Month: October 2023

Ellul on Being Christian in a Disordered World

This entry is part 14 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

In last Sunday’s gospel reading, Jesus responded to a question about taxes with his famous remark to give to Caesar what is his, and to God what is his (Matthew 22).

Often when I’ve heard this gospel preached (usually around pledge time, coincidentally), it’s been framed as Jesus being clever — threading a needle so as not to offend the Romans, and risk prison, or the Jews, and risk dismissal as some sort of collaborator with the oppressing power.

I don’t think Jesus feared either of those things, and I sure don’t think he was spinning his remark like some shrewd political operator. Treating the remark in this way treats it too lightly, as does treating it as an excuse to talk about church tithing. I think it was a much deeper and more important comment than that, about the way in which Christians are to live in this world. So important that it was included in all three synoptic gospels — remember, the Virgin Birth was in only two!

This comes to mind as I move to the next section of chapter 2 in Presence in the Modern World, where Ellul says that, although it is a “well-known truth” that “Christians belong to two cities,” it’s not something that is deeply understood in terms of daily living.

We are citizens of the nation where we live; we have social obligations, family obligations, governmental obligations; we must work to earn money, we participate in community and cultural activities. We’re not able to shirk these things, and importantly, we’re not called or commanded by God to shirk them. Nor are we called to “compartmentalize” and be Christians only on Sundays.

But Christians must consider their life in this world to be a temporary situation. They “belong” to a different city. They are something like foreigners temporarily residing in a country where they’re not citizens. They must play by the rules of the host country, adapt to the customs where necessary to get by, pay whatever fees or taxes are owed, conform with the laws; but still, their ultimate loyalty and allegiance lies with their own state, where they are full citizens, and to which they intend to return.

Ellul says that these Christians can be like ambassadors, defending the interests of their own city while living and working within a different city. Or he says it may be even better to think of them as spies, infiltrating the world and creating the conditions that will allow the Kingdom of God to burst forth.

No matter what a Christian’s situation in the world might be, their first loyalty must lie with God, yet they can’t abandon the world. It’s not their choice when to “return” to where they belong, so they must accept the inherent tension of belonging to two cities.

Ah, tension! Remember that from Chapter 1? There Ellul spoke of the need for Christians to embrace the tension that came from knowing that they could never make the world less sinful, but neither could they accept the world as it is.

This tension, of living in the world while not being of it, is actually the same tension, but, as Ellul writes, “transcribed into social, political, and economic reality.”

(Notice what he didn’t mention there? Cultural reality. But it’s almost always the cultural component that American Christians focus on when they talk about “being in the world, not of it.” If your argument against the prevailing culture leads to little more than the endorsement of a lucrative sub-culture, then you’re not embracing the tension, you’re just participating in the existing structures.)

This tension can’t be resolved. As Christians, though we are completely bound up in the world’s material reality, we must consider ourselves oppositional to that reality. We “must accept that the opposition between this world and the kingdom of God is total.”

But that doesn’t mean that we can sit smugly back, content that our side is “the right side,” and watch fellow humans suffer through the consequences of their bad choices. We can never forget that we are bound to our fellow humans, not only through social and economic and legal structures, but also because God has called us to be bound to them.

Christians, Ellul writes, “need to immerse themselves in social and political problems so that they can act in the world, not in the hope of making it a paradise, but only of rendering it tolerable.” (emphasis added)

It’s not our job to perfect the world (since we cannot), or to choose the right political party, or to try and create a utopia by forcing everyone else to live in accordance with our own cultural views, or even to “make the kingdom of God come.” It’s our task to try and ensure that the gospel can be both proclaimed and heard, so that “all people may hear truly the good news of salvation and resurrection.” (italics in original)

There are, Ellul says, three ways in which Christians must go here. It’s important to note that this represents a “strategic direction,” as David Gill writes in a footnote on page 29; Ellul thought it was impossible to create any sort of specific formula for Christian life and action.

  • First, understanding what God has revealed to them about humanity, they must “seek out the social and political conditions” that allow human beings to “live and develop” as God has commanded.
  • Second, they must recognize that God has placed them in “a certain setting” for God’s own reasons, and so they must accept the limitations of that setting. They are to work so that God’s desired order “might be embodied in particular, existing institutions and organizations,” without actually causing “the society that they live in to be destroyed.” (The original translated text is a bit confusing here; it sounds to me as if Ellul is saying that Christians are not called to be either docile societal sheep or “burn-it-all-down” reactionaries.)
  • Finally, the above points only mean something if everything is “oriented toward the proclamation of salvation.” This means that the top priority of Christians is to ensure that these institutions are not “closed” and that they can’t “claim to be complete, absolute.” These institutions cannot be allowed to prevent people from hearing the gospel. (This is not, I think, the same thing as requiring people to listen to the gospel, which does not lend to hearing “truly.”)

