John G. Stackhouse Jr.'s Blog, page 4

Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin

Love can forbear, and Love can forgive, though it can never be reconciled to an unlovely object.

 

These arresting warnings come from Thomas Traherne’s seventeenth-century spiritual classic Centuries of Meditations. They speak across the centuries (indeed) to our own time.

In our day, certain people mock the common churchly phrase “love the sinner but hate the sin.” To their ears, it sounds condescending, implicitly condemning, and strikes an odious note of false welcome. “I am what I am, so affirm me as I am—or stop pretending to love me when you hate a part of me, too.”

 

Here we come upon a nest of concepts that need very much to be sorted out if churches are going to function properly as communities of welcome, yes, but also of healing.

 

First, churches are not social clubs that welcome new members whoever and whatever they may be to enjoy whatever goods and services the church happens to offer. At least, churches are not supposed to be such—although many are, alas.

 

Churches are spiritual hospitals and, like hospitals, they accept anyone who comes in through the emergency room doors. They then get to work to assess what each person needs and provide it as swiftly and capably as possible. No one comes into a hospital perfectly healthy, and the ideal hospital treats everyone: restoring everyone to full health and helping everyone to peak fitness.

 

Hospitals, therefore, distinguish between patients and their problems. Churches must do the same.

 

Second, God himself distinguishes between sin and the sinner. And we had better hope God does. For God cannot indefinitely endure sin, as sin is noxious and ugly to our entirely good God. Sin isn’t going to become something else, and God isn’t going to become someone else. So God and sin are intrinsically and forever hostile to each other. God being God, God will ultimately have his way, and sin eventually will be removed from God’s good universe.

 

So we had better hope that God makes that distinction between the sinner and the sin, or we will perish along with the sin with which God cannot ultimately be reconciled.

 

Third, some folks make crucial misjudgments, thinking that since they’re getting along all right just as they are, thank-you very much, they surely enjoy the favour of the universe.

 

Not so. As Traherne says, Love (and God is love) can forbear. God can, and does, put up with sinful sinners sinning for a while. And God calls Christians to practice forbearance with each other and with our neighbours.

 

Why forbearance? God is launched on a grand, global project to bring whomever he can to repentance, renewal, and rehabilitation. Such big changes normally take long times. No one becomes a saint in a moment. So God has to forbear our sin as the long processes of evangelism and sanctification take their courses.

 

Moreover, without all of us practicing forbearance, all our relationships will rupture. And if they do, we will lack the help from others we so desperately need—from the Holy Spirit to our fellow Christians to others through whom God helps us along the way.

 

So Love forbears. But that’s not the same as forgiveness. Forgiveness is the kind, conscious decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you. Forgiveness means you will no longer hold their failure against them.

 

Forbearance, therefore, is recognizing that someone is behaving badly now and deciding to put up with it for a while. Forgiveness is recognizing that someone behaved badly in the past and deciding to draw a line under it and move on with them. And neither of those is affirmation, but quite the contrary: they both recognize the difference between sin and sinner.

 

In both forbearance and forgiveness, one party can act regardless of the (bad) behaviour of the other party. In reconciliation, however, both parties must act well. God cannot be reconciled with people who do not want to be reconciled to God, just as we cannot be friends with people who refuse to be friendly.

 

If people are acting badly toward God and God’s world—and there are lots of ways of acting badly: from outright, injurious hostility to blithe, cool indifference to self-righteous spiritual posing—then God’s forbearance and even God’s forgiveness will not be enough. Those people are still headed for hell.

 

Hell, after all, is the outcome of bad decisions: the decisions to be bad, yes, but also the decisions simply not to be good, not to seek after the good, and not to be reconciled to The Good, who is God. Hell is what you have left when you have decided to do without God, which means doing without everything that comes from God, which means doing without everything good.

 

God can love you all he likes—and God apparently loves us all very much. But if you consider yourself all right without God and resolutely carry on without God—mistaking forbearance for forgiveness and, an even worse mistake, acceptance for affirmation—you are in peril.

 

Traherne again: He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because it may be restored and, which is an infinite wonder, to greater beauty and splendour than before.

 

So let’s go to church and seek God together, shall we? Not to be affirmed because of our supposed abiding wonderfulness, but to be affirmed in the abiding, wonderful love of God—love that welcomes us, yes, and lovingly refuses to ignore our wounds, our deformities, our pathologies, and instead gets right to work giving us the treatment we need.

 

Hating the sin, but loving the sinner. Thank God.

Comedian Meets the Pope—and Misses Out

Arguably America’s leading magazine of criticism and comic writing, The New Yorker recently devoted four pages to humorist David Sedaris making a (Biblical) fool of himself. What’s going on here?

In “The Hem of His Garment,” Sedaris relates his tale of being invited, along with dozens of other American comedians and entertainers of other stripes, to meet the Pope. Sedaris disarmingly makes clear that he doesn’t understand why he was invited, not being a Christian. Raised in the Orthodox Church, he professes no faith now.

 

Indeed, his funniest line is to this effect: “It was a shame that I was invited to the Vatican, actually—like sending me to the U.S. Open when I’ve never watched a football game in my life.”

 

Had Sedaris stuck to his usual schtick of witty and pampered observer of the ever-changing pageant of modern life, all might have been well. Alas, however, something went seriously wrong the closer he got to St. Peter’s and, in particular, the person of Jesus Christ.

 

Stephen Colbert arranged a dinner the night before the papal audience. Colbert asked for volunteers to tell a “God joke”—perhaps not the most prudent invitation to a room of people desperate to be funny. Sedaris rose to the occasion and delivered an anodyne joke that made sport of Adam and Eve—no harm, no foul.

 

When that joke failed to land satisfactorily, however, he took dead aim and told a sexually filthy joke about Jesus. He afterward mused, “I don’t belong here, I thought, embarrassed, for the umpteenth time that evening.” And yet, he told that joke.

 

He told the joke, furthermore, having spent the evening sitting at table beside comedian Jim Gaffigan’s son. His youngest son.

 

Now, I like Jim Gaffigan’s humor and he seems like a fine Christian fellow. He isn’t going to win “Father of the Year” points, however, for inviting his son to a gathering at which one could be sure that participants will utter at least a religiously tone-deaf joke, if not a positively offensive one.

 

Sedaris, however, goes nuclear—in front of people some of which (like Gaffigan père et fils) he simply has to know will be pained. And for what? To fit in? To be one of the boys? Do comedians like Sedaris never, ever grow up?

 

Were his article simply a “fish out of water” story, or even a “Here’s why I despise the Roman Catholic Church for its child abuse” screed—and there’s plenty of that in the article, too—one could understand, if not approve.

