2/26/2013
NOT EVEN A MEANS
GOAFS II: #31
THE PRESENCE OF THE KINGDOM: 18
Chapter 3, the end and the means
FEBRUARY 27, 2013
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and
he will sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
Murphy’s
Other 15 Laws, #12
A majority of Americans live
in homes now applying for and obtaining one or more benefits from U.S.
Government programs.
Nicholas Oberstadt, A Nation of Takers, America’sEntitlement
Epidemic
Government is the great fiction, through which
everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
Frederic Bastiat, French
economist(1801-1850)
Just because you do not
take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an
interest in you!
Pericles
(430 B.C.)
Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow
men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects
of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.
Lionel Trilling, from “Elements That Are Wanting.”
We have come to the point where we are asked to take a giant step. We have seen how the work
of God invites us to suppress the distinction between the ends and the means,
and how our action is no longer a means, save to the extent in which it
expresses an act of God, the ‘end’ already present. Ellul takes us one step
further, and claims that no human activity—all this work of man, which today
fills the field of our vision—is really a means at all.
In reality, it is no longer a means for anything; it is only
an activity, and as an activity it is also subject to this conception of the
means which the Christian Faith shows us. For the most part these activities
are well-ordered and arranged. They are the best, well-intentioned efforts of
modern (fallen) man, put in their proper places, but divested of the integrity
of the fundamental unity of the end and the means in God’s willing and
ordering. Therefore they are empty of value and virtue. The future of humanity
does not depend upon mechanical forces.
Our President strives mightily to unite the means and the
end. For every problem, he has a ‘plan.’ If he doesn’t, his close friends and
imitators have one. In fact, who has ever met a politician without a plan? But
there is something else here we have not seen before: our President believes he
is also God, so superficially, in him, the means and the end become one. The
President’s ‘plans’ (means) are the President’s ‘ends’ and they are united because
he also believes he is God-- so we should all just relax and enjoy ourselves in
the arms of the Nanny State.
Rather than progress from the past towards the future, the
key is a movement of the future (God’s doing) which explains and informs the
present. So technical discoveries are never anything more than temporary
expedients which need to be put in their right place in the perspective of the
Kingdom. But ‘to put them in their right place’ implies that they are only secondary
aims, limited to these instruments. The secondary aims are of some use.
Thanks to this new relation between the end and the means,
we can say exactly what the means are called to do, and what we may expect of
them. This is something very different both from ends which are absorbed into
means, or from philosophical ends which are not related at all to means. This suggests
that to some extent we can apply a common standard to all these forces because
of their relation to the Lordship of Jesus Christ which is already present.
Thus we can search the Scriptures to try and discover what
reforms are needed now and how a temporary order of God can be set up in the
world. We are doing this fully aware that this has only relative value, and
whatever is done this way still will be judged in light of the order willed by
God for His Kingdom. In a nutshell, man’s efforts are of some use and God
expects us to honor that usefulness while keeping in mind that His Will, His
Order, and His Kingdom are the only absolutes in the situation.
This attempt to place the means in their true situation, to
give the right direction to human activity, will be only one more ideology, ineffective
and without value, unless it is accompanied by a much deeper transformation.
Concretely, unless the world can rediscover, by a spiritual
revolution, an end which is both transcendent and present, and end whose
presence can be perceived even in the secret world of technics, it is lost. No
matter how intensely or how thoroughly or how sincerely men search through all
the philosophies, they will find that Christianity alone offers a solution.
Recently I came across an example of what he is saying here.
Bojidar Marinov is a Reformed missionary to his native Bulgaria. He had been
invited to Moscow to the annual Adam Smith Forum of the Libertarian Party of
Russia to join a discussion panel on “Moral Sentiments of
Capitalism.” The other speakers were Russian and American academics, none of
them Christian. The Members of the Libertarian Party attending were all atheists
or agnostics.
