Here it was May 4, 1970, hardly two days after the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the slayings at Kent State, and I was organizing the student strike at Hamilton College, participating along with my contemporaries in hundreds of colleges and universities across the United States in the “great catharsis” of ‘70, the last big blowout of the Peace Movement. It was a glorious spring week as I recall, and the time seemed preordained, perfect for a successful revolution as we marched, protested, mobilized, and painted arm- bands while the Rolling Stones sang “Street Fighting Man” in the background.
Yet it was less than cathartic for me. No longer a student (having graduated from Hamilton nearly a year before) and no longer employed (having quit my job at the Reader’s Digest six weeks previously) I found the constant activity to be as unsatisfying as it was compulsive. Concessions won from anxious college administrators seemed empty to me in my position between two worlds, and the best of our efforts merely an exercise in futility. So it was that I lived through that week with an uncomfortable sense of the ambiguity of my own situation, an anxiety born of double-edged alienation.
On the advice of a professor, I walked into chapel one evening during those days in time to hear the following words spoken softly yet forcefully: “If, say about the end of the decade, there be any survivors of the death of American culture, and should any of them be theological literates, and, if, while sifting the rubbish, they happen upon a book or two by Jacques Ellul, they will surely be mystified as to why a message so intelligent and urgent was not more heeded.”
The speaker stood on the podium leaning on his cane, barely visible above the lectern, so bent and stricken was he by disease. Yet his voice, though lacking strength, carried the force of his convictions as he talked through the evening about a Christ I had never known. The man was William Stringfellow.
It was shortly after talking at length with Stringfellow that I first picked up the writings of Jacques Ellul, and began the process which carried me first to Koinonia Partners in Americus, Georgia, and then to Gordon-Conwell Seminary five years later. Although the journey has been long and has taken several forms, the goal has remained the same for this confessing Christian on the path of discipleship. Ellul helped awaken me from the sleepwalking which had previously passed for life, and was first to point the way that I might travel beyond the closed system of ‘movement politics’--while remaining committed to the pursuit of justice, freedom, and truth. He has been my pedagogue in the classical sense of that word--a teacher who has walked alongside me. And I have been grateful for his company.
Yet he is not an easy man to be with, and I have seldom been entirely comfortable in his presence. Although the influence of his thought has been a key factor in my decisions and thus my journey, at every way station he has articulated a challenge which pushed me further onward. Thus I have been as vigorously challenged by his thought at Koinonia as at Gordon-Conwell, two situations which differ from each other in the extreme. In each case, the challenge has been different, a particular word addressed to a particular situation, in specific terms. In each case, the word has been spoken with authority and credibility.
I offer the preceding as prolegomena, not apologetics. The times are hard and barren for Christians in this land so far east of Eden, and we must find our prophets where we can. I acknowledge the debt which I owe to Jacques Ellul in my effort to interpret and understand my own experience because it is precisely this effort which sparked my interest in Christian political thought. Having experienced the sterility of both political and religious orthodoxies (liberal and conservative alike) through participation in each, I have continued to struggle to locate the gospel’s life-giving alternative which encompasses truth in both its spiritual and political manifestations.
There is much to be gained, then, in listening to one who speaks to the extremes. Beginning with the heightened awareness of “the contradiction between the evolution of the modern world and the biblical content of revelation,” Ellul has studiously sought to develop his knowledge of both fields--the socio-political reality, and the biblical, theological reality. The result of his efforts has been what he refers to as “a composition in counterpoint,” in which each effort at socio-political analysis has been balanced by a corresponding theological or biblical analysis. Since it is written by a man whose approach unites a perceptive analysis of socio-political reality with a commitment to biblical faith, each volume partakes of the integrity of the entire effort.
Yet the unity of Ellul’s works is composed of several individual (though not fully discrete) elements, and each book must be read as such, with an awareness of it place in the overall scheme. At the same time, Ellul insists that his readers resist the normal temptation to over-emphasize the unity of the corpus by perceiving a system where none exists or is intended. The author intentionally separates his socio- political analysis and his theological/ biblical studies, and vigorously rejects any attempt to achieve an artificial or a philosophical synthesis based on an unwarranted adaptation or amalgamation of rightfully conflicting elements.
It is a principle basic to Ellul’s thought that solutions to the various social, political, and economic problems of the day are not to be found in biblical Christianity. “God in Jesus Christ puts questions to us--questions about our selves, our politics, our economics--and does not supply the answers; it is the Christian himself who must make answer,” he wrote in 1975. The Word is not seen as a static body of objectified knowledge about “the good” contained in some dust-covered record or a closed book, but as the living will of a living God, a “revelation ever new which cannot be systematized, nor analyzed, nor relegated to a past when it was alive but now that it has taken place delivered into our hands to do with what we will.” The author is extremely insistent upon this point, convinced as he is that when, in fact, man regards this revelation as a thing of the past which belongs to him, he falsifies it.” (To Will and To Do)
Ellul finds absolutely no room for compromise; the choice is between understanding the revelation as a living present word incapable of systematization and adaptation, or as a lifeless husk, empty of meaning and significance, and of little value to anyone. It is on the basis of this conviction then that Ellul has set up the principle of confrontation, “that is, bringing face to face two factors that are contradictory and irreconcilable and at the same time inseparable. For it is only out of the decision he makes when he experiences this contradiction--never out of adherence to an integrated system--that the Christian will arrive at a practical position. While it is certainly evident that his theology is informed by his socio-political experience, and vice versa, yet the distinctions are maintained and the lines are kept clear. The areas are neither confused nor conjoined, and the author's wishes in this regard must be scrupulously honored if his thought is to be understood as he intends.
