Two Faiths

Is it possible to be both a Communist and a Christian? Or must every convert who cleaves to one hate the other?

In a short book published this week, a Presbyterian minister from socialist New Zealand has done his best to bring two strong faiths--Marxism and Christianity --within hailing distance of each other. But Alexander Miller's The Christian Significance of Karl Marx (Macmillan; $1.75) is not likely to convert many Christians to Communism.

Author Miller, who was in charge of churches in London's dockland area in 1938 and who survived the blitz as a pastor in the thoroughly bombed borough of Stepney, has no hesitancy about putting his left foot forward. Unlike the Church of England's famed "Red" Dean of Canterbury, however, he is careful to put it down on the platform of Karl Marx's social theory, rather than on the pit-strewn ground of Stalinist Russia.

In expounding the theory of Marxism, Presbyterian Miller is at his lucid best. Readers who have long shuddered at the jabberwocky of "dialectical materialism" will find this book's opening chapters a clear, practically painless exposition of Marxism's fundamentals. But Author Miller's efforts to find common denominators between the Communist Manifesto and the New Testament are less successful. Christians, says he, would be better Christians for studying Marx because Christians must act in the world:

"Christians . . . are inextricably involved in all the material and social concerns that affect the lives of normal men. . . . In this area of life inaction is a kind of action. To be indifferent to the way in which social life is ordered is . . . to take sides with corruption and tyranny, graft and reaction, since these social evils feed on the indifference and inactivity of ordinary folk, and count on it for their continuing existence."

Presbyterian Miller believes that Karl Marx provided some knowledge that is necessary to effective action. Says he: "Marxism is an indispensable key to history. Its essential doctrines stand, and the contemporary process of social change is inexplicable without taking account of them. It is a scientific sociology."

How to separate the "scientific sociology" from the ruthless, end-justifying-means idolatry of the state that goes with it? Author Miller does not say. He is sufficiently aware of the problem to quote Novelist Arthur Koestler's classic damnation, in Darkness at Noon, of the Marxist revolutionary:

He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do what is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs in order that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it--an abstract and geometric love.

Author Miller does not apply the simple Biblical test for such prophets: "Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit."

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