 

What I find grimly fascinating, however, is that Sedaris—normally rather mild, in fact rarely rising above room-temperature Wildean drollery—knows that he’s ignorant and insensitive about Christianity and yet persists. He even buys a cassock from the Pope’s own tailor because the long black garment is “slimming,” wondering cluelessly only if it’s illegal—not bizarre, not disrespectful, not misleading—to buy and wear it.

 

He concludes this four-page exercise in repellent strangeness tellingly: “I hated to think I was missing something.” Yeah, you sure were.

 

The New Yorker keeps having people write about Christianity who not only don’t know enough about it but who clearly have such loathing toward it that they can’t see, or write, straight. Recently I castigated the normally insightful literary critic James Wood for such vituperation, and Adam Gopnik is a regular transgressor of this sort. Now we have Sedaris squatting and defecating while winking at the horrified crowd.

 

Hebrews 4 says that “the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”

 

Most Christians think that this passage refers to the Bible, but it refers to all the words of God, every word of God. That means especially the Word of God Incarnate. Encounter with Jesus himself “judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart” and lays everything bare to the sight of God.

 

Think of how encounter with Jesus provoked the delight of children and the deep devotion of marginalized women. Think of how encounter with Jesus elicited sarcasm, insult, and finally murderous scheming from the most respectable of his people’s religious élite. Meet Jesus and be exposed for who you really are.

 

Sedaris says that “I do believe there was someone named Jesus who was a revolutionary, but I don’t think he was God’s son or that he was resurrected.” That’s fine—or, no, it’s not fine, because his soul is in mortal peril, especially having been raised among people who knew better. But there’s nothing offensive about that, just something worrisome and sad.

 

It's when someone who professes not to care much about Jesus—like a non-athlete who blithely mixes up golf and football—is among people who manifestly do care, and in ways reminiscent of his own pious family members, then goes out of his way to offend. For laughs. Something is weirdly, ominously wrong here.

 

Normally astute critics sounding like bitter sophomores? Normally waggish humorists sounding like shock jocks?

 

Something is surfacing. I wonder what it is.

Resilience: A Fruit of the Spirit

I have been encountering some extraordinarily bad weather of late, unusual in both its severity and longevity. Perhaps things are difficult for you today, too.

 

The word resilience is popular in popular psychology these days, and I have been musing upon it from a Biblical viewpoint.

Resilience isn’t merely fatalism. Nor is it sheer stubbornness. Resilience is flexibility of attitude, elasticity of heart. It is the ability to take on a new shape to respond positively to a particular circumstance and then return to original form in due course.

 

Resilience is the ability to adapt to stressors, to maintain psychological wellbeing in the face of adversity. Resilience is going through trouble without losing your head, your heart, your identity, or your purpose.

 

The Bible doesn’t have a word for “resilience.” (A quick check of the four leading English translations shows zero results for “resilience” or “resilient.”) But it everywhere speaks of the qualities of character required for resilience.

 

The ability to change, to adapt to new challenges, should be natural for the Christian committed to following Jesus wherever he leads, to obeying whatever Jesus commands, and to accepting with thanks whatever Jesus gives.

 

The ability to endure, to persist nonetheless, should be natural for Christians for whom faith is the fundamental posture toward our heavenly Father, Maker of heaven and earth, who has adopted us forever into his royal family with the promise of an astounding and eternal inheritance.

 

The ability to recover, to get back in the saddle and get back to work, should be natural for Christians who follow a divine calling toward a glorious world to come.

 

Christians are thus equipped for resilience. We ought to be remarkably, even conspicuously, resilient.

 

We should expect trouble. We should endure evil and, when appropriate it, forgive it, even as we also resist it and replace it with goodness—albeit prudently and patiently as we have opportunity to do so.

 

We should maintain our poise as we maintain our orientation to the Big Picture, the Grand Story. We ought not to panic over momentary setbacks or even extended deviations from what appears to be the most direct route home. We trust God to take us where we need to go most optimally to do what we are to do and to become whom we are to be.

 

Resilience is at once both realistic and hopeful. Resilience reacts appropriately to the situation without surrending to it. Resilience flexes as necessary to act most helpfully—to love—without losing one’s confidence or one’s ultimate direction.

 

Faith, hope, and love—Christians resiliently practice all three. We pursue shalom no matter what, we seek to bless no matter what—even if that sometimes means merely staying in place while bad things happen, holding our ground and our confession and our trust in God toward the day, coming soon, when we can advance and serve once more. Resilience means looking forward with the certainty that all evil is only temporary and will yield one day to the bliss of the new earth (Revelation 21–22).

 

Christians therefore should be the world’s most resilient people, not brittle, flinty, fragile, over-sensitive, over-reactive, touchy, and irritable. We should not be discouraged and discouraging, gloomy, sardonic, cynical, hopeless, and defeated.

 

Christians should never be subservient, crippled, loudly wounded, perpetually traumatized—permanent victims and pathetic losers.

 

Let’s take heart from just one chapter of the Bible, Romans 8:

 

The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs – heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us….

 

In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:16–18, 37–39).

 

Christian resilience is empowered, sustained, corrected, and encouraged by the very Spirit of God, our Partner and Counselor and Advisor and Comforter. We aren’t resilient on our own, but instead remain strong in the strength of God’s strength (Ephesians 6:10).

 

I want to underscore here the importance of relying on the Holy Spirit. All this talk about resilience, about faith, hope, and love, about enduring and conquering—it all sounds positively heroic. And the authentic Christian life is hard and requires a kind of heroism.

 

Much of the time, however, I feel like “Fat Charlie” in Paul Simon’s song, “Crazy Love” (1986): “sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon.” I can recover my proper shape and strength only when inflated by the Holy Breath of God. Resilience depends utterly on returning to God and reconnecting with God—hour by hour, not just “emergency by emergency.”

 

 So adapt, O my soul! Endure! Bounce back! Keep walking!

 

What’s the worst that can happen? And then you die. And then you live.

 

For Christians, resilience has a special spelling. Remember it:

 

R-E-S-U-R-R-E-C-T-I-O-N

Each Day, Minus One

Thomas Traherne was a seventeenth-century Anglican cleric not well known in his own time and then ignored for two hundred years. In the early twentieth century, however, Bertram Dobell collected, lightly edited, and published a series of spiritual writings as Centuries of Meditations (1908). No less a fan than C. S. Lewis commends Traherne to us as a devotional writer. So I’ve been reading him.

Traherne is deeply impressed by the beauties of creation and calls on the believer to receive them and enjoy them as if they were given solely to each of us by our loving Father. In today’s reading, he fastens on our bodies as treasures:

 

My limbs and members, when rightly prized, are comparable to fine gold…. The topaz of Ethiopia and the gold of Ophir are not to be compared to them. What diamonds are equal to my eyes; what labyrinth to my ears; what gates of ivory or ruby leaves to the double portal of my lips and teeth?

