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July 21, 2019 |
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I spent almost 2 years in a very liberal church in a somewhat liberal denomination. When I joined the church, the liberalism was almost unnoticeable. You had to look for it to see it, and I wasn't looking for it. I had come from a series of conservative churches, as most are, or at least were. I guess I expected liberal churches to have flashing lights or signs or something.1
Even so, it wasn't long before I began to notice the signs. Unknown to me, the denomination had been slowly moving left for a long time, possibly decades. As I joined, the denomination was about to quicken the pace. That became visible at the church level about a year later.
Then, suddenly, the pastor of my church dropped all pretenses of being a centrist and his sermons took a hard left turn. It was time to leave.
This study is about liberal churches, but really it is about the liberal worldview, the imposition of a Christian worldview on top of it, and the church that is created from that. Most Christians have heard stories about "crazy" liberal churches. In this study we'll see how they result.
As Christians we believe there is a universal "God" worldview within every person. This "sense of God" or conscience provides us with a knowledge of God, a knowledge that there is a better world, and a knowledge of what is right. We know, however, that this is easily over-ridden. Even so it tends to pop-up and we'll see that as we go deeper.
This study begins with the natural liberal worldview, which is without any influence from the God or Christian worldview. Later we'll look at what happens when a person with that natural liberal worldview imposes a Christian worldview onto it.
The foundation for understanding the natural liberal worldview will be a survey done by John Haidt, social psychologist and professor at NYU. The results of this survey are going to help us understand the differences between the two worldviews.
The key factor in that survey is "openness to experience." This factor alone separates liberals from conservatives. Liberals tend to be open to new experiences and even crave change. Conservatives on the other hand view some experiences as good, some as pointless, and some as evil. Because it is difficult to know which are which in advance, they are slow to engage in them.
The results of thousands of respondents [to the survey] provides clear evidence for a divergence of importance placed on these five foundations of morality. Liberals value - Harm/Care high, then Fairness/Reciprocity, then a big drop to Authority/Respect and In-group/Loyalty, then least Purity/Sanctity. Conservatives value - Harm/Care lower than liberals but place it at the top of their lists as well. Authority is a close second followed closely by In-group/Loyalty, and Purity/Sanctity, with Fairness/Reciprocity at the bottom. (http://www.ethicsdefined.org/the-problem-with-morality/conservatives-vs-liberals/)
It's worth noting that cultural differences cause only a small amount of shifting in this graph; the essence of it remains the same.
The value of this survey is that it shows this conservative - liberal measuring line is directly linked to moral foundations. Generally, a person's moral foundation can be known from where that person sits on the conservative - liberal line.
While conservatives value all five of these foundations of morality about equally, liberals value two of them much more than the others. The two that are valued higher come as no surprise to any student of politics. It even explains very much.
From a conservative point of view liberals seem impulsive, and are driven by goals that have little value. This is because conservatives weigh the factors according to a conservative worldview and come to different decisions.
From a conservative point of view liberals have no interest in seeing if they are reaching their goals, and frequently leave behind a trail of destruction.
Two recent examples of these are: wind power generation farms that slaughter large numbers of birds, and men who claim they are women are destroying women's sport competitions.
From a liberal point of view, conservatives are uncaring and reject the changes that would make for a fairer world.
These moral foundations will allow us to understand how liberals think and why they do what they do. Some of these connections will be obvious. For example, liberals are all about safety (physical, financial, or other). This comes from their high value for minimizing harm.
Some of these connections are going to be key as we go along. The graph shows liberals score significantly lower in Authority/Respect, In-group/Loyalty, and Purity/Sanctity but much higher in desire for change. This results in a person whose worldview is seriously tilted away from God. This is underscored by a love for change when God does not change and is our model.
