Playing the little game of "Christian solutions"
Ellul on theologians who make theology irrelevant
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. (1 John 2:15-17)
The title is taken from the article “"The Authority of the Bible" by Jacques Ellul.1
“Worldliness qua temptation is a theme that runs through and warned against in scripture. People are, on the whole, aware of the dichotomy between Godliness and worldliness—often to the point of referring to imagined pieces of scripture to justify certain behaviours which we might consider to be “outside” the grammar of the Christian faith2. There are problems with that approach that are obvious to all, so I won’t waste time discussing them. What isn’t so obvious, however, is the problem of Vordenken3.
As a faithful apostle of Karl Barth, himself a far more Kierkegaardian thinker than most are aware of, Jacques Ellul was deeply critical of approaches prioritising worldly reason over God's self-revelation to humanity4. Broadly speaking, this is an opposition to “liberal theology” in its reinvented form: while liberal theology is often associated with the rise of Enlightenment thought and the insistence on the validity of a “foundationalist” epistemology, Barth, Ellul, and Hauerwas were aware in their own particular ways about the way in which the “spirit” of liberal negation would carry through to new methodologies. Where once the earnest theologian was aware of the dangers of following Hegel or Schleiermacher too closely, this awareness seems to have sloughed away when theology has been forced to beg for the scraps at the table of the Marxists, the postmodernists, the Heideggerians, the Aristotelians, and so on. Liberal theology, in its contemporary flourishes, should now be understood as an attempt to save our blushes by erecting the church on the foundations of the world—a most unscriptural notion.
In his praise for Barth’s recalibration of Christian ethics, Hauerwas notes:
“Barth does not seek to make the church a servant of a civilizing project and thus a supplement for what is a prior conception of ethics. Rather, just as Israel ‘‘annexed’’ the land of Palestine, so Christians must appropriate ‘‘ethics’’ as a secular, Enlightenment subject matter. For example, notions such as ‘‘the good’’ or the ‘‘Categorical Imperative’’ are far too abstract to give the guidance that can come only from the concreteness of God’s command as found in Jesus Christ.”5
When we follow the natural theologian’s line of thinking, we find that we are no longer doing theology but a decrepit form of philosophy—regardless of the particular form at hand—that turns all theology into apologetics; we are not “appropriating” the subjects that secularity demands it has an exclusive right over in our time, but becoming a sycophantic fascimile. Theology becomes the “little brother” of a real, grown-up subject, first begging for a mode of analysis that people will listen to and then second staring in amazement when no one listens. Whereas “apologetic theology was a secondary endeavour because the premodern apologist would never allow questions of unbelief to order the theological agenda”6, it has become a rather snivelling admission that the theologian has nothing interesting to say in modernity:
“...theologians and religious thinkers have largely sought to show that the modes of argument and conclusions reached by philosophical ethicists are no different from those reached by ethicists with more explicit religious presuppositions. The task of Christian ethics, both socially and philosophically, was not revision but accommodation.”7
For a Christian response to be meaningfully Christian, how can we say that we start from principles other than those which are Christian, or, rather, were delivered to us in becoming a Christian? When we turn to the “demands of the times” and adopt a perfectly sagacious and popular mode of thought to show that us unfashionable sorts who still believe in the divine, the importance of proclamation, and the genuine revealing of God in the life of Christ cannot, yet again, be taken seriously until we all adopt an appropriate mode of discourse (which always means the language of the newest worldly trends), we have already decided that preaching the word and witnessing the faith is actually not that important to the Christian faith. We have made that subjective decision to turn to convincingness or public recognition as our relative value. It turns out, contrary to Christ’s and Paul’s obviously outdated theories, that all we need to do is prepare a sufficiently clever and contemporary argument and God will finally catch up on delivering faith to the faithless—it was rather silly for Him not to inspire that particular approach in the scriptures as opposed to apparently only breathing out hot air, according to our liberal theologian colleagues.
I quote Ellul at length:
“If the Bible possesses any authority, it must have authority for all.” We have often heard this assertion. We will not study the problem of the authority of Scripture for non-Christians in general as far as the social and political realms are concerned; this would run the risk of becoming too theoretical. We will only reiterate what Christians should never forget in this regard in their ethical actions in society.
The Bible as such has no meaning, no authority and no value for non-Christians. We absolutely cannot require that they take it seriously for what it is. They may be able to find an admirable morality, historical information, or remarkable poetry in the Bible and declare that they agree with it. In reality, this agreement hides the truth from them. Their admiration is for what is human and perishable, for what has no authority in the Bible. We cannot ask them to change their lives or to have a conversion of heart in the name of this. In all our relationships with non-Christians we need to start from the Bible’s lack of authority from the natural point of view. Therefore, it is impossible to measure the actions of non-Christians with the measurable applicable to Christians. In other words, Christian ethics is not applicable to non-Christians. The morality shown in Scripture is not natural. It is related to the person of Jesus Christ. It is precisely because of this that it can be “Christian”. Therefore, the person who does not recognize Jesus Christ, does not need to recognize the validity of this morality. We cannot ask this person to apply it because it has no authority over that person.
