The Intellectual Encounter between Christianity and Marxism

In various parts of the world, dialogue between Christians and marxists is now a more or less regular occurrence. It has not been so for long. Indeed, it is only within the last decade that a reasonably continuous exchange of ideas between the two has occurred. In the preceding generation, an encounter of sorts did take place, though primarily from the Christian side and almost solely at the literary level. Before that there were only scattered attempts on the part of both Christians and marxists to come to grips with each other's convictions. Investigations of the political confrontation between various Christian churches and communist regimes have frequently enough been conducted. Analyses of the intellectual evaluation of marxist thought by individual Christian scholars have somewhat more rarely, and arguably less discerningly, also been undertaken. Less attention has been given to both surveying and assessing the more general development of the intellectual interchange that has taken place between the two movements from its beginnings until the present time. In order to keep such an examination within manageable proportions, however, consideration of the factors that have given rise to the current dialogue as of the value of its contents and future potential have been left to one side. Consequently the account that follows restricts itself to the period preceding this latest development and may be regarded as a contribution to the pre-history of the dialogue that is now in progress

Christianity · Economic history · Epistemology · Intellectual history · Sociology · History · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Religious studies