Stop Calling Jesus a Socialist

Throughout the entire 2016 election and onward, a tired line heard from within the Progressive Christian camp was that it was Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-declared "democratic socialist," who spoke from a policy platform most comparable with the New Testament ethic.  The assumption is that Jesus was himself a quiet socialist, and that his charity while acting as Lord, feeding without profit and giving without return, was to become the governmental archetype for any system built upon the imperative of public utility.  Too often, this assumption is met with shrugged indifference, forcing Christians choosing the moniker of capitalist to do so beneath a darker cloud of judgment.

It must be said that Jesus was and is not a socialist by anyone's definition, save those of his revisionists.  The Gospels do not speak of a heavenly economy of democratic access.  Instead, they speak of the Kingdom of God as the advent of an impending regime change whose topsy-turvy standard of behavior threatens the lives of the unprepared.  Where Jesus stands in the face of government saying his kingdom is not of this world, those aligned with him, the corpus mysticum, stand as a historical reminder that power itself is fleeting and its programs destined for collapse.  With king as his lexical base, Jesus contends for all our titles, and his seat at the right hand of God is the fulfillment of an all-conquering, one-world rule originally of Israel's national vision.

It is this image of Christ the Contender that thrusts the conversation into its most fundamental conflict.  The question is something like this: has the individual an inalienable right to private ownership, or has power the obligation to ensure a common equity?  From the raw data of the world's wealth concentrations, some draw the conclusion that competition and cooperation are mutually exclusive and that the ever pressing reality of competition has blinded populations from the possibility of human benevolence as a guiding principle of government.  Thus is the new expectation for the Christian eschaton, when a final install of programmatic distribution makes fruit possible without labor and labor without the pressure of personal improvement.  Such an expectation is foreign to that of the prophets, who gave the image of one sitting "under his own vine" as an anticipated era of peace when one's self-sufficiency goes uninterrupted.

Moreover, outside the point of exchange between producer and consumer, there is cooperation, where two or more parties agree to compete beneath the same body of rules.  The ethic of competition is that the boundaries of human interaction are set, and within these boundaries, one's worth becomes intrinsic to one's quality of behavior.  What duty one has toward the rights of his competitor is an equality of access upon the same ground of risk and possibility of reward.  After all, to review the etymology of "compete" lands one at the Late Latin competere or "to strive in common."  Where there is competition, so there is, too, a commonality that appraises victory as an end worthy of mutual struggle

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