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Were early Christians Communist?

Acts 2:42—47 gives us a quick glance into the very earliest group of followers of Jesus. We see them living in an intense community with one another. As the text says,

42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43 Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. 44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. 46 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, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

NIV

Hearing about this early church probably gets your blood pumping and excitement running. But… Wait… Hold on there. Sharing all possessions. Holding everything in common. Doesn’t that sound a lot like some type of commune, or maybe even communism? Were the early followers of Jesus communists? Should followers of Jesus today be communists?

Every so often the idea shows up that the early Christians were communists—or at least communistic—and that suggests we should be, too. It’s even here, in Wikipedia! Does this idea hold water? Let’s look briefly at the text and see what there is to see.

The (historically-specific) birth of the church

When we read the biblical text, it is helpful to remember that it happened in real history. The situation in Acts 2:42-47 was unique, and the unique factors are relevant. Let’s review what happened.

Pentecost, also known as the Feast of Weeks (see Leviticus 23:15-21), was a Jewish harvest festival held 50 days after Passover. By the time of Acts, this Festival of Weeks had morphed into a celebration of the giving of the Law. It was one of the three annual festivals for which Jewish people would travel from all over the known world to Jerusalem. On this particular Pentecost, probably sometime in May of AD 33,[1] God’s Spirit showed up with a roar. Jesus’ followers threw caution into the wind, preached the gospel boldly, and Jews from all over the known world responded, becoming followers of Jesus the Messiah.

The historical setting is important for grasping what is happening in Acts 2. People from the world over had traveled to Jerusalem on a religious pilgrimage. They were on vacation. They weren’t immigrating. When many non-residents of Jerusalem accept Jesus as messiah and stay there, the practical problem emerges of how to take care of everyone.

Cue spontaneous gifts of generosity. Widespread gifts of generosity, to such a degree that Luke characterizes it as:

44 All who believed were together and held everything in common, 45 and they began selling their property and possessions and distributing the proceeds to everyone, as anyone had need.

Acts 2:44-45 NET

This was clearly a communal way of supporting each other that is deeply foreign to most followers of Jesus today. But note how it is not communistic.

The early church versus Karl Marx

If we’re going to call them communistic, they are unlike any communism as it’s been practiced in the 20th-21st century. Notice that this is not a forced redistribution of wealth. It’s neither a profit-sharing endeavor nor the government forcibly controlling the means of production in society. It’s just people taking care of each other.

It’s organic, to use the criminally overused buzzword.

People shared what they had and what they could. People who had extra things, like the field that Barnabas sells (Acts 4:36-37), sold them to help other people. The fact that there are people who are “in need” makes plain that this “sharing everything” didn’t entail some sort of communal ownership of all the assets of each individual, otherwise, no one would be in need until the whole commune went bankrupt!

The actions of these early Christians have little in common with the government taking ownership of the means of production of wealth and sharing the profits in some sort of equal way (“all animals are equal; some animals are more equal than others”).

These early believers just were not concerned with addressing the questions which communism as a political theory tries to address at all. The sharing in the early church is more analogous to going and helping your neighbor move today than anything Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Mae Zedong, or Xi Jinping were ever up to.

Watching the growth, not just the beginning

Pay special attention to the way this pattern of extreme giving and communal living falls by the wayside as Acts progresses. This first account of the church is of a group of people in transition. After being scattered by persecution (Acts 6), they settle down elsewhere and start making longer-term commitments to the place they are at. Never again do we get a report of communities divesting themselves of their assets and living in a commune. Why? Are these later churches not hearing the same gospel? Aren’t they receiving the same spirit? Or did the apostles change the message?

To be clear, generosity and devotion to caring for each other remain a focus. Paul writes:

28 The one who steals must steal no longer; instead he must labor, doing good with his own hands, so that he will have something to share with the one who has need.

Ephesians 4:28 NET

But we see that the communal zeal and living on the means at hand fall by the wayside as not essential to the gospel community the Holy Spirit births. Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 3:10:

10 For even when we were with you, we used to give you this command: “If anyone is not willing to work, neither should he eat.”

NET

There is no freeloading, no taking care of people who simply won’t bother taking care of themselves. The gospel does not permanently remove people from the normal patterns of life, but redirects them on their way.

But, more to this point, working and sharing with one another remain a lasting mark of the church. Selling possessions and holding all things in common, however, don’t. Those are responses to an immediate concern at the birth of the church. While giving us a example to follow of passion, fervor, and generosity, they are not an economic or political theory about how to organize a local or national economy. Or even how followers of Jesus today should relate to those systems of politics and economics.

Community

The whole response of the proto-church in Acts is based on love and generosity and sacrifice for others. If that’s what you mean by communist, then you could call the early church communist. But a much better word for that is community. A community that loves and takes care of each other.

[1] Pentecost is 50 days (7 weeks and a day) after Passover. Passover was Nissan 14 on the year Jesus was crucified. This was either AD 30 or AD 33, with the later date probably more likely, though both dates have their advocates.

