Ernst Bloch was a Jewish Marxist atheist of the Frankfurt School who, oddly enough, inspired a generation of German Christian theologians with his writings on the utopian vision of Marx, proposing the “principle of hope” as a meeting point for revolutionaries and Christians. Bloch’s first book was called The Spirit of Utopia (1918) and it was followed by Thomas Müntzer as a Theologian of Revolution.
Thomas Müntzer was a contemporary of Martin Luther who started out as an ally in the Reformation, but his contact with the spiritualist Zwickau Prophets led him to advocate for deeper changes than Luther felt comfortable advocating. Müntzer became popular among the peasant class and his agitational sermons caused consternation among the princes, nobility, and his old ally, Martin Luther. Part of the so-called “Radical Reformation,” which included the Anabaptists and an array of other spiritualists, prophetic, and apocalyptic movements, Müntzer was a principal organizer of the disastrous 1525 German Peasant War that ended with the armies of the nobility slaughtering thousands of peasants and then capturing, and executing, Müntzer himself.
Luther had played what many (including myself) considered to have been a shameful role in the slaughter of what he called “the murderous and plundering hordes of the peasants.” Luther was unequivocal in his opposition, directing in detail to the princes and their armies as to how the peasants should be treated: “They should be knocked to pieces, strangled and stabbed, secretly and openly, by everybody who can do it, just as one must kill a mad dog!” He went on to recommend, “dear gentlemen, hearken here, save there, stab, knock, strangle them at will, and if thou diest, thou art blessed; no better death canst thou ever attain.”6
Müntzer was written off as a madman and a fanatic for centuries until he was “rediscovered” by Friedrich Engels who saw in him the precursor of modern communism. Ironically, Thomas Müntzer, the revolutionary Christian mystic, eventually became intrumentalized by the German Democratic Republic, part of the Communist movement that went so far to destroy religion that it sent many believers to the death camps of Siberia to be rid of the “plague.”7
I discovered Christians for Socialism (CFS), a national organization with a very strong Northern California branch. In September 1981 I went to a gathering in Vallejo with Dave Smith, expecting to see people pounding the pulpit and calling for revolution in the name of Jesus. Instead it was a sedate group of nuns, one very friendly and gentle Presbyterian minister named Joe Hardegree, a quiet couple from Tracy, and a few other pretty average-looking people. There was a potluck and discussion about God’s “preferential option for the poor” and the need to build a socialist movement to redistribute the wealth of the country and the world and we brainstormed a Christian Socialist creed.
We formed a Christian socialist study group and of the books we read I remember being particularly impressed by José Miranda’s book, Communism in the Bible, and wishing his work would get a fair hearing in US churches. Both he and Geevarghese Mar Osthathios, the late senior Bishop of the Indian Orthodox Church in Kerala and author of Theology of a Classless Society demonstrated that both communism and a classless society were the bottom-line Christian positions on economics and social structures for the church and, by extension, society. The “world turned upside-down” that Winstanley the Digger and so many Christians before and after him foresaw was a vision reawakened in the 1980s and it inspired a few of us in Berkeley.
But we knew we were few. The mainstream Christian Church, after a brief opening in the late 1960s, showed signs of going with the mainstream secular culture as it took a right turn under Ronald Reagan. The sense of isolation I often felt helped me understand bob rivera’s loner approach to politics, and it also gave me a real empathy for Garry Lambrev whose religious and political community had gone out in an apocalyptic fury. Dorothee Sölle expressed our feelings well in an article published in Radical Religion about that time. She wrote of “the dilemma of being Christians without a church and socialists without a party.” But our marginalization was powerful, she said, reminding us “It is not the center from which liberation will come. It comes from the periphery. Christ was not born in the palace of Herod but in the stable. He did not grow up in the center of Jewish culture among the power elite but in the backwaters of Galilee.”8
And our little “cell” of Christian socialists was going to become more isolated still. Sometime in 1982 the national office of CFS was closed down, as the director explained, due to “burnout.” The Northern California branch made several valiant attempts to first relocate the national office to the Bay Area (the offer was refused) and then to keep the local branch going. All attempts failed and within a year or two of my joining the organization, it ceased to exist.
Caught up in a millenarian mania, I plotted ways to get the word out. I’d initially bought a proof press with my friend Julie Holcomb, but politics separated us and she went on to take the proof press and become a master hand-press printer. I had a vision to save the world so I started learning to print on a mimeograph machine, but never managed to get it to function well enough to print more than a dozen or so semi-legible sheets. I quickly disposed of the machine and several of us in Calhoun House began looking for alternatives. We had no resources: as a house we fed ourselves mostly by dumpster diving. But we had faith and a vision so we began compiling and editing articles for a small magazine we hoped to eventually print down in the basement.
My ex-wife Karen and I were giving our relationship “one last try” and she joined in the project, offering to contribute her skills as a printer. We finally found a printing press advertised for $75 and when a few of us went to look at it we found it under a tarp next to a garage, the image for a flyer for a demonstration for the 1976 UFW grape boycott still on the blanket. We took this as a clear sign we had to buy this movement press, and I didn’t even try to bargain with the seller.
The printing press, in as bad shape as it was, seemed to be no problem for Dave Smith to fix and the challenge even excited him. Dave and I set to work, using rubber bands and pieces of pipe to replace springs and missing handles, and he sewed elastic bands together to make a conveyor table. It took weeks of hard work to get the machine running, and a month or two of long days working to print the forty-eight-page magazine. We had to raise the press up on a platform in the basement because the periodic winter rain would flood the area where we worked, and we often had to walk through two or three inches of water to reach our workstation. We solved that problem by making a path with milk crates to the platform holding the press. Bob rivera threw in his energy as art director, accompanied by my ex-wife Karen, and while Dave and I worked trying to fix the press, to get it, and keep it, running, bob and Karen spent the next several months of winter laying out the magazine.
Called The Second Coming, the editorial line was “Evangelical Marxist” since we were all former or current Evangelicals, with the exception, of course, of bob. The issue included solidarity statements with Nicaragua, articles by Dorothee Sölle that Marc had translated (and all of us had taken turns attempting to get them into English), poetry from the Rosa Luxemburg/Dorothy Day Cultural Brigade, and others, and it ended with the statement from the Christians for Socialism Vallejo meeting. “Towards a Christian Socialist Creed” affirmed, among other things, “that change is the result of the linking of the variety of our gifts and struggles in a non-hierarchical sharing” and that “the world and all its wealth belongs to everyone, that we are stewards of the resources within our reach and that the means of production cannot be owned by any individual but should be administered collectively by those who labor.”
The centerfold was perhaps the most controversial part of the magazine. It was a series of four illustrations by the Nicaraguan artist Cerezo Barreto and the first one was innocent enough: Jesus, with the dove descending on him and his Father’s hands reaching down to him as his own great hands protect little black children. That, however, was followed by a giant Uncle Sam with a blood-stained napkin around his neck, devouring handfuls of black and brown people. That was followed by a Nicaraguan pietá and the sequence ended with the giant Uncle Sam menacingly towering vampire-like as if preparing to pounce on a Sandinista demonstration above which was held a banner in Spanish saying “The children of Sandino neither sell out nor surrender.”
Needless to say, we gained few, if any, converts or supporters and the fact that we were supporting the revolutionary cause of the