non-metaphysical stephen

Promises, Promises | Christianity Today

I’ve known about The Political Illusion but didn’t know much about what he says in it until it showed up in my Google Search results a few days back. Tonight I found this discussion of the book from Christianity Today, a magazine I generally have very little in common with other than being a Christian and living “today.” (The article is by Chuck Colson, with whom I also have very little in common. The fact that he wrote this piece almost makes me suspicious of how he’s using Ellul, who had some harsh things to say about conservative Christians.)

From the article, it seems that Ellul focuses on the problem of relying on government for everything. Although I’m critical of all the accusations of socialism (mostly because I feel that the free market is screwing people over and that something needs to change), I recognize that we can’t simply turn everything over to the government. This idea is one I’ve believed for a while, but I must admit that I’ve been reluctant to give any credence to the paranoiacs on the right.

I’m trying to keep my critical distance with all the policy debates going on, and hearing this idea from someone I trust intellectually (Ellul) helps. The church needs to take a stand for human rights, needs to stand up for the people who are getting squeezed by the capitalist system. But how to do this without simply leaving everything up to the government.

I’m convinced that an unregulated free market will continue to be a bad thing. But I don’t want the theocrats getting into office either. So what’s the option for the church to follow that can set an example of how to fix the system without relying more and more on the government?

More from Ellul on Ecclesiastes….

In his section on the Myth of Progress, Ellul remarks on Qohelet’s comment in 1.8:

All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.

Ellul discusses this in terms of humanity as both creative and receptive: We run out of words, yet we continue to consume images and sounds.

Is this not true? I feel this all the time — there is too much to learn, too much to view, too much to read, too much to learn. And yet I run out of things to say — I have nothing to add.

The scary thing is that even with the overabundance of things to see and hear, there’s nothing new. I need to pay more attention to this: all those shiny objects that catch my attention? There’s nothing new in them. They don’t enlighten me. They don’t add anything of value to my understanding of the world or to the way I live my life. They don’t make me a better person or offer me any wisdom. They simply amuse/delight/distract me.

Even in my studies, the trap is there:

“When Qohelet tries to study everything that is done, he concludes that this is an evil occupation under the sun. You cannot draw any conclusion or lesson for the future from what happened in the past, because you know only the outer shell of things: piecemeal testimonies that enable us to tell stories but not to know the truth.”

Again, is this not true? I read literature, but all I can get are stories. If anything, it’s more honest than trying to read history, for I’d still end up with only stories. The inner truth of history is unknowable–we get appearances and effects, but cannot perceive the reality beneath.

May God give us the grace to accept the limitations of our knowledge and to learn wisdom from the Spirit of Christ.

This morning I re-read some of Ellul’s study on Ecclesiastes, Reason for Being — the section where he discusses the issues surrounding the translation of the Hebrew word hebel as “vanity.” For Ellul, the term makes the most sense, as it captures the sense of uselessness that Qohelet is trying to describe. It’s not that the world is “nothing,” but that it doesn’t lead anywhere except for the grave — no matter what we do, how much work or success we achieve, we all end up in the grave and therefore our work is useless. What good does any of it do us?

I was struck in particular with a paragraph in which he discusses how “vanity” has the sense of “illusion” or “mirage,” which he connects with ostentation and with the way we present ourselves to others–and to ourselves:

May God in God’s lovingkindness show me who and what I truly am, so that I might meet the world with more humility and become more fruitful for the sake of God’s realm. Amen.

I know I’m not writing as much on Subversion as I’d hoped. Too many ideas, but also too many other things that need to get done first.

Still, this morning I was reminded of something from chapter one. It must have come up in thinking about a conversation I had at GCN about how it is that evil is conquered but still present in the world. Ellul reminds us that the failure of the Church is not God’s failure since, in historical time, God has defeated the powers of evil through the work of Christ. This victory cannot be undone, not even by the weakness of generations of Christians whose pride and ambition distorted the truth of the gospel into its very opposite.

Death, Sin, Satan, the Devil, et al. have been defeated. They still roam around, perhaps because humans still give them room to act up. But their defeat is completed and their authority over us taken away. Praise be to God!

And may we live in such a way that their defeat is evident to every person we meet! Amen.