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Seeing, Believing, and Charity

Seeing is believing, as the old saying goes. Or a common one on the internet, “if there aren’t pictures, it didn’t happen.” These sayings neatly present a simple reality of how we as human beings live in the world: we depend a lot on our eyes. What we see has enormous influence on what we think, feel, and believe. That’s nothing new. But today there is something new. Today, it is easier than ever to make pictures that aren’t what they seem.

AI pictures

For nearly as long as there have been pictures, people have made fake pictures. In days of old, it took a fair deal of creativity and skill to pull off a decent fake picture. But no longer. Thanks to developments in artificial intelligence image generators, it takes shockingly little effort to make a reasonably good picture. But how good?

Surely, you will be able to tell the difference. Why don’t you give it a try?

Check out this quiz.

You might be a little disoriented that it’s on a German website and in German, but you can handle this. All you have to do, is choose whether you think the picture is Fake, or a Foto (that’s German for “photo,”; I bet you figured that out because you’re clever). After each result, you’ll see a percentage pop up. That is the percent of people who guessed right.

Why don’t you go check it out?

Seeing and believing

Assuming you tried out the quiz (and if you haven’t, go do it—it is pretty fun), consider the following. At the time I took the quiz, the collective accuracy of people was right around 64%. To put that into perspective, that’s not much better results than the same amount of people taking the test would get if they just guessed randomly without looking at the pictures at all!

Naturally, this image is from an AI image generator. The prompt that elicited it: guessing with a blindfold, cartoon.

The results of this quiz suggest there’s a very high likelihood you will see fake pictures generated by artificial intelligence and not be able to recognize they are fake!!

Charity

No, the sky is not falling

Life will go on. You don’t need to invest all your savings in gold and go live off-the grid to try to avoid the computer apocalypse (at least not yet, anyway 😊).

But, it is time for us to start the long, slow process of preparing ourselves for living in a world where fake pictures are indistinguishable from the real, at least much of the time. Since what we see has such a strong influence on what we believe to be true, it’s going to take some work on our parts to live in this brave new world.

One key plank in our preparations for this high-tech world is the decidedly ancient Christian practice of charity. Charity is the effort to believe the best about other people and to assume that they act with consistent intentions and in ways consistent with their character. Of course, this “believe the best about people” can be grossly abused. Often people prove that we should not believe the best about them. But charity is going to become increasingly necessary. After all, it has never been easier to make a compromising picture or clip of someone and weaponize it against them. All it takes is a bit of time on an AI image generator. Anyone can do it.

Practicing charity with pictures we see online will better prepare us to treat the real people in our lives with charity. Jesus modeled a way of treating others that held together justice and mercy—a pathway of charity. A big part of charity is to see people not just for what they are now, but for what they can become through God’s grace. If having to wade through AI generated pictures helps us train in charity, then it won’t be all bad.

Even if it will be unsettling, confusing, amusing, and a little bit scary.

And just for fun

Here is the response ChatGPT spit out when I asked it to summarize this blog post in two sentences:

The article discusses the prevalence of fake pictures created through artificial intelligence and highlights the challenge of distinguishing between real and fake images. It emphasizes the importance of practicing charity in the digital age, as the ability to believe the best about others and treat them with grace becomes increasingly necessary in a world where manipulated images can be used to harm individuals.

Not bad. Although it feels funny to me to cite AI-generated text in a quote.

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11 Cries of the soul from the book of Psalms

The writer Christian Wiman artistically captures one of the central dynamics of the book of Psalms, saying:

“Abundance and destitution are two facets of the one face of God, and to be spiritually alive in the fullest sense is to recall one when we are standing squarely in the midst of the other.”

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, 112

Journeying through the book of Psalms brings you through (1) seasons where everything is well in the world, (2) seasons where nothing is well, and (3) the time of emerging from seasons of distress into new seasons of joy. One reason why Psalms is so powerful is that not only does it speak to the seasons of life, but it speaks through them as well. That is, it teaches our souls how to cry out to God in all of life. Psalms emerges from the place of God’s people wrestling to know God and the result is more than just a bunch of poems. The psalms give a voice to the heart and teach the soul how to sing.

The journey

Our 11 weeks in the book of Psalms takes us only through a small portion of the wealth of the 150 different psalms found there.

But these 11 psalms capture some of the key ways that Psalms aims to shape our souls. And that is really important. Psalms is not in the Bible just to be neat poetry; rather, it is there to shape our souls so that they walk with and cry to God in tune with him.

