Sofie Marhaug and Mímir Kristjánsson have read the Bible and found Rødt’s party programme. They never found God. They found themselves.

In their new book, the Rødt couple explain that they have read all 31,000 verses of the Bible from cover to cover. They then provide the crown witness testimony against the entire project themselves:

“When we read the Bible, we were surprised by how much we recognised from the study circles in Rød Ungdom.”

Of course they did. That is what happens when one reads a mirror.

Eisegesis in Norwegian

Within biblical scholarship there are two words worth learning. Exegesis means reading out of the text what it actually says. Eisegesis means reading into the text what one brought with oneself. Marhaug and Kristjánsson have given us a textbook example of the latter variant. They arrived at Scripture with Rødt’s party programme under their arm, and discovered – miraculously enough – that it had been there all along.

That is not theology. It is merely ideological Marxists who see nothing other than Marxism.

Aftenposten’s reviewer Eilif Guldvog Hartvedt put it plainly: the book makes the Bible “as harmless as Thorbjørn Egner’s ‘Folk og røvere i Kardemomme by’”. The broadside lands because it is precise. When one filters out Christ, the cross, sin, judgement and eternity, and retains only what Marhaug and Kristjánsson call “love and forgiveness, fellow-feeling and generosity”, one is left with the icing. The cake they have discarded.

A gospel without the cross

The centre of the Bible is not wealth tax. It is the cross. A man nailed up as atonement for mankind’s sin, who three days later rises from the dead. This is the scandal of Christian proclamation – not the question of whether it is morally defensible to own a leisure boat.

Jesus was in open confrontation with the political revolutionaries of his time. The Zealots wished to overthrow Rome. Jesus rejected them. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” he said (Matt. 22:21) – and in one stroke separated spiritual from political authority. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he explained to Pilate (John 18:36). Rødt has turned this upside down: the Kingdom is of this world. There is simply not enough Marxism.

The voluntary early Church

Objections will be raised. Did not the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles hold possessions in common? Yes, but it happened voluntarily. Never by coercion. Peter says this directly to Ananias: “While it remained, was it not your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your control?” (Acts 5:4). Private property rights are the precondition, not the enemy.

The seventh commandment reads: Thou shalt not steal. That presupposes that something belongs to you. The prophets’ burning criticism was never directed at wealth as such – Abraham was rich, Job was rich, Solomon was rich – but against injustice in how wealth was acquired and used. False weights. Bribery. Exploitation of widows and the fatherless. That is something entirely different from two Marxists wishing to use the Bible to force through sky-high taxes by means of power.

The second commandment

There is something embarrassing about a self-declared “hardened atheist” such as Kristjánsson now cherry-picking Bible verses in order to sell a party programme. His cohabitant Marhaug presents herself as “not Christian” – she is a member of the Church of Norway, but “does not define herself as Christian”, as the reviewer writes. Two politicians who themselves do not believe what they read are thus going around telling those who actually do believe what their book really concerns.

The second commandment reads: “Thou shalt not misuse the name of the Lord thy God” (Exod. 20:7). Using God as political advertising for a party hovering around the electoral threshold is precisely such misuse. That is what Luther called taking God’s name in vain.

Liberation theology did the same thing in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. It was condemned by the Vatican under the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – not because the Church is indifferent to the poor, but because a gospel reduced to class struggle is no longer a gospel. It is a political ideology in clerical robes.

The judgement of history

The founder of Marxism called religion “the opium of the people”. Lenin sent priests to labour camps. The Soviet Union blew up churches. China’s Communist Party persecutes Christians today. North Korea executes them. Every time socialism has acquired state power, Christianity has been suppressed. That is not a coincidence. It is the logic of a system that cannot tolerate a rival for mankind’s ultimate loyalty.

Norway’s own tradition of Christian social engagement has an entirely different face. Hans Nielsen Hauge – lay preacher and entrepreneur – spent seven years in prison for preaching, and used the time between beatings to establish paper mills, grain mills, mines and shipyards. He lifted the poor out of destitution by creating work, not by redistributing what belonged to others. That is the genuine meeting between faith and labour in Norway. It resembles Manifest Forlag in no respect whatsoever.

The mirror

Whoever reads 31,000 verses and emerges with the conclusion that he had been right all along has not encountered God. He has encountered himself. C.S. Lewis called pride the sin we are most blind to in ourselves – we instinctively see it in others, never in ourselves.

Marhaug and Kristjánsson have written a book about what they found when they looked into the mirror. They have called it the Bible.

It is not theology. It is not Christianity. It is Rødt gazing at itself in the canon of eternity. That two Rødt politicians have such a religious relationship to their own politics is perhaps the greatest concern.

Greatest of all is the party programme.