In following this strategic direction, Christians will fall victim to two fundamental errors, Ellul says. One, they will assume that constant progress will lead to the establishment of God’s kingdom. And/or two, they believe that if they achieve certain outcomes or reforms, “this order that God desires would come about.”

Nope. To repeat yet again, there is nothing that we can do in this world that will perfect it, or even meet God’s demands, which are “infinite, as is his pardon.” All solutions to economic, political or social problems are temporary. This is why Christians are in a permanent state of revolution. They are always called to “continually question” everything that is “termed progress, discoveries, facts, established results, reality, and so on.”

(I have to admire “reality” being thrown in there to be questioned right before “and so on.”)

Remember, the world has a will to suicide; no matter its current order, the world is “moving constantly toward disorder.” It’s a world in which Christians have no choice but to live, and we must accept our obligations toward that world and to our fellow human beings (which includes joyful obligations). To “render unto Caesar.” But if we forget that we belong to God, not the world, and lose ourselves in the world’s political and economic realities — or if we compartmentalize and keep separate our faith from our material life — then we will fail to “render unto God.”

Don’t forget, you’re alive.

A few years ago, a high-concept app called WeCroak gained a bit of buzz in circles both mainstream and religious. Installed on your phone, several times a day the app will send you a reminder that says, “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

What peace, many wrote, to be reminded that our existence is but a blink of time! The argument you are currently having with your spouse, the project due this morning that completely slipped your Wordle-playing mind, the cruel things you snarled at the customer service rep over the phone last night: Who cares? None of it matters! Soon, you’ll be dead.

In his book Low Anthropology, Christian author David Zahl writes that, in addition to reducing anxiety by focusing the user on something beyond the present, the app also reminds us that all people experience death, of themselves and others, which makes grief a bridge across difference. “[L]oss is a touchpoint with our fellow citizens,” he writes, “however differently we may interpret that loss. More than that … it motivates sympathetic outreach to others who are suffering, regardless of what else we may or may not have in common.”

Which may be true, although you might think otherwise if you’ve ever seen how toxic Twitter can get following the tragic death of anyone associated with either political party.

I thought of this app today because I’ve been reading Kierkegaard (of course), and though I’m not in a position to presume to fully understand his work, it occurred to me that the reminder I need several times a day is not that I’m going to die, but that I’m alive.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard wrote, “If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness … if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair?”

His point (despite his morose reputation) is that life is not despair, or not despair alone. Because we do, in fact, have eternal consciousness. (Later, in Sickness Unto Death, he wrote, “If there were nothing eternal in a man, he could not despair at all.”)

I know about death. I’ve seen loved ones die, and I was told, a few years ago, that I was going to die myself — and not in the usual, happens-to-all-of-us sort of way.

Tell me I’m mortal and I’m apt to roll my eyes at the obvious. I mean, I get the utility of it: Yes, someday I’ll be dead and none of this will matter, and with any luck it will happen before I have to go to that dentist appointment next Tuesday.

What I need is an app that will remind me several times a day that I’m alive, and eternal, and to ponder that, even if only for a moment.

Ellul on the State of Permanent Christian Revolution

This entry is part 13 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Having explained his concept of “revolutionary spirit” and shown how most things described as revolutionary are mere power struggles, Ellul moves toward the meat of Chapter 2 by bringing Christianity more directly into the picture.

Christianity, Ellul says, is revolutionary, not in the sense of action but in situation. Christians exist in a revolutionary situation, a “state of permanent revolution.” Underlying a theme from the first chapter, Christians are called to exist in the world as signs that point toward God, and here Ellul says that Christians contribute to the world’s preservation by simply “being, in the world’s midst, a revolutionary and inexhaustible power.”

He admits that this seems like a paradox, since Christians of his time were “the most conformist, docile of all people.” I would argue that this is still true, even in a 21st century nation that seems plagued by hostile, angry “Christians” pursuing political domination. There is nothing more conformist to the state than trying to gain control of it in order to use its power for your own ends.

