non-metaphysical stephen

One of the discussions at GCN has brought up the issue of boredom and which responses are inappropriate for Christians. When we’re bored, we fall into all kinds of traps: some people eat when bored, some watch junky TV, some smoke, drink, look at porn, etc.–a whole range of responses from the seemingly banal to the spiritually risky. The question revolves around which responses will interfere with our relationship with God.

It occurs to me now that perhaps none of these responses are truly banal; that is, they are all spiritually risky. For, even though we may feel that we have nothing to do with our time, God has plenty of projects for us, some internal, some external. We always have something more to learn, something to work on, an attitude that needs to be adjusted, a habit that needs to be broken. We will spend the rest of our lives maturing in Christ.

There is no reason for us to be bored; God always has a long list of things for us to do. May we be more diligent to give God the attention he deserves. Amen.

Comment

I know I’m not writing as much on Subversion as I’d hoped. Too many ideas, but also too many other things that need to get done first.

Still, this morning I was reminded of something from chapter one. It must have come up in thinking about a conversation I had at GCN about how it is that evil is conquered but still present in the world. Ellul reminds us that the failure of the Church is not God’s failure since, in historical time, God has defeated the powers of evil through the work of Christ. This victory cannot be undone, not even by the weakness of generations of Christians whose pride and ambition distorted the truth of the gospel into its very opposite.

Death, Sin, Satan, the Devil, et al. have been defeated. They still roam around, perhaps because humans still give them room to act up. But their defeat is completed and their authority over us taken away. Praise be to God!

And may we live in such a way that their defeat is evident to every person we meet! Amen.

I’m still working my way through chapter 2 of Jacques Ellul’s Subversion–reading, re-reading, letting it sit in the back of my mind, etc. In the first 2/3 of the chapter, he argues that two of the main reasons for Christianity’s loss of identity were the shift from revelation to theology and the shift from being a small group to a large, organized insitution. Lots to think about (and hopefully blog about).

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading scholarship on Bartolomé de Las Casas. Sometimes two articles a day — quite a bit for what should only be a 5-8 page section of a chapter in a dissertation. I had never heard of Las Casas until Ellul mentioned him as an example of Christianity at its finest, alongside St. Francis. And I don’t understand how I had never heard of this man whom I now realize was a powerhouse for the Christian faith.

I supposed that what attracts me most about Las Casas was his rejection of the nationalist paradigm of his time. He wasn’t a relativist, in the sense that he did believe Christianity was superior to the indigenous religions. But he refused to accept that the Americans were less human or civilized for not having European-style culture. He was even able to see how human sacrifice could be seen from within the American systems as a form of worship rather than a form of savagery. Not that he believed it was okay (although he acknowledged the parallelism with the Abraham and Isaac story), but that he was able to see it as a form of sincere worship.

In fact, Las Casas was able to see the Americans as being more civilized than the Spaniards, whom he accused of the very butchery and greed they attributed to the Americans. (Montaigne made the same accusation against the Europeans in his essay On Cannibals.) Las Casas even claimed that the pre-conquest civilizations were more impressive than those of ancient Greece and Rome–the same Greece and Rome whose philosophers were being enlisted to justify Spanish policies.

Here was a man for whom Christianity was central, and not to be confused with accidents of culture. He understood that Western Culture did not make Spanish conquest right–just as Roman culture did not make their conquest of Spain centuries earlier right. In fact, the culture wants to maintain the status quo more than to establish justice: how else could Spain praise their ancestors’ heroism for resisting the Romans without seeing the parallels between Spanish resistance to Rome and American resistance to Spain?

One of the scholars called Las Casas an example of “radical Christianity.” May we all be so radical in our lifetimes. Perhaps we truly could change the world.

Today I read Las Casas’ introductory materials to his In Defense of the Indians (the material he used in his debate against Sepúlveda). One of his claims against the publication of Sepúlveda’s book is that the previous pronouncements by politicians and clergy against mistreating the Indians had had no effect, and the publication of a book that sanctions such mistreatment on scholarly and theological grounds would only embolden the colonizers to continue their evil. In a word, Sepúlveda’s book would be dangerous because it tells the listeners exactly what they want to hear.

When I read this, I was reminded of Ellul’s digression (in chapter 2 of The Subversion of Christianity) regarding the power of intellectual authority: people will listen and will accept what intellectuals say, even when what is being said is incorrect. Thus the church was led to adopt policies that were in contradiction to the gospel proclamation but which seemed to further the growth of the church.

