Later, I often became impatient when Christian believers asked me, “Are you a Marxist?” The best reply that came to mind was this counter-question: “Do you brush your teeth? I mean, now that the toothbrush has been invented?” How could you read Amos and Isaiah and not Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels? That would amount to being ungrateful to a God who sends prophets among us with the mssage that to know Yahweh means to do justice. Do we not have to make use of every analytical tool that helps us both to comprehend the sources of injustice? Should we not recognize at the same time that the victims of injustice are the possible forces for change that breaks the yoke of oppression of both victim and perpetrator? Could we afford to ignore Marx in a time when it should be clear to every attentive observer of the misery of developing countries that capitalism is neither able nor willing to end hunger?
Dorothee Sölle
