Christian anarchism and the Problem of Nihilism - part III
A preliminary exploration on Vernard Eller against arkydom
To read the other pieces in this series, see below:
Vernard Eller was massively indebted to Kierkegaard. Even if we don’t point to obvious points of contact like Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, His End Up, and Christian Anarchy, we can feel a sense of the melancholic Dane inverted and uprooted into the joyful, playful optimism that sang in the intellectual defender of the House Church Movement and academic historian of the Brethren.
Inspired by the work of a fellow Kierkegaardian, Jacques Ellul, Eller adopted the idea of a “Christian anarchism” which could be realised through the powerful approach to faith that rings through both S. K.’s work and the left post-Kierkegaardians in central Europe like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer1. As a faithful but “existing” interpreter of the extensive Kierkegaardian oeuvre, Eller will be our touchstone for establishing necessary categories and tensions within these two seemingly opposed terms: Christian Anarchy. References to Ellul’s own theo-political writings will also add a layer of his theology to our case for a Christian anarchism that is both consistently Christian (unlike Tolstoy) and resists the temptation of collapsing into “name-Christian”2 self-righteousness with accidental Pelagian undertones. The goal, as always, is to present Christianity as naturally anarchic - not to present yet another philosophical framework for Christianity to fit into.
As a disclaimer, hopefully, my generally unimpressed assessment of Christian anarchism doesn’t come off as ironically lacking in self-awareness. As Eller repeated throughout Christian Anarchy, there is no doubt that many Christians are doing what they perceive to be genuine good works. But Eller was particularly concerned about accidental Constantinianism and the creeping secularity of radical Christian thought. If we can’t construct a case for radical Christianity by simply speaking the Word, is there really a radical solution to the problem of nihilism?
Understanding arkydom
Understanding Eller’s Kierkegaardian approach to anarchism requires us to understand these unusual terms: arkys [ἄρκυς] and arkydom. Taken from the Greek, the term “arkys” here could mean “priority”, “primacy”, “primordial”, “principal”, “prince”, and the like (as Eller goes on at length to illustrate3). To the person who sceptically raises an eyebrow whenever they hear the phrase “Christian anarchism”, there is undoubtedly an early critical thought in the back of his mind: how precisely do we reconcile the anarchic account of the dizziness of freedom with conventional doctrines concerning the bondage of sin? What would anarchist thinkers like Bakunin, Goldman, and Malatesta have to say about an “anarchist” who views us all as incapable of doing good without the aid of God? The primacy of “autonomy”, the law of the self, seems to directly contradict conventional Protestant thinking. If this is the genuine cornerstone of Christian anarchism, then it must be dismissed out of hand. If one is to make themselves the “primordial” or the “priority”, then God has no place in this thesis and we are not Christians. At the very least, we should have the good sense to admit as much.
But Eller doesn’t end his investigation there. Instead, he sees that “arky” in scripture is most often used to signify “the beginning”:
Indeed, in Colossians 1:18 Paul actually identifies Jesus as “the beginning,” “the prime,” “THE ARKY.” However, our particular concern with the word is in Paul's writings where it is translated “principalities.” Clearly, the apostle assumes that we live in a world with arkys filled that threaten to undo us - and those constantly battling each other for primacy.
For us, then, “arky” identifies any principle of governance claiming to be of primal value for society. “Government” (that which is determined to govern human action and events) is a good synonym--as long as we are clear, that political arkys are far from being the only “governments” around. Not at all; churches, schools, philosophies, social standards, peer pressures, fads and fashions, advertising, planning techniques, psychological and sociological theories--all are arkys out to govern us.