I’m not sure to what extent this situation is true in the USA. To a certain extent it certainly is true. And yet the USA has also had a long anti-intellectual bias. Many people trust their preachers more than they trust scholars. But in these instances, the people assume the preachers have more authority than the scholars–perhaps because they are presumably more immersed in the Bible and in prayer and have the anointing of the Holy Spirit upon them. So, the effect is the same: we accept the words of authorities (that is, people whom WE recognize as having authority) whenever they tell us what we already want to hear.

God have mercy on us.

I’ve been reading Las Casas‘ Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and after the initial horror of the history died down (but God grant that it never go away completely), I realized that I was reading exactly what Ellul had said about the powers. Here were concrete examples of the way wealth and political power control the way human beings associate with each other. Everything the Spaniards did to the Americans was a result not of Christian love but of the love of money and power. These two factors actively determined the interactions between the cultures. These are the powers of the air at work in human life. Frightening stuff.

It also makes me think about Ellul’s contention (and Kierkegaard’s before him) that Christianity had long been dead in Europe. For how could this happen in the middle of the Renaissance, when medieval Christianity was still in operation alongside Renaissance optimism about humanity? The only explanation seems to be that the culture had long been, to a great extent, Christian in name only. Renaissance Spain was what we might call ethnically Christian, but not truly Christian. And the same would go for all of Europe, I wager. Just as it does for the modern US of A.

God have mercy on the souls of those destroyed by their greed in the name of the Church.

How surprising to think that one of the contributing factors to the subversion of Christianity is the very existence of theology as a discipline! How could the study of God possibly be a problem for the Church? And yet what Ellul says makes sense: the Bible is neither a systematic nor a metaphysical book: it is a history.

I love how he describes it as vitally incoherent — what a great compliment! The complexity of the book itself should be a warning to us about our temptation to make things neat, orderly, understandable. And its focus on history should warn us about our desire to see the underneath side of the tapestry, and worse, to turn the underside into a system!

I have long wondered if much of Church theology was contaminated by the early church’s desire to address Greek philosophical objections rather than to critique Greek thought. So Ellul’s comments appeal to me. But what would a Christianity without theology look like? How would our churches function differently? Would narrative return as the central vehicle for truth? Would our wrangling over words be replaced by consensus, or would we start arguing over events? On the individual level, would a turn from theology to history strengthen our devotional lives?

How would our faith change if we stopped seeking for what God is and start looking to see what God has done?

A short break from Ellul: Our church is doing a summer-long study on the Sermon on the Mount. Tonight we worked through the Beatitudes, and my group was asked to focus on the first verse: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

After talking about the way the Greek term for poor implies being a beggar (I thought it might translate well as “bankrupt” in spirit), we discussed the Amplified Bible’s translation of “poor in spirit” as not making too much of one’s self. And I realized that I’ve been addressing this idea every time I contemplate my createdness (an idea I gained through a Zen reading of John Calvin’s On the Christian Life).

I am nothing more than God’s creation — I did not create myself, nor can I take any credit for my own strengths or talents. I am only here because God created me, because God chose to, because God in his loving-kindness wanted to. This life is only a gift, and I owe everything I am and have to God. Yet I continue to make demands upon God as to how my life should go. How arrogant and ungrateful I am!

However, in those brief moments when I do grasp my own createdness, I sense just how poor in spirit I truly am. And in those moments, I feel God’s reign finally taking a place in my heart.

May I continue to decrease, that God might increase. Amen.

comment

I’m still contemplating the first chapter (of The Subversion of Christianity); since classes start Thursday, I haven’t had much time to get into Chapter 2. Still, there’s plenty I’ve been ruminating on in that opening chapter.

Ellul makes the claim, a perfectly reasonable one, that our modern Christian interest in social justice issues is not something to be proud of, as it represents more the church’s desire to keep up with the Joneses (e.g., worldly interest in charitable causes) than the church’s leading the world under the influence of the risen Christ.

It’s clear that Ellul is not against social justice; he simply wants the church to be doing it as a response to the revelation of God’s love in Christ Jesus rather than as an imitation of worldly trends. The danger here is obvious as, in following the world’s trends, the church tends to do the right things for the wrong reasons and, perhaps worse, in the wrong manner.

