The God Vacuum

Reading from The Subversion of Christianity, by Jacques Ellul

(Audio version at the end)

Part One Part Two

(Art by Michelle Horsley)

Learning to Fly

What is not acceptable to God is that we should decide on our own what is good and what is evil. Biblically, the good is in fact the will of God. That is all. . . . “Follow me,” not a list of things to do or not to do. He shows us fully what it means to be a free person with no morality, but simply obeying the ever-new Word of God as it flashes forth. . . . In all the parables the person who serves as an example has not lived a moral life. The one who is rejected is the one who has lived a moral life (p. 70, 71).

Ellul is following Kierkegaard (Fear and Loathing) here, by arguing that we can only know the will of God by submitting to the will of God unconditionally, i.e., without a moral framework. This is also the stark truth Job must confront, and finally accept: that we cannot impose human morality onto our terms with God, and that only so can we experience God’s will through our own lives (i.e., without a societal safety net).

Peter walking on water comes to mind: it’s a question of faith and surrender to God going hand in hand. This may seem obvious, because of course, one needs faith to surrender to God, and to trust that God will guide us through impossible obstacles. Nor is this to be confused with tempting God by casting oneself down for the angels to lift one up.

It’s a very subtle distinction, but one can only fly by leaping into a void: one has to take the leap of faith in order for one’s faith, not merely to be tested, but to be discovered. One can’t learn to fly by starting on the ground.

Ironically, this was Bill Hicks’ joke, about LSD-users who killed themselves by jumping out of windows: “Why didn’t they start from the ground?!” It is a good joke, and it seems sensible. But in my own lucid dreaming, when I wanted to test whether I was dreaming or not, I always leapt off abysses and trusted I would be able to fly. And of course, I always could; and of course, I’ve never done this while I was awake.

One has to give up the ground, both moral ground and cognitive, logical ground—any and all kinds of man-made ground—and leap into an abyss, as the only way of relinquishing everything one is depending on, and putting oneself completely, utterly, and irrevocably into God’s hands. Only then, it seems, will God lift us up, because it is the God within us that must lift us up; and it will only do so when we have relinquished all other means of visible support.

If we’re trying to ascend by any other means, or by any means at all, we’re not surrendering to God, and therefore we cannot access that within us that will lift us up. It can’t move through us, because we’re being in our lives, and in our bodies, in such a way that it can’t access them.

There has to be a void, a vacuum, for the Spirit of God to move into and take over.

This is absolute faith, absolute surrender, and it does relate to the necessity of letting go of a moral framework, in order to let God decide, through us, what is good and what is evil, in any given instant.

Islam as Religion of War

I believe that in every respect the spirit of Islam is contrary to that of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. It is so in the basic fact that the God of Islam cannot be incarnate. This God can only be the sovereign judge who ordains all things as he wills. . . . My conviction is that this revelation of love seeking to set up a relationship of love (alone) among us, and thus basing everything on grace and giving us a model of exclusively gracious relationships, is in fact the exact opposite of law, in which everything is measured by debts and credits (the opposite of grace) and duties (the opposite of love). To the extent that we are not in the kingdom of God, we certainly cannot achieve this pure relation of love and grace, this completely transparent relation. Hence law has a necessary existence. Yet we have to view it merely as a matter of expediency (because we cannot do better) and a necessary evil (which is always an evil). . . . But the legal spirit penetrates deeply into the church and I maintain that it is both under the influence of Islam and in response to the religious law of Islam. The church had to follow suit (p. 98, 99).

Ellul asserts here that Allah and Yahweh are not the same being, or principle. Yet this is something Muslims claim, hence their respect for the “People of the Book,” for Christians and Jews (historically at least; things are quite different currently, but that is more for sociopolitical reasons than theological ones).

Morality pertains to religion in any societal sense, where it inevitably overlaps with the law, and with ritual observances of it.

“The enormous importance of war has been totally obliterated today in intellectual circles that admire Islam and want to take it afresh as the model. War is inherent in Islam” (p. 100).[1]

For Ellul, this is very much the key to understanding Islam/Allah, and I would say also to any attempt to understand and practice Christianity, in any way that is true to the spirit of Jesus: namely, whether religion is a necessary means of communal and social harmony (or at least civility, as compared to mimetic violence, that eventually destroys everyone); or whether we are placing our relationship with God first, thereby putting any social or communitarian ideas at a far distant second, to the point, finally, of rejecting them altogether.

Just as Jesus rejects Peter when Peter is scandalized by the idea of his Lord being crucified, so we must put the world—and the Satan—behind us, in order to be able to move unflinchingly toward God.

In other words, to resist not evil when we meet it outside of us is, at the same time, to renounce all evil internally, even (or perhaps most especially) the “necessary” kinds of evil.

It is to choose Spirit over a necessity which ends up justifying violence, as it always does, including, or especially, as a means to spread the Gospel (the Crusades saw Christianity, through mimetic rivalry of Islam, fully metastasizing into Christendom: an unholy empire).

As soon as Christianity becomes a religion that conforms to nature then it becomes necessary to force people to become Christians. . . . The idea of a holy war is not of Christian origin. Emperors never advanced the idea prior to the appearance of Islam (p. 102)