Ellul, Jacques | The Subversion of Christianity

The Subversion of Christianity
Jacques Ellul

Paperback: Wipf and Stock, 2011, 212 pp.
Original edition: La subversion du Christianisme (Seuil, 1984)

Introduction

Nearly 50 years after his influential writing career began, Jacques Ellul turned to answer a central question: “How has it come about that the development of Christianity and the church has given birth to a society, a civilization, a culture that are completely opposite to what we read in the Bible...?” (3).

The question resonates poignantly today. The answers that Ellul provides in The Subversion of Christianity draws on his earlier critiques of the dangerous impacts of technique and technology on most areas of modern life, including religion.

Ellul contends that Christianity has been subverted by multiple ideological and sociological forces. These have perverted the three-fold essence of the faith, composed of “First, the revelation and work of God accomplished in Jesus Christ, second, the being of the church as

the body of Christ, and third, the faith and life of Christians in truth and love.” (11). Ellul writes to discover and explain how and why this has happened and, ultimately, to offer some hope.

Ellul delineates some key areas in which God’s people have gone astray. First, we've moved away from the revelation of God in history toward philosophy and ideology, trading the scandalous power of Jesus for the controlled thinking of humans. Second, as Christianity achieved success – in terms of both numerical growth and political power – it turned from “an explosive ferment calling everything into question” to an insipid “collective ideology” (39-40). Finally, our hearts are not innately poised for revelation; “being a Christian is the very opposite of what is natural to us” (154). We struggle to accept grace, we resist the “socially intolerable” idea of revelation, and we construct our own systems to organize the revelation in our own ways.

Working primarily with variants of these ideas, Ellul gives a history of this subversion of the faith from its earliest years through the present highlighting the effects of our understanding of the sacred, our moralism, the church's ties to various sorts of power, the influence of Islam, and more.

The account he offers in this book, like that of many other books recommended for the Live the Word project, emphasizes the witness of the earliest centuries of Christianity, and notes that although the subversion of Christianity began before the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, this fusion of church and state served to rapidly accelerate the subversion over the intervening centuries.

Participatory Worship

Ellul emphasizes that the vision and life of the church is not driven by a hierarchy of leaders, but instead by the people and gifts that God brings to the church in the Holy Spirit. He writes:

We set up pastoral positions or benefices with rectors and bishops, etc. We then fill these posts with people we think are suitable. But this is the opposite of the movement presented in the Epistles, in which the Holy Spirit gives to the church

people who have the gifts of love or the word or teaching, and the church has to find a place for them even if they had not anticipated doing so. If, after a while, the Holy Spirit does not give someone who has the spirit of prophecy but gives someone who has the gift of miracles, then the church must change its form and habits!” (157).

Ellul’s conviction is that every person that God gathers in a church is provided for the form and mission of that congregation. This is a fundamental tenet of participatory worship. He also keenly intuits that our systems of leadership generally serve to glorify humanity. In contrast, when we are open to receiving the leading and gifts of the Spirit in all our members, we become increasingly able to glorify and worship God, as our creator and sustainer.

Active Disciple-making

Ellul argues that “the robbing of the gospel of its significance is linked always with the appropriation of God's Word by the theologian, the ecclesiastic, or the church,” (209). He offers a radical call to return to the roots of the faith, stripped of cultural or historical trappings. By examining the central tenets of the revelation and the Word of God, he charts a path for growing as disciples. “In these conditions, the authenticity of faith, attentive listening to God's Word, the informing of everyday life by the Christian spirit, and boldness of witness become once more the true face of revelation” (208).

This “face” comprises key elements of discipleship. “Believers, then, are those who have the wisdom and strength to rob material realities of their seductive power, to unmask them for what they are, no more, and to put them in the service of God, diverting them totally from their own law” (190).

Ellul's work in defining the subversion of Christianity reveals the key elements of the faith for Christians, allowing our disciple-making to have clarity even as we learn to let the Holy Spirit do its work without trying to impose human restrictions on it.

Human Institutions

Human restrictions provide the fundamental means of subverting the faith. The gospel should create a terrible, paradigm-shifting upheaval of humanity’s ordinary ways of thought and life. Instead, Ellul laments “Christianity becomes an empty bottle that the successive cultures fill with all kinds of things” (18).

