Opening onto the Unthinkable
Reading from The Subversion of Christianity, by Jacques Ellul
(Audio at the end)
A Spiritual Bureaucracy
Picking up where we left off in part 3, Ellul writes about the development of a national consciousness, a national sense in Europe:
When the church itself was politicized up to the hilt, how in these circumstances could it still claim to be united and universal, transcending all boundaries and standing above all political conflicts? The political and religious alliance meant that the church itself broke up into national units and that the national churches were subject to the political authorities. The Pope wanted to be a head of state (p. 129).
I include this passage because of current affairs in Israel, which I consider useful as a historical mirror in which to see—written large—the consequences of an errant theology. In other words, just how badly religion can become subverted, perverted, and inverted, by being married—shotgun style—to to geopolitical interests.[1]
There may simply be no way to employ sociopolitical and economic means to further supposedly spiritual or religious goals, without enlisting and employing satanic forces to do so.
As Ellul writes, the church “may want to defend the weak (which is good), but it cannot do this without being in relation with those in power. If the bishops can defend little people it is because they themselves are seen to be strong by the authorities” (p. 130).
The other side of this legal and administrative contamination is that reciprocally the church itself becomes a legal and administrative organization. It organizes itself on the model of the state, fashions its own law in imitation of Roman law, and carefully sets up an institution and hierarchy. It does all this better than the state does. Its law becomes a model. Canon law is so perfected that it will last much longer than any other. The same is true of its administrative organization but the question is to know whether it is the church’s job to make rules, whether its life is referred to codes, whether it has the divine aim of providing an administrative model for the world (p. 131).
A Social Good But a Spiritual Compromise
Christianity has certainly been, for a time, a social force that has improved many things within the western world; but it has done so—Ellul implies—only by selling its soul into the bargain. And this is not all that has happened.
Christianity has become a religion of conformity, of integration into the social body. It has come to be regarded as useful for social cohesion (the exact opposite of what it is in its source and truth). Alternatively, it has become a flight from political or concrete reality, a flight into the spiritual world, into the cultivation of the inner life, into mysticism, and hence an evasion of the present world. The two perversions are complementary (p. 133).
If these two perversions are complementary, it is perhaps for the following reasons: a disembodied, abstract form of Christianity (mysticism) has no traction in the world, and so cannot satisfy the soul’s need for incarnation. God’s impulse is for engagement with Creation, and when this cannot happen, due to an overly “Gnostic” or mystical orientation, it leads to a misconceived attempt to correct this lack by pulling too far in the opposite direction, and politicizing and socializing Christian values.
At the same time, a politicized Christianity loses all touch with the Christ impulse, and with the kingdom that is not of this world, and this disconnection inflames the desire to escape a fallen and corrupt world, which all the misguided efforts to politicize faith are failing to redeem or transform.
Steiner would have said the two errors pertain to Ahriman and Lucifer, the forces of restriction and materiality and of fantasy and dissociation, respectively. He would have agreed that they are complementary (just as they are opposed); and he would have said that Christ is the balancing force, the intermediary, between the two.
Christianity claims not to be a religion that is superior to others, but to be an anti-religion that refutes all the religions that link us with a divine universe. No doubt, Christianity constantly becomes a religion, but for religion as for syntheses of values it carries with it an irreducible criticism. The Christian religion itself is constantly called into question by the absolute that is revealed in Jesus Christ. And we are thus left to ourselves, poorer and more naked than when we lived in our religious universe. . . . The first error is to think that a state or society can be made Christian. Christianity has always been a personal mutation on the basis of faith in the revelation. It is not a collective thing (p. 141, 146, emphasis added).
An Anti-Religion
Ellul writes with a sort of moral certainty that I initially found off-putting. By the end of the book, however, I had grown accustomed to it and accepted it as a kind of literary device, not a pose, so much as a tactic. “Take it or leave it,” Ellul seems to be saying: “But think about it.” The fact Ellul had written countless other books and was in his seventies by the time he wrote this work also reconciled me to the authority of his voice. He had, to a degree, earned it.
There are pros and cons to this approach, just as there are pros and cons to taking the Bible as an infallible source of wisdom, or “Word of God”—as Ellul does—and not just a very old, incalculably influential book, full of ups and downs. The problem with Christianity relates to this, also: Christians take the Bible both too seriously, and not seriously enough.