Critics within the church and without find Ellul’s dialectical approach equally troublesome, though for different reasons. Conservative Christians regard Ellul’s wholesale indictment of existing systems of government, politics, and culture as unchristian, even unpatriotic, in this “one nation under God.” Politically liberal nonbelievers, on the other hand, though perhaps more accepting of Ellul’s trenchant analysis of socio-political reality, find his constant reference to biblical revelation a source of embarrassment and an indication of the ultimate weakness of his thought. Each group would gladly divide the work precisely at the point of confrontation which Ellul has struggled to force. One faction, evangelical Christianity, desires a word which is less concerned with the world and its problems and more expressive of the glory of God They come seeking “blessings.” Another, composed of liberal nonbelievers, want less God-talk and more criticism of an expressly sociological nature. They come seeking critiques.
It all has a faintly familiar ring to it, and suggests a situation Paul himself once described in his first letter to the Corinthians:
For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:21-24)
Although their criticisms take markedly different forms, and appear to differ considerably in matters of substance, yet both Ellul’s evangelical and his liberal detractors stumble on the same rock of offense, the uncompromisingly Christocentric nature of his thought.
There is little wonder that nonbelievers should be caught up short by Ellul’s constant reference to God’s revelation in scripture; the very concept is an offense in a world which is unwilling to acknowledge transcendence of any kind, let alone the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. To be sure, there is much in Ellul’s writing that appears to be free of such emphasis. In fact, three of his works of socio-political analysis, The Technological Society, Propaganda, and The Political Illusion, are widely quoted and have helped form the basis of the radical critique of Western culture by many respectable radicals on the left. This is not surprising, as these works in particular show the influence of Ellul’s early encounter with Marxism. While he ultimately chose faith in Jesus Christ upon realizing that he could not be both Marxist and Christian, yet he has been careful to acknowledge his debt to the Marxist perspective:
What Marx had brought to me was certain way of “seeing” the political, economic, and social problems--a method of interpretation, a sociology.
It seemed to me that the method of Karl Marx (but not of the Communists) was superior to all that I had encountered elsewhere.
His analysis of existing socio-political reality is informed by class consciousness, and an awareness of the determining effects of systematic and structural forces within society, two significant elements of his thought directly traceable to his encounter with Marxist methodology.
Yet it must be remembered that Ellul’s final choice was faith in Jesus Christ, and from that point on a rigorously biblical perspective has formed his concepts all the way down the line. There is nothing hidden about this agenda, as Ellul himself takes pains to point out:
I therefore confess in this study and this research that the criterion of my thought is the biblical revelation, the content of my thought is the biblical revelation, the point of departure is supplied by the biblical revelation, the method is the dialectic in accordance with which the biblical revelation is given to us...(To Will and To Do)
Hence Ellul’s sociology is fueled by a theologically-based pessimism which finds little cause for hope in humanity’s unceasing efforts to justify itself by works apart from God’s redemptive grace.
His analysis of the illusory nature of most political activity in The Political Illusion provides an instructive case in point. Drawing heavily upon conclusions first articulated in The Technological Society, Ellul suggests that in the absence of moral determinants sufficiently strong to resist the encroachment of technology’s needs, necessity and efficiency have become the dominating criteria of political life. Spurred by the constant growth of the technology that it serves, the state has assumed its place at the center of human life and has in the process been invested with a religious faith and trust by its citizens. The state, then, has become the ultimate arbiter of the good. As a result, values are irrevocably altered by the political process and stripped of their distinctive content, because the individual’s spiritual or moral motivation is rendered irrelevant to political behavior.
The blame for this situation is laid directly at the door of technology. Yet this observation is placed within the interpretive schema provided by the biblical revelation. The current ascendance of technique to its position of unparalleled dominance is merely the latest, most progressive manifestation of the Fall’s consequences.
Only the biblical revelation of humanity’s true potential illumines and reveals the extent of our actual depravity, as well as the specific nature of the only effective cure. In The Political Illusion, Ellul proposes a solution which is entirely dependent upon
...a profound change in the citizen. As long as he is preoccupied only with his security, the stability of his life, his material well-being, we should have no illusion; he will certainly not find the civic virtue necessary to make democracy live... What is needed is a conversion of the citizen, not to a certain political ideology, but at the much deeper level of his conception of lift itself, his presuppositions, his myths. If this conversion fails to take place, all the constitutional devices, all studies on economic democracy, and all reassuring sociological inquiries on man and society are vain efforts at justification.