Marinov says this in a report about the event:
“My talk was titled: ‘The Rhetoric
at the Foundation of Capitalism, and the Ethics at the Foundation of that
Rhetoric.’ I presented the case for a change in the ethical outlook in Europe
in the century after the Reformation as the factor for the change in rhetoric.
And the change in the ethical outlook could only be one thing: Calvinism. No
other factor can explain the sudden (single-generation) paradigm shift in the
Netherlands, England, Scotland and Switzerland that produced the modern world
with its economic and social system, that produced enormous wealth hitherto
unknown to post-flood mankind..
“I am sure most of my listeners
didn’t agree with my thesis. A change of mind within an hour, over a single
lecture, is a very rare thing. But I am happy to say that they at least
understood my thesis quite well. How do I know if they understood it? Because I
was asked the same question several times: Are you saying that if we don’t
change our faith, we won’t see a change in the culture?... they grasped very
well my thesis, that behind every social change there must be a faith change.”
I think this is exactly what Ellul means by ‘deeper
transformation’ above. He is saying that the revelation of God in Christ Jesus
alone provides a valid solution of the world’s present impossible problem of
the end and the means. He is also saying that this truth will have vital
consequences for the life of people who, at the present time, call themselves
Christians.
For Christians, the first ‘consequence’ of this new position
is this: that what actually matters, in practice, is ‘to be’ and not ‘to act.’ This
world is entirely directed towards action. Everything is interpreted in terms
of action, nothing is more beautiful than action. People are always looking for
slogans, programs, initiatives, ways to act. Our world is so obsessed by
activity, that it is in danger of losing its life. We know that the great
slogan of all dictatorships is this—‘action for action’s sake.’
A familiar example of this is the inevitable answer applied to
the problem of a stagnating church--start a building program. A building
program keeps people busy doing and distracts them from the fact that they
don’t know how to be what God intends them to be. This just brings things
around again to the problem of the end and the means.
At the same time, the world tends to eliminate, almost
wholly, the life of the individual. By the formation of masses, by the
artificial creation of myths, by the standardizing of living, by digitizing
everything, there is a general movement towards uniformity (efficiency for
efficiency’s sake). This leads man more and more to forget himself as he is
caught up in this general tendency of our mechanical civilization. A man who
spends all his time in action, by that very fact ceases to live. Today, 60
years after Ellul made this observations, man now has the cell phone (the Droid
who sticks closer than a brother) to make sure he has no waking minute of
inaction, quiet, or reflection—modern man is connected to the culture of death,
metaphorically and actually.
But if what we have been saying about Christianity is true:
the necessity for the Christian to represent the actual true end in life, the
necessity to give the world a true perspective, the necessity to rediscover
secondary aims for activity itself, all this presupposes that the action is no
longer master, and that what we need to do is live, and to refuse to accept the
methods of action proposed by the world.
The central problem which today confronts Christians is not
to know how to act. It is not to choose one method out of innumerable forms of
action which the world suggests to us, not to act with, or against, or in another
way. The Church is too often at the forefront of ‘white papers,’ and ‘calls to
action’ and ‘programs’ to get people to take sides against something. The
Church is little more than a miserable imitation of the world in this regard.
We have lost the meaning of true action, which is the
testimony of a profound life, not of myth, or of propaganda, or of Mammon! What
matters is to live, and not to act. In this world, this is a revolutionary attitude,
for the world only desires (utilitarian) action, and has no desire for life at
all. The act of being spiritually alive is a profoundly revolutionary in a
world with an overpowering will to death.
At the point where men are alive rather than being obsessed
with action, there means can be put in their right place. To be alive means the
total situation of man as he is confronted by God; this is precisely what the
world tries desperately to forget, and desperately wants Christians to forget
as well.
Next week, as we finish Chapter 3, we will say more of this ‘spiritual
life’ which is ‘life indeed.’ Then, in Chapter 4, The Problem of Communication”
we will go into this in considerable depth.
Jerry
Sweers
cmudgeon@windstream.net
2/20/2013
ALL MEANS UNSUITABLE
GOAFS II: #30
THE PRESENCE OF THE KINGDOM: 17
Chapter 3, the end and the means
February 20, 2012
Remember, brother, everything outside the lake of fire
is mercy, every drop of water is pure grace.
