6
We can never say “This has to be done.” For the hard-pressed layman who wants specific instructions there is no “Do this or that.” There are no clear, simple, universal, Christian solutions to all the problems which arise. We can only put the problems as clearly as possible and then, having given the believer all the weapons that theology and piety can offer, say to him: “Now it is up to you to go and find the answer, not intellectually, but by living out your faith in this situation.” There is no prefabricated solution nor universally applicable model of the Christian life. Freedom itself causes the difficulty . . . Freedom implies that each Christian discovers for himself the style and form of his action.96
Though we habitually say that Ellul was both a sociologist and a theologian, neither of these two terms allow us to understand clearly what Ellul really did. On the sociology side, Ellul was trained in the history and evolution of institutions. So, while he is best known in North America for his studies of technique, propaganda, and the state, his most in-depth and detailed work is actually his untranslated Histoire des Institutions (History of Institutions) in five massive volumes. This work looks at how societies are organized and how their institutions change, following these mutations in the Western world from ancient Greece through eighteenth-century France. Likewise, on the theology side, Ellul often refused to call himself a theologian. Certainly, he was being a bit modest; by the time one writes numerous books of biblical commentary and theological-ethical studies, in dialogue with the most influential voices in theological study of one’s day, one should simply accept that to some extent one is doing theology. However, it is more correct to view Ellul as a theological ethicist than a theologian.97 Just as the Histoire des Institutions is the largest and most detailed work among Ellul’s sociological writings, his five published volumes of theological ethics are his most substantial and exhaustive works among his theological writings.
The Big Picture of Ellul’s Theological Ethics
We have seen that from the beginning of his writing career, Ellul was already concerned with theological ethics. Presence in the Modern World, his introduction to his writings, sketched the beginnings of an ethic for Christians, using presence as a major ethical category. The ethics he outlined in Presence in the Modern World were only the beginning of a much larger planned project.
Ellul envisaged a major project of ethics for Christians in four parts. The first part would be an introduction to the whole enterprise, laying the groundwork for the rest. The other three components would each relate to one in the trio of theological virtues lauded by the apostle Paul in the New Testament: faith, hope, and love. Remember that in Hope in Time of Abandonment, Ellul thought that the West today is most urgently in need of hope. He saw freedom as the ethical category implied by hope; thus, The Ethics of Freedom corresponds to hope. Next, he planned his Ethics of Holiness to express faith, and his Ethics of Relationship to express love.98 Like Presence in the Modern World, these books would bring Ellul’s in-depth studies of society into contact with one of these themes from biblical theology, resulting in an exploration of what the Christian life might look like in the twentieth-century West.
Unfortunately, Ellul never managed to finish this massive project before his death. He did, however, manage to finish the introduction, To Will & to Do (in two volumes); The Ethics of Freedom (three volumes); and a full manuscript of The Ethics of Holiness (unpublished to date). To the best scholarly knowledge, some sketches of material for The Ethics of Relationship might exist, but Ellul never wrote a manuscript. The published volumes are major texts in twentieth-century Protestant theological ethics; they are written in close dialogue with other significant theological thinkers, such as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Ricoeur, Reinhold Niebuhr, among others—as well as major philosophers of the time, such as Jean-Paul Sartre. In these pages, we cannot give an in-depth a summary of Ellul’s theological ethics, as we have of his other works, simply because these ethics are much bigger and longer than most of his other works. We will, however, give an outline of the main ideas in the two published volumes of his introduction to Christian ethics, To Will & to Do.