The gap between these moral values and Harm/Care causes a similar problem. A liberal worldview attaches little value to the concept of justice. Any significant punishment (Harm) is seen as increasing harm with little justice, and therefore cruel. When breaking laws (Authority, Loyalty, and Purity) is seen as not very important, justice cannot exist. Justice takes on a relative and unsatisfactory nature. A vicious evil done to one liberal may leave that person seeking for real justice, but unaffected liberals will not see it being worthy of significant punishment.
This also relates to their concept of god. They see the God of the Bible slaying people and eternally tormenting them in the afterlife, therefore God is seen as unjust. This is why there are very few liberals that are truly Christians or Jews.
In the place of real justice, the liberal wants Social Justice, which is actually fairness masquerading as justice. While natural justice is sometimes flawed, Social Justice is undefined, arbitrary, and therefore unjust.
The gap between these moral values and Fairness/Reciprocity also causes a problem. A liberal worldview struggles with guilt. If a liberal has anything more than another person has, this is experienced as guilt. It has even been given a label, White Liberal Guilt. This guilt can result in giving away things or on the other side, self-loathing or a loathing of one's society.
Liberals are all about social issues, socialism, a better society, collectivism, etc. They also tend to picture conservatives as individualistic. At first that seems odd when the graph shows liberals have so little value for being in a group and being loyal to a group.
It makes perfect sense though, when understood. The liberal social endeavors are not driven by a desire to be in a group. Instead it comes from Harm / Care. A social group is created for the betterment of a group of people.
An important connection between these moral foundations and the actions of liberals that is not obvious is the liberal view that all people are inherently good but outside forces cause them to do evil sometimes. Conservatives view people as having an evil nature that they overcome to different degrees.
This "inherently good" idea appears to evolve from a strong concern for the harm and fair treatment of others and little concern for anything else. In that way of thinking all people are seen as equally of value. Because "all people" includes the viewer, his view of himself as a pretty good person translates onto all people.
Without an external standard for "good" each person tends to believe that he is basically a good person.
This view of all people as equally of value leads liberals to an internationalist view of life, many peoples in many places with many different lifestyles but all being equally and inherently good. Conservatives do not believe people are equally good. Instead they tend toward a nationalist view which is essentially "the more that people are like me, the more they can be trusted."
The Liberal worldview contains some premises that are driven by worldviews:
This shows an important difference in the liberal worldview - the idea that man can create something good and just, something that can be trusted. The conservative view, however, sees man as doing evil, and the more men, the more and greater evil they do.
Seeing this we can restate the two world views as true opposites, man-made-social-structures-are-good versus man-made-social-structures-are-evil.
man-made-social-structures-are-good is conflated into man-made-social-structures-are-god
The idea behind Utopian Socialism is that there is a better society possible. For worldly liberals that utopia is Socialism. We only need to look at John Lennon's song Imagine to see it described. More than that, Utopian Socialism is the drive to achieve that utopia, whatever the cost. Despite the fact that every attempt to create that utopia has resulted in brutal totalitarianism, liberals believe it still exists and is attainable.
Past failures to achieve utopias has added a connotation to the word. Utopia has come to imply imaginary, impossible, or unrealistic.
An unexpected tertiary effect emerges from the liberal worldview and the secondary effect of Utopianism that comes from that worldview. The strong desire to achieve that utopia runs into skepticism, if not mocking. Because of the absolute belief in the rightness of the goal, instead of the liberal giving up, he goes underground. He thinks of his detractors as being unenlightened and unable to understand the greatness of his goal. He begins working toward that goal surreptitiously through manipulation of people and events, using every opportunity to move it forward. He teams with other like-minded people.
A time comes when they believe they have achieved the goal and their work cannot be undone. Then they unmask themselves, at least in respect to that particular effort.
History has shown that liberals are poor judges of when that moment has been reached. Partly due to bad judgment but also because they believe it is such a wonderful goal, they often expose themselves too soon. Sometimes there is one person who didn't get the memo and speaks too soon. That person is quickly pounded into silence and his words are papered over with lies. But those who were listening, heard.