But, Ellul says, the Holy Spirit does not depend on human choices and works (intervenes) irrespective of what we do. He writes, “That the Christian situation is revolutionary is not due to a stance of the human mind or will. It is so by necessity, and it cannot be otherwise insofar as Christ is acting in his church.” The Holy Spirit, in Ellul’s vision, is a presence directly active in human history, not just the peaceful dove floating down from Heaven that we sometimes imagine.

Ellul takes pains to note that the Christian revolution is against the world, not against any existing governments. “One can be conformist toward the government and yet revolutionary toward the world,” he writes. “The idea of revolution goes deeper here; it does not essentially have to do with changing a form of the state or an economic form but precisely with changing a civilization’s structures, which must constantly be called into question.”

This may indirectly lead to changes in government or economic structures, Ellul says, but “it does not necessarily lead to direct conflict with authority.”

Ellul on the Revolutionary Spirit Against the Facts

This entry is part 12 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Since chapter 2 of Presence in the Modern World is titled “Revolutionary Christianity,” at this point one might ask exactly what Jacques Ellul means by the word “revolutionary.” It’s a spirit, he says, that has existed for as long as human society has existed, a spirit that “has been a necessary part of social life. It has always meant the affirmation of a truth of a spiritual order over against the error of the moment.” (emphasis added)

In Ellul’s mind, everything else that calls itself revolutionary — from the communist and fascist ideologies from the time of his writing, to today’s self-proclaimed “anti-woke” activists “battling” school administrators — are not revolutionary at all, because they have not only accepted, but are actually participating in, “the error of the moment.”

The error underlying the current moment, the structures of our civilization as briefly described in the earlier pages of this chapter, lie, according to Ellul, in our respect for, and worship of, “the fact.”

The fact, Ellul says, is considered to be the final arbiter. The fact cannot be questioned; no judgment can be brought to bear on the fact, the fact is to be bowed down before. “Everything that is a fact can be justified by that alone.”

As a civilization, we have decided that facts and truth are synonymous. (In that world, Ellul notes, God cannot be true, because he does not look like a fact.)

Now hold on, one might say, how can you say that facts are indisputed given the dizzying controversies of the past few years surrounding conspiracy theories, “alternative facts,” and the like?

It seems to me that these controversies actually support Ellul’s contention, because every case involves the disputation of asserted facts with a different set of asserted facts.

But, one continues in protest, anti-vaxxers are alleging things that are untrue!

I certainly don’t disagree with that. I’m simply pointing out that in none of these controversies are people, on either side, questioning whether or not a fact is good or evil, whether or not that fact should exist at all; they are responding by appealing to the authority of something else they call a fact.

This gets quite confusing, I admit, but I think it’s an important point. David Gill writes a clarifying footnote on page 22, reproduced here in full:

“What have been lost are such things as purpose, human values, revelation, community, tradition, paradox, and mystery. Facts are disconnected, measurable phenomena that are available to our senses. They come at us in a blizzard of factoids and bits. We survey them, count them, and call them ‘established facts,’ and believe them to be reality.” (emphasis added)

To me, those last couple of sentences describe both, for example, Fox News and MSNBC. Whether you are a watcher of one or the other, you are worshipping at the altar of what you believe to be an “established fact.” The 2020 election was criminally rigged, or it wasn’t; whether or not the “facts” being appealed to on either side are objectively “factual” or not, the proponent of each believes them to be reality. They argue by asserting “facts,” no matter how silly those facts might sound to each other. Conspiracy-minded January 6 rioters are dismissed as “living in an alternate reality,” but I think that Ellul would argue that they are living very much in the same reality as their political opponents.

Ellul uses the example of the atomic bomb — something top of mind at the time of the book’s writing (and which should probably be more top of mind now). All the questions asked about the bomb, he wrote, were secondary: who should be allowed to use it, how will it be controlled, shall we use this force for war or peace, etc. The primary question, the one question that only human beings can ask because only humans know the difference between good and evil (which is beyond and superior to The Fact) is, can this fact be allowed to exist?

Replace “atomic bomb” with “AI” and consider these same issues.

There have always been “alternative facts” — they are what parties and voters argue about. It is not that they are fighting over the existence of a particular fact, but that they oppose one alleged fact with another. The process, Ellul says, is always the same: a fact is taken up, be it “the proletariat” or “money” or “critical race theory” or “QAnon,” and turned into a God of sorts. “It is then imposed on a whole group of people, bluntly and simply, because all modern people in their hearts embrace the worship of the fact.”

