsessively – and allows instead only the hoarding of the treasures of heaven (Matt. 6:19–20). He tells all who would follow him to sell all their possessions and give the proceeds away as alms (Luke 12:33), and explicitly states that “every one of you who does not give up all that he himself possesses is incapable of being my disciple” (Luke 14:33). As Mary says, part of the saving promise of the gospel is that the Lord “has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away starving” (Luke 1:53). James, of course, says it most strikingly:

Come now, you who are rich, weep, howling at the miseries coming upon you; your riches are corrupted and moths have consumed your clothes; your gold and silver have corroded, and their rust will be a witness against you and will consume your flesh like fire. You have stored up treasure in the Last Days! See, the wages you have given so late to the laborers who have harvested your fields cry aloud, and the cries of those who have harvested your fields have entered the ear of the Lord Sabaoth. You have lived in luxury, and lived upon the earth in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts on a day of slaughter. (James 5:1–6)

Simply said, the earliest Christians were communists (as Acts tells us of the church in Jerusalem, and as Paul’s epistles occasionally reveal), not as an accident of history but as an imperative of the faith. In fact, in preparing my own recent translation of the New Testament, there were many times when I found it difficult not to render the word koinonia (and related terms) as something like communism. I was prevented from doing so not out of any doubt regarding the aptness of that word, but partly because I did not want accidentally to associate the practices of the early Christians with the centralized state “communisms” of the twentieth century, and partly because the word is not adequate to capture all the dimensions – moral, spiritual, material – of the Greek term as the Christians of the first century evidently employed it. There can simply be no question that absolutely central to the gospel they preached was the insistence that private wealth and even private property were alien to a life lived in the Body of Christ.

Well into the patristic age, the greatest theologians of the church were still conscious of this. And, of course, throughout Christian history the original provocation of the early church has persisted in isolated monastic communities and has occasionally erupted in local “purist” movements: Spiritual Franciscans, Russian Non-Possessors, the Catholic Worker Movement, the Bruderhof, and so on.

Small intentional communities committed to some form of Christian collectivism are all very well, of course. At present, they may be the only way in which any real communal practice of the koinonia of the early church is possible at all. But they can also be a tremendous distraction, especially if their isolation from and simultaneous dependency upon the larger political order is mistaken for a sufficient realization of the ideal Christian polity. Then whatever prophetic critique they might bring to bear upon their society is, in the minds of most believers, converted into a mere special vocation, both exemplary and precious – perhaps even a sanctifying priestly presence within the larger church – but still possible only for the very few, and certainly not a model of practical politics.

Therein lies the gravest danger, because the full koinonia of the Body of Christ is not an option to be set alongside other equally plausible alternatives. It is not a private ethos or an elective affinity. It is a call not to withdrawal, but to revolution. It truly enters history as a final judgment that has nevertheless already been passed; it is inseparable from the extra-ordinary claim that Jesus is Lord over all things, that in the form of life he bequeathed to his followers the light of the kingdom has truly broken in upon this world, not as something that emerges over the course of a long historical development, but as an invasion. The verdict has already been handed down. The final word has already been spoken. In Christ, the judgment has come. Christians are those, then, who are no longer at liberty to imagine or desire any social or political or economic order other than the koinonia of the early church, no other communal morality than the anarchy of Christian love.