To Will & To Do: A Biblical, Relative, Impossible, and Necessary Ethic for Christians
Ellul’s introduction to ethics for Christians, Le Vouloir et le faire (To Will & to Do), is composed of two volumes. The first volume was published in French in 1964 and translated into English in 1969. The manuscript for the second volume was lost for decades. A copy of volume 2 was recently rediscovered in Switzerland, edited, and published in French in 2018 as Les sources de l’éthique chrétienne (The Sources [or Springs] of Christian Ethics).99
To Will & to Do is structured in five major parts, with three parts in volume 1, and two parts in volume 2. Part 1, “Origins,” looks at the origin of ethics as a question and a problem. Part 2, “Morality of the World,” examines various possible approaches to thinking about ethics. Part 3, “The Impossibility and the Necessity of a Christian Ethic,” addresses exactly what its paradoxical title says—Ellul thinks that an ethic for Christians is both impossible, and yet necessary. Part 4 examines the “Conditions and Characteristics of a Christian Ethic.” Finally, part 5 looks at “The Content Ethics,” and does so in two subsections: first, “Ethics and the Law,” and second, “Ethics and Theology.” We will now offer a brief look at each of the five major parts.
The Origin of the Problem
Ellul begins his introduction by examining the origins of the very question of ethics. From the first page, Ellul is clear that his whole approach to ethics, his reason, his starting point, goal, and measure, all come from the Bible. We should not be surprised, then, to see that Ellul looks to the biblical creation story to find the origin of the problem of ethics.
In close dialogue with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, Ellul argues that the opening chapters of Genesis offer an important clue to understanding questions of good and evil. According to the Genesis narrative, if we can even ask the question of what is good and evil, that shows that we are already separated from God—just like Adam and Eve, who did not know good or evil until after they ate of the forbidden fruit. Therefore, all our knowledge of the good is already in separation from God; this separation is traditionally called the fall (though Ellul prefers the term “rupture,” showing our broken relationship with God). This means that what humans call good and what God calls good are not the same thing.
So, if what we think is good is not the true good, what is the true good? Ellul believes that the Bible very clearly tells us: the true good is the will of God. While some philosophers think that God wills something because it is good in itself, Ellul’s thinking takes the opposite position. Nothing is higher than God, Ellul says; something is morally good because God wills it. What God wills, therefore, is the only true good. This will be discussed more fully momentarily. The next question, naturally, is: What does God want? Many people, whether theologians, Christians, or none of the above, give different answers to this question. Following Karl Barth, Ellul’s answer is: we do not know unless God reveals it to us! This might lead us to throw our hands up in despair. But the good news is that God is caring and loves us; he does graciously show it to us. In fact, the title of Ellul’s book, To Will & to Do, comes from Phil 2:13, which says that God is the one who gives us both the willing and the doing. So, for Ellul, even the question of what we must do is framed by God’s grace.
This is enough to show us Ellul’s position on the many ways of doing ethics. If we do not know God’s will unless God reveals it, this means that we do not know it naturally. Furthermore, if we look to nature or to the way things are or simply to our own observations—which in theological terms is often called natural law—we cannot find it. For Ellul, natural law absolutely cannot reveal the will of God to us. Similarly, many people believe that we all have a voice inside us which tells us what is right or wrong, our conscience. The French term for “conscience” is conscience, which means both “conscience” in this sense of an internal moral compass or guide, and “consciousness,” in the sense of simply being aware of something. For Ellul, this latter sense is the only properly biblical view; we are aware of things, but it is we who are aware of them, not some divine voice in us leftover from the creation. In short, Ellul adopts a strongly Protestant position in which Jesus Christ is the only mediator between humanity and God. Any other attempts to provide some mediation that could solve the problem of good and evil—whether through natural law, conscience, values, virtues, or so-called Christian principles—are ultimately human attempts at justifying themselves. But Protestant theology since Luther has always emphasized that Christian justification is sola fide—by faith alone, in Christ alone.
In other words, Ellul’s theological approach to ethics takes humanity’s break with God as described in Genesis very seriously. If we could know the good naturally, on our own, without God revealing it to us, Ellul thinks this would be to minimize the problem of sin and the break with God. Furthermore, the radical solution to the human condition proposed by the Bible—the horrible crucifixion of Jesus Christ—is hard to understand. Why such a serious solution, Ellul thinks, unless the problem itself was of utmost seriousness?