 

Is not sight a jewel? Is not hearing a treasure? Is not speech a glory? O my Lord, pardon my ingratitude and pity my dullness who am not sensible of these gifts. The freedom of Thy bounty has deceived me. These things were too near to be considered.

 

Last evening at a friend’s birthday party I met a man, not much older than myself, who has led an interesting life. He was wearing a Harley-Davidson cap, so we immediately began to share our love of motorcycling.

 

Turns out he knows vastly more than I do about it, having competed for Canada’s Kawasaki road race team in his youth. So for the next twenty minutes, I battered him with questions about Harleys versus Gold Wings, BMWs versus Triumphs, and why Ducati bikes seem to be Hollywood’s choice to signal a particularly cool character.

 

Then he mentioned guitars, and off we went for another twenty minutes on the virtues of Ovations versus standard flattops, how we differently string our respective 5-string Fender basses, and how a friend of his started the Duncan Africa Society to build guitars in Uganda that would rival my Pennsylvania-made Martin. We moaned about the virtual monopoly Long & McQuade has over the Canadian retail scene. And he was about to talk his playing in a blues band when we had to sing to the birthday boy.

 

The conversation was a blast—until, after the song, he held up his clever hands and said quietly, “I can’t close either one. I’m waiting for a rheumatology consultation and it might be another year before I get one.”

 

Can’t ride. Can’t play.

 

I just had my guitars set up by a local luthier and have been enjoying playing them all again this week. To think of just staring at them instead, and then staring at my painful hands, is awful. Yet maybe I should, at least in humble imagination.

 

As Traherne says, the gifts of God are so many and so close to us—our own hands!—that we typically fail to enjoy them, let alone deliberately give thanks for them. I wonder if a good spiritual discipline might be to go without one each day.

 

Rather like fasting, we might decide to pick a limb, or an organ, or even a finger, and imagine going through a single typical day without it—or with it hurting all the time. How we would appreciate it, in our loss of it. How we would pray!

 

And then getting it back, whole and healthy. How we would rejoice! How we would thank God for his (new) gift!

 

My late grandmother’s favourite hymn, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” is based on Lamentations 2:22-23: “It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.”

 

And how are “the Lord’s mercies . . . new every morning”? As I rise from sleep on any given day, I could find any of the previous day’s blessings missing. Overnight, a part of my body could stop have working, or started to pain me. Overnight, I could have lost my retirement fund in a stock crash, or my home in a fire. Overnight, a friend or family member could have died.

 

Each morning, then, when I don’t suffer such a loss, I am in effect being freshly gifted by God with the blessings I rather mindlessly enjoyed the day before: my left hand and my right hand; my left leg and my right; all of my organs functioning properly; and my mind not yet ravaged by a stroke, or Alzheimer’s, or schizophrenia, or some other neurological nightmare possibly waiting for me down my life’s road.

 

I am praying, then, for my new friend’s healing. I am praying also that God meanwhile will teach and train him in whatever he needs to learn through the severe mercy of this manual debility and discomfort.

 

And I am praying that I may learn from his trouble and trial at least to be newly thankful for God’s blessings to me, “new every morning”—as I get back today what I enjoyed yesterday, a veritable fountain of blessing.

 

Or perhaps “minus one,” in my imagination. What should it be today?

How to Win Friends and Influence People—Christianly

My previous post excoriates the snide, tendentious article by Prof. Matthew Sutton as he finds fault (or thinks he does) with a generation of evangelical historians of American evangelicalism—ranging in age from George Marsden to Randall Balmer.

 

In the interest of lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness, I offer this reflection on this dozen or so historians, most of whom I have known and valued as inspirations and some as friends, even mentors. I have in mind particularly, and alphabetically, Randall Balmer, Edith Blumhofer, Joel Carpenter, Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, Mark Noll, George Rawlyk, Harry Stout, and Grant Wacker.

(The photo shows Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll listening to the English historian David Bebbington.)

 

I will refer to them as “the ISAE bunch” because I got to know them through the late, lamented Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals. Housed at Wheaton College, the ISAE was a multi-decade powerhouse of grants, conferences, and books that revolutionized the study of American religion. I studied with George Rawlyk at Queen’s (B.A., 1980) and then attended Wheaton to study with Mark Noll (M.A., 1982). I hung around the Chicago area for another five years (Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 1987) before heading for parts west (Iowa, Manitoba), while still returning frequently for those storied conferences.

 

Here’s today’s point. A lot of evangelical energy, especially in the United States, goes to apologetics, the defense of the faith through argument. (I have argued that argument is not all there is, or should be, to apologetics, but let’s let that thumbnail sketch of it stand for now.) It’s almost a subculture of interlocking authorities, books, podcasts, debates, and conventions, from Biola University on the west coast to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary out east, by way of Houston Christian University in between.

 

However much good is done by all that conversation—and much of it seems to me to be pretty self-contained—two major developments in the American academy stand as apologetics done right.

 

One of those is the astonishing rise of Christian philosophers and of the subdiscipline of philosophy of religion to positions of respect in the larger guild. William Alston, George Mavrodes, Alvin Plantinga, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, among others, led a renaissance of explicitly Christian philosophy that changed their profession and their field. Indeed, Christians discussing the philosophy of religion with colleagues of various stripes has become one of the most dynamic areas of academic philosophy.

 

The other apologetic success is the equally astonishing rise of American evangelical historians studying American evangelical history. Before 1980, American religious history was dominated by liberal or lapsed Protestants. (I read through thousands of pages of such authors as part of my introduction to the field at Chicago, culminating in Sydney Ahlstrom’s magisterial A Religious History of the American People, Doubleday, 1975.) Today, historians can publish resentful articles bemoaning evangelicalism as a theme, and evangelical historians themselves, everywhere they look on the landscape of American religious historiography.

 

What’s most remarkable to me is that these revolutions occurred with very little bloodshed, so to speak. No ruling hegemony had to be overthrown by (verbal) violence. Instead, Alston, Plantinga, Wolterstorff, et al. have been matched by Marsden, Noll, Hatch, et al. in key respects, respects that have prompted, yes, respect from their peers.

 

I have had the great blessing of hanging around such eminences, so I can testify directly to the traits I here extol. (I didn’t know Bill Alston or George Mavrodes, but Al Plantinga patiently answered email queries of mine for three decades and Nick Wolterstorff has generously mentored an amateur philosopher such as I even longer. I know the historians better.)

In brief, this is a fellowship marked by friendliness, mutual encouragement, appreciation of others’ talent and work, ecumenicity (especially toward non-evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics), and a welcome to newcomers older and younger alike. Both of these revolutions have been led by giants astonishingly generous with their time toward lesser lights, impressively willing to give credit to others, and always on the lookout, it seems, to offer scholarly companionship to anyone who shares their interest.

