Christian Message Boards: Spurgeon on socialism

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Posted by Michael Harrison (Member # 6801) on :

From http://www.americanvision.org/article/spurgeon-on-socialism/

Christians today simply must follow Spurgeon’s example in decrying the false paradise of socialism. This means addressing social and political issues, even when other Christians and certainly most secularists disagree (in fact, especially so!), but from a strictly biblical and not Marxist or socialist way. Socialism itself stands absolutely antithetical and opposed to Christianity as it for one denies the commandment against theft of private property (and that’s just the beginning). The original socialists themselves intended to supplant the faith, and hated it as a rival. Christian scholar and journalist David Aikman mentions an interesting anecdote in his book on atheism, The Delusion of Disbelief. He writes,
The strong linkage between politics and religion in the late nineteenth century was having a profound social impact, one that deeply troubled Marx and Engels. The following story illustrates just how it incensed them. While playing a well-known Victorian parlor game with Karl Marx’s daughter, Engels answered with a single word a “Confessions” question (“What is your favorite motto?” “What is your favorite color?” etc.) that asked whom he most hated in life. “Spurgeon,” was Engels’s curt, one-word answer, referring to the English Baptist… whose sermons in the 1850s to the 1880s drew as many as twenty thousand people, many of them working-class folk. Why did Engels hate him so? Because Spurgeon was diverting England’s urban working class away from atheist revolutionary socialism to Christian parliamentary reformism.[9]
We should take up Spurgeon’s example and start diverting fellow Christians, and others as well, away from the temptation to believe that government socialism will take care of us. It will not; and every nation so far that has installed so-called “universal health care” now sees regular shortages, rationing, waiting lists, denials, delays, and diminished treatments because of it. Millions are oppressed and literally thousands have died waiting for healthcare simply because socialized medicine cannot respond in the way they need. It’s a death trap.

The practical point is, brothers and sisters, since we want to do good, let us preach up our Lord Jesus Christ as the sovereign balm for every sinner’s wound. If you want to be philanthropists, be Christians. If you would bless your fellow-men with the best of all blessings, convey to them the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Do not believe that there is anything you can do for your children which will be more effectual than teaching them about Jesus. Do not think that anything in the workshop can soften the vulgarities, silence the blasphemies, and end the profanities of your fellowworkmen, like setting Jesus Christ before them.… Oh, let us keep on with the subject of Christ crucified! Whatever there is not in our shop window, let us always have Christ as the chief article of our heavenly commerce. Whatever there may lack of grace and beauty in our speech, and our outward appearance, may there be no lack of Jesus Christ, set forth among the sons of men; for “men shall be blessed in him,” and not without him. Great schemes of socialism have been tried and found wanting; let us look to regeneration by the Son of God, and we shall not look in vain. Nothing has come of newfangled preaching, from the first day till now; but never has the old faith of Jesus failed. Men have been blessed in Jesus, and they shall be blessed in him as long as the race shall exist.[6]

Posted by MentorsRiddle (Member # 2108) on :

This is a good post, very good.

But most people, I fear, will no longer acknowledge the link between religion and government.