Presence in the Modern World

Ellul: Do Not Confuse Christian Ethics with Morality

This entry is part 5 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Returning to Chapter 1 of Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World. (Remember, I’m taking these notes as I go, section by section, so I reserve the right to realize later that I’m making incorrect assumptions and assertions! In other words, maybe I’m getting it wrong; feel free to tell me so.)

In my last post, we discussed Ellul’s contention that only laypeople can present “theological truth” to the world, since unlike clergy, they have no separation from the world.

This means that we must live our daily lives as “salt of the earth, light of the world, sheep among wolves” — essentially, pointing the world to Christ — not by following any formula or set of rules, but by the way we act in any particular situation.

It would be easier to grasp Ellul’s point here if he offered concrete examples about what exactly it might mean to live as salt/light/sheep, but maybe he is avoiding examples on purpose. A concrete example would suggest that there is always a single behavior required for a particular situation, or a set of guidelines we can follow for living as Christians. But those guidelines would add up to “morality.”

And that, Ellul says, is the problem: we confuse “Christian ethics” with morality, or virtues. But moral systems are what we use to try and improve the human world, and that’s exactly what we cannot do. We’re so desperate to relieve the tension of living in a sinful world that we create moral systems to try and improve that world. But that world cannot be improved, and Christianity does not equate to morality. (EDIT: Maybe that would more accurately read “that world cannot be made less sinful.” There are things about the world that can be improved at a certain objective level, I think, but the sinfulness — and ultimate collapse — remains.)

If we want to understand this, we need to understand Ellul’s definition of Christian life, which he views as a state of constant struggle between judgment and grace.

At every moment, we are being judged, and we are being forgiven. It is the struggle between these two states that ensures our freedom because, at every moment, we are being “placed in a new situation.” That new situation sets us free from both “satanic fetters” and any pre-determined, legalistic program of morality.

Ellul’s Christian faith certainly reminds me of Kierkegaard and his “individual before God.” For Ellul, there can be no accounting of God’s ethical demands appropriate for every circumstance, because “all Christians are in fact responsible for their works and conscience.” Each individual’s faith is a “living attitude” and that faith is what will determine their individual actions in every circumstance, as opposed to a specific moral guideline.

But, and here’s the requisite complicated rub, just because there are no guidelines, doesn’t mean there isn’t any guidance. We are able to (and in fact, required to) “trace the outlines” of Christian ethics, so that we might better respond in “specific, variable situations.” But these ethics cannot replace the “combat of faith” within each individual Christian for determining their behavior.

So, as we struggle each day to deepen our individual faith in Christ, we decide on which actions to take based on that faith, along with the broad lessons (not hard-and-fast rules) we learn from Christian ethics. Those ethics themselves, Ellul says, should be “continually subject to question, review, and reformulation through the efforts of the whole church community.”

In this discussion of ethics and individual action, Ellul appears to embrace a Kierkegaardian existential faith, while also preserving a role for the church, of which Kierkegaard thought little.

Note: I’m going to try to figure out how to better track these Ellul posts, perhaps by creating a single page listing them in chronological order.

Laypeople of the World, Unite (I Mean, Unite Two Opposing Concepts and Hold Them in Tension)

This entry is part 4 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Continuing with my (extremely slow) reading of Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World. There’s still a lot of Chapter 1 left, so if I don’t step up the pace, this book may take the better part of my remaining life to finish. And it’s not even a very long book!

In the last post, I talked about Ellul’s contention that “it is by living and receiving the gospel that political, economic, and other problems can be resolved.”

This is done through accepting the tension (and “liv[ing] it out to the full“) between knowing that it is impossible to make the world less sinful, while still refusing to accept it the way that it is.

It’s up to laypeople to live out this tension and present “theological truth” to the world, because, as he wrote earlier in the chapter, “for them in particular there is no separation from the world” — and the clergy “does not understand the world’s situation.”

Unfortunately, modern laypeople tend to compartmentalize their faith aside from the rest of their life, or else they have reduced it to a “moral system” (which is not theological truth, or even faith). Since God uses “a material medium, human means, to act by his Spirit,” and this material medium — the laity living out their faith, in tension, in full — does not exist to any great extent, “the gospel no longer affects the world.”

We (laypeople) live and act in the midst of economic, political, and ideological realities, and our role is not to pick and choose amongst these forces to find the “best” ones, but to recognize that they are all sinful and “cannot be improved in some other way.” Our role instead is to demonstrate “Jesus Christ’s forgiveness” for all of these sinful realities.

Ellul says that laypeople are not “guinea pigs” — and I think perhaps here he means that they are not merely being dispatched by the church to attempt a seemingly impossible task, but instead their very existence (if they are “liv[ing] out the tension each day of their lives”) is what actually enables the church to understand the world’s dire situation, and the world to recognize the spiritual problems it is trying (and failing) to solve with other means. The layperson is where the world and the church connect.