So my question is how to distinguish Christian activism that is truly inspired by God and led by the Holy Spirit from an activism that simply christens worldly movements in Christ’s name.

Right at the end of Chapter 1 (of The Subversion of Christianity), Ellul makes two claims about the relation between Christianity and culture, and I’m trying to untangle them. (I have to; this topic is crucial for my dissertation!)

First, he points out the the scriptural authors repeatedly incorporated texts from other cultures, but always re-oriented them in light of God’s revelation. Then, at the very end, he complains about the church has become a “sponge” of the cultures around it — in a bad way.

I know that historically, both of these facts are true: many of the differences between the Synoptic Gospels, for instance, have been traditionally understood as being due to the authors’ different audiences: Greek, Roman and Jewish. On the other hand, the early church began responding to the resistance of Greek thinkers by giving a little too much credence to Greek philosophy; by the time the church was evangelizing the Germans, this process became so common that Christianity was changed more than the Germans were.

So, how do we determine when this process is in line with God’s revelation and when it’s merely an adaptation to the world?

Sigh…… So much to ponder!

From Chapter 1 (p. 17 in Bromily’s translation): Ellul is complaining about how Christianity, which in the Bible is anti-religion and anti-moralism, has become both:

A Christianity that has fashioned a morality–and what a morality!–the most strict, the most moralistic, the most debilitating, the one that most reduces adherents to infants and renders them irresponsible, or, if I were to be malicious, I should say the one that makes of them happy imbeciles, who are sure of their salvation if they obey this morality, a morality that consists of chastity, absolute obedience (which in unheard-of-fashions ends up as the supreme value in Christianity), sacrifice, etc. A Christianity that has become totally conservative in every domain–political, economic, social, etc.–which nothing can budge or change.

What a great quote!

I’ve been re-reading Ellul again — Subversion is the book that got me interested in him, but it’s also one of the books that has had the most influence on me. I guess I’d call it a personal paradigm-shift (using Kuhn’s sense of the term): it realigned the way I think about Christianity in a way that has stayed with me ever since.

Ellul (writing in the early 80s) poses the following problem and question: Christianity is now (and has long been) the exact opposite of what is presented in the Bible. Instead of being a subversive force, it is conservative. How has this happened?

His thesis is that it is not a failure on God’s part–since the work of redemption was fulfilled 2000 years ago and since the Holy Spirit leads us out of truth into ignorance. Therefore, it must be a failure on our part: We have chosen not to live the Biblical teachings, preferring instead what he terms “human aggrandizement” (p. 13 in Bromily’s translation). And our failure has had catastrophic results, since the only way in which the world sees God’s revelation is through our lives.

Powerful stuff. Even after it’s been swimming in my mind for 10 years, it feels as though there is so much to think about and meditate upon.

Re-reading the first chapter, I was struck by his comments about the falsity of explaining the problem in terms of the difficulty of living up to an ideal, since (as he says) “there is no such ideal” (9). He then says,

“From the very first we have full realism and full materialism. The idea of God does not exist. The philosophers of the Death of God movement were right to destroy this idea that completely blocks the meaning of the revelation” (9).

This last sentence sent me running to Wikipedia–how had I not recalled him affirming the Death of God theologians (e.g. Vahanian, whom he likes a lot)? Yikes! My mind went a bit dizzy with the shock of it all.

I’m still sorting it out; but in searching for help, I ran across a great comment in a book review of his The Betrayal of the West:

Ellul is convinced that “the world” needs “demythologizing” by the Scriptures, not the Scriptures “demythologized” by “the world.” His commitment is to the Christian faith, but this requires a realistic understanding of the world we experience in shopping malls, on television, in real estate agencies and banks, as well as the “great issues” of nuclear arms races and ecological disasters. [You can read the book itself online.]

I love how Ellul reminds us so easily that we have inverted our priorities: While 20th century theologians sought to demythologize Christianity to make it more comprehensible to modern humanity, the work we should have been doing is to demythologize the world. Our world is just as religious as the first century world, only we don’t recognize the myths as myths: technology, media, capitalism, consumerism, and the like all function as myths, as religion, even as magic.

And God’s revelation gives us the tools to see through those myths; in fact, it liberates us from them. This is the project we should be doing. This is the task that can help us save the world from suicide. This is our calling as Christians.

Let us take up our crosses and follow….