This distrust of the goodness of others can lead to individualism. That doesn't really make any sense though. If all people are viewed as inherently evil, then that must include the viewer. How can a person trust himself not to do evil? The best that can be said is that he alone must live with the consequences of his evil.
Still, some conservatives are individualistic. The conservative worldview, however, is bounded by the inherent social nature of mankind and by the nature of the universe. There are some people who have less desire to be with other people, but most people enjoy the company of others, at least to some extent.
It is also bounded by practicality. The world is a very hostile place for a person who tries to go-it-alone. The smallest mistake or change of weather can bring death. The social nature of man and the nature of nature always pull the individualistic person back into social structures. The net effect is that conservatives desire a minimum of social structures.
The liberal worldview is not bounded. It naturally leads to a one world social structure. There is no nature that conflicts with that. It is only limited by practical limitations such as dissidents and the ability to exercise command and control over distance. In the communication age we live in now, that limitation only constrains us to this solar system.
When Liberals act to improve the world they are absolutely certain that what they are doing will make things better, even when the course they plan has never been tried before and despite warnings that it cannot work. This certainty of success drives out any desire to fully evaluate the plan and especially to consider views from outside their circle. This certainty is a central characteristic of Liberalism.
The major steps are: complete the course, declare it a success, and move on. It's as though the act of doing something is more important than the something. This gives the strong appearance that the thing being done is really for the benefit of the doer. The common observation is that the course was done to abate "white liberal guilt" as though the course was done to ease the conscience of the doer.
Once something has been completed, no matter how badly it has failed, it can never be taken down. That makes sense, given the idea that it was done for penance and not to benefit others.
Liberals do not like to hear negative ideas. They prefer to express everything in nice sounding positive terms. ones that contradict
Once the course is complete, the certainty that it will work is such that there is never a serious effort to check.
The idea that man can create social structures that are good, leads to some key goals of liberalism, growth and improvement. Whether a social structure needs to expand due to population growth, geographic expansion, or perceived failures of the current social structure, these lead to change. This is not just change but the expectation that social structures must change. This spreads into all aspects of life and becomes a belief that all things must change. This leads to the idea that there are no absolutes.
This alone argues against absolute truth, but there is more. Change naturally means that the previous form was not perfect - which was likely the opposite of the claim when it was instituted. This leads to doubt that any social structure can be perfect. That thought cannot be allowed though because it conflicts with the basic premise that man can create a social structure that is good. This kind of doubt could lead people to reject the social structures. Therefore the social structures must be treated as perfect and declared flawless, every one of them. That is obviously a lie and thus a strike against truth. This also often leads to revisionism.
Years of failure seem to have left the liberal worldview with a belief that social structures are needed to control the evil impulses of people. This produces social structures with governance. Only the die-hard Marxists still believe in social structures that function without a governing authority. This view of controlling evil impulses leads to elitism, the belief that some people are above those impulses and can be trusted to control the others.
This comes from an idea within liberalism that mankind is basically good, with some better than others.
The liberal view naturally tends to view the world in a collectivist way - everything is a top down social structure or a group of top down social structures.
Liberals are all about social issues, socialism, a better society, collectivism, etc. They also tend to picture conservatives as individualistic. At first that seems odd when the graph shows liberals have so little value for being in a group and being loyal to a group.
It makes perfect sense though, when understood. The liberal social endeavors are not driven by a desire to be in a group. Instead it comes from Harm / Care. A social group is created for the betterment of a group of people.
For conservatives, social groups form organically, from a desire to be with people who have the same interests, backgrounds, or whatever. They also easily develop a loyalty to these groups.
For liberals, a social group or a collective is created by someone (often from an authority), based on the characteristics of people to organize people for the betterment of those people.
For liberals, with their low affinity for authority and being in a group, what keeps them in a group is the purpose of the group. When they are aligned with that, they will stay. In Communist countries, the leaders commonly appeal to "do it for the state", for a greater good. This has little appeal for conservatives. Most of the purposes or motivations for a collective make little sense to a conservative.