All this means that any attempt at making an ethic for Christians must be recognized as a fallen attempt. Morality is made in a fallen world, the world of necessity. Christian ethics can never be an absolute law; it can only be a human attempt at listening to God’s word and offering a life in response. It can never claim to know the absolute good; all it can do is know relative goods. The problem here is that today we are used to thinking in absolute terms: truth and good must be absolute, or they are not true or good at all! But Ellul calls us to a more nuanced approach. All human knowledge and life is relative—we do not eat absolute bread, breathe absolute air, or have absolute friends. But relative does not mean unimportant. For Ellul, everything is relative, and everything is important, including our ability to know the world around us and respond ethically.
Like Presence in the Modern World, To Will & to Do makes clear that this is not an easy or comfortable balance to live. In ethics, Ellul calls this same uncomfortable balance “the double morality.” Morality (Ellul uses “morality” and “ethics” somewhat interchangeably) for Christians is “double” because on one hand, there is what is good according to our society; on the other hand, there is what is good according to God and Scripture. But Ellul notes that even Paul commands us to do what is good before men; this means that Christians cannot just ignore what is good according to society; instead, they must pay attention to both, to act as mediators between the two.
Other Approaches to Ethics
In part 2 of To Will & to Do, “Morality of the World,” Ellul examines various ways in which ethics has been approached by other thinkers. He notes, first of all, that there are indeed various approaches; there is not one absolute ethic, but many human attempts to know and understand the good. Second, there is a difference between “theoretical moralities”—made by philosophers and intellectuals, who spend years thinking and drawing up elaborate systems of knowledge, describing what is good—and “lived moralities,” which are applied by the average person, who will never actually use or consult theoretical systems. Ellul notes that any society has a morality of some kind or another; this morality is what allows humans to live together somewhat harmoniously, without conflict or violence breaking out. This lived morality must be believed and followed by individuals, and it must somehow explain and direct social and political institutions.
Ellul also includes a chapter on “Technological [or ‘Technical’] Morality.” Understanding this morality helps us to see why Ellul is really concerned with the danger of technique for society. Ellul thinks that Western society is in the middle of a moral transformation. Our society’s current morality is made up of two elements: “One of these is what is left of the Christian morality developed in the Middle Ages and transformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It emphasizes individual virtues and is oriented towards charity. The other is a technological morality, emphasizing collective virtues and oriented towards work.”100 However, this leftover Christian morality is no longer sufficient to keep pace with the major technological developments we have seen; this means that a new and purely technical morality is being developed, which is starting to replace the old morality. Remember that Ellul studied the history of law and the evolution of institutions; he is deeply interested in the link between the individual and their society. For nearly all human history, this link was a matter of words and laws, discussion, relating human civilization to the natural world and a spiritual or divine world. But now, for the first time, this link is a question of adapting the human to a constructed world of machines. In today’s world, the individual-society link has only become more and more technical; what are social media, apps, and the internet, if not a technological link between individuals and larger society? This represents a fundamental mutation of law and human society, which Ellul sees as a threat to human civilization as a whole.
Christian Ethics: Impossible, yet Necessary
In part 3 of To Will & to Do, Ellul writes that an ethic for Christians is impossible and yet necessary. What does this mean, and how is this coherent at all? We have seen that Ellul thinks that the good is God’s will. No human can know God’s will completely or perfectly. Any attempt to make a Christian ethic is thus condemned from the start, because it sets up a good that is not God’s own good! We cannot claim that what we think is good is actually good; to do so would be to justify ourselves. Thus, the impossibility of a Christian ethic.
And yet the church is a group of humans. It obeys the same sociological laws of every other group of humans. This means that like all others, it cannot help creating a morality; it will do so spontaneously. But if Christians cannot avoid morality at all, if humans absolutely need morality to live together in community, it would be much better to consciously decide on this morality so that we are aware of it rather than to pretend we have no morality. Having a conscious morality is important precisely so that Christians do not forget that morality is relative, not absolute. It helps them remember that they are just as human as everyone else. Having now established that we cannot do without an ethic for Christians, part 4 of To Will & to Do examines eight characteristics of this ethic.