“Anarchy” (“unarkyness”), it follows, is simply the state of being unimpressed with, disinterested in, skeptical of; nonchalant toward, and uninfluenced by the highfalutin claims of any and all arkys. And “Christian Anarchy”… is a Christianly motivated "unarkyness." Precisely because Jesus is THE ARKY, the Prime of Creation, the Principal of All Good, the Prince of Peace and Everything Else, Christians dare never grant a human arky the primacy it claims for itself Precisely because God is the Lord of History we dare never grant that it is in the outcome of the human arky contest that the determination of history lies.4
The primary problem for Eller, much like S. K., is in the Pelagian independence of the moral agent in the face of worldly struggle. Christian anarchy, as explored by other Christian anarchist thinkers, often neglects the metaphysical or dogmatic aspect of the faith - sometimes to the point of abandoning the theology altogether in favour of a particularly radical liberal theological reading of the Gospels5. This, for the good Kierkegaardian, will not do whatsoever - as Eller explains, this is just another imposition of power onto the lives of another, not the opposition to powers that Christ brings (Colossians 2.15). Any attempt that begins with a moral theory already begins with the assumption that there is an “in-group” that must reach out to the “out-group” and turn them over towards God; it is to become a “truth-wielder” against the enemy, not a child of God towards the neighbour. But who could say that this was the message of Christ? Even if the sheep shall be separated from the goats (Matthew 25:31-46), there is no reason to say that we will be able to recognize them before the fact! Without a theoretical understanding that takes root in Christ, we have little Christian anarchism here; just another “Christian” political movement where Christ is a Guevara from antiquity - a hollow slogan, an empty image. This will not do!
The autocracy of anarchism
Anarchists, since the idea was first formally conceived, have opposed authority6, most notably in Bakunin’s famous arch-anti-authoritative stance taken against God:
A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.7
So committed to the idea of autonomy, Bakunin would be prepared to overthrow the very thing which grants him free will8, sustains him against evil9, and provides the telos to our struggles10. Aside from the rabble-rousing Romanticism of the Russian antisemitic godfather of the anarchist movement, there should be little for the Christian here in these words. Chomsky, however, would controversially redefine anarchism as an opposition to all “illegitimate or unjustified hierarchy” in order to explain how group dynamics would work within, e.g., anarchist syndicalist organizations. In a sense, Eller follows on from Chomsky here - but by turning the screw the other way.
Autonomy is simply another illegitimate arky, based on the heteronomous arky of the self - it is only a creature's instincts, not genuine self-rule11. Drawing on Kant’s and S. K.’s image of the self, it is not enough to simply be guided by our whims because we are then slaves to them. Consider a “desire” that you have had recently: seemingly random, popping into your head from nowhere, and - if not acted upon - disappearing just as quickly. Although the secularist might view this as a legitimate and proper reflection of the self (although, obviously, due to the randomness, there can be no consistent sense of self - the first section of Anti-Climacus’ The Sickness Unto Death comes to mind here…), the Christian simply cannot. How would we know that we are not tempted? That the adversary whispers in our ear that we could take great worldly power on behalf of the Lord - only for us really to be serving the path of evil (Matthew 4:8-11)? Without a release into the power of the other, there is only autocratic rule of the self - thereby making a genuine anarky impossible and Christian faith twice as impossible again.
Instead, right at the beginning of his exposition, he identifies Colossians 1:18 in particular: “And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning [ἀρχή] and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.” Christ is “the Arky”12 Himself, the legitimate source of authority in the universe and the beginning of all just actions. Here, my reader, we depart from Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Chomsky: we are not opposed to authority (itself a confused and difficult term), but in search of the one legitimate authority within the universe - Christ.
But this idea comes with a double edge: how do we navigate from a legitimate source of authority to anarchic social structures? The will for “arky-messiahship”13 quickly follows any recognition of Christ as the legitimate source of authority, which would surely lead to the imposition of this authority onto others. However, Eller is quick to follow this thought with the rejection of a temptation which places Chist's anarchy over the worldly elected and sponsored. Arky faith is that enthusiastic human self-confidence14, not the divine arky itself. When there is a group of people who are convinced that Christian piety can generate the holy causes, programs, and ideologies that will affect the social reformation of society15, the obvious question for these people is: “who elected you?” The epistemological frailty of the human subject before God’s will - incomplete to the point of possible total ignorance - is no grounds to assert Christ’s message onto the other! These agents of righteous societal reconstruction view themselves as messianic - “they are God's anointed social agents of redemption”.16
As S. K. mused in his journal:
“The majority of men in every generation, even those who, as it is described, devote themselves to thinking, (dons and the like), live and die under the impression that life is simply a matter of understanding more and more, and that if it were granted to them to live longer, that life would continue to be one long continuous growth in understanding. How many of them ever experience the maturity of discovering that there comes a critical moment when everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood. That is Socratic ignorance, and that is what the philosophy of our times requires as a corrective.”17
Like a holy Socrates, the Christian must know that they know nothing about everything. The anarchist accepts the responsibility that comes with incomplete knowledge and holds themself towards Christ in an effort to avoid the nihilism of self-election.