When faced with the destabilizing entry of God's grace, humans have frequently tried to organize God’s revelation into something more palatable. For example, Ellul writes, “Setting aside the true message, the church looked for texts that might justify moral rigor” (34). Rather than embracing God's entry into human history – the story at the heart of everything – people settled for a moralism they could control. People who converted to the faith “have kept intact their mode of thinking,” when a new way of thinking is required (26).

Much of the trouble arises with “God's representatives on earth, who put their own law in the place of God's law, who impose their own norms, who organize the divine enterprise as though it were an affair of human history” (209).

Likewise, the church engages in politics in a perverse manner, preferring “law to the nontemporal truth of Jesus Christ,” choosing to help the weak by “being in relation with those in power,” and generally “justifying political power and action” (126-131).

In these efforts, we've reduced the “profoundly disagreeable” way of Christianity to an ordered, civil structure. Whether turning revelation into philosophy, grace into moralism, or weakness into power, we've frequently subverted the faith into more manageable, more bearable, more strictly human institutions.

Hope for the Church

Ellul concludes his discussion of the subversion and failures of Christianity with the confident assertion of the fundamental truth that, “Christ is there” (191). Despite the critical review of the past two thousand years of church history, Ellul recognizes that the “church still exists, and does so not merely as an institution or organization, but in spite of that it still exists as the body of Christ, as the true church” (194).

Thanks to the action of the Trinity, the church does not disappear. Like the prophet Isaiah's smoldering wick, the flame of faith will not go out. Even when we may think the church is dying, God “kindle[s] new life from the ashes of the dead wood . . . that in an incomprehensible way bear witness that the Word of God is still alive and surges through the ancient despairing organism” (198).

“This Word of God is itself the burning bush that is not consumed even though the errors and sins and falsehoods and crimes of the church

and of Christians seem to have completely destroyed it. Death is not stopped at this limit, and no matter what may be the subversion of Christianity, the last word lies with restored life and with the Word that expresses and brings it” (198-9).

It is God, not the sociological institution repeatedly ensnaring revelation, that controls the outcomes of God’s work throughout history. Ellul argues that “the church never reforms itself.” There is no human institution, strategy, plan, or program (what Ellul calls “technique”) sufficient for this task. “There is in the church no association, according to the usual formula, whereby a sociological institution may also be the body of Christ, or the body of Christ may be forcibly put in sociological forms” (211).

Ellul describes how God guides the church despite itself. “Once the church organizes and clericalizes itself, it is intrinsically a transgression of God’s order.” Yet, Ellul writes, even this transgressive sociological church “produces within itself that which breaks forth as transgression of the transgression.” In other words, the church “secretes within itself a reconquest of the eternal by the eternal.”

What does this limitation imposed by God on the subversion of Christianity look like? Is it something that occurs ”‘spiritually’ or in an easy, agreeable, intellectual, and pious fashion”? No, Ellul asserts, the reconquest of the eternal by the eternal always happens “by way of severe tests and terrible upheavals” (212).

Not surprisingly, God’s limitations on man’s subversion of Christianity also operates according to the upside-down logic of God’s own Kingdom. Thus, Ellul argues, “Transformation of the church does not begin at its human head but with an explosion originating with those on the fringe” (212). If we are to find fresh signals from God for renewal, we should look to the margins where Jesus waits.

Thus, Ellul calls the church back to an originating point where it may find its authentic self in the scandal of revelation, acting as a countercultural witness rather than a staid “sociological institution” (198).

“. . . the renewal of the church takes place in conditions in which the church is forced back to its origins. That is to say, it is on the one side confronted by a society that no longer claims to be Christian in any sense, and on the other side it is subjected to challenge and even persecution. In these conditions the authenticity of faith, attentive listening to God’s word, the informing of everyday life by the Christian spirit, and boldness of witness become once more the true face of revelation” (208).

Ellul's writing serves, not just as a critique of the church throughout history, but as an indicator of the way forward. Since that way comes through the work of God, and not through our own human efforts, we can maintain our hope that the body of Christ continues maturing into the healing and reconciliation that God intends for humanity and all creation (cf. Col. 1:20).