 

Let me use George Marsden as an exemplar.

(In the photo, George is sitting beside Mark Noll.)

In the mid-1980s, George found out from his friend Mark Noll that my master’s thesis, written under Mark’s supervision, focused on E. J. Carnell, formerly a professor and briefly the president of Fuller Theological Seminary. George was working on his history of Fuller and deigned to obtain a copy of my little effort.

 

He subsequently sent me a kind note of approval—which letter you better believe I have kept pressed between the front cover and first page of my own thesis copy. He cited the thesis and even quoted me by name. Look and see how he has done exactly that with dozens of other theses and thesis-writers over his career. His footnotes are studded liberally with references to out-of-the-way un-prominent historians, including student historians.

 

Startling was the contrast between the ISAE’s fellowship and what I encountered upon my return to Canada a couple of years later, still in the mid-1980s, to begin research on Canadian evangelicalism for my dissertation. Attending a conference in Toronto in honour of the retirement of Emmanuel College’s John Webster Grant—the one truly superb Canadian church historian of his generation—I was dismayed by the petty suspicion and gossip of the doctoral students and a couple of their mentors I encountered.

 

Grant himself, I hasten to say, was magnanimous. He let me host him for lunch and quickly made me feel at home again in my native land. He shared bits of academic lore and even some very candid opinions about his own United Church with this youngster eager to make connections in Canada like those I had made through the ISAE in the US.

 

Otherwise, though, the jockeying for position in a country with precious few job openings (then and now) was both fierce and sad. I hastened back to Chicago and the friendly courtliness of the ISAE gang. I later experienced its like in Canada only once: when George Rawlyk, funded by ISAE money, held the once-ever conference on evangelicalism in Canada a decade later at Queen’s.

 

This is how apologetics—of a more general, implicit, sort—can succeed, even if (and sometimes particularly if) the agents of it aren’t motivated primarily by apologetical concerns. This is showing, not just telling, what the Christian mind can do.

 

The University of Pennsylvania historian Bruce Kuklick was a fellow traveler of the ISAE bunch. Clearly not identifying as an evangelical, he liked what he saw in the work of this group, and in the group itself, and sometimes participated in one or another of their wide-ranging projects.

 

Kuklick more than once chided them, however, for not demonstrating the difference having a Christian mind would make in the writing of history. Having forsworn the “providentialist” history of so much pop evangelical history and biography—“And so God clearly did this wonderful thing and the church rejoiced”—what, then, made what the ISAE bunch wrote any different from what any good historian would write?

 

I think Kuklick raised a point that I’d like to tackle myself sometime. But for now, I’ll pronounce this double commendation in defense of my ISAE friends.

First, they raised a whole subject matter into prominence. A whole community (or set of communities) previously under-studied now had to be taken seriously by everyone in the guild.

 

That’s “added value.”

 

Second, the ISAE bunch approached this subject matter differently. Previous historians who deigned to look at evangelicalism looked at it as, at best, friendly critics, and usually with condescension: the Perry Millers, William McLoughlins, and so on. Here now instead were critical friends: people who knew evangelicalism from the inside out and took it as seriously, and respectfully, as they took their own parents. They thus noticed what others didn’t, and explained what others couldn’t understand.

 

That’s “added value” also.

(The photo shows George Rawlyk in his prime—1988—trying his best to educate a hapless hanger-on.)

 

In sum, the ISAE historiographical revolution (like the philosophical one) was a quiet apologietical triumph of Christian scholarship. Do good work—so good that sensible people, at least, will acknowledge it as such. Do good work with goodness: camaraderie, honour toward those doing different things in different ways, circumspection about one’s claims—even if those claims boldly challenge the received wisdom, and courtesy always. Esteem older ones, encourage and empower younger ones. Build a healthy conversation, even a community.

 

That’s how two entire academic domains were changed by orthodox Christians in the last half-century. I can’t speak here to the so-called Seven Mountain Mandate, but these two hills were taken for the cause of Christ by Christian soldiers using Christian means.

 

Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:16)

 

They are the apologists I admire most.

(Thanks to ISAE majordomo Dr. Larry Eskridge, himself an accomplished historian, for the photos.)

How Did THAT Get Published?

Well, now. Here’s a barrel full of fish. Let’s start shooting.

Matthew Sutton is a historian teaching at Washington State University who specializes in the critical, some might say “jaundiced,” study of American evangelicalism. Previous alarmist titles of his oeuvre include Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War (Basic Books, 2019) and American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Harvard, 2014).

 

He recently published an article in the generally respected Journal of the American Academy of Religion with the following abstract. I have been a member of the AAR for many years, but didn’t re-up this particular year, so I don’t have access to the whole article. Never mind that. The abstract gives me lots to work with for the purposes of a mere blog post:

 

Writing in the shadow of the religious right, a group of historians beginning in the 1980s crafted a new history of American evangelicalism to counter the politicized, right-wing faith of their era. Rather than focus on the movement as a product of specific historical, cultural, and political contexts, they defined it by a set of abstract theological principles. Then they identified those people from the colonial period to the present who fit their definition and who made positive contributions to North American history. The result was a new, singular, multi-century, “evangelical consensus” in the literature that decoupled the movement from politics, race, class, gender, and sexuality. I assess the historiography they created and then argue that we should drop the use of the term evangelical from our eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories, and I offer a new definition of postwar evangelicalism that embeds it in its cultural context.

 

This abstract possesses the singular quality of being tendentious, if not simply wrong, from top to bottom. Shall we begin? Lock and load.

 

Writing in the shadow of the religious right, a group of historians beginning in the 1980s crafted a new history of American evangelicalism to counter the politicized, right-wing faith of their era.

 

This group of historians was led by George Marsden, whose masterful survey of Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford) was published in 1980. George (an old friend—full disclosure: I count the subjects of this essay to be friends of long standing) has testified in several places that he began this work a decade before. But let’s not quibble about dates in a historical discussion.

 

It is true that some few volumes produced by this prolific group did counter “the politicized, right-wing faith of their era”: e.g., Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Crossway, 1983) and Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1995). Still, the unprejudiced reader would be hard-pressed to find evidence of any sort of explicit “countering” in the main stream of historical articles, reviews, and books that poured out from these historians. Most of it is just . . . history.

 

Rather than focus on the movement as a product of specific historical, cultural, and political contexts, they defined it by a set of abstract theological principles.

Now we’re into it—except we’re already there. Note that Marsden’s landmark book is titled Fundamentalism and American Culture. Marsden’s volume takes pains to describe, yes, the specific historical, culture, and political context of fundamentalism. So does Mark Noll in his magisterial America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford, 1995). And so do the others in books too numerous to mention here.