Examining the Powers
Of course, this isn’t to say that these people are bad people by virtue of their arky faith. In fact, many of us would agree that there are suitably good intentions from the far and wide of the political spectrum, even if some economic or social factors meet in contradiction (although, sometimes it can be difficult to excuse the outright racism of “social” liberalism and the far-right). However, understanding Barth’s famous anarchist slogan makes it all the more clear: “ethics is dogmatics and dogmatics is ethics”18 - what you believe about Christ is your ethics; there is no need to fall into immanent, worldly categories when the Christian approach itself is a political stance which asks for no secular intellectual grounding.
Against the Right
The problem of dealing with a Christian political stance is that, at this moment, the Christian response is usually an overwhelmingly economically right position - having noticed “Christian values” presented by a particular brand of political agents, those same Christians form “the Crowd” around the figurehead of the right-liberals19. If you were in the habit of scanning the political parties for the propaganda that most appeals to a broadly Christian worldview, the American right would no doubt seem to be an obviously religious choice which serves the purpose of a religious representative.
However, the Right posits “only that it knows which of the arkys God considers his chosen instruments”20, i.e., the Right knows what God wants and will enforce that at a state level. This, in turn, will lead to the creation of a Christian nation with Christian values and a Christian state. The police will be Christian, the schools will be Christian, the adults are Christian, the children are Christian, the newborns pulled from fresh from the womb will be Christian, if they are as successful as they desire they will no doubt achieve the heady heights of having livestock born ready for baptism. But let’s leave the idiocy of declaring a state Christian aside for a moment - the point here is that the Right is the most obvious example of the arky faithful, which is something we can even see with the recent ruling to introduce the Ten Commandments into classrooms in America. Although Christians, no doubt, don’t necessary oppose the widespread adoption and meditation of the commandments, the imposition of an arky faith at the hands of Louisiana statespeople comes as a clear challenge to Christ - the gift of faith is something for the Right to deliver, not a gift from God.21
This emphasis on God’s sovereignty (paired with the presumption that the Right should capture it) is likely the most notable form of arky faith that people living in modernity see. The “law and order” approach to faith creates the notion of a “Christian society” where all those who pass through it will have “Christian values” - however, there is a great deist turn in the Right’s understanding of the faith when Eller notes:
Yet the anarchists are not at home there, either—because they can’t buy the conservative thesis that the present order of society is the one God wills for us.22
How convenient! says the Christian anarchist. The very society you were born and operate in is truly the society God wills for this world. Continuing with the American example, we might say that this reduction of God to “the immanent”, i.e., the “that which is the case at the moment”, is not only a Promethean attempt to steal God’s sovereignty but also for the Right to elect itself in His position.
Even worse, and thank the Lord that we have not fallen into this state, but the concept of a “morality police” or pride about secular laws mirroring “Christian values” is the most concerning tendency of the radical Christian Right. Stepping out from Eller, we even see this in the worries of the monarchist, quasi-Hobbesian Kierkegaard:
“Above all, save Christianity from the State. By its protection it smothers Christianity, as a fat lady with her corpus overlies her baby. And it teaches Christianity the most disgusting bad habits, as for example, under the name of Christianity to employ the power of the police.”23
Christianity’s devaluation of the dispassionate outwardness of the ethical means that an essential inwardness is the first step towards a faith we could actually call Christian. Faith is necessary for anything to be called Christian, “for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23); to force the other to act as a Christian without that essential inwardness, in turn, is amongst the most terrible of sins. We shall not displace Christ in order to force others to follow us in our illegitimate authority.
