No doubt because Bernie Sanders is making a serious run for the presidency in the United States, this question is on the minds of some podcast listeners. One, a listener named Christian writes in to ask this, "Hello Pastor John, how should Christians view socialism?" What'd you say, Pastor John? Well, I suppose I should put all of my misgivings up front to say I'm no expert in political science or economics, so take it for what it's worth.

Here we go. I think the first thing I should say is that the church, the church in the church, no one should go hungry. No one should be without a place to stay. No one should fail to get the health care they need. No one should go without a job if it's possible for believers to help them find one and so on.

And all of this should happen through the free and uncoerced help of other believers. When Luke writes in Acts 2, 44, "All who believed were together and had all things in common, and they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need." What he means is that every need was being met by other believers, even if they had to sell things that they owned in order to help meet them, and this was done freely.

It didn't remove, but rather presumed the ownership of private property. Indeed, all of the Bible, Old and New Testament, assumes both the legitimacy and, I think, necessity of personal ownership. Thou shalt not steal makes no sense where no one has a right to keep what is his. The reason I stress that all of this is uncoerced, free, not forced, is because of the heavy emphasis that Paul puts on giving to the poor in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 freely, cheerfully, not under compulsion.

I remember I had a big debate when I was in Germany with a professor and other student because of the way they fund the church, the state church there, through taxes. I said, "That just doesn't fit without compulsion, cheerfully and freely." In other words, there is built into the Christian faith an inner impulse by the Holy Spirit through the gospel to make sacrifices so that others have their needs met, and there is no such impulse built into human nature or the human heart apart from God's grace.

And it is so vital that this kind of love and mercy and sacrifice be free and uncoerced that this is laid down as a principle by Paul in 2 Corinthians 9, by Peter in 1 Peter 5, as he's instructing the elders there. Now, socialism, as I understand it, I don't know much about it, but socialism, as I understand it, refers to a social and economic system that through legal or governmental or military coercion, in other words, you go to jail if you don't do this, establishes social ownership at the expense of private or personal ownership, or and/or, you could say, where coercion is used to establish social control, if not ownership, at least control of the means of production in society, and thus through control effectively eliminate many of the implications and motivations of private ownership.

In other words, socialism borrows the compassionate aims of Christianity in meeting people's needs while rejecting the Christian expectation that these things will not be coerced or forced. Socialism therefore gets its attractiveness at certain points in history where people are drawn to the entitlements that socialism brings and where people are ignorant or forgetful of the coercion and the force required to implement it and whether or not that coercion might in fact backfire and result in greater poverty or drab uniformity or worse, the abuse of the coercion as we saw in the murderous states like the USSR and in Cambodia.

It may be that Bernie Sanders is naming things in our society that need addressing. I don't doubt that's the case. There are no doubt real injustices that make it harder for the poor to move out of poverty and make it easier for the rich to do wrong and get away with it.

But I doubt that holding up Denmark's economic model, which he does, as the way forward is the path of wisdom. Forbes, for example, reports that out of a total population of 5.6 million, a little more than 2 million in Denmark, a little more than 2 million are state pensioners, unemployed, sick, or on social transfer payments for other reasons, and another 800,000 are employed by the public sector.

That's half the population employed by the state or sustained by money channeled through the state. Or to put it another way, out of 5.6 million people in Denmark, there are only about 1.8 million that are not directly dependent on the state for payments of some sort. And even among this group, there is high focus on cheap, subsidized childcare, free healthcare, child bonus payments, subsidized housing, and a large number of other ways to secure additional income from the state.

Just an example, students get five years of free tuition at state universities, and I read of a married student who gets a $900 stipend from the state and free childcare. So basically, living totally off the state for those university years. Now political liberals, they analyze this all over Europe right now and everybody says these systems are under pressure.

That's the word that's used by liberals. They're under pressure, like most of the entitlement states of Europe. Conservatives say it's a ticking time bomb. In other words, almost everybody says it can't go on. The crisis in Greece is the forerunner, and no matter how angry people may get when their entitlements are threatened or taken away, you can't create tax income out of nowhere.

And the support base is not going to be there indefinitely, not to mention other disincentives that plague socialist economies over the long haul. So for Bernie Sanders or anyone else, to commend a socialism like that of Denmark as the system that is going to do things well for us is short-sighted to say the least.

So in general, I would say that the impulses of biblical Christianity include, one, compassion for the disadvantaged; two, justice under law without respect to status; three, freedom to create and produce; and four, private property. And my own sense is that history and reason and further biblical reflection lead to the conclusion that freedom and property rights lead to greater long-term well-being, or like we say today, flourishing for the greatest number.

And it should not go unsaid, lastly, that every economic and political system will eventually collapse where there are insufficient moral impulses to restrain human selfishness and encourage honesty and good deeds even when no one is watching. That's very interesting. Thank you, Pastor John. I appreciate your thoughts on economics and socialism.

We don't get a lot of questions on socialism, I'll admit, but we do get a ton of questions on spiritual depression. We are the joy people after all, Christian hedonists at Desiring God. So what do we do when spiritual depression descends into our lives? What do we do? How do we respond?

John Piper will explain next time. I'm your host Tony Reinke. For more on this podcast, visit us online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.