 

Indeed, it is this group of historians who have constantly opposed the tendency among American theological and Biblical scholars, especially those caught up in the inerrancy debate of the 1980s, to define evangelicals strictly by theological commitments. Over and over, Marsden, Noll, et al. refer to evangelicals by what they do, not just what they profess.

Moreover, they early on engage in a long-running historiographical debate with colleagues such as Donald Dayton precisely over the problem of defining evangelicalism solely by theological criteria—and Reformed criteria at that. See, for instance, Donald W. Dayton and Robert K. Johnston, The Variety of American Evangelicalism, a book published by IVP more than thirty years ago (1991).

 

Then they identified those people from the colonial period to the present who fit their definition and who made positive contributions to North American history.

 

As a student of this group of historians, I have long been impressed by how wide their historical net could be. Mark Noll’s has actually reached beyond the USA to take in Canada and the U.K. in a number of comparative studies.

I was even more impressed by how they refused to focus only on “positive contributions.” Instead, these historians have made clear that evangelicals held slaves and resisted emancipation, discriminated against women, despised Roman Catholicism, and in a number of other respects fell short of the gospel they proclaimed, even as others fought for abolition, women’s suffrage, ecumenism, and so on.

 

Sutton makes these historians sound like boosters, if not propagandists. It’s a silly slander to slight their work this way.

 

The result was a new, singular, multi-century, “evangelical consensus” in the literature that decoupled the movement from politics, race, class, gender, and sexuality.

 

Actually, that "new . . . 'evangelical consensus'" goes back “in the literature” pretty far. Back beyond Timothy Smith’s pioneering historical work of the 1950s. Back beyond the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942. Back beyond the founding of the international Evangelical Alliance in 1846. Back to the friendly sharing of news and good wishes in the trans-Atlantic correspondence of the eighteenth-century revivals out of which evangelicalism emerged.

 

As for the various categories Sutton commends, Randall Balmer’s work has, if anything, been increasingly preoccupied by politics—not least his biography of Jimmy Carter, who was, as I understand it, a noted . . . politician. Race, class, and gender show up all over the work of Marsden, Noll, Hatch (especially his magisterial The Democratization of American Christianity [Yale, 1991]—please note the title!), Edith Blumhofer (such as her important biography of Aimee Semple McPherson), and the rest.

 

If these historians haven’t been preoccupied by whatever Sutton means by “sexuality,” it’s because they mostly haven’t dealt with the last few decades, since they are, after all, historians. Noll mildly refers to anything dealing with the last few decades as “journalism," and those are the decades in which such issues have come to the fore in evangelical life. So what’s the problem here?

 

I assess the historiography they created and then argue that we should drop the use of the term evangelical from our eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories, and I offer a new definition of postwar evangelicalism that embeds it in its cultural context.

 

Well, Sutton is far from the first historian to breathlessly advocate for the dropping of the term “evangelical” from describing vital, orthodox Protestantism. He is among the few, however, who would advocate for restricting it instead to post-1945 white American Billy Graham-style religion.

I remember conferences debating this very issue in my graduate school days in Chicago—at meetings of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, led by, yes, this very group of historians. I myself have challenged such a restriction in an article I published three decades ago (ahem) comparing the National Association of Evangelicals with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. It might serve the interests of such organizations to co-opt the term for themselves. But it isn't obvious why a historian would want to let the term be narrowed thus.

 

Why drop a perfectly apt term and let one tiny group—considered globally—take over a word used confidently and helpfully by, say, the World Evangelical Alliance and the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, as well as by historians of, yes, evangelicalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? I defy Sutton (or anyone else) to come up with a better term for what appears to me, and to millions of other people, to be a style of Christianity demonstrably similar across eras, cultures, and denominational lines.

 

(This is where I cannot avoid suggesting an alternative take on the word “evangelical” in a nice little book that is ready-to-hand.)

 

Professor Sutton therefore appears to be wrong about pretty much everything. Perhaps readers of his article will tell me that his abstract doesn’t do justice to his article, or that I have otherwise misconstrued his argument. If so, I’ll revise or drop this post. Until then, I think I’ll pay for and read something more promising.

 

[For a similar demolition of a similar argument presented by Daniel Silliman in Church History, please click here.]

UPDATE: I have now had opportunity to read the whole article. It's a little better, but it's also worse, than the abstract. It's better in that Sutton clearly knows more than his abstract indicates and the article is more careful about dates and developments than one might suppose. Alas, the tendentiousness of the article is overwhelming. Randall Balmer's biography of President Carter is ignored when Sutton accuses the evangelical historians of ignoring politics, but then deployed when Sutton wants to chide them for picking such an attractive fellow as an exemplary evangelical. Mark Noll's America's God, which is candid about evangelical defenses of slavery, is ignored on that crucial matter but accused of "sanding edges, massaging differences, and downplaying conflicts and divides among his subjects"—of which Sutton stoops to providing not one example.Even more centrally in an article focusing on definition, David Bebbington's quadrilateral is simply ignored in all the ways it points to evangelical practice, not just evangelical theology. Evangelical activism is, after all, one of the four criteria. Since Sutton doesn't pause to actually name Bebbington's points or critique them directly, however, the reader might not realize that Sutton is just wildly off the mark.Along the way, Sutton snarks at how these evangelical historians managed to get funding for scholarly projects, a level of funding that if the latest generation of historians of liberal or so-called mainline Protestantism were to enjoy, the scholarly world would tip the balance back to—what? The previous generations of liberal Protestant (or lapsed Protestant) American religious historians had the field pretty much to themselves, as Sutton briefly concedes. They demonstrably still control the main journals and presses—such as the AAR and JAAR. So what's Sutton's problem? Such ressentiment is unbecoming, especially from someone who enjoys a university chair of his own and publication by good outlets.Finally, however, Sutton tries to champion a boldly different approach. But he comes up with the likes of Anthea Butler and Kristen Koben De Mez, and their work, at least as he summarizes it, is hardly going to win the day:

Other historians contend that we can no longer afford to separate evangelicalism from race, sex, gender, and politics. Anthea Butler argued in her White Evangelical Racism (2021) that “racism is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism” (Butler 2021, 2). She highlighted evangelicals’ long support for slavery and segregation, which, she contended, “speaks to a history that is obscured by some historians of evangelicalism who cannot or will not deal with the racism at the core of evangelical beliefs, practices, and political allegiances” (Butler 2021, 5). . . . Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in her surprise bestseller Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020), argued that sexism and a commitment to patriarchy are central to any definition of evangelicalism.

These arguments, however, are nonsense. In Butler's case, yes, evangelicals in slave-holding areas generally supported slave-holding. And those areas would include most of the known world until the nineteenth century.

