Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, in "Are Christians really supposed to be communists? A response to David Bentley Hart" in America: The Jesuit Review, here:
Jesus, we are told, did not just speak in parables, he spoke in hyperbole. Quite right: Nobody thinks that Jesus actually wants you to pluck your eye out if it drives you to lust. (Wouldn’t you be just as able to lust after a beautiful person with just one eye?) What is wrong is to stop once we have said this.
Professor Hart is wrong and the church is right. There are vocations, and some Christians are called to total poverty; others are called to live in the world, and therefore to engage in market transactions, to earn wages and to accumulate savings to provide economic security for their families. No church father, catechism, encyclical or council has ever preached the opposite. What is wrong is to stop once we have said this, as his critics would have us.
Here’s the rub: The fact that I can know that God does not want me to give up all worldly goods because I support a child is precisely why I cannot rest easy. The fact that my vocation is perfectly acceptable to God is why Jesus’ thunderous words still apply to me. Jesus’ dramatic, hyperbolic words are a reminder that even while maintaining my vocation as a petit bourgeois, I can always be more radical in how I love and how I give to my fellow man. “Fearful it is to fall in the hands of the living God,” Kierkegaard reminds us in the same passage I quoted above. And how reassuring it would be for petit bourgeois Christians like myself to tell ourselves that the way Jesus preaches is for the others, for those who go into the desert.
To put it simply: poverty sine glosa is not the only way for the Christian. But that reminder should always be followed up by the always urgent reminder that we could still do with a lot less glosa and a lot more poverty.
As usual, this confused mess arises precisely because it is divorced from the all important context of the history of early Christian apocalyptic. Divorce Jesus' message from that and all that remains is one form of compromise with the world or another. Anything can then be made of it, and has. The error arises when the existence of early Christian poverty and communism is not seen simply as evidence of this original apocalyptic context, but instead as a prescription. The same error takes Paul's compromises as an entrepreneur for a blessing of capitalism. "Is" does not mean "ought".
It will not do, as Gobry does, to say "virtually all church fathers missed" the early Christian call to poverty and communism. The great value of Hart's essay is to show the fathers' knowledge of it, and to link it to the evidence for it in Scripture. Gobry simply ignores all this.
The imminent end of the world as imagined by Jesus and even Paul has little to offer in the way of life instruction for an interminable future, whether spiritually conceived, for example as the hermetism of the Desert Fathers or the monasticism still thriving on the eve of the Reformation, or materially, as the base conceptions of mercantilism, capitalism, fascism, socialism or communism now and again embraced by Christian thinkers. Everything Jesus taught is repentance from this life in the face of the impending judgment. There was nothing hyperbolic about this, nor about the requirements necessary for navigating to the new reality of the arriving kingdom of God. The disciples understood this clearly, as did every hearer of Jesus' message, which is why it was at once so compelling to a few and so revolting to the many:
Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions. ... And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's, But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life. -- Mark 10:21f., 29f.
Evidently Mr. Gobry can't imagine any of The Twelve were deadbeat dads.
Paul himself, the first theologian to compromise the teaching of Jesus and get away with it, didn't even recommend his own capitalist industriousness in the service of the gospel, not to mention class struggle nor freedom from slavery nor any other social value, because he himself retained the apocalyptic outlook where everything is impermanent. Paul's was a halfway house of vocationalism where everyone was to remain in the state in which they were called because of the impending end of the world, whether slave, free, married, unmarried, etc.:
Only, let every one lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him, and in which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches. Was any one at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was any one at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision. For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but keeping the commandments of God. Every one should remain in the state in which he was called. Were you a slave when called? Never mind. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity. For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ. You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men. So, brethren, in whatever state each was called, there let him remain with God. Now concerning the unmarried, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord's mercy is trustworthy. I think that in view of the present distress it is well for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek marriage. But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a girl marries she does not sin. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that. I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away. -- 1 Cor.7:17ff.
This so-called hyperbolism of apocalyptic was anything but. It only waned because history ensued and destroyed its very credibility, including Paul's halfway house of the already/not yet. Faced with its basis in the false predictions of the end, the Christians had to adapt their story to reality or die. What had become no longer conceivable they replaced with something less susceptible of contradiction, something at once more durable because it was by definition social but ironically also actually hyperbolic, something which made sense of the failures and transformed them into victory, the doctrine and practice of the Real Presence:
"Take, eat; this is my body. ... Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins."
This actual hyperbole became the center of the holy catholic faith, and remains so to this day for over a billion of the world's Christians. Perhaps that's why Christians such as Gobry read hyperbolism into everything which competes with it, especially when it comes from Catholicism's enemies the Orthodox and the Protestants: "Hart, a tireless basher of Protestant theology (not one of his least virtues), has produced a crypto-Protestant theology out of his exegesis".
They know their own error only too well.