I think that failure of the laity to recognize the importance of our role may be the biggest problem the church faces, not only in mainline denominations such as my Episcopal Church, but across the spectrum. We compartmentalize, and we moralize (on left and right), and everything else is up to the clergy and the church staff; that’s what we pay them for, right?

We Cannot Solve Sin’s Consequences by Human Means

This entry is part 3 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Resuming my read-through of Jacques Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World. I got sidetracked for a while with life, vacation, other writings and readings. There is still quite a bit of Chapter 1 to muddle through.

In my last post, I mentioned Ellul’s contention that the world is now so interconnected that all of us share some responsibility for sins, even if they are corporate, institutional or cultural sins; it is “scandal” for Christians to be associated with the world’s sins, but there is no solution to this scandal.

In fact, as Ellul continues in Section 2 of Chapter 1, simply living in the world — which is something he says Christians must not try to avoid — is, always has been, and will remain, a scandal. “We have no right to accustom ourselves to this world or spread a veil of Christian illusion over it,” Ellul says.

The world is “the domain of Satan” and all of us who live here, including Christians, are affected by the consequences of sin because we’re all sinners, and through our connections to others, participants in the world’s sinful condition. (A footnote explicates Ellul’s belief that Satan is “only the composite, the synthesis, the sum total of all the accusations brought by people against other people in the world.” Which is not a terribly clarifying footnote, really.)

Christian virtues will not “offset” these sins. Trying to change the world so that humankind might be “less wicked, if not less unhappy, living in it” is futile. At the same time — and here things get a bit complicated — we cannot reconcile ourselves to the wickedness, either. “We must not tell ourselves that we can do nothing about it,” even though Ellul has just said that we can do nothing about it.

In other words: the tension, oh the tension, of two truthful statements completely opposite in meaning. “On the one hand, we cannot make this world less sinful; on the other, we cannot accept it as it is.”

He compares this tension to that we feel being caught between sin and grace — we are sinners; we have received, and will receive, grace — and admits that this is an “uncomfortable” position. But it can’t be avoided: accept the tension, and live accordingly, he says.

Which means what, exactly?

It means not falling for the same false choices presented by most people and groups in society. They try to solve the economic, social, and political problems around us by using “technical means or moral criteria,” because they cannot see the underlying spiritual causes behind all of these problems. They don’t see sin.

Since they don’t and can’t solve the spiritual crises that they don’t or won’t see, they create “solutions” that just make the existing problems get worse “until what they have called their civilization reaches the point of collapse.”

As Christians, Ellul says that our role is not to see these problems in the same way as others, or to offer technical or moral “solutions” to these problems. Instead, we must look to the spiritual reality beneath the corporeal difficulties, and respond to these problems with the only actual solution: “it is by living and receiving the gospel that political, economic, and other problems can be resolved.”

At this point in the reading, I’m not sure specifically how this sort of thing would look in everyday life. Going back to Ellul’s point that we are Salt, Light, Sheep, even those metaphors-not-metaphors are pretty abstract: we are to live our lives as signs that point others to God. I find myself longing for a listicle of “24 ways to live and receive the gospel today.”

Actually, writing that last sentence made me shudder, and it certainly feels opposite to Ellul’s point. Almost, but not quite, as opposite, as trying to, on the one hand, “return” the government to an illusory “Christian” past; or, on the other, solve every human problem with a bureaucratic government program. (Oversimplifying both sides here.) Both of those proposed “solutions” rely exactly on the technical and moral means that Ellul claims move civilization closer to ruin.

To respond to the crises of our time “in a human way that is not a lie or pretense,” Christians have to embrace the uncomfortable tension: we cannot remove sin from the world, or solve the problems caused by sin using human means; but neither can we accept the sinful world as it is.

Sin & Scandal

This entry is part 2 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Continuing my read-through of Chapter 1 of Jacques Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World. There’s a lot here.

Ellul (perhaps because he was a layperson) is most concerned with the plight of the laity in the modern world, because unlike the clergy, there is no separation between a layperson and the rest of society. “Claiming to be separate becomes more and more difficult, as each person is forced into a world that becomes more intrusive, crushing, and demanding than ever.”

Ellul argues that modern society differs from previous civilizations in the extent to which humans are immersed in the world. “Modern transportation systems, the interconnection of economic institutions, or the rise of democracy” — modern humans are submerged in larger systems from which they cannot easily extricate themselves. (Even moreso now than it was in Ellul’s time, obviously.) For this reason, he says, Christians “cannot consider themselves pure” in comparison to the rest of the world; they are not only individual sinners, but they share in the collective sin of society.

Having just finished reading Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death I’m pondering the difference between SK’s focus on the individual sinner and Ellul’s definition in this chapter. Ellul says that the reason that there is “none righteous” is not that every individual is wicked, “but because all things are confined under sin.” We are related to others in sin extending back across time and generations to the original sin. So the modern world makes clear (through our global inter-connection) what was always a Biblical truth: we share in the sin of all.