Then, however, the British Empire divested itself of slavery and began its global campaign to end slavery—and why? As historians of various stripes have pointed out, the motive here seems to have been provided, by gosh, by evangelicalism. Meanwhile, what kind of religion are the slaves themselves practicing? Most of us would say it looks awfully like evangelicalism. Butler's point evanesces.As for Jesus and John Wayne, the bestselling part is hardly a surprise given the political climate in which it appeared. But the idea that "sexism and a commitment to patriarchy are central to any definition of evangelicalism" is, again, to say both too little and too much.

Virtually everyone everywhere has been demonstrably "committed to patriarchy" until very recent times, as any historian should appreciate. Yet when evangelical (or "Biblical") feminism arises in the 1970s, its proponents don't somehow cease being evangelical—which they would be, if "sexism and a commitment to patriarchy" are not just previously common (as they were, again, pretty much everywhere among everyone) but "central to any definition of evangelicalism." Just because a trait you don't like happens to be common among white American evangelicals really doesn't mean it is somehow essential to the definition of evangelicalism. The majority of white American evangelicals, not to put too fine a point on it, aren't all evangelicals. Globally considered, not by a long shot.I'll be less modest in conclusion. I've spent a lot of time—most of my adult life, in fact—living among, studying, and writing about evangelicalism. I think both the term and the style of Christianity it signifies continue to make sense and are worth both retaining and defending. So take a look at my Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction and see if a non-American, non-presentist view of evangelical Christianity makes sense to you. I dare to hope it could even make sense to Professor Sutton.

Stop Reading That!

“So, have you read all these books?”

 

The HVAC repairman looked up from the heat pump he was servicing in my home. Around him were the thousand books in my study. He had seen the family library on the main floor that is home to a couple of thousand more. And he had noticed the dozen or so boxes of books still in a storage room in the basement.

 

The question was one I have been asked a hundred times in my teaching career as students and other guests paid their first visit to my faculty office. I daresay every faculty member—at least in the humanities and social sciences—gets asked the same question regularly.

 

“Of course not!” I replied, as I always do.

 

I was raised in northern Ontario among the Christian (or “Plymouth”) Brethren. This little group of English and Irish Protestants recognized no ordination ceremony and no clergy. Each congregation was led by a small group of elders. Some one or two might be supported financially part- or full-time for evangelistic or pastoral service. But even these were not referred to as pastors, but as “commended workers.”

 

All of us, so we were taught, are saints. We are all called by God to serve in our various walks of life and, according to our spiritual gifts, in our local churches. And each of us was charged with the duty to study the Bible on his or her own and participate in group study on a regular basis.

 

Members of the Brethren therefore each had a small personal library—and some, not so small—of religious literature: missionary biographies, guides to prayer, hymnbooks, doctrinal works, and, above all, Bible study resources. No matter one’s job, be it pipefitter, insurance representative, or chemistry professor, everyone was responsible to “dig deep into the Word.”

 

My father set a good example. A surgeon by training, Dad came home at night to read—but only occasionally in the history of medicine and almost never in other sciences. (He kept up with advances in the pertinent surgical fields assiduously, but that was on his "professional" time.)Dad loved history, poetry, and fiction, and his single year of Bible school set him up for a lifetime of poring over various Bible versions (he knew no Hebrew or Greek), concordances, dictionaries, and commentaries to learn the Word of God better. Once in a while, Dad would preach in our local assembly, and his reading of the hundreds of books in his home library was evident.

 

Mom had an M.A. in English literature, but was almost never caught reading, busy homemaker as she was. I thus inherited bibliophilia from both parents.

In graduate school, I started to buy books in earnest. The Christian Book Distributors mail-order house offered sets of reference works at astonishing prices, and many a time I asked for such as Christmas and birthday presents. I would buy the textbooks required for my courses, naturally, but also most of the books recommended by professors along the way.

 

By the time I was in doctoral study, however, I realized that I had made something of an idol of my growing library. A fellow student possessed a library that dwarfed mine, but he was not a strong academic performer. One night while visiting at his home, I realized with a start that a big library was no sure sign of a big mind. All it took was . . . money.

 

Ever after, I purchased much more carefully. As my interests both broadened and deepened—I have never been able to settle on a single subject or even a single discipline—I bought only what I needed, which parsimonious and pragmatic policy in itself was enough to strain the family budget (and whatever grant money I could get). Eventually I constructed a “working library,” as professors do, and for all my circumspection, in my last job it took the shelves of three offices to house it.

 

Francis Bacon cautioned, however, that acquiring a book doesn’t mean one has to read it. “Some books are to be tasted,” he advised, “others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Books serve different functions, and they should be used accordingly.

 

Some books are light fun: “airplane” books, in my own parlance, and books I generally read via Kindle. Some books are for reference. Some are collections of scholarly essays only some of which are relevant to my concerns.

 

Some books make an important point but make it sufficiently in the first 50 pages so that the rest of the book can be safely skimmed, or even ignored. (Many a pop bestseller of this thin sort began as an excellent, pithy magazine article.) And some books, yes, deserve slow reading—and re-reading over the years.

 

It is said that “the good is the enemy of the best.” When it comes to books, “the ‘started’ can be the enemy of the ‘better.’” A book you have started will keep you, as you persist in reading it, from dropping it to read a better one. And maybe you should indeed drop it to do so.

 

When I have asked serious students how comfortable they are in dropping a book they have started reading, the common reaction is a kind of sheepish dismay. People literally blush, giggle, and look away. Folks who like to read usually like to finish. Many confess to feeling guilty if they start a book and don’t complete it, as if they are breaking a tacit contract with the author, or disappointing—well, who?

 

I have amused classrooms of such earnest people by solemnly informing them that there is, in fact, no one to award them a prize when they finish a book. Nor is there anyone to condemn them if they don’t. Startling, perhaps, but then also soothing is the sober truth that no one else cares at all whether you finish a book you start.

 

So why pound through another hundred or two hundred pages of a book that is no longer rewarding, or only barely so, when you could move on to a book with a much richer return on your reading investment?

 

Here’s a shocker. Count up the number of books you read last year. Multiply that total by the number of years you have left to age 80 (roughly the Canadian life expectancy figure today). That’s how many books you have left to read.

 

And it isn’t a big number, is it? You likely could shelve those books on just a couple of bookcases.

 

So read as well as you can. And if a book isn’t delivering by page 50—or, frankly, by page 20—drop it and move on. Life is short. Wonderful books await you.

 

I acknowledge that you can’t now put the partly read book on your shelf as a token of accomplishment. (I swear that’s how a lot of readers unconsciously view their home libraries: as trophy cases.) Put it there instead as a tool to which you might return and that for now has served its purpose.