James McKendrick, Scottish
Evangelist
Whenever there
is an attack on the organization of society, there is an attack on religion.
R.J. Rushdoony, The
Foundations of Social Order
The church is the report card of the culture.
Martin Selbrede
Recently I received in the mail the Jan/Feb issue of Faith
For All of Life, Published by the Chalcedon Foundation. The theme of this issue
is “Another Rejected Stone,” and the introductory editorial is taken from R.J.
Rushdoony’s book The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and
Councils of the Early Church. The first paragraph of this editorial is so
relevant to our study that I will quote it in full:
“Every social order rests on a
creed, on a concept of life and law, and represents a religion in action.
Culture is religion externalized, and, as Henry Van Til observed, ‘a people’s
religion comes to expression in its culture, and Christians can be satisfied
with nothing less than a Christian organization of society.’ Whenever there is
an attack on the organization of society, there is an attack on religion. The
basic faith of a society means growth in terms of that faith, but any tampering
with its basic structure is revolutionary activity. The Marxists are in this
respect more astute than their adversaries: they recognize hostility to their
structure as counter-revolutionary activity, as hostility to their
establishment. The Life of a society is its creed; a dying creed faces
desertion or subversion readily. Every creed, however healthy, is also under
continual attack; the culture which neglects to defend and further its creedal
base is exposing its heart to the enemy’s knife. Because of its indifference to
its creedal basis in Biblical Christianity, western civilization is in a life
and death struggle with humanism.”
In a way, this paragraph summarizes much of what Ellul has
been saying so far. I will only make one specific comment and then we will move
on. President Obama’s second inaugural speech is a reminder that he came to the
White House four years ago promising to “totally transform America.” He has
busily been keeping this promise by continually attacking the Judeo/Christian
creedal basis upon which America was founded. He has been tireless in finding
opportunities to marginalize or constrain the expression of the Judeo-Christian
faith in America.
If this death struggle with humanism is being fought right
now, primarily by the massive weapons of technical means that overwhelm and
make irrelevant even any consideration of ends, what are the implications for
the Christians who are losing the battle?
The first would be that we must recognize that our means are
entirely unsuitable for the only end that matters. When we say that our means
have no aim, we are speaking the simple truth. It is impossible to synchronize
these means and the only end willed by God; and, for this very reason, these
means are absolutely useless.
The ‘technicians’ easily get upset by what they perceive as
the confusion of thought here. ‘But,’ they will say, ‘You are comparing apples
to oranges, mixing things up that ought not to be mixed. We have never claimed
that we could bring in the Kingdom of God by our efforts. Our technical means
are adapted to immediate ends. You have no right to condemn us in the name of
the Return of Christ. There are two orders which are entirely different: there
are spiritual values, with the return of Christ at the end, and there are
material values, the here and now. At a practical level, the advice of the
technicians is, “Limit your religion to Sundays in Church, and stay out of our
business.”
But this argument will not fly. First, because the whole
idea of making the Kingdom of God come upon earth is the essence of what
technicians imply when they use the word ‘progress.’ They believe that man will
continue to evolve and the Kingdom will gradually appear through their efforts
as humanity ascends to God.
Second, it is wrong to separate the two orders of matter and
spirit, of grace and law. With God, the means and the end are one, in Jesus
Christ. The orders of preservation and redemption are not separated, but
integrated into one another. All of man’s actions are subject to the Lordship
of Christ.
The bottom line is that human means (technical or otherwise)
are unable to achieve their particular ends because man has refused the reality
of the unique and absolute end. The science of economics will wholly fail to
order economic life aright, because it assumes that economics is a closed
sphere, not subject to the actual judgment of the Return of Christ. This is not
man’s opinion but God’s revelation: all technical achievements are useless unless
they are given their right position, and judged by the coming Kingdom of God.