I’m still working my way through chapter 2 of Jacques Ellul’s Subversion–reading, re-reading, letting it sit in the back of my mind, etc. In the first 2/3 of the chapter, he argues that two of the main reasons for Christianity’s loss of identity were the shift from revelation to theology and the shift from being a small group to a large, organized insitution. Lots to think about (and hopefully blog about).

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading scholarship on Bartolomé de Las Casas. Sometimes two articles a day — quite a bit for what should only be a 5-8 page section of a chapter in a dissertation. I had never heard of Las Casas until Ellul mentioned him as an example of Christianity at its finest, alongside St. Francis. And I don’t understand how I had never heard of this man whom I now realize was a powerhouse for the Christian faith.

I supposed that what attracts me most about Las Casas was his rejection of the nationalist paradigm of his time. He wasn’t a relativist, in the sense that he did believe Christianity was superior to the indigenous religions. But he refused to accept that the Americans were less human or civilized for not having European-style culture. He was even able to see how human sacrifice could be seen from within the American systems as a form of worship rather than a form of savagery. Not that he believed it was okay (although he acknowledged the parallelism with the Abraham and Isaac story), but that he was able to see it as a form of sincere worship.

In fact, Las Casas was able to see the Americans as being more civilized than the Spaniards, whom he accused of the very butchery and greed they attributed to the Americans. (Montaigne made the same accusation against the Europeans in his essay On Cannibals.) Las Casas even claimed that the pre-conquest civilizations were more impressive than those of ancient Greece and Rome–the same Greece and Rome whose philosophers were being enlisted to justify Spanish policies.

Here was a man for whom Christianity was central, and not to be confused with accidents of culture. He understood that Western Culture did not make Spanish conquest right–just as Roman culture did not make their conquest of Spain centuries earlier right. In fact, the culture wants to maintain the status quo more than to establish justice: how else could Spain praise their ancestors’ heroism for resisting the Romans without seeing the parallels between Spanish resistance to Rome and American resistance to Spain?

One of the scholars called Las Casas an example of “radical Christianity.” May we all be so radical in our lifetimes. Perhaps we truly could change the world.

Today I read Las Casas’ introductory materials to his In Defense of the Indians (the material he used in his debate against Sepúlveda). One of his claims against the publication of Sepúlveda’s book is that the previous pronouncements by politicians and clergy against mistreating the Indians had had no effect, and the publication of a book that sanctions such mistreatment on scholarly and theological grounds would only embolden the colonizers to continue their evil. In a word, Sepúlveda’s book would be dangerous because it tells the listeners exactly what they want to hear.

When I read this, I was reminded of Ellul’s digression (in chapter 2 of The Subversion of Christianity) regarding the power of intellectual authority: people will listen and will accept what intellectuals say, even when what is being said is incorrect. Thus the church was led to adopt policies that were in contradiction to the gospel proclamation but which seemed to further the growth of the church.

I’m not sure to what extent this situation is true in the USA. To a certain extent it certainly is true. And yet the USA has also had a long anti-intellectual bias. Many people trust their preachers more than they trust scholars. But in these instances, the people assume the preachers have more authority than the scholars–perhaps because they are presumably more immersed in the Bible and in prayer and have the anointing of the Holy Spirit upon them. So, the effect is the same: we accept the words of authorities (that is, people whom WE recognize as having authority) whenever they tell us what we already want to hear.

God have mercy on us.

I’ve been reading Las Casas‘ Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and after the initial horror of the history died down (but God grant that it never go away completely), I realized that I was reading exactly what Ellul had said about the powers. Here were concrete examples of the way wealth and political power control the way human beings associate with each other. Everything the Spaniards did to the Americans was a result not of Christian love but of the love of money and power. These two factors actively determined the interactions between the cultures. These are the powers of the air at work in human life. Frightening stuff.

It also makes me think about Ellul’s contention (and Kierkegaard’s before him) that Christianity had long been dead in Europe. For how could this happen in the middle of the Renaissance, when medieval Christianity was still in operation alongside Renaissance optimism about humanity? The only explanation seems to be that the culture had long been, to a great extent, Christian in name only. Renaissance Spain was what we might call ethnically Christian, but not truly Christian. And the same would go for all of Europe, I wager. Just as it does for the modern US of A.

God have mercy on the souls of those destroyed by their greed in the name of the Church.