Against the Left
Of course, that isn’t to say that Eller asks us to step in line with the radical left either. Or even the centre-left24 with the likes of Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders. Similar to Jacques Ellul’s account of the embarrassing failure of “Christian” “Marxism”25, Eller views those who simply take Christianity and an ideology of the radical left together uncritically are showing that Colossians 1:18 is really not a great deal of concern for these thinkers; they have little time for the boring, outdated aspects of the faith such as dogma, scripture, or even a surface level of theology. You find this amongst the secular Left, with their attentions focusing on left-acceptable expressions of faith such as “the Social Gospel” movement. The faith, it turns out, doesn’t need faith at all - we are open to simply slotting into the secular “parties” (or, in the case of the anarchists, “syndicates”) as eccentric radicals who also insist on carrying a Bible on their way.
In turning the gospel message into “a teaching”, something for the faithful to do alongside the faithless, then we strip the faith of its very reason to be faithful: the love for Christ. From this point, a more elaborate Kierkegaardian critique is necessary to fully unpack our problem with these kinds of movements in general. However, we can focus on why Eller rejects the kind-hearted but fundamentally muddleheaded approach of those who identify on the Left before they identify with Christ. To paraphrase Eller’s cutting words, they engage in the performance of faith26.
One of Eller’s most challenging insights into the problems of the Left is his nonviolent opposition to pacifism: when the Christian adopts pacifist or even nonresistant political tactics - which, for the sake of argument, are plainly apparent within scripture - and attempts to put this pacifist stance as a demand onto the state, they are again attempting to turn the world into the Kingdom of God, the worldly into Children of God, by force and not faith. But this, for Eller, is an attempt to avoid making moral decisions which require nuance and context in order to provide a Christian response; the individual fails in claiming arky faith over the state. Instead, the context of a decision relies on us recognizing ourselves as subjective moral agents within a world that must relate itself to Christ - but at no point does that remove us from our objective surroundings. While we long for the Kingdom, to call for the weapons of the world to crumble under our command is to attempt to force God to grant salvation on our terms; in a stunning exposition of what it means to genuinely surrender to God, Eller illustrates that his nonviolent opposition to total abandonment of heavy arms on the grounds that this would potentially doom millions of people to violent conquest by some foreign nation27 - but this is by no means a nationalist defence of his own American backdrop. Instead,
And this theme plays an important role in Eller’s view of all moral decisions that the Left (but, to a greater extent, liberals) view as essential to their mission of arky faith:
Arky faith greatly simplifies moral decision making. One escapes the ambiguity and terrible complexity of dealing with actual individuals who always are very much a mixture of good and evil, actual forces and situations that are very much the same way. Now one can think in terms of homogenous arky power-blocs that clearly classify into either good or bad; moralizing can be done sheerly by knee-jerk reflexing. So “pacifism” (of whatever character) is good and anything that is not pacifism is “evil warmaking.” A capitalist U.S. government is bad; a socialist Sandinista government is good. “Masculinity” is bad; “femininity” is good. The Moral Majority is bad; the National Council of Churches is good.28
Against Politics
Much like a charge that haunted S. K. since the days he was still walking the cobbles of Copenhagen, Eller might appear to be a “quietist”, an earnest withdrawal from society in order to maintain faith. However, this simply isn’t the case: Eller never advocates acting or not acting on behalf of certain political parties, but, rather, calls for us to refuse the conflation of politics and theology because “Worldly politics is built upon pretentious claims of moral superiority—of which the Christian gospel recognizes nary a one”29. Therefore, politics and theology must be held separately, with worldliness never being dressed up as “Christ’s will” and with theology never being affected by the pressures of the immanent30.