Consequently, we cannot hope that the teachings on social and political ethics will have any value for a non-Christian person. This must certainly warn us aganst the ideology of “a political system drawn from Scripture.” Such a system would only apply in two hypothetical instances: a situation in which all people were Christians—but this is unthinkable on earth—or the case of a Christian party taking power and building this kind of society by force, which of course is not in line with a Christian ethic. There is no other solution. For if we tried to justify a certain principal of socila ethi with human reasons, we would be in the domain of natural authority but not in the domain of revealed authority. Consequently, the principle thus demonstrated would no longer be Christian since it would be founded on something else than the person of Jesus Christ. We must recognize that the transformation of our relationships with society appears to be of little importance and incomprehensible to non-Christians. We should not fel much pride or hope about this attitude. We have been warned ahead of time that non-Christians would only understand this attitude after their conversion (see 1 Peter 2:12, Matthew 5:16). So we must not expect to find an authority for non-Christians in our attitude. The demonstration of the love of God which is asked of us can only be understood when the love of God has visited non-Christians. Therefore our attitude towards society, towards economic powers, towards the State can be neither understood nor accepted as an example from the outside. Yet, it is efficacious within the reality of events.
Finally, this does not mean that non-Christians are left to their own devices or have no morality. Scripture shows us that there is a certain behaviour established by God in the covenant with Noah, a covenant, which like all covenants, is confirmed in the New Covenant in the blood of Jesus Christ. Scripture also reminds us that non-Christians obey an order over which Jesus Christ is lord. Therefore, to a certain extent it is possible for them to live in the good, a good over which Jesus Christ is Lord. Yet, this dependence of non-Christians on Jesus Christ is mysterious and hidden. It is only barely revealed in the Bible by faith. It is completely unknown to pagans. This is why anything that comes from it is devoid of authority in their eyes. This is also why all political, social or ethical systems vainly search for a foundation, a solidity, an authority in the natural resources of man, without ever finding one. The indisputable existence of this order for all humans, and yet the impossibility of understanding the reason for it (who is Christ, hidden to the natural eyes), explains the uncertainty and variability of human systems.8
As Ellul beautifully deconstructs in three parts, the liberal theologian has made three assumptions that his power, without the proclamation of God’s Word, can wield what God had so far overlooked:
i) That the Christian teaching is not an emergence from “the cave” of the world into the freedom of Christ that would guide those who carry the faith to do “the impossible” from the perspective of the secular world. To present a reasonable, sagacious argument for why one might become a martyr, for example, is to openly ask people to stop inviting you to social events.
ii) That the Christian teaching will first find its authority in some secular system of thought before it can start to call people to worship. It is to interpret “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End” (Revelation 22:13-15) as a rather embarrassing lack of modesty on God’s part, apparently unaware that His authority is actually based upon Cartesian foundationalism, phenomenological collisions, or mystical intuitions, and we need Him to take a backseat until we have suitably impressed our secular interlocutors.
iii) That the Christian teachings on redemption, salvation, and eschaton are not actually that important in the grand scheme of things, and a suitably advanced thinker would recognize that these dainty window-dressings are not central to the faith—again, Paul seems to have completely failed to understand this—but rather an embarrassing footnote that we might include once we have convinced everyone to absolute certainty that we are all, finally, definitely speaking the same language.
The ad hoc accusation of “hyper-Calvinism” here9, itself often only as meaningful as whatever theology and preaching the interlocutor doesn’t like—if it is defined at all, is an uncomfortable retreat into a kind of postmillennialism; it is not by the grace of God that we will be saved and brought into salvation, but by the very impressive argument that wins over the faithless sola humanitas and gives God the kick up the proverbial that He has so evidently required since humanity entered this very impressive, sagacious period of thought. If we have no faith that simply proclaiming and living out the Word will bring about a proper Christian socio-political response to the world (which, contra an unimaginative selection of our American counterparts, does not necessitate the legal enforcement of the faith—as if such a thing had occurred to Christ or the apostles), what precisely are we doing with this hufty old text that is so obviously less important than our syllogisms or legislative dicta? Maybe it would surprise our interlocutor to find out that there are paths between unimaginatively turgid fundamentalism and unimaginatively irrelevant liberal theology.
If you are a particularly astute analyst, my reader, you might have noticed that I have drawn upon one or two secular ideas here as well from the history of philosophy. What a terrible hypocrite I am!—says the person who has fallen off the horse on the other side10. As S. K. so often tried to express, the importance here is the absolute relation to the Absolute in the prototype of Christ’s life and then becoming relatively related to the relative as is appropriate for the sake of explanation. As we have no other method11 by which we can understand God’s self-revealed will to humanity but through the example of Christ which acts as the “key” to unlocking scripture, any other approach would be to relatively relate to the absolute and absolutely relate the relative. Only when the knowledge and the mode by which we understand the knowledge of God are delivered to us (itself, now only regarded as a “childish folly”)12 can we begin to talk about faith meaningfully—otherwise, we are like the blind man holding oranges who is struggling to make an omelette because these damned eggs won’t crack. We start from the revelation of Christ as a fact of our existence—as a known experience that hands us the “that we are” in our lives—that means all biblical criticism, all secular philosophy, all legal demands, and all liberal theology is held relatively at worst and indifferently at best.
