Yes, Marxism is a Christian heresy

It´s sometimes said that Marxism is a Christian heresy. For a long time, I didn´t get it. For starters, Marxism in its revolutionary form is surely more similar to Islam than to Christianity. (Marx and Engels liked Thomas Münzer, whose interpretation of Christianity smacks more of Muhammad than of Jesus meek and mild standing on a mount preaching.) In terms of philosophy, Marxism is based on Hegelianism, with its quasi-pantheist notion of the World Spirit. Christianity isn´t pantheist.

But *of course* Marxism is a Christian heresy. The reason is simple: Hegelianism is also a Christian heresy. Hegel did away with God, but kept Divine Providence. This is the famed "World Spirit". I used to assume that Hegel got the pantheist spirit from Schelling, and made it more clear cut, since it works itself out in concrete history, rather than in some hard-to-fathom way in Nature, mythology or psychology. I suppose he *did* to this, but only by stealing an idea from the Bible: the notion that God directs history (and reveals himself in history) by directing it towards a predestined goal. This curious philosophy, in which Providence works all by itself, was then taken one step further by Marx, who claimed that Providence is a purely natural process, in effect ending up with a doubly curious materialist-teleological hybrid. Of course, Marx believed that he was scientifically explicating the process which Christianity could only grasp in a "superstitious" manner, and Hegel in an "idealist" one. 

It´s intriguing to note that when a materialist philosophy wants to claim that the cosmos is meaningful, it has to take the dominant religion of its time, file off the serial numbers, and present it as a new revelation of sorts...