BLOG 12.03.12: JACQUES ELLUL AND THE CHURCH’S DRIFT INTO DARKNESS
God’s people are called out of darkness, out of the dominion of darkness, and into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Colossians1:13). They are called out of darkness into the Light of the gospel, and into new creation. This is the church’s calling. But such a calling requires that God’s people also have a very clear grasp of that out of which they have been called, and (even more) that into which they have been called. They need to know what the New Testament teaches.
The reality is that the darkness out of which we have been called is not passive. The darkness has malicious personality. The darkness is relentless in seeking to truncate or trivialize this radical calling. The warning of the apostle is that we are to be on our guard about conformity to this present order of darkness, and always being transformed into conformity to the life and mind of Christ (Romans 12:1ff).
The New Testament message is one that is utterly transformational and disruptive of status quo religion. And yet the church almost ineluctably forgets it radical calling, drifts back into the darkness, conforms itself to the dominant order, creates comfortable religion, and with it a church that is socially acceptable and makes few demands
The tragedy is that no one seems to notice. Few within seem to have ears to hear or eyes to see what is happening. The prophetic voices are there … but unheeded. Those voices can be as diverse as Annie Dillard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Folk read them, acknowledge that what they are saying may have merit, but not serious enough to change.
In the past couple of centuries there have been several major voices that have challenged the church in its complicity with the dominion of darkness most pointedly. In the mid-nineteenth century there was Søren Kierkegaard, who found the church’s pastors and bishops in Denmark had trivialized the New Testament message unforgivably. His insightful essays are collected in a volume: Attack on Christendom. More familiar to our generation was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was a leader in a minority, a witnessing church in Germany during the reign of Adolph Hitler, and in which the German church had sold its soul to the Nazi regime. You can find his pastoral protest in his key work: The Cost of Discipleship.
But a third voice that is resisted by all too much of the church’s leadership is that of the post-World War II sociologist Jacques Ellul. He was a member of the French resistance army in the war and then became a major voice as a sociologist. But Ellul was also a major theological voice, and so acknowledged by the giant of 20th century theologians: Karl Barth. Ellul is not gentle with the church’s drift. His work: The Subversion of Christianity, in my own thinking, ought to be required reading for anyone in a position of leadership in the church in the 21st century. The problem is that Ellul believes that the New Testament teaching by and about Jesus Christ are quite too radical and disruptive to be acceptable or contained in our over-organized, clergy dominated churches. To accept Ellul’s thesis is to reclaim the integrity of the New Testament faith, but at the cost of disrupting our comfort-zone, success-oriented churches of the present generation.
He nails the church’s drift back into the darkness with uncanny accuracy and skill. “ … if the church wants to be faithful to [Christ’s] revelation, it will be completely mobile, fluid, renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imaginative. It will never be perennial, and can never be organized or institutionalized.”
For starts. I’ll be revisiting Ellul again because he is a voice exposing the relentless darkness that emasculates Christ’s church. Stand by.
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