 

(I also have taught rooms full of readers how to mark up books you own, and record them in a database, so as to harvest and retrieve the good things you found in each of them. That means, among other things, that you can yet profit from books you don't finish. But that lesson will have to wait for another blog post.)

 

Here, then, my friends, the benediction: If the book you're currently reading isn’t sparking joy (as someone, somewhere has said), or is nonetheless necessary for your work, then move on. No one else will care, I promise you. And you’ll be a happier, smarter, better reader.

A Lesson in Prophetic Interpretation from—a Running Back

On the wall of our little home gym is a framed photograph of my all-time favourite football player: Walter Payton, the storied halfback for the Super Bowl-winning Chicago Bears of the mid-1980s.

 

“Sweetness” previously held NFL records for career rushing yards, touchdowns, carries, yards from scrimmage, all-purpose yards, and many other categories. He also retired with the most receptions by a non-receiver, and he threw eight career touchdown passes.

 

Payton also taught me, however, how to interpret a strange Old Testament verse, and thereby taught me a big lesson about the providence of God.

 

Running backs normally get the ball from the quarterback and then run as fast as they can either through or around their opponents. But the experienced and savvy running backs know that they will get farther by working well with the big blockers sent out in front of them to mow down some of those opponents before the runner even gets there.

 

Payton was a master at receiving the ball and then sizing up the situation in front of him. He would keep his legs moving, yes, but often at half speed, or even slower, while he waited for the guards and tackles and tight ends to line up their targets and push them away from him. When the alleyway then opened up, #34 would hit the afterburners and burst through the space.

 

God speaks to a bewildered prophet Habakkuk that a vision is surely coming to console and direct him:

 

“For the vision is yet for the appointed time;It hastens toward the goal and it will not fail.Though it tarries, wait for it;For it will certainly come, it will not delay.”

 

Many Bible readers have stumbled over those last two lines. “Though it tarries . . . it will not delay.” But, not to put too fine a point on it, doesn’t “tarry” just mean “delay”?

 

Think of Sweetness getting the ball and looking downfield. If he simply runs fast, he may outrun his blockers, or even run into them, and simply get tackled immediately. The quickest way to the most yards to be gained is actually to tarry—and then to move when the time is right.

 

God moves as quickly as it makes sense to move, and God longs to bring relief to those he loves as soon as possible. So God does not delay.

 

But God will wisely “tarry”—in order for various processes to unfold such that when he makes that decisive move, the most shalom will be achieved.

I realize that the analogy is only very rough. (Football is a very rough game.) God's omnipotence, one would think, would mean that God doesn't have to wait for others to help him move where God wants to go. He can just head downfield and every would-be tackler would just bounce off.

Think, then, of agricultural parallels instead. If God isn't just going to perform miracles all the time, if God wants to work with things as they are, then he needs to work with things as they are. And that means, often, waiting for them to become what they need to become in order for God then to work with them for an optimal outcome.

 

“In the fullness of time,” Galatians 4:4 says, “God sent forth his Son.” God’s maximizes the good. God waits for things to ripen and then he harvests.

 

Sometimes, to be sure, God’s blessing is held up by our own sin. We are not ready to receive it, whether through active resistance to his plan or through passive indifference.

 

It doesn’t matter why the lamps aren’t lit when the bridegroom finally shows up, whether because of angry antagonism or sheer sloth. We’re not in position to cooperate (Matthew 25:1–12). We can’t blame God for that.

 

If we are, however, eagerly waiting on God, as Habakkuk was, then we need to trust  God and wait. God’s love is strong, God’s wisdom is perfect, God’s power is unmatched, and God’s timing is right.

 

God is coming to save. He is not delaying. But he is tarrying in order to have maximum impact.

 

And that’s worth waiting for.

Second Thoughts on the Olympic Opening

Christians offended by the “Last Supper/Feast of Bacchus” tableau in the Olympics opening? Christians offended by those offended by it?

 

As the event drops from the news cycle after an apology of sorts from the organizers, what intrigues me is how both these kinds of Christians are focused on . . . themselves—and in at least three respects.

First, they’re both focused on themselves in terms of their religion. The one side explodes with “I won’t stand for people mocking my religion.” The other side more coolly replies, “My religion expects to be mocked and it’s too strong to be bothered by such public events.”

 

I would have thought that Christians would place priority on Christ, not on themselves and on their religion. I would have thought Christians would care most about how Jesus would feel about this episode. I would have thought Christians would care most about how their Lord and Saviour is being treated in effigy.

 

The cool “I don’t care” Christians need to decide whether they would be equally cool going back in time to watch Jesus being mocked by the Romans and the Jews. “Hey, Jesus said he would be mocked—and look! There he is, being mocked. Okay, then. Let’s move on.”

 

The hotly offended Christians need to decide whether they’re more upset about Jesus being profaned or about their religion and thus themselves being derided.

 

Second, they’re both focused on themselves in terms of this one religion, Christianity.

Decadent japery in a sacrilegious register is to be expected in a France that has been resentful and resistant to Christianity, and especially the Roman Catholic Church, since the Revolution in 1789. I certainly would not defend that Church against all the criticism leveled against it. But in 2024, with that Church so relatively weak in France, it seems like a weird sort of bullying to pick on it again in public.

 

The larger point here, however, is that loving your neighbour and living by the principle of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you might prompt Christians to worry about more than Christians. If the IOC in France feels free to take on France’s main religion, how secure are France’s Muslims and Jews going to feel?

 

Spoiler alert: They’re feeling pretty insecure already. Islamophobia is rampant in France and anti-Semitism, never absent from the French cultural bloodstream, is back afresh on the political right and left. This summer’s election in which the centre lost ground to parties on either wing is just the most recent sign of trouble.

 

Christians should use their clout to object to the tableau on behalf of others who lack their votes and their dollars/Euros—both in France and beyond. Childish abuse of any religion’s sacred iconography is antiliberal and is the opposite of liberté, egalité et fraternité. Contrary to the protestations of the producers, it is certainly not an expression of inclusion, let alone of love.

 

Third, they’re both focused on themselves in terms of offense against a religion. But the point of the tableau isn’t so much to mock Christianity as to promote a different worldview, that of pansexual libertinism. One of the greatest paintings in the Christian artistic tradition that celebrates one of the greatest moments in Christian history was co-opted by people promoting an ideology shared by only a minority of the world’s people on the stage of the bring-the-world-together Olympics.

 

Altius, fortius, citius has nothing to do with this tableau. Ironically enough, neither does “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The Olympics are one of the few international events that really are diverse, equitable, and inclusive. It’s a shame to spoil them with an opening that divides and alienates.