Here is the second consequence, not only are our human means
entirely unsuitable for the only end that matters, but all the technical means
at our disposal, money, mechanical force, propaganda, movies, the press,
comfort, communications, are nothing but vanity, a striving after the wind,
unless they are already present in the means God uses to achieve His ends.
This is not to imply that all these means of our present
civilization must be abolished, nor is it asking for some kind of arbitrary
transcendentalism based on the power of the spirit of man. And it is not an
optimistic view of the issue of this adventure, because we do not say that
‘this ought to happen,’ keeping our fingers crossed. A Ellul is trying to do is
lay down the one essential condition which must be fulfilled if these means are
to make human life, as God intends it, to be possible.
But this presupposes an attitude that is resolutely hostile
to political realism, an attitude in which means are judged, not in the name of
moral rules, but in virtue of this actual presence of the end willed by God.
If these means are to be fully ordered in the light of this
eschatological event, they must cease to be limitless in their demands, and
subject to no higher authority than themselves. They must be judged, then
accepted or rejected. It is not their intrinsic virtue, their quality as means,
which counts; it is their eschatological content, their faculty of being
integrated under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. These means are not good or bad,
they are called to enter the Kingdom of Love, and they are either able to enter
it or not. They are either inside or outside the gates of the Heavenly
Jerusalem. Their glory may or may not be brought as tribute to the glory of
God.
This is where we have to take the largest step. We have seen
how the work of God invites us to suppress the distinction between the ends and
the means, and how our action is no longer a means, save to the extent in which
it expresses an act of God, the ‘end’ already present. Ellul takes us one step
further, and claims that no human activity—all this work of man, which today
fills the field of our vision—is really a means at all.
In reality, it is no longer a means for anything; it is only
an activity, and as an activity it is also subject to this conception of the
means which the Christian Faith shows us. We will pick this up next week.
Jerry Sweers
Online:
www.crmudgeon.blogspot.com
2/13/2013
UNITY OF END AND MEANS
GOAFS II: #29
THE PRESENCE OF THE KINGDOM: 16
Chapter 3, the end and the means
February 13, 2012
Under every stone lurks a politician.
Aristophanes
We hang the petty thieves and
appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop
How is the Christian to confront the reality of a world and
a worldview that is dominated by technical means that have overcome and
replaced transcendental ends? The first truth that must be recognized and
remembered is that for Christians there is no dissociation between the end and
the means. It is a Greek ethical idea that has caused the division. The point
at which we ought to start is that in the work of God the end and the means are
identical. Thus, when Jesus Christ is present the Kingdom of God has ‘come
upon’ us. This formula expresses very precisely the true relation between the
end and the means.
When Jesus Christ appears in His incarnation, He appears as
God’s means, for the salvation of man and for the establishment of the Kingdom
of God—where Christ is, there also is this salvation and this kingdom.
This situation is the exact opposite of that which Ellul has
described for his day and ours. Our civilization absorbs the end into the
means, and in the process, obscures the action of God where the means only appears
as the realized presence of the end. The end, this Kingdom, which will ‘come’ at
the end of time, is already present when the divine means (the only, unique,
Mediator) is present.
Whether it be the Covenant, or the Law, or the Prophets, or
the history, or the wisdom of Israel: it is always the same act of God that
manifests this unity of the end and the means. This should be reflected in all
Christian life. For the Christian also the end and the means are united in the
same way. So we are irrevocably committed to fight with all our might against
the present enslavement to means.
Above all, our attitude must be different. It is not our
primary task to think out plans, programs, methods of action, ‘initiatives’ of
action and achievement. There is an epidemic of this behavior in the Church
today, but it is nothing more than an imitation of the world that is doomed to
defeat. What we can do is of no importance unless we can offer it with a ‘good
conscience toward God.’
Here it is not our instruments and our institutions that
count--it is ourselves. We are God’s instruments, as individuals and as members
of the Church. In so far as this is true, the Church and all its members are
God’s ‘means’ and ought to constitute that ‘presence’ of the end that is
characteristic of the Kingdom.