But what was the “root sin” of arky faith’s zealotism? Eller, channelling the words of Johannes de silentio, identifies the absolutizing of relative choices - these “radical” thinkers have sunken into worldly political solutions to spiritual theological problems and started to treat as vertical those alignments that are actually horizontal31, i.e., dealing with a human interrelation (horizontal in that no one has a rightful claim to arkydom over the other) from a God’s eye perspective. Regardless of whether the Christian of arky faith is of the Left or the Right, well-intentioned or otherwise, the problem is that it leads to zealotry: “God and me make a majority”. Even if the good-hearted Left-leaning Christian is merely invoking “the will of God is with us” as a propaganda tactic to others, there is a constant danger of the revolutionary self-election of the very zealots that Christ opposed in His time. In looking to Christ’s words in Matthew 5:9, we see a refusal of “top-down” revolutionary action - instead calling for “bottom-up” faithful conversion; armed neutrality manifest. Of course, this requires a concerted and consistent effort on the part of the faithful: there is a constant temptation that could change the “togetherness” of the church into arkys-power. An enthusiastic organizer, an overly representative priest, an Arminian faith that forgets the prevenient grace it relies upon… The assignment of the quantitative value of the sum of the individuals instead of the recognition of each and every faithful individual holding themselves in personal responsibility to God, the self, and the other could lead to a collapse into “the Crowd” - and is there anything worse than “the Crowd” which transforms a church into a corporate head?32
But that isn’t effective! cries the zealot. Utopian! Dreamer! cries the “Christian” “Marxist”. Firstly, there is little in scripture that leads me to believe that efficiency is a top priority for the Lord - the very notion of “working in mysterious ways” seems totally antithetical to the worldly idea of absolute efficiency33. If we should only find a band of 12 who are earnestly following the Word in all honesty, then we have achieved as much as the greatest there ever was had been capable of. Efficiency and practicality should come second to the truly great virtues of the faith: faith, hope, and love. Christ Himself breaks up the worldly obsession with achieving everything by our own power, as if the correct hyper-efficient theory could grant us liberation; only the Lord grants the flow of history to continue in accordance with His will, only Christ can break apart “the Crowd”. As Eller notes, there is a concerning number within the arky faith that forget Ephesians 4:15: “Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.”
“Choosing God [in "render unto Caesar"] with this sort of intensity must entail the denial that the outcome of history is being decided in the contest of the human arkys we have chosen to designate as "good" and "evil." Consequently, Christians refuse to become embroiled in the contest, whether investing themselves in the arkys of the one side or the other. And this stance is what we have been calling "Christian Anarchy.””34
A Theology of Two Kingdoms
Before we finish up, I wish to briefly explore the Anabaptist metaphysics which could lead Eller to hold such a position. That’s correct, my reader; metaphysics, not morality. Instead of beating our interlocutors over the head with moralist pearl-clutching, let us simply acknowledge reality: let us note how our subjectivity relates to the absolute of the Lord, i.e., let us deliberate.
It is not enough to simply appeal to morality - people, by and large, are not convinced by moral arguments and don’t tend to make changes in their lives due to especially elaborate moral argumentation. But, what if we simply appeal to what is real, as opposed to what we present as moral? As is so often the case in the history of Christian thought, we turn to an often overlooked and even more often maligned group of those sincere and faithful “enthusiasts”35 - the Anabaptists. Most famous in their Amish iterations, we might think of the Anabaptists, a group far more diverse than we would first assume, as a particularly odd little group of the pious. But, in their opposition to formal, systematic theology, they hold to an important variation on a Lutheran theology: a theology of two kingdoms.
Instead of the Christian anarchist writing tracts and tomes to elaborate a particular view of “the Christian life”36 and mutilating an earnest faith into an abstract doctrine, the Anabaptists call for us simply to live in accordance with what appears to be real - if love is a force that is imparted into the world from outside and does not rely on human action to exist, then properly relating ourselves to the nature of reality implies living out love in a radical sense37. Zimmerman clarifies:
“The claim that we love because God first loved us suggests that even in cases where its particular manifestations are not merited, precedented, or reciprocated, love is a reasonable and reciprocal response to the world’s pre-existing and indeed fundamental condition... the Christian narrative casts self-sacrifice, like love, as having a precedent outside humanity in the highest being... the dualist understands Jesus’s death not as a source of moral inspiration or prototypical instantiation of a moral principle but rather as an event with which reality is consonant.”38
If, my reader, we are to say those fateful words “not of this world” (John 18:36) and mean them, then there is a real implication in our lives. It is not a matter of comparing moral theories amongst moral theories, but rather a recognition of what Christ showed us and a call for earnestness in simply living in reality qua reality in contradistinction with the world. This is Christian anarchism: recognizing our metaphysical misrelation to God and turning towards Him; the impossible recognition that “each [kingdom] operates according to reference points that may be unavailable, inapplicable, or even unintelligible in the other. But this recognition also suggests that the line dividing the two kingdoms can be clearly drawn”39 - and we shall draw them, even if it appears impossible.
