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Holiness the Community Believed Was Already Possible

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Holiness the Community Believed Was Already Possible

Bible Communism does not treat complex marriage and community of goods as separate customs the community happened to adopt. It presents both as consequences of a single theological claim: that perfect holiness, freedom from sin, was attainable in this life rather than something deferred to an afterlife most other Christian traditions of the period held it could not be reached before death.

Noyes drew his scriptural warrant chiefly from the book of Acts, which describes the earliest Christian community holding property in common, and read that early practice as a pattern meant to be restored rather than a historical curiosity. If believers could actually achieve the sinless state scripture promised, Noyes reasoned, then exclusive marriage and private property, arrangements he considered rooted in selfish possessiveness, no longer had a theological basis and could be replaced by arrangements grounded in shared ownership of both goods and intimate relationships.

That argument is why Bible Communism reads as theology rather than social experimentation for its own sake. The community was not proposing an alternative lifestyle detached from doctrine. It was arguing, in careful and deliberately biblical language, that its practices followed logically from a belief about human perfectibility that the community held with complete conviction, whatever outsiders made of the conclusions that belief led them to.

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