The works of both Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have highlighted the fundamental discrepancies between Christianity and religion. It was Barth who felt that religion primarily constitutes our quest to find God by means of the heavenly ladders of experience, morality, or reason, whereas Christian faith witnesses to the phenomenon of God coming to us.
Bonhoeffer expounded an even more provocative thesis about religion. In his prison letters he advocated a religionless Christianity. Some took this to mean that Bonhoeffer wanted to shed traditional sacramental worship, Bible study, and prayer. Upon closer scrutiny, most scholars conclude that he was not attacking Christian disciplines so much as the way we participate in them and confuse them with the gods of popular religion.
For Bonhoeffer, religion (not Christianity) is the deus ex machina: when we cannot fathom something any other way, we call on the god of the gaps to fill in the missing links of our knowledge. The gods of popular religion are invoked at the right time to fulfill our needs, solve our problems. In his associations with secular humanists in resistance activity against Hitler, Bonhoeffer sensed increasing numbers of moderns to be rejecting the gods of popular religion. He longed for a church and spoke of a world “come of age” which might abandon false concepts of God in order to clear the decks for the God of the Bible. That God would meet us in our strengths rather than so much in our weaknesses, to summon us to be persons for others.
Jacques Ellul has put forth his book The New Demons as a counterpoint to Bonhoeffer’s call to reclaim for Christ a world come of age. Though Ellul handles Bonhoeffer gingerly compared to his treatment of Harvey Cox and the death-of-god theologians, The New Demons is full of barbs directed toward any notion of the world come of age. Ellul shares Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion, though he shifts to a Tillichian view of religion as that which we grant ultimate concern. Ellul asserts that we live in a post-Christian age but he disagrees vigorously with any notion that we live in a post-religious age. He attacks the analysis that since Christianity was the highest form of religion and our era is post-Christian, it follows that we are no longer religious. In truth, our age is more religious than ever before.
Likewise, Ellul deplores any assumption that secularization is good. He claims that we have confused the statement of the fact of secularization with statements evaluating the desirability of secularization. By placing biblical sanctions on the process and claiming to be more laicized and secularized than anybody else, Cox and others attempted to assure themselves of something more than the obscurity of a back seat. The death of God theologians, in elevating the myth of science, have subordinated Christianity to the cultural. Religion becomes a reduction process which sanctions whatever comes to hand in formulating our faith.
Ellul, who lived through an experience similar to Bonhoeffer’s of underground resistance against Nazi tyranny, puzzles over the Germans’ blindness. Bonhoeffer lived in the midst of the most formidable outburst of mystical-irrational religion we have known for centuries. Ellul speculates that Bonhoeffer may have been greatly troubled in prison or may have erroneously judged Nazism to be a gross but brief aberration.
Bonhoeffer’s assessment of the world come of age was no doubt characterized by a certain naiveté about secular humanism. But his associations with some of the finest and most sensitive morally outraged Germans did verify his judgment of the minority mood -- one which Ellul too lightly dismisses. Ellul also overlooks Bonhoeffer’s insistence in the letters that we must not gloss over the ungodliness of the world. For the world is not a sinless one, but one which needs to be reclaimed for Christ.
Ellul grants that Bonhoeffer’s followers think that Bonhoeffer may have been more prophetic than descriptive in proposing the world come of age. With this judgment I agree. Bonhoeffer called for the death of the gods of religion, in hopes of a greater allegiance to the God of the Bible.
Due to the time-lag between the appearance of the book in France and its American publication, Ellul’s critique of Harvey Cox often seems outdated. After rather typical critiques of any easy embracing of the secular city, Ellul judges Cox’s seeming repentance in The Feast of Fools to be but another attempt to be with it. Though some of us have shared his judgment of Cox in the past, it should be said that Cox has refused to go with some recent trends which run counter to the stance of biblical faith. Though a master at interpreting propaganda, Ellul seems to have been victimized by the media in giving more status than he ought to give to the death of God fad. Throughout the book he assumes it to be a major trend in American theology. That was not the case even at the time of his writing.
In spite of such unfairness, originating in his polemical zeal, Ellul’s basic case is sound. He points to the great proliferation of the religious in the so-called world come of age. There are over 3,000 soothsayers, fakirs, and fortunetellers in Paris alone. If each averages a clientèle of 150 persons, this means that some 450,000 adult Parisians consult spiritualists. Horoscopes are followed by some 10 million French. We can supply similar phenomena from America, such as the success of Transcendental Meditation Neo-Hindu cults, Scientology, and the revival of mystery religions. Ellul’s inclusiveness can lump Billy Graham, the Jesus movement, neo-Pentecostalism, the Jehovah Witnesses, and Teilhard de Chardin all together as contemporary “fashion phenomena.”