First, this ethic must be drawn from the Bible, developed and lived out with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. If we are to know God’s will, the only way we can do so is if the Holy Spirit reveals it to us. But, Ellul thinks, the Holy Spirit will never reveal something to us which does not square with what we find in biblical revelation.
Second, this is an ethic for the person. A major theme in Ellul’s thinking is that God calls humans to separate from the crowd, to relate to him individually and personally. Thus, an institution or group can never obey God; but people can obey God and be part of an institution or group. A state or business cannot be Christian; but there can be Christian people who work in a state or business. Thus, the ethic never directly addresses a group but is always addressed to individual people.
However, this is closely linked to the third characteristic: this ethic is communal. As an individual, I am always also a citizen, a family-member, a worker, and so forth Because this ethic involves my whole life, it involves my belonging to all of these groups as well. In other words, no part of my life is left untouched by this ethic; by touching the individual, it touches all of society.
Fourth, this ethic is immediate. We have seen that Protestant theology emphasizes that the only mediator between God and humanity is Jesus Christ. This means that we cannot exclusively rely on principles, values, conscience, natural law, or anything else, to tell us what is good; while we are free to explore these aids thinking, we cannot use them to shield ourselves from our intimate, existential, and sometimes overwhelming relation to God in Jesus Christ.
Fifth, this is a specific ethic. By calling it specific, Ellul is taking a position in certain theological debates of his time which said that the Christian life was like any other. Some theologians see a minimal or nonexistent difference between being a Christian and not being a Christian. Ellul vehemently disagrees; emphasizing Rom 12:2 again, Ellul recalls that the Bible commands Christians not to conform to this world.
Sixth, the ethic for Christians is an ethic of contradictions. In a way that recalls Kierkegaard, one of Ellul’s major influences, Ellul understands the Christian faith as embodying various paradoxes and contradictions. These cannot be resolved using human logic or critical thinking skills; there is no abstract solution here. Rather, the paradoxes and contradictions must be embraced and lived out. Recalling the paradoxical tensions between time and eternity, necessity and freedom, Ellul calls on us to concretely live out the contradictions of the Christian faith rather than looking for abstract, formulaic solutions; the Christian’s life is a response to the paradoxes.
Seventh, this ethic is an ethic of means. We saw in Presence in the Modern World that Ellul maintains that nearly everything has been reduced to a means today, and that ends are lost. Combatting this situation, the Christian life is one of being, not doing. However, this sort of being will necessarily lead to using some means and rejecting others. By “means” in this context, Ellul is implying the entirety of our relation to our neighbor; he implies that we reject dominance or control, and that mirroring God’s free love for us, we freely love them. In contrast with other ethical theories, Christian ethics do not give us specific goals to accomplish. Instead, we are told what God wants to do, but also that he has already done it in Jesus; we cannot add anything to this work. All we can do is respond in obedience to this God because of his work. Jesus is both our means and our end. “It is a matter of choosing the best means to express the work of God accomplished in a man by Grace, in concrete circumstances in a society historically determined by social, economic, political, and ideological structures.”101
Finally, this is an eschatological ethic. Ellul means that all ethical reasoning must take into account its situation in time. We cannot reason as if we were still in God’s original, uncorrupted creation; neither can we reason as if we were already in the kingdom of God, where all things are fully made new. Instead, this ethic should be somewhere in between. It must express its own temporality: it is not a kind of absolute reasoning relevant for all time, but a relative reasoning, suited for this time, in between the times.
Ethics, the Bible, and Theology
Part 5 of To Will & to Do is split into two sections. The first examines how we should use the legal texts of the Bible for ethics today. We cannot simply ignore these texts; Ellul believes the Scripture forms a unity, and separating it would be a way of making the Bible say what we want. However, we cannot apply these texts directly; many of them were clearly meant for their context and time, and applying them today would have no more theological meaning. To see the law of the Old Testament today, we must see it through the lens of Jesus Christ, who fulfilled the law, yet did not abolish it. For each of the Old Testament laws, we must seek the significance of its accomplishment in Christ. The law cannot be eliminated but instead must be completely translated into our ethic.