We literally carry within ourselves the objective for which
the world has been created by God. Christians are not in the same situation as
others with regard to the end. They have received this end in themselves by the
grace of God. They must represent before the world this unity between end and
means, in the name and authority of Jesus Christ. For it is not man who establishes
this end, and achieves it, it is God who orders and arranges it and brings it
to pass.
This completely reverses the usual attitude of those who
wishing to sanctify something they have accomplished by adding; ‘of course it
is for God to make it fruitful,’ or ‘do what you ought to do and let what will
happen,’ or ‘man proposes and God disposes,’ or the all purpose, ‘Do what I
ask, if it be Thy will.’ All of this sort of thing is merely popular human
wisdom, which tries to bring God in somewhere, to tack Him on in order to
sanctify human effort.
In this attitude as a whole there is a dissociation between
the work of man and the work of God—between the means and the end. Such a view
of life is radically anti-Christian when it incites man to carry on his
affairs, and then adds ‘God’ out of a sense of ‘decency’ belonging to another
age.
This means, for example, that we do not have to strive and
struggle in order that righteousness may reign upon the earth. We have to be
‘just’ or ‘righteous’ ourselves, bearers of righteousness (salt and light
again). The Scriptures tell us that where there is a just man justice prevails.
It is understood that here the world ‘just’ means ‘justified’ by Christ. This
is why justice prevails where there is a just man.
The just man lives by the justice of Christ. This justice is
present, for it is this which makes him just. This justice is not a goal to
attain, or a balance to be acquired. Rather it is a gift of God, free and
inexplicable. A gift that exists in our lives so that our means are not
intended to ‘bring in’ justice, but rather to ‘manifest’ it.
Likewise we do not need to force ourselves, with great
effort and intelligence, to bring peace on earth. We ourselves have to be
peaceful, peacemakers. Where there are peacemakers, peace reigns. And it is
always the same idea which prevails. When God completed the original creation,
He declared it ‘very good.’ His intentions for that creation were good, the
ends he desired in the development of the creation were good. He made it a
living creation in Jesus Christ—and His aims (like peace) were intended to be translated
through Christians who were to be salt and light, the ‘means’ ordered by God.
The principle of a Christian ethic begins here. Our mission
is to search the Scriptures for the way in which we ought to live, in order
that the end, willed by God, should be present among men. The whole object of
ethics is not to attain an end but to manifest the gift that has been given to
us in Christ. This is the gift of grace and peace, of love and of the Holy
Spirit, the very end pursued by God and miraculously present within us.
This overturns our whole idea of ‘human means’ and cuts away
its root of pride and power within us. The ‘means’ is no longer called to achieve
anything. It is delivered from its uncertainty of the way to follow, and the
success to be expected.
We are freed from the obsession with means, from which our
time is suffering. Thus the Church can accept the reality that it is not our
possibilities that control our actions, but it is God’s end, present within us.
Ellul does not ignore or devalue institutions but insists
that changes in them should be the result of the recognition of God’s order for
the world and not be the first and primary consideration. He suggests that “it
is quite good to discover institutional reforms, on the condition that this
research is the product of our fundamental attitude, and that it is an
expression, pure an simple, of the presence of God’s end in the world. And also
that the change takes place through the living presence, in the contemporary
world, of the end, and also of the judgment.”
He points out the elimination of slavery as a social reform
that sprung from Christianity. Slavery was gradually suppressed during the course
of the third and forth centuries, not by decrees, nor by direct condemnation of
slavery by the Church, nor by individual Christians. It was because Christians
of the day were quite conscious of the equality with their slaves, since they
were all, as Christians, looking for the Return of Christ. Since Christ was
about to come, it seemed both useless and unjust to have slaves. The
institutional reforms that followed grew out of the faith of the Church, not
from the technical competence of a few experts, whether they were Christians or
not.
The implications of this for our time suggest an
unprecedented upheaval of the massive means that our civilization has been
piling up. Ellul begins to examine some of the implications of this next week.