Liberals therefore use "individualistic" to refer to people who have no interest in their collectives. These people prefer to create their own groups.
Liberals in the church have the same worldview as liberals in the world. That may seem hard to believe because one of the liberal worldview's main tenets is that government is god. From this worldview, liberals in the world derive policies, or at least statements, that are anti-god and government-worshiping. From these come causes, such as pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality, sexual freedom and others that are clearly not Biblical.
The liberal in the church handles this by overriding his natural worldview with the Biblical worldview at the points he sees as conflicts. This leaves him constantly in a tension in those conflict areas, drawn to the natural liberal worldview but also drawn to God's worldview. It also results in the line between the two being drawn differently by each person and therefore there cannot be an absolute definition of right and wrong.
It might be said that the conservative does the same overriding of the conservative worldview and to an extent that is true. The conservative worldview does not align perfectly with the Christian worldview either. Some might say that the conservative worldview is that the individual is god. That appears to make sense if one is expecting the opposite view from liberalism to have the opposite pole from government-is-god. It isn't true though. The strongest Bible-based Christians are conservatives. A close look at a liberal Christian reveals a god the Bible does not describe, an all-loving, non-violent god who wouldn't harm anyone
We discussed how the gap between the two sets of moral values causes problems for a liberal worldview. The God-commanded slaughters in the Old Testament and the eternal punishment of the New Testament appear excessive and therefore unjust. Any gift from God that another person does not have results in guilt.
This conflict results in very few liberal Christians and causes those few to twist the Bible to make it work for them. Of course the person doesn't consciously think of it as twisting scripture. Instead it would be thought of as applying the "correct" interpretation to the Bible … the one that no conservative has ever come to understand.
In that interpretation the eternal punishment either becomes momentary or ultimately a restoration. The Old Testament slaughters are left as incomprehensible or become the work of Moses, not God.
This focus on physical Harm/Care and Fairness in the world has an unexpected effect. The focus of the liberal Christian becomes so set on worldly matters, that spiritual matters become much less important. Things like discipling and spiritual growth suffer.
When we hear of pastors and musicians leaving the church and abandoning God, if a reason is given, it is that they just couldn't accept a God who would do these things that they perceive as evil.
In the church, the Liberal worldview affects many other areas in Christian beliefs and practices. This God doesn't care so much, if at all, about things like obedience to his laws. Instead this God really cares about causing harm to others and treating others fairly - much like Liberals believe. This God also really likes big churches, with a worldwide church being ideal.
There are many conservative churches, each of which has small differences in doctrine. Therefore it's natural to think of liberal churches as also being different in a few places. That misunderstands the source of their differences. They don't come from a different interpretation of some Bible passages. They come from a different worldview, an entirely different foundation for interpreting the Bible.
While their doctrine may appear similar, but when closely inspected, many, many very small differences begin to show up. Some of these are differences in emphasis or in the meaning given to words. After studying these for a while it becomes obvious that the foundation is different.
Doctrine takes a double hit from this. Liberals, generally, do not like to be confined by rules and they also view rules as interfering with their goals of growing a large church. Together, and when mixed with some time, these always result in a church that slowly moves away from doctrine, with the endpoint being a church where each person believes whatever they want to believe.
A progressive spiritual community where how you live is more important than what you believe3.
In 2003, when we gathered together to begin writing a statement of faith, we experienced first-hand what statements of belief do. In the same moment that they identify a group, they separate it from others, i.e., beliefs divide people into those who belong and those who don't, those on the inside and those on the outside. We discovered that we would rather create a document articulating how we wanted to live. We felt it reflected an aspect of our Christian roots in the early communities who shared what they had and became known for how they loved4.
These quotes sound very nice but they smooth over the truth that God's word is not the basis for their lives. They determine what is good. If they look to the Bible at all, they pick what they want from it and throw the rest away.
It's necessary to note that these quotes come from a church that is pastored by a woman who claims to be an atheist.