Taking the Old Testament law seriously does several things. First, it reminds us that God claims our entire lives, and that in our sin, we must be made holy, conformed to his promises. Second, taking the Old Testament law seriously gives us a “charter of the new life according to God,” concretely informing our style of life. God’s law sets us apart for his service and for life with him. Furthermore, Ellul insists that we hear each commandment as both a commandment and a promise from God to care for us. The point of the law is to trace limits within which the human can be free in relation to God. In this respect, freedom and obedience to the law are not opposed to each other but go hand in hand.
The second section of part 5 examines the relationship between ethics and theology. Ellul begins by asking about the relationship between ethics and doctrine (or dogmatics). In some of his most in-depth critical discussion with Karl Barth, Ellul sees ethics as submitted to dogmatics. Ellul follows Barth in affirming an essential unity between the two theological disciplines. Both must be directly inspired by biblical texts. However, he thinks that Barth focuses so much on this unity that he never actually gets to the concrete details of ethics. So, while they are united, they still have different tasks which must be treated separately.
Next, Ellul emphasizes that there are no Christian principles. For example, in Christian reasoning concerning money, many Christians are tempted to read the biblical texts and summarize biblical teaching in the Christian principle of stewardship; they then seek concrete actions that reflect stewardship. Ellul thinks this is a poor way of reasoning because it separates our actions and their truth from the person of Jesus Christ, and because it does not accurately reflect scriptural teaching. Instead, biblical principles substitute our philosophical morality for the Bible’s own ways of speaking about ethics.
Finally, Ellul recommends the analogy of faith as a guiding principle for interpreting these texts. This term comes from Rom 12:6, suggesting that the Christian with the gift of prophecy should exercise it “according to the analogy of faith.” The analogy of faith thus applies to the prophet. Ellul sees theological ethics fulfilling the same role today that prophecy fulfilled in the New Testament. Ellul thus thinks the analogy of faith means that all ethics must line up with scriptural doctrine. The ethicist must seek the consequences of God’s word for action today, in a way that exhorts, encourages and builds up believers.
Summary
Ellul’s five volumes of theological ethics are some of the longest and most detailed texts he wrote. Taking them seriously makes it clear that while Ellul did not see himself as a theologian, he certainly was a theological ethicist. Christian ethics is not so much a problem of knowing good or evil as relating to God and others. Human knowledge of the good is necessarily limited and idolatrous; it sets up a good according to us, in separation with God, after the fall and the order of necessity. The true good is the will of God. Christians have the difficult and uncomfortable task of balancing between two moralities—that of today’s world, and the moral life as God would have us live it. This is difficult since today, morality is becoming increasingly technical. However, because Christians are a group of humans like any other, despite the impossibility of a true morality, Christians must humbly create a relative and necessary morality, knowing that its validity comes from God, not from itself. Ellul gives eight characteristics of this Christian ethic: first, it comes from the Bible, with the Holy Spirit as a guide; second, it is for the person; third, it is communal; fourth, it is immediate; fifth, it is specific; sixth, it is an ethic of contradictions; seventh, it is an ethic of means; and eighth, it is eschatological. Even the Old Testament law texts must be incorporated into this ethic—not directly, but as interpreted by the analogy of faith, submitted to dogmatic theology, and without any Christian principles.
96. Ellul, Ethics of Freedom, 300.
97. For more on this, see one of the classic treatments of Ellul’s theological ethics: Gill, Word of God in the Ethics of Jacques Ellul. For the last several decades, Gill has highlighted, explored, extended, and developed Ellul’s ethical project.
98. Cf. Ellul, Ethics of Freedom, 7.
99. A new English translation of both volumes is currently underway, forthcoming from Cascade Books.
100. Ellul, To Will & to Do (trans. Hopkin), 185.
101. We are citing from Jacob Marques Rollison’s forthcoming translation, which has yet to be published; we thus cannot yet give page numbers.