The point of this “gospel-first” approach to theology is not to petulantly stamp and insist that we use parochial and particular methods to expound theologically in the freedom of Christ—although, at the same time, we do not shirk away from our parochiality and our particularity simply due to the embarrassment of being identified as parochial and particular, which is very much the opposite of the “demands of the times” in our own epoch—but rather that to speak of making theology untheological is to attempt to explain something hidden by the scales on the eyes of our audience (Acts 9:18-19) in terms which we assume that it isn’t! To encounter the Bible as the Word of God, we must believe that God has delivered us the condition of faith13, Christ has redeemed us out of the state of sin14, and the Spirit acts as our guide in the life we are called to live15—otherwise, it is just a book! The scriptures are only an aesthetic object of inquiry for the non-believer, a remarkable book that is still only a book, which we can turn to for some ancient teachings or a collection of moral duties16. If we are to speak of a Christian response to the world, remembering that the Bible is not a blueprint for political action or a collection of moral precepts17, we must start with the example of Christ in order to ensure that:
a) we maintain our faith,
b) we chase our salvation,
c) we take Christ seriously when He says “no one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6), and
d) we maintain our absolute relation to the Absolute when temptation arises.
All else is in severe danger of sagacity—at which point, we might as well become Hegelians.
“In this world which is the most admired teacher of Christianity? Is it the shamelessly worldly man who sans phrase and without disguise admits that he seeks after the earthly, after money, power, etc., and succeeds in attaining it? No, that is out of the question. Is it then the truly pious man who takes Christianity seriously, therefore actually is without this world's goods and pleasures, so that his life is an exposition of the Apostle's saying, "If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men most pitiable"? No, not that either.
But if there is one who has the shrewdness to know how to deceive God, and in such a way that he always comes out of it well and wins (perhaps more surely than the shameless worlding) all worldly goods and pleasures, while constantly he is the pious man, the God-fearing man, the man of God, earnestness itself—he is the admired one.”18
J. Ellul, tr. A. Andreasson Hogg, from Jacques Ellul and the Bible: Towards a Hermeneutic of Freedom, Kindle location 997, ed. J. M. Rollinson
“Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and a Method of “Virtue Ethics””, R. C. Roberts, from Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, p. 147
“Transcendence in Kierkegaard and Barth”, p. 17, A. Myrick
“The Authority of the Bible”, J. Ellul, tr. A. Andreasson Hogg, from Jacques Ellul and the Bible: Towards a Hermeneutic of Freedom, Kindle location 1059, ed. J. M. Rollinson
“How “Christian Ethics” Came to Be”, from The Hauerwas Reader, p. 49, S. Hauerwas, ed. J. Berkman and M. Cartwright
“On Keeping Theological Ethics Theological”, from The Hauerwas Reader, p. 53, S. Hauerwas, ed. J. Berkman and M. Cartwright
Ibid., p. 69
“The Authority of the Bible”, J. Ellul, tr. A. Andreasson Hogg, from Jacques Ellul and the Bible: Towards a Hermeneutic of Freedom, Kindle locations 1044, 1059, 1073, ed. J. M. Rollinson
A very amusing accusation against someone within the Methodist tradition.
“...as Luther says, the world continues to be like the drunken peasant who, helped up on one side of the horse, falls off the other side.” JP III 1846-47
Taking a sceptical eye to fantastic revelation and the obviousness of natural theology which everyone seems quite capable of not recognizing until someone quite forcefully asserts that it is as such.
Philosophical Fragments, p. 113, [J. Climacus]
Ibid., p. 80
“The New Testament Conception of Flesh”, W. T. Dayton, from Wesleyan Theological Journal, vol. II, p. 14-15, ed. C. W. Carter
“The Authority of the Bible”, J. Ellul, tr. A. Andreasson Hogg, from Jacques Ellul and the Bible: Towards a Hermeneutic of Freedom, Kindle location 880, ed. J. M. Rollinson
Interestingly, as noted by Barth, Brunner, Ellul and many others, the atheist exegesis is almost identical to the fundamentalist exegesis in approach, faith, and understanding.
“We cannot extract any system from God’s revelation without twisting the texts and coming up with unwarranted conclusions because redemption is not a system... When we open the Bible we do not find a philosophy, a political statement, a metaphysic or even a religion. We find instead the promise of dialog, a personal word addressed to me, asking me what I am doing, hoping, fearing—and especially what I am.” Money & Power, p. 25-26, J. Ellul
“A picture of life and a picture from life”, from The Instant, no. 8, September 11th 1855, from Attack upon "Christendom", p. 250, S. Kierkegaard
nice. three of the theologians i read a lot while still Protestant (now Russian Orthodox). Ellul is/was amazingly prophetic. friend of my father’s, who studied under Karl Barth and who forty or so years ago warned me of the perils of americanism and the reign of nihilistic stupidity.