Jerry Sweers
Online: www.crmudgeon.blogspot.com
2/06/2013
WHAT WOULD BUDDHA DO?
NUMBER 204
WHAT WOULD BUDDHA DO?
The other day I found myself sitting at a stop light reading messages to the world on the back of a late model van. The one that caught my attention was this attempt to stick a finger in the eye of those sincere Christians with their WWJD? paraphernalia.
WHAT WOULD BUDDHA DO?
I had a very strong urge to get out of my car, walk to the driver’s window and give her an answer to this question. I say “her” because the rest of the stickers on the back door strongly suggested a “save the whales-kill the babies-tree hugging-vegetarian lesbian” with a very large chip (organically grown, oven-baked, of course) on her shoulder.
I would have said was this: “Your bumper sticker asks a question: What would Buddha do? I have the answer; Buddha would do nothing, he has been dead for almost 2,500 years.”
But the light changed and the van moved off and I had to go about my business.
You can ring this little fellow’s bell and ask for good luck, but he will not answer and is not able to do a thing for you. The Alpha and Omega, THE ONE WHO WAS, THE ONE WHO IS and THE ONE WHO IS TO COME is in a whole different class than the gods of the pagans who inhabit the bumper-stickers of the world.
Some years ago when we lived in Southern California it was a fairyland of bumper stickers. I’m told it still is. A pair that still stands out in my memory was on the back of a scruffy looking pickup truck:
On the left side; WELCOME TO MILLER TIME
On the right side; JESUS IS LORD
I have often wondered if this represented a husband and wife debate. The British Preacher Leonard Ravenhill used to suggest that if you put a bumper sticker on one side that says:
JESUS LOVES YOU AND HAS A WONDERFUL PLAN FOR YOUR LIFE
You should balance it with one on the other side saying:
GOD IS ANGRY WITH SINNERS EVERY DAY!
It takes more space than a bumper sticker offers to present the One the Apostle John describes in his vision on Patmos:
I, John, both your brother and companion in the tribulation and kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was on the island that is called Patmos for the word of God and for the testimony of Jesus Christ. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, and I heard behind me a loud voice, as of a trumpet, saying, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last,” and, “What you see, write in a book and send it to the seven churches which are in Asia: to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamos, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.”
Then I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And having turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the seven lampstands One like the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes like a flame of fire; His feet were like fine brass, as if refined in a furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters; He had in His right hand seven stars, out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was like the sun shining in its strength.
And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. But He laid His right hand on me, saying to me, “Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last. I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. Revelation 1.9-18
This is the Lord we serve—He is not a bumper sticker kind of God.
WHAT WOULD BUDDHA DO?
The other day I found myself sitting at a stop light reading messages to the world on the back of a late model van. The one that caught my attention was this attempt to stick a finger in the eye of those sincere Christians with their WWJD? paraphernalia.
WHAT WOULD BUDDHA DO?
I had a very strong urge to get out of my car, walk to the driver’s window and give her an answer to this question. I say “her” because the rest of the stickers on the back door strongly suggested a “save the whales-kill the babies-tree hugging-vegetarian lesbian” with a very large chip (organically grown, oven-baked, of course) on her shoulder.
I would have said was this: “Your bumper sticker asks a question: What would Buddha do? I have the answer; Buddha would do nothing, he has been dead for almost 2,500 years.”
But the light changed and the van moved off and I had to go about my business.
You can ring this little fellow’s bell and ask for good luck, but he will not answer and is not able to do a thing for you. The Alpha and Omega, THE ONE WHO WAS, THE ONE WHO IS and THE ONE WHO IS TO COME is in a whole different class than the gods of the pagans who inhabit the bumper-stickers of the world.
