Marx and the Bible by José: P. Miranda (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Marx and the Bible. By JosE: P. MmANDA. New York: Orbis, 1978. Pp. 202. $7.95. Jose P. Miranda's Marx and the Bible is an extraordinarily erudite and persuasive exegetical study written from the point of view of a passionate commitment to the liberation struggle in the third world. In the introduction, Miranda states that after years of exegetical study he came to the conclusion that " the Bible, especially Exodus and the prophets, is the revelation of the Transcendent God, the Liberator of the oppressed who fights against the oppressors in their behalf " (p. vii) . This essential message of the scriptures has been eluding us for centuries, claims Miranda. The purpose of his study is to give voice to this message, using the best and most rigorous exegetical methodology. Whether Miranda is successful the reader must judge for himself. In the opinion of this reviewer, this is an important theological work. The tight argument, which reveals intimate familiarity with an enormous corpus of the best contemporary biblical scholarship, is open to question at many points. The study is far too significant, however, to be ignored or to be countered with any but the most serious investigations and logical and theological counter-arguments. Early on, Miranda declares that his intention is not " to find parallels between the Bible and Marx, but simply to understand the Bible. Our method will be the most rigorous and scientific exegesis." (p. xvii) Except for the Introduction, Chapter I, which Miranda says he included by way of example, and the final Chapter (V) , Miranda remains quite faithful to this intention. Chapters II through IV, which make up the body of the book, are indeed an effort to understand the Bible using the most rigorous scientific exegetical methods. Before getting into the exegetical body of his book, however, Miranda sheds some light on the role Marx will play in his attempt to understand the Bible. Miranda affirms what various Christian authors have pointed out, namely that " Marx belongs to the category of the prophets of Israel and ... both his messianism and his passion for justice originated in the Bible " (xvii). Because of this messianism and passion for justice, Marx opened up the way for a rediscovery of the Bible's esse~tial message. In Marx, the biblical polemic against idolatry (the objectifying of God) is reactivated. Marx's social and political iconoclasm represents an attack on the idolatry of the System parallel in many ways to the biblical attack on false gods, who were always the ultimate legitimation of the given system of which they were the apex. Such gods were not gods, but objects used for the 136 BOOK UVIEW:S 187 purpose of domination and rrianipulation~for the purpose of justifying a given social order. They were, in fact, reifications of that order. As his critique of religion makes clear, Marx understood this relationship between the system and its gods, but was unable, in part because of the theology of the time, to distinguish between the false Gods of the System and Yahweh, God of Israel. Miranda points to the recent papal encyclicals on social issues as evidence of the importance of Marx in the rediscovery of the biblical message. The social encyclicals of Pius XII, John XXIII, and Paul VI have, according to Miranda, all been " riding on Marx's shoulders " (p. xiii. This is actually a quote from Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S.J., in Stimmen der Zeit, 180, 1967, 365-74). They have not only taken their diagnosis of capitalistic society from Marx but have also followed Marx in moving beyond a plea for the reform of persons and attitudes to a call for the transformation of structures and institutions (p. xiii). The introduction thus articulates the hermeneutical orientation from which the exegetical study will be pursued. It is a Marxist orientation insofar as it is committed to the proposition that Capitalism is " the culture of injustice and of the crushing of men carried to extreme perfection and systematic refinement " (p. 254) . The axis of this oppressive culture, which according to Miranda is " the transformation of labor into merchandise," has its roots in Greek philosophy, "which conceives of reality...