How surprising to think that one of the contributing factors to the subversion of Christianity is the very existence of theology as a discipline! How could the study of God possibly be a problem for the Church? And yet what Ellul says makes sense: the Bible is neither a systematic nor a metaphysical book: it is a history.

I love how he describes it as vitally incoherent — what a great compliment! The complexity of the book itself should be a warning to us about our temptation to make things neat, orderly, understandable. And its focus on history should warn us about our desire to see the underneath side of the tapestry, and worse, to turn the underside into a system!

I have long wondered if much of Church theology was contaminated by the early church’s desire to address Greek philosophical objections rather than to critique Greek thought. So Ellul’s comments appeal to me. But what would a Christianity without theology look like? How would our churches function differently? Would narrative return as the central vehicle for truth? Would our wrangling over words be replaced by consensus, or would we start arguing over events? On the individual level, would a turn from theology to history strengthen our devotional lives?

How would our faith change if we stopped seeking for what God is and start looking to see what God has done?

I’m still contemplating the first chapter (of The Subversion of Christianity); since classes start Thursday, I haven’t had much time to get into Chapter 2. Still, there’s plenty I’ve been ruminating on in that opening chapter.

Ellul makes the claim, a perfectly reasonable one, that our modern Christian interest in social justice issues is not something to be proud of, as it represents more the church’s desire to keep up with the Joneses (e.g., worldly interest in charitable causes) than the church’s leading the world under the influence of the risen Christ.

It’s clear that Ellul is not against social justice; he simply wants the church to be doing it as a response to the revelation of God’s love in Christ Jesus rather than as an imitation of worldly trends. The danger here is obvious as, in following the world’s trends, the church tends to do the right things for the wrong reasons and, perhaps worse, in the wrong manner.

So my question is how to distinguish Christian activism that is truly inspired by God and led by the Holy Spirit from an activism that simply christens worldly movements in Christ’s name.

Right at the end of Chapter 1 (of The Subversion of Christianity), Ellul makes two claims about the relation between Christianity and culture, and I’m trying to untangle them. (I have to; this topic is crucial for my dissertation!)

First, he points out the the scriptural authors repeatedly incorporated texts from other cultures, but always re-oriented them in light of God’s revelation. Then, at the very end, he complains about the church has become a “sponge” of the cultures around it — in a bad way.

I know that historically, both of these facts are true: many of the differences between the Synoptic Gospels, for instance, have been traditionally understood as being due to the authors’ different audiences: Greek, Roman and Jewish. On the other hand, the early church began responding to the resistance of Greek thinkers by giving a little too much credence to Greek philosophy; by the time the church was evangelizing the Germans, this process became so common that Christianity was changed more than the Germans were.

So, how do we determine when this process is in line with God’s revelation and when it’s merely an adaptation to the world?

Sigh…… So much to ponder!

From Chapter 1 (p. 17 in Bromily’s translation): Ellul is complaining about how Christianity, which in the Bible is anti-religion and anti-moralism, has become both:

A Christianity that has fashioned a morality–and what a morality!–the most strict, the most moralistic, the most debilitating, the one that most reduces adherents to infants and renders them irresponsible, or, if I were to be malicious, I should say the one that makes of them happy imbeciles, who are sure of their salvation if they obey this morality, a morality that consists of chastity, absolute obedience (which in unheard-of-fashions ends up as the supreme value in Christianity), sacrifice, etc. A Christianity that has become totally conservative in every domain–political, economic, social, etc.–which nothing can budge or change.

What a great quote!

I’ve been re-reading Ellul again — Subversion is the book that got me interested in him, but it’s also one of the books that has had the most influence on me. I guess I’d call it a personal paradigm-shift (using Kuhn’s sense of the term): it realigned the way I think about Christianity in a way that has stayed with me ever since.

Ellul (writing in the early 80s) poses the following problem and question: Christianity is now (and has long been) the exact opposite of what is presented in the Bible. Instead of being a subversive force, it is conservative. How has this happened?

His thesis is that it is not a failure on God’s part–since the work of redemption was fulfilled 2000 years ago and since the Holy Spirit leads us out of truth into ignorance. Therefore, it must be a failure on our part: We have chosen not to live the Biblical teachings, preferring instead what he terms “human aggrandizement” (p. 13 in Bromily’s translation). And our failure has had catastrophic results, since the only way in which the world sees God’s revelation is through our lives.