It can't be emphasized too much how the combination of concern for others, a strong love of change, and a low value for universal truths, quickly results in a rejection of God's word and therefore God.
The Bible, and especially the Old Testament, does not paint God as the all-loving God that Liberals want. Conservatives have no problem understanding a God who is both a God of love and of justice. But for a Liberal, this is intolerable.
In the book, Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament's Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Gregory Boyd), the Liberal author twists the whole Old Testament inside out in an effort to eliminate the idea of a violent God. He rejects the idea that the Torah, and other books, are the word of God. His basis for this is not textual but is entirely based on his need for a nice god. Here are comments from different book reviewers.
Boyd argues that such "violent" injunctions come from the "textual" God of the misguided ancient Near Eastern biblical author with his fallen, violence-prone worldview ("thus says Moses/Joshua"). These aren't instances of "thus says the Lord" - the "actual" God whom Jesus represents. Boyd's "cruciform" hermeneutic emphasizes how the character of God is displayed in the power-surrendering, non-violent, self-giving Christ on the cross. If this is what God is really like, then we must rethink how we view violent OT texts - and even certain New Testament (NT) passages. - Paul Copan
Given Boyd's thesis, we should ask: Where does the NT give the impression that Moses is so utterly and even demonically misguided that he leads the Israelites into immoral bloodletting in the name of Yahweh? - Paul Copan
Boyd's driving motivation […] is to establish [that] the fallen condition of the people God revealed himself to led him to accommodate to them in such a manner in that he allowed them to project onto himself a wrong conception of "God as a warrior." They placed a mask of ugliness on him, depicting Yahweh as a "god who fights," covering up the true God - the crucified God in Christ - the non-violent, enemy embracing, self-sacrificial God of the Bible. - Tavis Bohlinger
"All my life I've tried to believe God was as beautiful as Jesus reveals him to be … but I never could fully give my heart to him. I love the God who gave everything for us while we were yet enemies, but I can't love the God who ever demanded that people mercilessly massacre untold numbers of innocent babies."
So a woman confessed to Greg Boyd after one of his sermons. She was in her mid-sixties, confiding a spiritual struggle of decades. Tearfully she told him that "today you helped me see that I don't need to believe God ever ordered babies to be massacred! I can finally let myself believe God really is as beautiful as the cross reveals him to be! I can finally trust God with my entire heart!" - Collin Cornell
When he brings up Deuteronomy, it is only as a purveyor of genocide. Leviticus is a list of capital offenses. Numbers is a theological fossil preserving the archaic belief that God enjoys the smell of burnt offerings. These claims are not wholly wrong so much as drastically reductive. [Instead,] Deuteronomy is a sustained meditation on God's grace and the joy of grateful human life. Leviticus and the priestly writings are, in the words of Jewish Theological Seminary professor Benjamin Sommer, "the most Christian section of Hebrew Scripture" in view of their preoccupation with God's initiative to overcome sin and dwell among humans. Numbers is the book of spiritual journeying par excellence. Boyd omits all of this because he treats these books and the Old Testament at large as an almost unrelenting train of horrors - a massacre of babes, as in the woman's summary. - Collin Cornell
It should be apparent from these quotes how necessary it is for God to meet the Liberal standard. In forcing him into their mold they create their own god, not so different from the Mormon god or the Muslim God. Just as Mormons and Muslims insist it is the same god, so do Liberals - but it plainly isn't.
Professor Haidt did what science requires in designing his study. As part of that he derived 5 foundations of morality as he had seen them expressed in society.
Even a quick glance at the data shows that those 5 can be easily grouped into 2. The challenge would only be in finding a way to name and describe the unified groups.
For Christians, who believe that God's law is impressed on everyone, that isn't difficult. The Bible gives us the descriptions.