As noted in an earlier part of this chapter, our current political differences are merely about power and who will wield it. Since, as Ellul writes, “the fact of the future is preferred to the fact that is currently on the way out,” new “alternative facts” are being introduced all the time. A cacophonous Internet blasting us with “factoids and bits” may make it simpler for one fact to replace another as perceived truth in our minds, because we have this preference for the future. This might make everything feel more unstable, but it doesn’t really undermine the civilizational structure.

Ellul’s revolutionary spirit is total. It can’t be merely an affirmation of truth or freedom — which truths, which freedoms? — or the affirmation of some political party, doctrine, or ideology (see earlier post on solving sin by human means). Ellul says that we will either have the current civilization of mass, technological conformity — “hell organized on earth for the physiological happiness of all” — or we will have … something else.

But we don’t know what that something else might be, because it must be “made by conscious human beings.” If we unconsciously follow along “the course of history,” then we have chosen the side of the world’s will to suicide.

At the end of this particular section, though, Ellul throws his hands up and admits that, given the way that society is structured, a revolutionary consciousness (which is, remember, “the affirmation of a truth of a spiritual order”) is “almost impotent.” We can’t even see who might have this revolutionary consciousness in the first place.

Determinism Means You Can Do Anything You Want

I actually feel sorry for this guy. I have some quick thoughts about this admittedly condensed NYT interview with Stanford neurologist (and “genius grant” recipient) Robert Sapolsky.

  • Sapolsky contends, the interviewer says, that “biology, hormones, childhood and life circumstances coalesce to produce actions that we merely feel were ours to choose.” This is actually not a denial of free will. Circumstances narrow choices. Choices narrow choices. Morality narrows choices. Choices are narrow, and sometimes, maybe even often, you don’t really have a choice. You still have free will.
  • I don’t think that “free will” means that you can do anything you want, at any time. In fact, that statement would more appropriately summarize Sapolsky’s deterministic argument. Because, if free will is a myth, and you can’t be held responsible for your actions, then aside from physics etc., what is there to limit your choices in any particular situation?
  • Sapolsky believes that this avoidance of responsibility is “liberating.” This is like saying a week’s vacation at the beach is relaxing. Yes, and so what?
  • He says this feeling of liberation is because, for “most people,” “life has been about being blamed and punished and deprived and ignored for things they have no control over.” Um, has it? Don’t ask this guy to take care of your plants while you’re enjoying that week at the beach.
  • He’s a biologist (turned neurologist) and apparently, he believes that this gives him expert insight into human behavior, when in fact all he is doing is applying the principles of one particular field to a completely different one. For example, he says that you can prove to him that free will exists if you can prove the existence of neurons controlling every decision you make that act independently of all the other neurons. Sigh. This just shows how STEM education without an in-depth humanities requirement is destructive …
  • … because Sapolsky doesn’t know what a metaphor is. You see, he keeps referring to humans as machines, biological machines. Except that humans are not machines; that is a metaphor. As Iain McGilchrist wrote: “Just as a joke is robbed of power when it has to be explained, metaphors and symbols lose their power when rendered explicit … Is it logical, or just a matter of faith, to believe that logic has no limits? Is it logical to rule out the possibility, understood for millennia, that there was a difference between the sort of knowledge that is available to logos and the sort that is available to mythos? Is it logical, or an assertion of faith, to assign reality to only one of these kinds of knowledge? Is it logical, or just a dogma, to assume that all will be understood, as long as we only carry on applying the model of the machine? Is there a cost to this approach, which, though it makes us powerful manipulators, puts us out of touch with so much that gives life value?”
  • Sapolsky, at least in this interview, doesn’t even pretend that his viewpoint is actionable. His “machine-ness” comes to mind maybe “once every three and a half weeks or so.” Otherwise he’s just, you know, living his life — making decisions — like any other human being.
  • He has even less of a grasp on how human society works. Don’t worry about everything sinking into chaos, he says, because there are “societal mechanisms for having dangerous people not be dangerous, or for having gifted people do the things society needs to function.” As if … these societal “mechanisms” have some sort of independent ontological status? Societal mechanisms exist because humans form societies and agree, collectively, on what those rules are. Take a look around if you want to know what it’s like when people stop agreeing on those rules. It’s only going to get worse.
  • Finally, Sapolsky admits, “At some point, it doesn’t make a difference whether your feelings are real or whether your feeling of feelings being real is the case.” Then why even have the conversation? He seems to specifically limit the applicability of his argument to areas where thinking in this way might support his own political opinions.
  • A few weeks ago, I told a friend that I didn’t think “determinism” could ever rise above the level of college dorm bull session because it’s simply not actionable. Even if it were somehow proven to be true, that free will is false, there’s literally no way to go through one hour, let alone one day or one lifetime, as if it were true. Based on this interview, Sapolsky agrees. And yet he chose to write a book about it anyway.

