It's interesting that, in the period of great turmoil before 1917, the Russian Orthodox clergy showed this division. The Church at the village level was so leftist that the Church hierarchy felt compelled to purge it periodically. There was a lot of material being written and preached at the village level about the People of Christ being oppressed by the Tsar, about how the message of Christ meant being liberated from the wealthy and powerful, and so forth. This is the reason that the 1905 pogroms targeted seminarians. And the closet Marxist seminary Stalin attended was more the rule than the exception.
--- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> I was responding to the proposition that there is
> something inherent in
> Protestantism which predisposes their adherents to
> favour capitalism. My own
> view is that the Bible can be invoked to justify
> either social inequality or
> social justice, and in periods of social crisis,
> when such issues are thrust
> to the forefront, Protestants, like other believers,
> have tended to divide
> between those at the bottom interpreting scripture
> to support their demands
> for justice and the higher clergy resisting their
> claims on behalf of the
> propertied classes.
>
>
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