What is presented here in largely secular terms finds a full theological articulation in The Presence of the Kingdom:
So far as the solution is concerned, it cannot be a rational one: it can only be a solution in terms of life, and in the acceptance of forgiveness given in Jesus Christ. In other words, it is in receiving and in living the Gospel that political, economic and other questions can be solved. Thus it is the acceptance of the tension (already mentioned) which alone permits us to discover the true social situation; it alone helps us to respond to it by a human attitude which is not a lie, not an illusion.
What is a stumbling block to non-believers is also a rock of offense to many Christians, though, of course, for different reasons. Ellul’s critique which has found its origins in the Word is ultimately turned back upon the very community which has grown up around the Word. The people of God are held responsible to the Word, which stands over against them as the perpetual judgment which is the prior condition of grace. The church is held accountable to Christ.
Ellul brings to his critique of the church a commitment to the authority of God’s revelation to his people. Without erring with the Pharisees, it is yet necessary to locate a fixed standard if the effort at obedience for the Christian is not to be an exercise in futility. Christ’s command that we follow him presupposes that it will be possible to know when one is on the path and when off it, in what direction one is traveling, and, most importantly, precisely who one is following. Here the importance of God’s word becomes uniquely apparent as a most trustworthy guide to those on the Way, as St. Paul himself has made clear.
Christian ethics for Ellul flow from an explicitly biblical view of truth. He concludes that the good is unknowable apart from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
…the problem is above all a problem of truth, and. . . it is only in this truth, recognized and assumed, that ethics can take shape. . . . For Christian ethics is going to be the relation between the person of Jesus Christ and a person who takes him as his Savior and Lord. Here, we are restored in the good which God says and does. Now that good is strictly impenetrable, incomprehensible, beyond our grasp from the standpoint of what man calls good. There is no comparison possible. The person who does not accept Jesus Christ can only pass judgment on the good from his own point of view, starting with what he calls justice or love at a given stage in civilization. (To Will and To Do)
Because God became incarnate not as a principle or as an ideal, but as a man, there can be no Christian principles. There is only and always God’s call to obedience experienced in the personal encounter with Jesus Christ. Ellul argues that the Christian faith finds its center not in some objectified legalism derived once and for all from divine ordination, but in a living God who acts in reality. Thus he insists that all efforts to construct a Christian system of ethics be recognized for what they are--the recurrence of the Phaisaic temptation to self-justification.
His position is thoroughly Reformed at this point; his unsparing criticism of this all-too-human tendency within the church is but a reflection of the importance which he attaches to the doctrine of justification by faith.
We must be convinced that there are no such things as “Christian principles.” There is the Person of Christ, who is the principle of everything. But if we wish to be faithful to Him, we cannot dream of reducing Christianity to a certain number of principles (though this is often done), the consequences of which can be logically deduced. This tendency to transform the work of the living God into a philosophical doctrine is the constant temptation of theologians, and also of the faithful, and their greatest disloyalty when they transform the action of the Spirit which brings forth fruit in themselves into an ethic, a new law, into “principles” which only have to be “applied.” (The Presence of the Kingdom)
Hence Ellul speaks both a Yes and a No; at the same time that he affirms the necessity of Christian ethics he also insists upon their impossibility. The ultimate paradox of Ellul’s writing is that he sees the necessity for translation from idea to act, but sees the possibility of heresy in the attempts to codify ethics.
Ellul’s biblical studies have convinced him that “such valid human activities as political involvement and business be come works of sin and death when they are shut into a world which has excluded God in order to glorify, to force, to seduce men!’ (The Meaning of the City) His socio-political investigations conducted over a period of 41 years (he wrote his first article on technique in 1935) have only served to confirm the validity of his conclusion.
Yet in spite of his awareness of the moral effects of sin, Ellul reminds us that the world is first and foremost the place of Jesus’ incarnation. This act of God’s love requires that we maintain the idea of “a world both lost and loved” in the same moment. The question which the incarnation requires that we ask of ourselves, “How can Christ be incarnate in us?”, thus admits of no separation from the world. Conservative Christians who would seek refuge in a pietistic moralism and shield themselves in a religious orthodoxy from the contamination of worldly involvement will receive little in the way of comfort or support from the writings of this intractable Frenchman.
Throughout his long career, Ellul has been guided by his understanding of ethics as “the place of criticism . . . the examination, the calling into question at every instant, of everything that we have been able to try to do as Christians, of every response that we have been able to make to God;” (To Will and To Do) Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught us that in the end it is not a matter of reason, principles, conscience, freedom, or virtue--but the Christian’s willingness to sacrifice all of this when one is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God.
The writings of Jacques Ellul bespeak a lifetime spent in just such an attempt, an effort to describe an ethic for Christians “that will be within all the limits indicated by a servant role, beneath the cross, and in the hope of its pardon.” He has much to teach to those who have the ears to hear, yet he is an exacting taskmaster who recognizes that it is far more important to teach people how to think than it is to teach them what to think. He is resolute in his refusal to construct a system of thought, and has instead elected to provide Christians with the means of thinking out for themselves the meaning of their involvement in the modern world.
When this article appeared, Christopher Walters-Bugbee lived in Durham, North Carolina, and was an associate editor of Southern Exposure, a quarterly journal of politics and culture.
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