"Teacher, which commandment in the Law is the greatest?" 37 Yeshua said to him, "You shall love the lord Yahweh your God from all your heart and from all your soul and from all your power and from all your mind. 38 This is the great and the first commandment 39 and the second which is like it is, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' (Matthew 22:36-39)
Turning back to the topic of liberals in the churches, we see the same effects. Goals such as inclusiveness and non-judgementalism overwhelm all else. Biblical teaching is trampled in the rush to reach the goals.
The liberal worldview clashes with the Biblical worldview at its very foundations - the ideas that change is desirable, absolute truth is impossible and that man can create something good are not Biblical. The conservative view sees God as unchanging, God being the source of absolute truth and man as incapable of good. This aligns with the Bible better than the Liberal worldview.
Next we'll look at the some examples of the kinds of doctrinal changes that result from a decline into Liberalism. Because these changes happen over time, not all Liberal churches will show all or many of them.
Although the Bible speaks plainly about some things being sins, the Liberal worldview can't help but syncretize Liberal beliefs from the world. That may seem like an impossibility but it is done primarily by declaring the words of the Bible as relating only to a past time. Therefore, in this more enlightened age, a Liberal church can still champion a cause such as homosexuality.
Generally this treatment is related to specific topics, but sometimes a particular book contains so many of these, or a particular author, such as Paul, so frequently casts them in a negative light that is is necessary to remove the book or author from the reading list.
This is done individually. The Liberal church is about nothing so much as everyone doing what he feels is right. So some individuals will remove every book Paul wrote; others will be more selective.
In the very early stages of the decline process most doctrinal changes come by re-interpreting what the Bible says. This is sufficient to deal with small doctrinal changes. This is done in many ways; the ingenuity of the Liberal mind for twisting scripture cannot be fathomed. Even the most illogical reasoning is acceptable because people were only looking for a bridge to get them where they wanted to be.
A little later in the decline process it's necessary to deal with the question this raises about the authority of scripture. A Conservative church will believe that every word of scripture was inspired by the Holy Spirit. A Liberal church must change this view so the Holy Spirit inspires the author to write whatever the author wants.
At some point doctrine no longer matters. Either it becomes a "don't ask, don't tell, don't teach" or no one cares about doctrine because it has the same significance as genealogy - small talk.
There is no greater sin in a Liberal Church than legalism. Here as well they've changed the definition. Legalism, as far as church usage goes, means "believing that salvation comes by obeying the law." This is a false definition. It is also a very rare belief. The Liberal meaning is more like "obeying the law more than I do."
The Liberal worldview and its focus on not harming people also affects the after-life. The idea of eternal suffering is just not acceptable to them.
Despite the Bible being very clear about it, Liberals twist the words around. One result is Annihilationism or a close variant of that idea. In this fantasy, the soul of unrepentant sinners instantly, and painlessly, cease to exist.
This is usually accompanied by some idea that says souls in the intermediate state do not suffer. Either they are unconscious, they zip through (or bypass) time and arrive at the end, or something else.
The result of these two is that the souls of sinners do not suffer in the intermediate state, then, on Judgment Day, God tells them they were bad and they are annihilated painlessly. You can be forgiven for thinking this doesn't sound at all like what the Bible describes about the consequences of living a sinful life.
A Liberal will respond to this criticism by telling you the torment of the unbelievers will be to know how horrible it will be to be annihilated.
An alternative to soul sleep and annihilation is the idea that, in the end, everyone will be saved. The foundation is the same as above - God just loves us too much to let us suffer. So, by various methods, the souls of all sinners will be saved. The methods range from working off the sins to an unmerited pardon.
Collective salvation is the religious belief that members of a group collectively influence the salvation of the group to which they belong — Wikipedia
Collective Salvation fits well with the Liberal view of mankind as a collective. Collectivism, by itself, measures the value of the individual by what he adds to the groups to which he belongs. The individual has little or no intrinsic value.
Collective Salvation takes collectivism into the spiritual realm, where salvation is only possible if everyone is saved. This has an obvious tie-in to Universalism, which believes everyone will be saved.
We discussed Utopianism and the worldly liberal previously. The following thought-process steps are reproduced from that.