Original (hereditary) sin is a difficult concept to grasp (for me!), and I remember being somewhat confused by SK’s brief discussion of it in TSUD. Conceding my lack of familiarity with both authors, I think that there may be a similarity between these two takes on sin, that they might in fact be one, since they both describe sin as essentially a state of being, as opposed to actions or behaviors. This is definitely oppositional to (for lack of a better term) Americanized Christianity, with its emphasis on individual responsibility for specific actions or behaviors.

Laypeople feel this connection to societal sin most acutely, Ellul says. It makes them uncomfortable; it is scandal to be associated with the world’s sins. So they try to escape, in two ways:

  • Separate the material from the spiritual — eg, This is my personal life, and that is my spiritual life, and never the twain etc. They focus their effort on “spiritual problems” apart from everyday life, which is separate, their dayjob, so to speak. This sort of compartmentalization is hypocrisy. “God became incarnate; it is not our job to disincarnate him.”
  • Or, they try to “Christianize” everything. Let’s create a Christian state, Christian movies, Christian books, Christian psychology, etc. This is taking “the world” (of which we are, as noted earlier, specifically not a part), finding what we think is “good” in it, or glossing it with something we think is “good,” and calling it Christian. You can’t reform the world’s activities by “pronouncing a blessing on them.” On the social/cultural side, this is very reminiscent of the evangelical subculture in which I grew up; on the governmental side, more reminiscent of today’s dark illiberal impulses.

In both of these cases, Christians are attempting to “build a bridge” between themselves and the world. This bridge, Ellul says, is “morality” — and he is clearly not using the term in a favorable sense.

This type of bridge, he says, is the “most anti-Christian position possible.” But he also says that there is, in fact, “no possible solution” to the scandal that exists.

Salt, Light, Sheep

This entry is part 1 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Started reading Jacques Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World a while back and set it aside because I had to read some Kierkegaard for a couple of Catherine Project groups, and I can only take so much. After those months of strenuous mental exercise, I’m returning to the Ellul and it feels a tiny bit lighter, like picking up a 50 lb weight after months of picking up 75 lb weights every day. (Or whatever weight analogy might make sense here, I don’t know.)

I’ll be posting some notes as I make my way through Presence — notes in the broadest and quickest sense possible; I’m not aiming for essays here.

According to the foreword to this edition by Ted Lewis, this is the foundational text in Ellul’s surprisingly large oeuvre. It combines both his sociological insights — the thoughts later expanded in such works as Propaganda and The Technological Society — with his theological vision. He was apparently unhappy that people were not reading these two types of works in dialogue with each other, since that is how he wrote them:

“On the one hand he was unveiling a dark vision of technological totalitarianism that pulls every facet of Western culture (and every person) into its vortex; on the other hand, he was presenting a theological vision where human freedom and responsibility could lead to a hopeful future.” (Ted Lewis, foreword)

According to the first chapter, “The Christian in the World,” that “hopeful future” may depend on your perspective. The world is “heading toward death” and the role of Christians, on a planet not our home, is not to change the world’s trajectory but to serve as signposts for those who still cling to it.

Christians “are not called on to select the human activities that they consider good and then participate in them.” Christians have a “specific function” as Christians that is decisive for the world’s fate.

Ellul locates three images from the Bible — You are the salt of the earth, You are the light of the world, I send you out as sheep among the wolves — and states that these metaphors, despite being actual metaphors, are not “similes or special terms to use when speaking of Christians,” they are “not figures of speech or pretty pictures.”

They are also, he says, not possibilities for Christian life; they are what we are here to do, how we are meant to live.

  • “Salt” is the sign of the Covenant, according to Leviticus. First and foremost, we are here to show the world that there is an alternative to the death toward which it is hurtling. If we are not here to demonstrate and point to God, then the world will not know that there is a God.
  • Christians shine the “light” on history and make sense of it all. Christianity provides the logic of history, which is otherwise just a series of random events. We are a sign of the end toward which all is headed, where God has already won.
  • Christians are not to be wolves, seeking spiritual dominance; they are to be sacrificial “sheep” and accept the domination of others. “They are sheep not because their action or sacrifice has a purifying effect on the world, but because in the world’s midst they are the true, living and ever renewed sign of the sacrifice of the Lamb of God.”

In just these first few pages Ellul has staked out a very counter-cultural claim — counter to not only the broader culture but also certainly to the Christian culture in the U.S. I’m reminded of Kierkegaard (still percolating in my mind) and his scorn for the Christendom of his day. A century later and Ellul was just as derogatory towards the church of his time (which sounds similar to the church of ours).

If Christians do not fulfill their specific function as Salt/Light/Sheep, Ellul says that “they are not fulfilling their role and are betraying Jesus Christ and the world also. Christians can always strive to do good works and exhaust themselves in religious or social activity, but this will signify absolutely nothing if they do not accomplish the one mission that Jesus Christ charges them with specifically — to be, first, a sign.” (emphasis added)

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