Powerful stuff. Even after it’s been swimming in my mind for 10 years, it feels as though there is so much to think about and meditate upon.

Re-reading the first chapter, I was struck by his comments about the falsity of explaining the problem in terms of the difficulty of living up to an ideal, since (as he says) “there is no such ideal” (9). He then says,

“From the very first we have full realism and full materialism. The idea of God does not exist. The philosophers of the Death of God movement were right to destroy this idea that completely blocks the meaning of the revelation” (9).

This last sentence sent me running to Wikipedia–how had I not recalled him affirming the Death of God theologians (e.g. Vahanian, whom he likes a lot)? Yikes! My mind went a bit dizzy with the shock of it all.

I’m still sorting it out; but in searching for help, I ran across a great comment in a book review of his The Betrayal of the West:

Ellul is convinced that “the world” needs “demythologizing” by the Scriptures, not the Scriptures “demythologized” by “the world.” His commitment is to the Christian faith, but this requires a realistic understanding of the world we experience in shopping malls, on television, in real estate agencies and banks, as well as the “great issues” of nuclear arms races and ecological disasters. [You can read the book itself online.]

I love how Ellul reminds us so easily that we have inverted our priorities: While 20th century theologians sought to demythologize Christianity to make it more comprehensible to modern humanity, the work we should have been doing is to demythologize the world. Our world is just as religious as the first century world, only we don’t recognize the myths as myths: technology, media, capitalism, consumerism, and the like all function as myths, as religion, even as magic.

And God’s revelation gives us the tools to see through those myths; in fact, it liberates us from them. This is the project we should be doing. This is the task that can help us save the world from suicide. This is our calling as Christians.

Let us take up our crosses and follow….

I recently had a conversation with someone who explained that one of her concerns about the way some churches emphasize the death of Christ is that if God would do that to Jesus, who’s to say God wouldn’t do that to us as well?

My first response was to emphasize that in putting Jesus to death, God was allowing himself to be put to death (according to the orthodox understanding of who Jesus is). Jesus’ death is self-sacrifice, and it is self-sacrifice by God, who gives himself to us so completely that he allows us to kill him so that he might redeem us. This act is not cruelty, but immense, overpowering love–a love so strong that it conquers even our rejection of it.

As Ellul has said, we kill God whenever we refuse to accept him in the way he chooses to reveal himself to us. In this case, God chose to reveal himself as Love in the flesh. When we reject that Love (and we do, even though we claim that we all agree with love), we reject God and God truly becomes dead for us. Yet Love is stronger than our rejection, and cannot be completely conquered.

Because God offers himself, we need not fear that God will demand the same of us. For the teaching is that God did what we were (and are) unable to do ourselves. Jesus accomplished all that needed to be done, and we are safe from the wrath of God.

Thinking about it later, though, I recalled that frightening passage in Job 13: Though God slay me, yet will I trust Him. And I recalled that this life of ours isn’t really our life. It never has been, and it never will be. It is on loan to us for so brief a time. The reality is that we live and move and having our very being in God. It is his life that has been given to us. And it is his to recall to himself at the proper time.

What a difficult thing it is to trust God–to truly, fully and faithfully trust that God has our best interests at heart. To believe that all that happens to us works for good because God loves us. To be willing to walk through the water and through the fire if God calls, knowing that God’s we remain in God’s hands and will not be hurt. Even death itself cannot separate us from God’s love. Our death is precious in God’s sight, and to die in the service of our Lord is truly one of the most blessed deaths.

Should God slay us, will we still trust him?

(comments)

I’ve been involved in a discussion on GCN about Christians and money, and I was reminded of Jacques Ellul’s discussion of wealth as one of the 6 powers that govern the world according to the New Testament. Here are the relevant passages, taken from Chap. 9 of Ellul’s The Subversion of Christianity:

The Bible refers to six evil powers: Mammon, the prince of this world, the prince of lies, Satan, the devil, and death. This is enough. Concerning these six, one might remark that if we compare them we find that they are all characterized by their functions: money, power, deception, accusation, division, and destruction.