Here are 11 ways your soul should cry out to God:

  1. Psalms 1-2: sing the song of blessed submission as you learn blessedness through submission to Torah (God’s word) and Messiah (God’s Anointed rescuer and ruler)
  2. Psalm 8: cry out God’s majesty as a director of the world in praising God
  3. Psalm 145: cry out with thankfulness for God’s robust and complex goodness in this world
  4. Psalm 86: praise God in the midst of the storms of life
  5. Psalm 88: learn to lament (it is worship, too)
  6. Psalm 79: cry out against brokenness with passion for God’s saving and judging acts
  7. Psalm 109: cry out in your anger toward God to find the stability and peace to speak in love towards your neighbor
  8. Psalm 23: praise God for the settled peace of being his—in the darkest valley or at the exalted banquet table
  9. Psalm 117: cry out the praises of God with such brilliance that others see his steadfast love is beautiful
  10. Psalm 136: worship God for the simple and life-alter reality: his enduring love is the greatest thing EVER
  11. Psalm 150: cry out to God because “Praise God” is the point of life

Leaving the Psalms

This brief sermon series in the book of Psalms barely touches at the riches therein. There is much more to learn.

Crying comes naturally to a baby. The baby feels a need and cries out over it. Crying at this basic, instinctual level is useful. But it is a crude and limited form of communication. As the baby grows up, crying in this instinctual way becomes more and more a limitation rather than a help. The child needs a more robust way of communicating the needs and desires of the soul.

In a similar way, crying out to God comes naturally to his children. But our instinctual cries stand in need of honing, shaping, and maturing as we come to better know God, his intentions, and this world he has created. Mine the Psalms. Meditate on the Psalms. More so than any other place in Scripture, here your soul is schooled in crying out to God in all of life. 

Check out guidance here from Dr. Donald Whitney on praying the psalms and praying the Bible. This is life-changing guidance on prayer!

Shape it well through long years of steady observance and practice.

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Adversaries and anger

young man yelling into pay phone

In Psalm 79 and 109 we see the psalmist crying out in anger against adversaries. Parts of each of these psalms sound pretty harsh. But they do address an important part of life: the reality of adversaries. We all have adversaries of some sort at points in our lives. The book of Psalms, wonderful for so many reasons, gives us guidance on how our hearts should move towards God and others when we are angry because of difficult people and difficult situations in life.

Responding to adversaries in difficulty

Adversaries come in many shapes and sizes. We can consider people bringing difficulties into life as “adversaries.” Maybe, like the psalmists, your adversaries are people scheming about how to kill you. More likely, they are people plotting your downfall at work, a family member who always manages to create chaos whenever they show up, a class bully, or a medical provider who doesn’t take you seriously. The list of possible adversaries is nearly endless. They all share in common the ability to elicit anger as they bring difficulties into life.

There are many ways we can respond to difficult people and difficult situations in life. Here are four ways we can respond to adversaries and the anger they inspire in life: (1) dreaming, (2) scheming, (3) bearing, and (4) moving.

dreaming

By dreaming I mean the sort of wishful hoping for the downfall of your adversary. Maybe you silently wish your coworker would get fired; or that your obnoxious neighbor will get caught violating the city rules and be forced to change their ways. Whatever it be, dreaming involves a sort of curse: “I hope you choke.”

scheming

If dreaming is wishing for the downfall of your adversary, scheming takes it one step further. Here you are actively planning how to bring about the shame and/or downfall of those who have hurt you.

Scheming may take the form of passing around juicy stories—whether true or false—with the aim of exposing your adversary to ridicule. Or, in a more extreme form, scheming can involve creating traps that directly threaten the life and well-being of an adversary: political, financial, relational.

Scheming can feel good because it is taking initiative and using our power to fix the situation.

bearing

Often, the adversaries of our lives will pass by, if we are content to wait for a time. And if you are prone towards stubbornness, waiting emerges as an obvious approach to conflict. Bearing allows you to deal with your adversaries by not dealing with them. You may bear with your adversaries and the anger and frustration they bring into life because you are strong and can take it; you may bear with them because you feel like you deserve the difficulties they bring into your life. Whatever the reason, bearing concludes that it is better to put up with injustice than to try to do anything about it.

moving

Another possible response to adversaries is to move. That is, moving towards God. Moving involves turning toward God in prayer about our adversaries, driven by the anger and frustration they cause within us. This is, I submit, the basic posture which Psalm 79 and 109 recommend in dealing with adversaries. Moving toward God in prayer while angry is an exercise in expressing ourselves towards God rather than towards our neighbor.

Responding by moving toward God in prayer differs in a couple key ways from the other responses above. It acknowledges that God is ultimately in charge of justice, it acknowledges that my resources for dealing with difficulties and difficult people are very limited, and it also acknowledges that anger is not a wrong part of how we function. Anger should drive us toward God, who is big enough to hear our anger, strong enough to bear it, and wise enough to patiently redirect our anger where it should be, rather than leave it in the misplaced directions we so often vent our anger in.

Conclusion

Life is full of adversaries. Most are small and passing; some are big and lasting. People and situations in life lead us again and again into anger by bringing difficulties and frustrations into life. The question is not, “Will you get angry?” but rather, “How will your anger play out?”

As adversity moves into your life, where does anger lead you? If it does not lead you to God in prayer, than your anger will certainly emerge as a force of destruction to you and to others. The Psalms guide us not only in how to praise God, but in how to respond in our anger towards adversaries in our lives: by moving towards God in prayer.

Photo by Alexandra Mirgheș on Unsplash