To read the other pieces in this series, see below:
Although the identification of Barth and Bonhoeffer seems wildly eccentric to anyone who has spent time engaging with these thinkers, chapters V and VI of Christian Anarchy does present a compelling case for both these thinkers rising above the dialectic struggle in their contemporary Nazi Germany.
"State/Christianity" from The Instant, no. 3, June 27th 1855, from Attack upon "Christendom", p. 127, S. Kierkegaard
Christian Anarchy: Jesus' Primacy over the Powers, p. 1, V. Eller
Ibid., p. 1-2
And often at the expense of Paul - presumably, this theological disaster in anarchic circles is due to the deification of Tolstoy’s particular and wildly unorthodox theology. So unorthodox was his theology, of course, that the only real Christians have been those Hindus who took part in the Quit India movement - and didn’t believe Christ was God at all! I’ll let the Christian anarchist decide where they find themselves in that debate.
Occasionally, this is worded in terms of “hierarchy”. While there is a minor technical difference that we could stretch out over the course of a book that no one would read and even fewer people would find informative, I am choosing to use these terms as at least synonymous enough for our purposes.
God and the State, p. 28, M. Bakunin, ed. P. Avarich
Concepts of Power in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, p. 85, J. K. Hyde
"The Gospel of Sufferings: Christian Discourses", from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, S. Kierkegaard, p. 239
"The Cares of the Pagans" in Christian Discourses, p. 41, S. Kierkegaard
Christian Anarchy: Jesus' Primacy over the Powers, p. 3, V. Eller
Ibid., p. 1
Ibid., p. 10
Ibid., p. 13
Ibid., p. 14
Ibid., p. 26
JP XI A679
Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 793, K. Barth
For the sake of clarity, “right-liberal”, in my terminology, might be better understood as “conservative” in the general parlance. However, that doesn’t serve the purpose that I want here; philosophical conservativism is the interesting but uncommon position that all political aspirations (or “imagination”, in Kierkegaardian terminology) is necessarily nonsense. The most infamous figures from the modern “conservative” bloc, including Johnson and Trump, are really just another flavour of liberal - with the terms “neoliberalism” and “neoconservativism” acting as more appropriate determinants.
Christian Anarchy: Jesus' Primacy over the Powers, p. 25, V. Eller
Ibid., p. 33
Ibid.
“Medical diagnosis” from The Instant, no. 4, July 7th 1855, from Attack upon "Christendom", p. 140, S. Kierkegaard
And obviously not the centre-right with the liberals!
Neither one nor the other; as with many syncretic movements, the primary goal is to strip both Christianity and Marxism of their internal logic, until they can both be reduced to a facsimile at the mercy of an academic with too much time and not enough reading on their hands. See Jesus and Marx, p. 84-152, J. Ellul for a sophisticated assault on two particular approaches to Christian Marxist syncretism.
Christian Anarchy: Jesus' Primacy over the Powers, p. 30, V. Eller
Ibid., p. 18
Ibid., p. 26
Ibid., p. 13
Ibid., p. 144
Ibid., p. 84
Ibid., p. 50
This Ellulian theme is key for understanding how he leveraged S. K. in turning against the “technological monism” of mass society in modernity. My reader, in time I will expand on the life and works of J. Ellul, including his great sociological treatises, The Technological… series.
Christian Anarchy: Jesus' Primacy over the Powers, p. 78, V. Eller
Incredibly, this term is often used as a criticism of these simple, faithful folk who prioritise the honest expression of sola fide and sola scriptura in their lives. A great litmus test for Protestant theologians is exploring just how damningly they view the role of “enthusiasm” in their assessment of Christian thought; if their thought becomes jauntily out of accordance with itself at random intervals in order to avoid excessive pietism, then we are justified to explore how practical and faithful that theology actually is.
As if such a thing could be a single thing.
"Anabaptist two kingdom dualism: metaphysical grounding for non-violence", C. Zimmerman, from Religious Studies, p. 4
Ibid.
Ibid.