Some years ago when we lived in Southern California it was a fairyland of bumper stickers. I’m told it still is. A pair that still stands out in my memory was on the back of a scruffy looking pickup truck:
On the left side; WELCOME TO MILLER TIME
On the right side; JESUS IS LORD
I have often wondered if this represented a husband and wife debate. The British Preacher Leonard Ravenhill used to suggest that if you put a bumper sticker on one side that says:
JESUS LOVES YOU AND HAS A WONDERFUL PLAN FOR YOUR LIFE
You should balance it with one on the other side saying:
GOD IS ANGRY WITH SINNERS EVERY DAY!
It takes more space than a bumper sticker offers to present the One the Apostle John describes in his vision on Patmos:
I, John, both your brother and companion in the tribulation and kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was on the island that is called Patmos for the word of God and for the testimony of Jesus Christ. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, and I heard behind me a loud voice, as of a trumpet, saying, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last,” and, “What you see, write in a book and send it to the seven churches which are in Asia: to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamos, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.”
Then I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And having turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the seven lampstands One like the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes like a flame of fire; His feet were like fine brass, as if refined in a furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters; He had in His right hand seven stars, out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was like the sun shining in its strength.
And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. But He laid His right hand on me, saying to me, “Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last. I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. Revelation 1.9-18
This is the Lord we serve—He is not a bumper sticker kind of God.
TOTALITARIAN MEANS
GOAFS II: #28
THE PRESENCE OF THE KINGDOM: 15
Chapter 3, the end and the means
February 6, 2012
There is no God but Me.
First
and Great Commandment of Progressive Liberalism
As we saw last week, means have become totalitarian. Our
civilization is wholly a civilization of means and means affect all spheres of
life. Means respect nothing. This totalitarian reality can be considered from
two points of view.
First of all, means have become so exclusive that they
exclude everything which does not help their progress, everything that does not
contribute to their development. In addition, the means destroys all that
threatens its development. Technics will attack and ruin successively the moral
judgment (and in consequence, morals as a whole) and the humanism which claims
to subordinate all things to man (but technics does not admit that it can be
limited by the interests of man). Means despises all the activity in which man
expresses himself freely for the disinterested pleasure in the activity itself.
Everything must be ‘useful.’ Art for art’s sake must be
replaced by art for the use of the community or the regime. All spiritual
awareness must be put away because it is essential that man should be blind, so
that he can be a good slave of the means which he creates. Technics will
abolish the critical sense, in order to be able to develop freely (as everyone
thinks) for the greater good of humanity.
As the ancients put out the eyes of the nightingales in
order to make them sing better, so does technology through means rise
triumphantly on the ruins of human values and constructs its own values, which
will help it ascend. All these new values are aids, supports of the means, as,
for instance, the new type of myth. The State, the nation, the race, the
proletariat, labor, and today, multiculturalism as god, are presented to us
according to the different parties as ‘spiritual values’ when in reality, they
are simply illusions to make man accept the desert--the terrifying sterility of
the world in which he is living.
The essence of these new, means-based myths is that they
place the spiritual at the service of means. They permit the use of that which
until recently seemed impossible to use in man (and, by this very fact, was
rejected by Marxist realism). This is the great discovery of the United States
of America, which began to use Christianity as a factor in labor (the
Calvinistic work ethic), then of the Fascist dictatorships, that utilized
spiritual forces for the material power of the nation. Eventually Communism
seems to have understood this point, and in its turn began to utilize myths of
whatever kind they could, even Christian ones, for the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
This subordination of the spiritual to technical means is
the great revolution, and in truth the only revolution which our day has
accomplished: that is to say, the final point which effectively puts a stop to
any possibility of true revolution.
The second aspect of this totalitarianism of means is that gradually
it extends its sphere to everything; not only are material objects subordinated
to technology, but man also. Man is no longer subject, he becomes the object of
the forces which he has created. Man no longer seeks to know himself, in order
that he may acquire self-mastery, but simply in order that he may be used. He
is no longer concerned to discover his true ‘image’ (“made in the image of
God”), but to reduce it to the state of ‘facsimile.’
