And what exactly are ’socialist motives’? You mean live feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and having all things common in a community so that everyone is equal?

Now, Joel did not say this directly, but what he is implying in this statement is that socialism or communism is the practice of the early Church as described in the Bible–that the feeding of the hungry, the healing of the sick, and the sharing described in the book of Acts are all socialist practices, opposed to the workings of the free market and private property rights.

Now, you may know if you’ve read much here that I am very much an advocate of free markets.  But I want to, at the outset, make clear the fact that I am pro-feeding the hungry, pro-healing the sick, and pro-sharing of resources.  But all this does not make me a socialist.  Socialism as the word is used today refers to the use of governmental powers to force people to share resources.  And it is this that I object to.

So let’s skip straight to Acts and see if the passage Joel is referring to actually has any relation to socialism.

And all who believed were together, and had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and distributed them to all men, as every man had need.  And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, ate their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God, and having favour with all the people.  (Acts 2:44-47.)

At first glance, this description might look like socialism.  But a knowledge of early Church history will reveal at least one crucial difference:  no governmental enforcement.  Indeed, the sharing of resources voluntarily is entirely consistent with free-market economics.  The Church, in the book of Acts, was an institution of those who chose to join it, regulated according to voluntary decisions and completely separate from the actions of the state.

Nor was cooperation with the sharing of the early Church in any way coerced.  The story of Ananias and Sapphira makes this utterly clear.  Rather than retell the whole story, here’s just six verses (Acts 5:1-6):

But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possesion, and kept back part of the price (his wife also was in on this) and brought part of the proceeds and laid it at the apostles’ feet.  But Peter said, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and keep back part of the proceeds from the land?  While it remained, it was yours, wasn’t it?  And after the sale, was it not still under your control?  Why have you conceived this thing in your heart?  You have lied not to men, but to God.  And as Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last.  And great fear came upon all who heard these things.  And the young men got up, wrapped him in cloth, carried him out, and buried him.

Notice that Peter was upset over the fact that Ananias lied.  You have lied not to men, but to God, says Peter.  And it’s not as though you had to do this to protect your stuff.  It was your land, for Pete’s sake.  And even after you sold it, you were free to do whatever you wanted with it.  So why lie about it?  Why pretend you’re giving more than you are?  You’re lying about your personal choice is unnacceptable.  And for this Ananias died.

And so despite the widespread sharing going on in the Church, even such a leader of distribution as Peter himself implicitly recognized the validity of personal property.  Even though people were being given what they needed, Joel is wrong about the reason.  His comment asserts that this distribution is being done “so that everyone is equal.”  The distribution was being done to relieve genuine need, not to make everyone equal.

Indeed, Paul later spells out in more detail policy on distribution to widows, revealing that he has a strict notion of who should and who should not receive from the common purse.  His policies outline the fact that as Paul saw it, the norm was to produce one’s own sustenance, with only exceptional cases granted monies outside of what they produced (1 Timothy 5):

Don’t let a widow be enrolled if she is under sixty years old, having been the wife of one man, with a good reputation for good words;  if she has brought up children, if she has taken in stranger, if she has washed the saints’ feet, if she has given relief to the affliction, if she has diligently followed every good work.  But refuse the younger widows . . .

Monetary redistribution for Paul is something exceptional;  not a means to creating a world of forced equality as some would imagine.  And remember how the early Church in Jerusalem was conducting a utopian common-purse system?  To see how that turned we can find a hint in Romans 15:25-26

But now I’m going to Jerusalem to minister to the saints.  For it has pleased those from Mecedonia and Achaia to make a certain contribution for the poor saints who are at Jerusalem.

For some reason or another, the total sharing movement of Jerusalem failed to provide any sort of long-term relief for the poor believers.  This is to be expected, however, because any system that relies on the continued selling off of property cannot provide stability.

And so in conclusion, the record of the New Testament is this:  there did exist, for a while, an incredible level of sharing of resources in Jerusalem about 30 A.D.  This project, for reasons we are not given, failed in the end, leaving the Jerusalem church impoverished and in need of outside assistance by sometime between 50 and 60 A.D.  Even amidst the massive sharing experiment of the early Jerusalem Church, Peter still recognized the validity of personal control of property.  And after the collapse of the sharing experiment, Paul’s letters leave for us a set of instructions confirming that his intent was for the mass of believers to be personally responsible for their own expenses, with only a very small minority being the recipients of the Church’s common property.

And so it looks to me like the New Testament record is fully compatible with a free market system, and there exists no demand anywhere in the New Testament for the abolition of the free market or personal property rights.  On the contrary, property is repeatedly upheld in the Bible.

Let’s look at what Jesus and Peter say to each other. Jesus has been asking his disciples about the various theories as to who he is:

¹⁵He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”

¹⁶And Simon Peter answered and said, “you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

¹⁷And Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but my Father who is in heaven. ¹⁸And I say also to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. ¹⁹And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

Regardless of whether you think Jesus was setting Peter up as Pope, setting him up as a leader of the apostles, or not even giving Peter any leadership at all, there is no doubt that Peter’s having a good day here. All is well, Peter is on top of the world, and I’m sure he feels like even the gates of hell cannot prevail against him. But what happens next is most curious:

²⁰Then he commanded his disciples not to tell anyone that he was Jesus the Christ. ²¹From that time on Jesus began to show his disciples how he must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again on the third day.

Now, Peter was having such a good day. Why did Jesus have to start ruining things by talking about death? He was, after all, the living Son of the living God. Surely God would not let his own son die.

²²Then Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord! This will not happen to you.”

²³But he turned, and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an offence to me, for you do not keep your mind on the the things of God, but the things of men.”

Oops! I’m sure Peter had good intentions. Probably he just thought the Son of God was getting a little too gloomy and needed a little verbal encouragement. But if we try to read between the lines of what’s going on here, I think that what Peter just did, however accidentally, was to contradict his own previous statement.

Earlier, Peter said that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. But if he is, we have to believe what he says. And that’s what Peter is learning here. We step out of bounds whenever we try to tell God how things are supposed to be; whenever we, however well-intentioned, try to correct him. And Jesus found that point so important that he was willing to use the word “Satan,” that old Hebrew word meaning “Enemy,” to describe Peter when overstepped his place as a disciple.

May we all know our places as disciples, in service of a God who doesn’t always seem to make complete sense to us. And a God who, even when we wind up wrong, always lets us come back to him. Amen.