Ellul identifies a dialectic of idols and iconoclasts: the thing invoked to desecrate a sacred myth becomes itself elevated to the place of a sacred object. Thus the debunking of the religion of the state often results in a new sacralizing of the ideology of revolution. We may demythologize the biblical myths only to end up multiplying modern myths to provide meaning for our lives. Among these myths are the myth that technology is the god who saves, the worship of the state, our faith in science, the myths of progress, youth, and class, and utopianism. We may exorcise one religious demon only to have seven others enter the back door.
Since Ellul maintains that the left and the Marxists are the greatest producers of myths in our time, he reserves his big guns for an attack on the secular political religions of our era. Though he cuts across ideological boundaries in naming Marxist communism, national socialism, and American democracy as examples of absolute faith of political religion, as a burned former Communist he is best in delineating the religious elements of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist orbit. It is this analysis which constitutes the bulk of his chapter on political religion.
Though I have wondered if Ellul ever finds any fruits of the gospel in secular humanism or valid judgments of God in political religions, I have shared his overall pessimism about our predicament. Here we are, he says, in the most religious of all worlds. Our mastery of the universe, with the consequent possibilities for good, is almost limitless. We can still know awe about what can be done with and through technique. Yet we have experienced atrocities in the service of technique.
Faced with seemingly insoluble problems, apostles of “progress” fail to console us. Under such conditions, asks Ellul, how can we help but fall back on the sacred, the myth? It takes heroic courage and intelligence to be non-religious today. In this situation Ellul reasons that we need purveyors of mass media to engross and satisfy us, while preventing us from acting effectively. Utopianism is the Negro spiritual of modern intellectuals; its crooners maintain their bearings in the world by escaping from it.
It may not be right to destroy these shelters. Weaning the world from its secular myths can only be effected if we can offer clear and satisfying answers in their place. If we cannot, Ellul concludes it may be best to allow humanity to sleep peacefully in its religious dream.
Though many Ellulian tomes have required another book to look for the Christian answer, here Ellul follows his epilogue with a “coda for Christians.” What can be the Christian response?
We must, unlike so many Christian intellectuals, turn our backs on the rites and beliefs of today’s myths. We must recognize that the power to level is uniquely the power of the gospel.
To be a Christian is to break with our society. We should make certain that technical objects are simply objects -- we are not to attach to them any ultimate meaning for life. The political must remain secular; we are to avoid the idealizing which accompanies political ideologies. We should reject the Constantinian orientation which strives to win over the rich, the powerful, and the control centers for Christ. We should avoid the cultural mistake of incorporating into Christianity all current cultural values. We must not feel we have to locate ourselves in a world that is lay, secularized, scientific, and rational.
In a nutshell, we must become iconoclasts in destroying the new and old demons. A person who, in the name of demythologizing, attacks the biblical God, instead of attacking our contemporary demonic divinities, is giving millions of people over to death.
Ellul is masterful in elucidating and smashing our religious myths. He is at his best in calling for an exorcism of our contemporary demons. His Amos-like ministry to the technological society is very much needed.
For me he has not been as helpful in offering guidance or inspiration for discipleship. In this Bonhoeffer has more to offer. For example: Ellul grants that millions of people are suffering from hunger. But he quickly adds that millions are also dying from the divine power of political ideology. If we take the political route in order to save people from war, exploitation, and hunger, he says we become guilty of providing the surest guarantor of exploitation and further wars in the future. But what about the problem of hunger? In False Presence of the Kingdom Ellul suggests that Christians should be more rationally involved in long-range analyses and solutions.
I have wondered if Ellul engages in much weeping over our Jerusalems. What he labels as an idolatry of political ideology often seems to be an outpouring of Christian compassion -- in Bonhoeffer’s language, a participation with God in his suffering for the sins of the world. When our faith and hope in what we can do is destroyed, we do not automatically turn to what God can do. For this reason, I believe Ellul has more responsibility to call for Christian discipleship and to engage in a dialogue concerning what the shape of this discipleship might look like.
When this article appeared, Dale Brown was a Sojourners correspondent and professor of Christian Theology at Bethany Theological Seminary. He is author of The Christian Revolutionary.
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