If then we are to see the Church as essentially a revolutionary movement within the world, how are we to assess its relationship to other, more overtly revolutionary movements? In particular, what are we to make of the consistent opposition that the Church has in fact shown to such movements?

Throughout the prophetic books of the Old Testament, especially in the psalms, runs the theme that the dominative society, which is maintained in stability by domination and fear, is linked to the rejection of Yahweh. It is linked with the worship of idols, of gods, and the inability to believe in Yahweh, the “non-God,” the one whose demands are not essentially in terms of this or that religious practice, but of righteousness and justice between men. Together with this goes firstly the idea that this is not due simply to the individual bad choices of men, but that all men are somehow the victims of this setup, that we are constituted as men in a system of relationships that inevitably compromises us, and secondly the idea that release from this situation is to come somehow through the anawim, the dispossessed, the outcasts of society.

In a well-known passage, Karl Marx speaks of

a class in civil society which is not a class of civil war, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal...which claims no traditional status but only human status...a sphere finally which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, without therefore emancipating all these other spheres.

Marx saw quite clearly that the freedom of the oppressor is as illusory as the freedom of the oppressed. For him there can only be true freedom when the relationship of domination which alienates man is destroyed, and he thought that the one force in society which could do this was that of the poor, the dispossessed.

Jesus, you might say, carries this idea a good deal further. He says it is the poor who will possess the kingdom of heaven; that is to say, it is through the poor, the anawim, that the kingship of God is to replace the kingship of man over man. And Jesus' notions of poverty and of alienation also go further. For him, the liberating class consists of those who have sunk below even the poverty of the proletariat, who have gone beyond a poverty inflicted from outside to an even deeper poverty of spirit, those who have reached a total dispossession even of themselves. This is what Jesus means by faith. A willingness to accept destruction, a willingness ultimately to accept death. That is why he links faith with crucifixion. He refers to his crucifixion as his “baptism” and as his “consecration” and he demands the same of his disciples. This acceptance of death is, for Jesus, the beginning of life. It is the emancipation not just of the poor that finally brings about the kingdom (or non-kingdom) but the emancipation of the dead. The final revolution is the resurrection of the body.

It is characteristic of revolutionary change, as distinct from simple reforms, that its ultimate aim is not describable in the available language. The concepts and descriptive language at our disposal in any age are determined by the whole complex of institutions that go to make up that age. It follows that a proposal for the complete transformation of the structures of a community cannot be expressed descriptively, except very approximately, in the language of that community. Fortunately, the range of expression of our language goes beyond its descriptive use. We are able through symbolism to point toward what we cannot yet express descriptively. Thus, whereas a revolutionary can state precisely a number of things he wants to get rid of (and he may to this extent be confused with a reformer who wishes to remove abuses while retaining the present basic structure of community), when it comes to trying to say what his new world would be like he has to leave the language of sociological prose and employ imagery. He has to hope that his listener will understand the direction in which he is pointing. An important consequence of this is that it is nearly always possible to betray the revolutionary by taking him literally; to fulfill all that he seems literally to be demanding and yet to move no nearer the revolutionary goal. This indeed is exactly what we see happening in neo-capitalism. It is possible to give away all I have and deliver my body to be burned and yet have not charity.

The sacraments of the Church are precisely the imagery in which she speaks of the world of the future, the coming kingdom of God. What sort of relationship is there to be among men? The kind that is hinted at, symbolized in the Eucharist; it is to be a political reality but not one that can be described in today's political terms. A revolutionary is not merely one who tries to make political changes; he is out to change the meaning of the word politics. When the kingdom can be described in political terms, in its own political terms, the Eucharist will be no longer necessary. But until then we point toward it in symbolic terms. And, of course, there exists an equivalent of neo-capitalism to emasculate the revolutionary character of the Church. This takes the sacraments not as symbols of the future, but as literal realities. We may see the liturgical movement, the whole concentration on the parish community, the people of God gathered around the altar and so on, as in some danger of embodying this “neo-capitalist” mistake. The sacramental life has been valued literally for its own sake—as somebody might value the nationalization of steel for its own sake—instead of seeing it as an image of the world at which we are trying to arrive.

It is in this sense that the revolutionary is concerned with the transcendent, with what cannot be accommodated within the categories of our time, of our world. He points toward an unimaginable future. He is there to tell us that the future is unimaginable. It is in this sense that we speak of God as the absolute future—not as the relative future which will in turn become present and domesticated, but as what eternally summons man to self-transcendence, to living into the future.

