“How long, O Lord, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?”
That’s Engels quoting the souls of the martyrs slain for the word of God who cry out with a loud voice saying: “How long, O Lord?”
And this is what Engels hears in the response they’re given; to rest for a little while yet, for more martyrs must be slain:
“So here it is not yet a question of a ‘religion of love,’ of ‘love your enemies, bless them that curse you, etc.’ Here undiluted revenge is preached, sound, honest revenge on the persecutors of the Christians. So, it is in the whole of the book.”
Engels seems to get lost in the scholarship, but, to my eyes, that’s the heart of what he sees as the revolutionary potential in “Christianity in its undeveloped form.” This was the “party of overthrow, which was known by the name of Christians.” This was the movement that “undermined religion and all the foundations of the state; it flatly denied that Caesar’s will was the supreme law; it was without a fatherland, was international; it spread over the whole empire, from Gaul to Asia, and beyond the frontiers of the empire.”
To Engels, all of that was lost when Christianity became a “religion of love.” A religion of appeasers. A religion of the status-quo.
The relationship of Engels to Christianity is a fascinating story. As Roland Boer puts it, “he could both castigate it for being thoroughly reactionary and argue for its deep-seated revolutionary tendencies.”
It’s a push and pull that reflects his own upbringing. He was “born and baptised into a sincere and devout Reformed (Calvinist) family,” and throughout his life, “he would maintain his interest in the Bible, commenting to Marx from time to time on debates, new developments, the latest book he had read” on the subject despite their shared atheism.
In fact, the last thing Engels wrote before he died in August 1895 was ‘On the History of Early Christianity,’ a text that, according to Boer, “had been on his mind for almost fifty years.”
It’s a disjointed piece; in the first half, “he argued that Christianity was revolutionary, that its followers came from among the oppressed and downtrodden classes, that it faced insurmountable problems, that the socialist movement might learn a lesson or two, that it simultaneously overturned the ancient world and offered an other-worldly redemption while doing so.” Then he spends the rest of the article talking about the Book of Revelation:
“The biblical book becomes a historical window into earliest Christianity, without the usual beliefs and structures with which we have become familiar. It presents a group of Jews (not Christians) who believed the end would come soon. There is no Trinity, for Jesus is subordinate to God, and certainly no Holy Spirit. There is no doctrine of original sin, no baptism or sacrament of communion, no justification by faith, no elaborate story of the death and resurrection of Christ, and no religion of love. This position would become the basis for Engels’s argument concerning the revolutionary origins of Christianity.” (Roland Boer)
These are strange but fascinating theological moves that, at first glance, don’t make total sense to both Christians and non-Christians. Stripping the faith of all these layers, what was he trying to find, exactly?
Revenge. Undiluted revenge
I don’t fault Engels for his conclusions. Who would not hate a “love” like that? A “love” like that deserves a hammer, just like Mao said of his kind of communism. A hammer to crush our enemies.
But we all know that anger is not enough. We all saw that line by Che making the rounds the other day too: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
What kind of love? A love that refuses to be consoled. A love that shouts out to the heavens: “How long, O Lord?”
How long?
Not long.
For what you reap,
is what you sow.