[...] The same applies to money. Once we have demonstrated the mechanisms and explained finance and the economy, there is a strange irreducible residue. Why is money so seductive? Here again we have an exousia, which Jesus personalizes by calling it Mammon, the Mammon of wickedness. As for Paul, his warning is clear: It is not against flesh and blood that you have to fight, but against thrones, powers, dominions, authorities (exousiai), against the princes of this world of darkness, against wicked spirits that dwell in heavenly places (this last feature is the strangest of all).

[...] Mammon is money imposing itself as a law of relationship: exchange, buying and selling, nothing for nothing, everything to be bought and sold. This is integrally and totally contrary to grace (see L’Homme et I’Argent). The spirit of it has made its way into the church, where sometimes grace has been put on sale, or the church has become a center of rapine and self‑enrichment, or (like the French Reformed Church today) it is so obsessed with its financial problems that all its other concerns and functions take second place. In a hundred ways money has effectively corrupted the church. But what we see here is not just the world of money itself or our subjective desire for it. It is in truth a demonic power that has given money the ability to change everything that ought to be free and open grace into bitter conquest, possession, and obsession. The Book of Acts and some of Paul’s Epistles show how things ought to have been and to have continued to be‑why not? Giving is the general rule in all relationships. It conforms perfectly to the application of grace. The holding of goods in common by the community is the normal result of the disparaging of money. But this does not last.

The traditional theory is that these first believers were constructing an “eschatological” community, that they believed that the end of the world was imminent, that they could thus live in common and spend their time in prayer, not working but living off what others had made. But when these resources were exhausted, what then? They had to come back into line, working like the rest, earning their keep. This rather highfalutin story of a community of goods then has to come to an end. I am not satisfied at all, however, with this type of explanation, which is marked by such flat banality and gross common sense. In the course of the church’s history there have been periodic repetitions of such communities, and I know of some today. The real question is a different one. When the spiritual tone, or intensity, if one will, is strong and faith is vital and brotherly love is resurgent, money is no problem. Money becomes dominant only when men and women really cease to hope or believe and enter into routines and conformities. The Christian life is not a matter of having but of being spiritual in Christ. When this is weak, having immediately becomes dominant. Mammon sets up its law in the church precisely to the degree that the church loses its relationship with Jesus Christ. But Mammon is a power that waits patiently for faith to fail. In its abundance it prevents faith from coming to birth. The logic is implacable. What use is faith or hope when we have everything and need only a little more to spend? Mammon with its satisfactions (everything may be bought) and its law (nothing for nothing, or no free lunch) builds up around us an impenetrability to grace. Christians have experienced this in every age.

Quote for the day, from Jacques Ellul–I posted this over on GCN as well:

“If God, who has chosen to be totally and uniquely love, is no longer loved, if his love is rejected, then indeed nothing of God is any longer perceptible to us. At that moment God, in fact, is no longer anything. But it is for us that he is no longer anything.”

(Jacques Ellul, Hope in Time of Abandonment)

Why is it so difficult to focus on Christ during the Christmas season? Advent is a penitential season, a season of examination and expectation, a season of quiet, hopeful waiting. Yet it seems impossible to live this season outside of a monastery. Traffic, noise, busyness, adornamentation, wish-lists (argh! to do away with the evil of the wish-list for Christmas! Christ has given himself completely to us; how dare we think we need or even desire anything more?), spend and buy and eat and drink and be merry and be busy and don’t slow down or you’ll be behind.

I continue to say, Save Christ from Christmas! Bad music, bad clothing, bad decorations. Teaching children all the wrong lessons, instilling them with the worst expectations. Was it for this that Jesus became the bread of the world?

How have we gotten so far away? Kierkegaard and Ellul were right: Christendom is the exact opposite of gospel Christianity. American Christendom even more so (more the opposite? is such a thing possible?). The true god of the season is greed/luxury. Celebrate the economy. Celebrate the capitalist virtues. Celebrate Jesus for one day when we ignore him all year.

The Christmas season does not start the day after Thanksgiving. It starts on Christmas Day and runs for 12 days. We have it completely backward. But do we care?

Christ be honored and glorified in spite of it all. May our hearts and minds return again to the bread of the world, born in the House of Bread (Beth-Lehem) and lying in the feeding trough. Eat of him and live eternally. Glory to God, Peace to mankind. O come, o come….