For liberal Christians the Utopia is not Socialism. It is a little different. You might think it would be the millennial period that begins when Jesus returns to rule. Somewhat surprisingly, it is still a man-made Utopia.
In Christianity this Utopianism can be seen as an interpretation of the Bible as instruction to create a Christian Utopia - a perfect world where everyone is a follower of Christ. It is also an eschatology (end-times view) a belief that a time will come when the church will convert most of the people of the world. Then Jesus will return and finish the job.
There are different streams of this view but a commonly seen part of it is that Jesus cannot come until the church has converted most of the people of the world.
The Bible never presents this view. Quite the opposite of this interpretation, Bible prophecy says no such society will be achieved. Instead society, and even the church, will decay. Only when the Messiah returns will the Utopian society be built. Our instructions are to save those (individuals) who can be saved and to make disciples of them.
So how do liberals believe it, other than they just want to believe it? They get rid of Old Testament prophecy and the Book of Revelation. One way to do this is to believe that, when Jesus was crucified, all Old Testament prophecy about the time after that crucifixion was canceled. Also, the Book of Revelation is seen as allegorical, meaning there are valuable insights hidden within it but mostly it isn't about the future.
We discussed earlier how liberals find themselves driven underground to achieve their goals. This becomes a way of doing things. Anything that might encounter rejection is done in secret and revealed when complete. This hiding and the deceit that is required to keep it hidden becomes part of the lifestyle. It is justified by the perceived worthiness of the goal - the ends justify the means.
For a Christian this deceit and attitude are poison.
"Issued on September 8, 1951 [Pope] Pius XII wrote, that the resurgence of this ancient heresy (kenotic or kenosis) is 'led by an excessive desire for new things.'" - encyclical Sempiternus Rex"kenotic" or "kenosis" - the idea that God emptied himself completely to become man and as Jesus was only man but became God again after the cross.
Liberals tend to see collectives everywhere, including when they aren't there. One such place is the story of the early church that gathered on the Temple Mount.
But the crowds of people who believed had one soul and one mind and none of them was saying that the wealth which he possessed was his own, but they had all things common. (Acts 4:32)
This might sound like Socialism, if you are looking for Socialism. The far left isms are not like this though. They always have a governing body who determines who gives and who gets and the money goes through that body.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs - (popularized by Karl Marx)
These words from Karl Marx sound nice until you realize that he left out the part about who decides who it is taken from and who it is given to.
The early church was people deciding these things as individuals. Paul emphasizes that in his words to Ananias.
Was it not yours until it was sold? And after it was sold, again you had power over its proceeds. (Acts 5:4)
There is also a problem with this story - nothing like it is ever recorded again in the Bible. We know that very quickly persecution against these people increases and everyone except the apostles are forced to flee the city. We also know that "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence" but later references to wealth are more like "be generous." We also see in-fighting begin over favoritism.
It is much more reasonable to see this event as a one-time manifestation. Perhaps it was just an early growth stage in the church. It may have even been aberrant in the same way that the Tower of Babel was a refusal to repopulate the earth. This may have been a refusal to take the gospel into all the world.
There is also an odd indication in the selling of property. Why is it necessary? Do these people have jobs? It appears there are a large number of people, especially widows, requiring financial support. As mentioned above this becomes the basis for in-fighting. Later on Paul will instruct church members that their widows should be cared for by their families. That isn't what is going here.
We have to wonder if this is some kind of cult. Are they all waiting for Jesus to return because they have misunderstood how long it would be before he came? Cults like that have existed in our time.
Whatever the story behind it, there is no indication that God commanded it nor that it was a pattern for the future.
1 I have since heard of a rule of thumb - If the name of the church contains United, Unity, Unitarian, or anything like that, pay attention. It's likely a liberal church.
2 John Haidt - www.MoralFoundations.org
3 West Hill United Church
4 West Hill United Church
5 http://www.cuebon.com/HomePage/34_Points.html