Things Fall Apart, But the Center, It Holds

This entry is part 11 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Ellul wrote Presence in the Modern World during the very tumultous post-War period of the 1940s — a revolutionary era, as he noted in Chapter 2. He himself served in the French Resistance and had first-hand experience with the conflicting ideologies of fascism, communism, and capitalism.

Despite the ongoing and protracted struggle between viewpoints (within societies, not only between), Ellul wrote that the “appearance of movement and development” was an illusion. “We are in fact in complete stasis.”

Ellul believed this to be the case because none of these “revolutionary” ideologies actually disagreed on the fundamental values of modern civilization, which he listed as “the primacy of production, the constant increase in the powers of the state and the formation of the nation state, the autonomous rise of technique, and so on.” One imagines Ellul at the end of that sentence making a vague sort of “and all this” gesture.

Ellul discusses technique and communications (propaganda) a bit further in this book, and of course he went on to explore them at great depth in multiple volumes. For now, it is enough to say that, from his perspective, civilization is following a path made inevitable by the very structures of that civilization. Any proposed revolution would merely be “surface changes” while in fact reinforcing the existing structures.

“[In order for a revolution to succeed], it would need to use the very means of today’s world. For example, in order to liberate humankind, the compliance of many people would be required; this means that propaganda would have to be in routine use. A politics of the mass would have to be instituted, because that alone can succeed today and it is useless to attempt revolution on some other basis. But if we create a mass, we cooperate precisely with these structures. To free humankind, we would start by destroying everything that still remains free in each person.“

p. 20, emphasis added

The differences between parties existed, Ellul wrote, but ultimately they were only about “knowing who will take power.” The point of modern society is the assimilation of individuals into a mass, and once modern premises are accepted, only appearances can change.

Since this book was published 75 years ago, one has to wonder — as we look around the turmoil of the 2020s, wars across the globe and fierce polarization — is Ellul’s belief, that we are in stasis no matter who is in power, still tenable?

In 1989, only 41 years after publishing Presence, Ellul added a footnote to a new edition addressing this section in light of (then) more recent events. He wrote that China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s had aimed to root out Western techniques (along with the very culture of the Chinese people and their traditional social structures), but since then, “China has returned to the path of technique, productivity, economism.” In fact it certainly seems, since Ellul added this note, that China is practically defined by its embrace of technique.

Then there is the matter of Islam. Continuing in 1989, Ellul wrote that Islam “is the only power today that calls the worldwide structures into question,” and that is only because in Islam, state and religion are one. An Islamist revolution, he said, might provide the world’s first true revolutionary victory, “but at the cost of the world’s total enslavement. For Islam is equivalent to what communism was, in its will for absolute domination of the world.”

Given the prevalence of “anti-liberalism” in 21st century political debates, along with “nationalist” and “populist” movements worldwide, is Ellul still correct in his assessment? I would argue, yes.

It’s true that there are a growing number of “Christian” figures who seem envious of the whole Islamic “state-and-religion-are-one” thing, be they Catholic integralists or evangelical “dominionists.” But beyond writing books and arguing with each other, none of them have a realistic path to power in the United States. Some hold out the possibility of taking advantage of, say, the potential re-election of, and subsequent catastrophic reconfiguration of the executive branch by, Donald Trump. But Trump doesn’t care about religion; he specifically upholds technique and a rent-seeking version of capitalism as ideal; he is naked in his desire to wield an expansive power of the state against his enemies.

21st century political “polarization” is centered around mere power. Yes, parties have differences, and those differences can be quite meaningful in terms of specific policy approaches and outcomes for certain groups. But ultimately, these debates are about who will gain power and, once there, how they will stay in power, and for how long.

The companies and technologies made possible by technique and productivity (which have a far more insidious control over our daily lives even than the state) might be regulated, taxed, fined, infiltrated or in some cases, in some countries, even taken over completely by the state — but they are certainly never eliminated. (Would even an anti-liberal, anti-market government that managed to gain control in America even try to shut down, for example, social media — or would it seek to use it to its own advantage, instead?)

From the point of view of the modern state, no matter who is in control, individuals can be a mass, or they can be slaves, or both. But where does that leave Christians?