Ellul on Government
| Ellul, Violence,
4. See Douglas Kries, "Political Augustinianism," in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 657f. |
The Western Christian tradition (political
Augustinianism) justified government's use of force by distinguishing
between human nature and the nature of the state. An implication of this might be
that, given that the state is something more than human, it is
divine. Actually, "divinely ordered" is how it was
said.
At any rate,
one aspect
of this
justification of government was the loss of one side of the
Bible's words about government: The Bible sees it both "as ordained
by God, in harmony with the divine order, and at the same
time as the Beast of the Abyss, the Great Babylon; as wielder of the
sword to chastise the wicked and protect the good, but also as
the source of persecution and injustice." The demonic side of
this understanding of government was lost.
Part of
the place of the Christian community in relation to the state in
the Western Christian tradition is to tell the government whether
its laws are just or unjust. The church has lost this role in an
official sense, but the loss is relative, considering not only
limitations in how much governments heeded the church in the days
of Christendom but also the fact that
"modern Christians are
always prone to judge the state and to tell it what it ought to
do"; one might go beyond that: the effort is to judge
society,
all the various sorts of people we live among, and to
tell them what to do. This is the core of
"Constantinianism"�and why we can say it exists
as much now in the U.S. as in medieval Christendom.
To do so,
to make judging the rightness of government's laws a task of
the Christian community, is to trivialize the Christian community
and the gospel. Even if a government heeds such pronouncements
coming from the Christian community, why is that community
suggesting, by bothering to make such pronouncements, that its hope
is in life here and now?
The tradition of tyrannicide, which lives on
to some extent in liberation theology (insofar as a
liberationist might speak of overthrowing a government by force as a
good thing for Christians to do), is built on the same assumptions as
this Constantinian tradition, is really its counterpart, and can be
held together with it. (The only reason it might appear otherwise
to us is the vast social, economic, and political differences
between right-wing Christians and Christian sufferers and their
liberationist spokespersons.) And it leads to the same question:
why do liberation theologians suggest by what they write that a
Christian's hope is in life here and now?
| On political violence as the prime
temptation faced by Jesus, see T. W. Manson, The Servant Messiah:
A Study of the Public Ministry of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press,
1953). |
Here
there
is an answer, and we must acknowledge it or be too
callous. The reason is suffering. It does a comfortable North American white
person (such as me) no good to vaunt himself over theology that speaks out of or
to suffering. Indeed, perhaps the greatest temptation Jesus faced was to be a
leader of revolution, of a revolution religious from core to peel�to be, that
is, a liberationist as both a theologian and an active leader.
The Son of God went far beyond
where we reasonably comfortable North Americans can apparently go
in sympathy for the oppressed.
But still
it is true, and so I will say it: The reason for the tyrannicide
tradition and liberation theology is the human incapacity to
countenance suffering as normal and its continuance as
permissible.