Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis: The Marxist Delusion and a Christian Evangelist

This is a good article analyzing one of Campolo's latest works...

The purpose of Campolo’s letters to two young evangelicals (Timothy and Junia) is to convince them that the “Religious Right” in America is their sworn enemy, and if they wish to get serious about God’s business, which is assisting the poor and oppressed to bring in the Kingdom of God, they must reject the Jerry Falwells, the James Dobsons and the Tim LaHaye’s of the conservative wing of Evangelicalism and stake their claim with the true “progressives,” namely the Sider, Wallis and Campolo camp. This camp will bring forth the Kingdom of God on earth in spite of the constant foot dragging of their non-progressive, conservative, Evangelical counterparts.

Campolo conveniently forgets to mention, or else does not know for himself, that the baggage he asks these two young, naïve evangelicals to carry with them in bringing about the Kingdom is simply a plethora of failed radical ideas and agendas that make impossible any and every effort to establish that Kingdom-- unless, of course, the Kingdom of God is a socialistic "paradise" something on the order of a Stalinist farming collective or Moscow under Brezhnev. Those horrors, and not Campolo's airy utopian dreams, are what his ideas repeatedly yield, and to where they inevitably lead.

Campolo has renamed his leftist camp “the Red-letter Christians.” (7,8) ("Red" indeed.) By this moniker Campolo means that his camp is seeking to put into practice the Sermon on the Mount, which is all in red letters in his Bible. What this name implies about the book of Acts or the letters of Paul, Peter and John is not exactly spelled out. Campolo, for example, never quotes Acts 5:1-4, probably because there the concept of private property is favorably mentioned. Campolo is, at heart, an anti-capitalist (142). So are Sider and Wallis. So are the liberation theologians.

Relative to his two young readers, Campolo’s position is summarized quite frankly and forthrightly: “There was no question in our minds that in the struggle for justice, God sides with the poor and oppressed against the strong and the powerful. For the first time, these students understood liberation theology, and they supported it—if by ‘liberation theology’ we mean the declaration that in the struggle to end injustice God sides with the poor and oppressed against their oppressors” (265.)

So much of Campolo’s book is decidedly ambiguous, one might even say it is flatly contradictory -- not simply when he talks about ethics and public policy, but even when he talks about himself. He claims to be a Fundamentalist and not to be a Fundamentalist; to be pro-life and not to be pro-life; to be anti-gay marriage and not to be anti-gay marriage; to be conservative and not to be conservative; to be anti-capitalist and not to be anti-capitalist; to be liberal and not to be liberal; to believe in universal salvation and not to believe in universal salvation; to denigrate America’s middle class values and to admit being middle class himself; to hate the rapture and not to hate the rapture; to despise dispensationalism and to really despise dispensationalism. One is reminded of Luther's exasperated assessment of Erasmus: He is a slippery eel only Christ can grab.

for full article, see http://www.christianworldviewnetwork.com/article.php/1597/David_Noebel