Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 05:2 (Fall 2023)
Article: Karl Marx Has Won The Culture: But He Will Not Win The War
Author: James M. Hamilton, Jr.

Eikon 5.2 (Fall 2023) p. 9

Karl Marx Has Won The Culture: But He Will Not Win The War

James M. Hamilton, Jr.

James M. Hamilton Jr., PhD, is Professor of Biblical Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Senior Pastor of Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, KY. His most recent books include the two-volume commentary on Psalms in the EBTC from Lexham Press and a book on Typology from Zondervan.

The debate about biblical manhood and womanhood has moved beyond word studies and disputes about the flow of thought in Paul’s Epistles.1 As summarized in an account of “Feminisms, Then and Now,”

From the outset of second-wave feminist activism in the 1960s, the three main branches of feminism were liberal, materialist, and radical. Liberal feminism worked incrementally to extend all the rights and freedoms of a liberal society to women. . . . Materialist feminists were concerned with how patriarchy and capitalism act together to constrain women, especially within environments like the workplace and the home. Thus, their theories drew on to varying degrees Marxism and socialism more broadly. Radical feminists foregrounded patriarchy and viewed women and men as oppressed and oppressor classes.2

We are faced with a culture that views the male-female binary as an oppressive construct. And in response, the culture rages and plots in vain, as the power

Eikon 5.2 (Fall 2023) p. 10

brokers set themselves and those in authority to take counsel together against the Lord and his anointed, seeking to burst their bonds and cast away their cords.

Karl Marx Has Won The Culture

The cultural Marxists are pursuing the destabilization of norms, and those norms are the objective truths about created reality — things like “male and female he created them.” I am of the opinion that these doctrines of demons represent an alternative religion against which it is our duty to stand.

To give an anecdotal illustration: Two girls in our church, an eleven-year-old and her fourteen-year-old sister, recently met girls their own ages in a public place. Both were asked by separate little girls on different occasions: “Do you like girls or boys?” These encounters took place, not in San Francisco or New York City, but in Louisville, Kentucky.

The loss of the givenness that, for instance, little girls will like little boys represents the successful destabilization of norms, or “hegemonic discourses,” as Antonio Gramsci terms them, whereby the assumption that little girls will like little boys can no longer be made. This “blurring of boundaries”...