God's Movement, Not Ours

Beer commercials are often wonderfully clear representations of how we want to approach things. Really any advertising will do, but beer is best. Beer can quench thirst and provide an alcohol buzz, and that can be relied on, but what it provides to the people in the commercials is attractive friends, enjoyment in great environments, natural or otherwise, and of course at least a hint of sex (remember the "Swedish bikini team" of the 1970s?). We are encouraged to understand beer in terms of our own desires and fears, not on its own terms, for what it actually is. We modern people are the masters of our own directions solution-oriented people, people who understand things in terms of the questions that we bring to them. Therefore, we are confused or blind and deaf if anything tries to come to us in its own terms.
Among other things, this means that we are less able to read the Bible as it wants to be read. Wherever biblical interpretation is taught, the focus is on what questions one is to bring to the text rather than on the questions the text asks. The questions can be historicist (who wrote it, when, where, and why?), pietist, pastoral (what consolation does this bring to the afflicted?), or liberationist (what does this offer to the revolution?).

Ellul, Hope, vii-viii.

"[I]t is very wrong to look to the biblical revelation for an answer to the question one is asking or with which one is faced.... it is God who questions us and who awaits a response from us, not the other way around. No consoling formula or solution was to be sought in the Bible." The competing means of approach to the Bible are various ways of sidestepping the challenge the Bible gives to us, what has sometimes been called the "existential" task.
     When we are engaged in that "existential task," a significant part of the hermeneutical standpoint we should adopt is to accept all of what is said (though not in a fundamentalistic sense). We take the biblical text as authoritative, as determinative of how we live. When we do so, it is still easy to soft-pedal some things it says. It is true that Jesus used hyperbole, but sometimes he is read as if he used hyperbole to cover up the fact that he was not saying anything of importance. So the hermeneutical task should include identifying the path of least resistance to the text, which Ellul follows most of the time.
     One result that leads to is pacifism. Among biblical scholars, where the immediate task is not to interpret the text as authoritative and determinative for the behavior of the believing community, it is easier to recognize that Jesus taught nonresistance and that the New Testament letters teach submission to the way of the cross.
     Another result for me, not for Ellul, is rejection of universalism. Universalism, it seems to me, is a way of not taking the path of least resistance to the text, of not reading the Bible as it wants to be read, of putting ourselves over it to solve problems of our own age (since universalism seems to be what the world needs now).
     Yet another result might be to acknowledge that there is something to the Bible�s usual portrayal of God in male rather than female terms and metaphors.
     Our solutions orientation means, thus, that we never let anything be what it really is. To be pre-postmodern, which I usually do without thinking about it, the Bible and God�s movement are what they are apart from whatever we seek from them and apart from whatever methods we use to soften God�s call into mush. God has determined what his way for us is, and it is not for us to do so all over again for him.
     One result of this is that Christians have to be somewhat aloof. The Christian

Ellul, Presence, 8f.

"is not asked to look at the various movements which men have started, choose those which seem "good," and then support them. He is not asked to give his blessing to any particular human enterprise, nor to support the decisions of man." The Christian has a distinctive mission. Christianity is not a campaign against sin.

Ellul, Presence, 16.

"The fact of living in the world, from which we ought not to escape, is a stumbling-block for our faith. It ought to be so, and so it must remain. We have no right to accustom ourselves to this world, not to try to hide it from ourselves with Christian illusions." Ellul is fundamentally set against any idea of reform. And so much for some Calvinists' interest in "transforming culture," which sounds to me like pretty much the same thing as old-fashioned liberal Victorian reform.
When Christianity is attacked, it is not for the content of its ideals but for its ineffectiveness in implementing them, that is, for the failure of Christians to live redeemed lives. The sorts of apologetic that have been used in response such attacks accomplish nothing.

Ellul, Subversion, 6.

See this page on "why some good
people do not become Christians."

"...one cannot say: "Certainly our practice is poor, but consider the beauty, purity, and truth of revelation." We have insisted on the unity of the two.... No recognizable revelation exists apart from the life and witness of those who bear it. The life of Christians is what gives testimony to God and to the meaning of this revelation." It was a real failure of Christians that kept Gandhi, for instance, from becoming a Christian.
The root of this Ellul sees in the fact that what is alive and moving in a person's thought or philosophy is so often later defined into an "ism." For instance,

Ellul, Subversion, 10.

"The moment the mutation takes place from existential thinking to existentialism, a living stream is transformed into a more or less regulated and stagnant irrigation channel, and as the thought moves further and further from the source it becomes banal and familiar." It becomes that which can be reduced to single page in a freshman textbook.

Ellul, Subversion, 8-12.

Jesus and Marx were anti-ideological teachers. They warned against ideologies. Both wanted to initiate movement, but both had their teachings turned into systems, laws by which adherents can be distinguished from the heterodox. What is neglected when Christianity is thus subverted is the presence of the Holy Spirit, that is, that Christianity is supposed to be God's movement, not a human movement.