If what I have been saying is approximately right, then we may say that Christianity is Marxism carried a great deal further. Christian and Marxist both recognize the need for struggle against specific anti-human forces, and both see human history as the story of this struggle. Both seek to end the dominative society, and both see this coming about through a redemptive movement that has no stake in that society, a redemptive community of the poor. Both, moreover, in their different ways—pre-destination for one and the materialist theory of history for the other—claim that they are not merely proposing an ideal, a possibility that we may happen to choose, but that they are recounting facts, revealing the plan upon which human history is based, whether we like it or not. Marx, however, only claims to be dealing with the alienation brought about by conditions of life, ultimately by conditions of labor; Jesus claims to deal even with the alienation involved in death.

Corresponding to this is the difference in their notions of the redemptive community. For Marx, it is those dispossessed of themselves through the conditions of their work; for Jesus, it is those who have faith, those who are totally stripped of themselves, those who are crucified. For Marx, the proletariat claims no traditional status, only human status. His redemptive community is left with its human powers, above all its numbers. It is by these human powers—the power to handle a gun—that the armed violence of the bourgeois state is to be overcome. For Jesus, the redemptive community has dispossessed itself even of its human status, and its revolutionary force comes from the depth within man which is beyond man, from the power of grace. Involved in faith is the confidence that by dying to ourselves, by giving up all forms of self-assertion, we will receive again our humanity, we will rise again from the death of faith. We will “come forth from the baptismal font” transformed by the divine life, so that we become an explosive force in the world, a force which will, as St. Paul puts it, “Do away with every sovereignty, authority and power” and finally even with the domination of death itself.

It seems to me that the operation of this restored, divinized humanity does not necessarily preclude the use of guns or any other human power. I think there are times when the constant violence of the class-structured society reaches such an intensity that it can only be contained by revolutionary violence. There is this difference, however: for the revolutionary, precisely because of his vision of the non-dominative community, violence is an exceptional and regrettable measure; for the dominative society, institutionalized violence is the very condition of its existence. As James Connolly, the Irish rebel who was, I believe, the first Roman Catholic Marxist, pointed out: “One great source of the strength of the ruling class has ever been their willingness to kill in defense of their power and privileges...the readiness of the ruling class to order killing, the small value the ruling class has ever set upon human life, is in marked contrast to the reluctance of all revolutionists to shed blood.”

The first thing, then, that I want to say about the revolutionary mission of the Church is that it cuts deeper than what would ordinarily be called the political revolution. The Christian is entitled to feel that the political revolution, precisely because it does not reach to the heart of the matter, to the ultimate alienation of sin, is liable to betray the revolution itself. The achievements of the political revolution, insofar as they are thought of as ultimate aims and not as pointers toward an absolute future, may themselves become forms of the dominative society. The mission of the Church is to be—in a slightly different sense from Regis Debray—the revolution in the revolution. To proclaim the gospel is to interpret the revolution in revolutionary terms, not to see it as merely the substitution of one imaginable social order for another.

The honest hostility of the Christian to the Marxist is based on the Marxist's apparent denial of the absolute future, the Marxist's belief that man can ultimately arrive at being man, with no further transcendence beyond him, in other words the Marxists' atheism. The honest hostility of the Marxist to the Christian is based on the belief that concern with an ultimate alienation, with sin and with death, is a technique for avoiding the demands of the historical present. The Marxist-Christian dialogue, it seems to me, starts from these two honest hostilities.

But vastly more important in practice is the dishonest hostility of both sides. The dishonest hostility of Christian for Marxist arises out of the Christian's betrayal of his own revolutionary purpose. It arises when he forgets that he is involved in a revolutionary movement and comes to think of the Church as a community that is part of the established political order. Then what threatens the established order will seem to him a threat to the existence of the Church. This has been the typical attitude of at least the higher clergy for centuries. Similarly, the dishonest hostility of the Marxist for the Christian arises out of the fossilization of Socialist society into an authoritarian form and fear of the Christian Church as a possible form of organized opposition to the government and its domination. The actual world scene is governed far more by the interplay of these two dishonest hostilities and the natural reactions to them than by the conflict of the two honest differences I mentioned above.