Ellul saw the eventual removal of everything transcendental
from the public school system so that it could carefully craft little wheels,
cogs, pulleys and chains to fit perfectly into the machinery of Leviathan, the
Absolute State. Today science (and, by implication ‘means’) is the god of the
public educational system. Ellul listed some things he saw 60 years ago along
this line: psychological tactics, labor camps, propaganda, and directed
leisure.
The autocracy of means also invades the spiritual sphere;
what were once spiritual problems have become problems of ‘the means to use.’
This denudes ‘spiritual means’ of all substance, and because man has become ‘object,’
and because the spiritual is classified among spiritual ‘means,’ existence no
longer has any possible significance.
Existentialism (A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness
and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent
universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of
choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts.), the philosophy
of Ellul’s day, was right to remind man that his existence was what it was, but
it was wrong to suggest that man is free to give fresh meaning to his life. The
irremediable triumph of means takes away all liberty from man along this line.
In face of all this, if we somehow still manage to believe in the angelic
virtue of man, it only shows that we do not know either ourselves or our own
day.
In 60 years the reigning philosophy has shifted several
times, it has been a downward spiral to
the present, where we have a narcissistic (Excessive love or admiration of
oneself.) nihilism (An extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence. A doctrine
holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or
communicated. Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a
willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief.
The belief that destruction of existing political or social institutions is
necessary for future improvement.) This is well-illustrated in The First and
Great Commandment of Progressive Liberalism: ‘There is no other God but Me.”
We are caught in a trap. It is no use pretending to be
‘deep,’ and to talk loftily about the possession of inward liberty. If liberty
cannot be expressed in my life it is an illusion. For the Christian this
situation is appalling, for what we have been describing actually proves that
it is impossible, in human terms, to live one’s faith, to bear genuine witness.
Of course, in these terms, it has always been impossible to
live one’s faith, and we easily comfort ourselves by saying ‘our day is no
worse than any other,’ and that ‘our difficulties are just the same.’ But that
is just not true. It may have always been impossible to live one’s faith, but
that was due to inward causes; “Woe unto me! For the good which I would I do
not: but the evil which I would not, that I practice.”
But today this inward difficulty is greatly increased by
external causes. In no other civilization has man been so totally repressed. He
may have been the slave to hunger, of natural circumstances, or of another man:
but he always managed to preserve a margin of freedom, sufficient to remain
master of the greater part of his time, and to choose his own line, out of more
than one possibility.
All civilizations have imposed a certain amount of
restriction, but they left man a large field for free and individual action.
The Roman slave or the mediaeval serf, was freer, more personal, more socially
human (Ellul would not say ‘happier,’ from the material point of view) than the
modern industrial worker or the Soviet Union official.
Our civilization which claims to exert no restraint tries to
dominate man as a whole, and to confine him within narrow limits, where all his
gestures, and his secret thoughts will be controlled by the social machine
(absolute political correctness). In America, the land of the free and the home
of the brave, hate crime legislation is rapidly working on this—Leviathan has
his toe in the door, thought control is already making good progress in Canada,
and Western Europe, we are not far behind.
Ellul suggests that this is primarily a spiritual battle for
Christians and unless they begin to take it seriously, both the social and
individual aspects of Christian life and witness are in great danger.
Christians must recognize that this conflict is ‘not against flesh and blood,
but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of
this darkness.” (Eph. 6.12) And they ought to know that this conflict, which is
primarily spiritual, at least at first, is a life and death struggle. This
spiritual conflict is just as brutal as any battle in time of war.
When the Apostle Paul wrote, the enemy in this conflict was
the world, the flesh and the Devil. When Ellul wrote the enemy was essentially
the same. Today there is another major player, a false religion with a false
god, a false prophet, and a lying book—Islam. This too is the subject of
another book but we need to remember that things seem to have gotten more
complicated in the past 60 years.
Ellul has ideas about what to do. He will not suggest means
of action, opposing one form of technology against another. He will remind his readers
of an ancient Christian way, abandoned for the last 300 years, which moves in
the opposite direction of the triumphant path traced by modern technology.
Jerry Sweers
Online: www.crmudgeon.blogspot.com