 

As such, it was a strikingly selfish act. You don’t have to be a Christian to think so. You just have to be a decent person who thinks that the Olympics should celebrate what we have in common. You just have to recoil at a particular group diverting that noble, if sentimental, Olympic goal to tiresomely and heavy-handedly promote its particular agenda.

 

Let me make clear that I would feel the same way if Marxists did something like this—or Microsoft. The point here is to protect the (literally global) inclusion of the Olympic Games, and no one should be allowed to exploit their ceremonies.

 

So, yes, I think Christianity will survive this stupidity. (I use this strong language because, honestly, if you can’t really tell the difference between the Last Supper and a bacchanalia—between a celebration of divine self-sacrifice and a celebration of divine self-indulgence—then your religious obtuseness is total. For a quick introduction to the former, let me direct your attention to last few chapters of any of the four Gospels. As for Bacchus/Dionysius, I daresay Google will do.)

The Olympics will survive also, and I’m glad we’ve moved on to focus on what really matters in the Games.

 

I hope, however, that we can pause before we forget all about this incident to consider how Christians ought to respond to such things: with love for Jesus and for our neighbour—not so much for ourselves.

A Window onto a (Much) Larger World: Jacques Ellul (1912-1994)

My Marxist professor seemed genuinely surprised.

 

Young David Gregory, a newly minted Ph.D. from Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario, was teaching “Twentieth-Century European Intellectual History” to a dozen or so of us History majors in the late 1970s. A fiery Englishman devoted (he said) to Marxism, he sported a bushy beard the blond equivalent of Marx’s own.

His reading list for the year-long seminar brought us through first-, second-, and even third-rate thinkers all in social and political thought. It was my one and only exposure to the likes of Fourier, Luxemburg, Kautsky, and the like.

 

When I mildly asked, late in the year, why no theologians were on the list, nor any philosophers, he equally mildly replied that he had thought all religious questions to have been asked and answered in the nineteenth century. He really was a Marxist.

 

When it came time to write my main paper for the second term, I asked if I could write on the social criticism of Jacques Ellul, and particularly on his big book known in English translation as The Technological Society (1964)—although the original French version, La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle, came out a decade earlier. (That makes this year the 70th anniversary of the book’s original issue, and the 30th anniversary of Ellul’s death.)

 

 Dr. Gregory recognized the book, so he gladly signed off on the assignment. When he returned my paper to me some weeks later, it was apparent that he approved of my efforts. But he made a note as a postscript to his other, evaluative, comments. He said that he was taken aback that Ellul, as I had made clear in the paper, was, of all things, a Christian.

 

When I came to his office the following week to discuss the paper a little more, I took with me as a gift to him a copy of the book that had brought Ellul to my attention: Os Guinness’s The Dust of Death (1973). A month later, at the end of the year, I happened to visit with Dr. Gregory again, and I was gratified to see the resplendent white book spine of The Dust of Death, published by IVP, beaming out from his bookcase, sitting on top of (and I’m not making this up) Dr. Gregory’s cloth edition of Das Kapital.

 

Jacques Ellul was a sociologist, born in Bordeaux.After his education was completed in Paris, he returned to his birthplace and served as a professor of sociology at the University of Bordeaux for his entire career. (Formally, he was “Professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions in the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences.”)

His greatest work, by all accounts, is the hefty La Technique—well over 400 pages of sustained argument around a single theme. (I will refer to it by its French title because the English title is positively misleading, as we will soon see. Not a few are the books that have suffered by infelicitous titles in translation. I think immediately of Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship that in the original German does not focus on “cost” but simply on discipleship—in fact, Nachfolge, the actual title, means, powerfully, just Following.)

 

Ellul’s thesis is simple. In a preliminary “Note to the Reader,” Ellul defines technique:

 

The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for obtaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. [Emphasis in original]

 

Technique is the impetus toward rational efficiency. What can be done (better—that is, more efficiently) can be done, must be done, and shall be done. Ellul sums it up under seven qualities: rationality, artificiality, automatism of technical choice, self-augmentation, monism, universalism, and autonomy.

 

Technique is rational—what makes sense to the analytical part of the brain, the mentality of the Enlightenment, the “scientific/technological” outlook. It is artificial, bent on making things the way they ought to be. It proceeds by automatism of technical choice: the most efficient option is necessarily and invariably selected. It constantly expands by self-augmentation. It seeks to dominate completely any domain it enters, producing monism. It seeks to dominate every domain, producing universalism. And it operates without regard for any other value or virtue, with utter autonomy.

 

In the 2020s, two generations later, we might well think of la technique in terms of a virus, both biological and virtual. It seeks to take over everything and make it run according to its own principles. It has its own logic—why wouldn’t one want things to be rationally efficient?—and only strong value-systems maintained and applied by strong human communities will have a hope of standing against its rule.

 

Curiously, Ellul’s book doesn’t so much as mention the earlier sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), whose dark musings on the “iron cage” of rationality remind many of us of Ellul’s concerns. In turn, however, Ellul anticipated and in some cases inspired many later thinkers, from the secularization theory of sociologist Steve Bruce to the wide-ranging social and political philosophy of Charles Taylor.

 

Speaking of Taylor, a devoted Roman Catholic, Ellul was indeed himself a Christian, although of the Reformed Protestant variety. Ellul was particularly devoted to the Danish Lutheran gadfly Søren Kierkegaard and the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth. Considering those two along with Ellul’s comprehensive knowledge of and regard for Karl Marx, one would expect many more “either/ors” in Ellul than “both/ands,” and that’s what one finds.

 

I myself turned quickly to some of his theological works, and then almost as quickly turned away. I found his argument for universalism to be disappointingly bereft of solid exegetical grounds—proceeding (as, indeed, most arguments for universalism seem to do) from a few first principles (God wants everyone to be saved; God has infinite resources to bring people to salvation) to this conclusion. (Not surprisingly, Barth’s thought similarly leans hard in this direction.)

 

I also couldn’t remain content with his general pessimism (shared by Barth) toward the prospects of Christians cooperating with others to pursue a measure of shalom in our life together, with justice and even love being realizable even before the Lord Jesus returns—if only partially and, often, disappointingly.

 

Ellul’s The Meaning of the City posits the eschatological cities of Ezekiel and John as simply stark, glorious alternatives to “the detestable, gangrenous suburb I have to walk through, the workers’ shacks with their peeling paint and permanent layers of dirt, the tool sheds sinking into the sewers and streams that reek of washings and toilets, and the corrugated iron that constitutes man’s choicest building material.” Not much incentive here to work daily to increase shalom in society.

 

His political alternative to our apparently hopeless state was a form of anarcho-syndicalism (per Proudhon). This political view aimed at a reformation of the economy and government by trade union governance fostered by grass-roots cooperation on a society-wide scale. It constituted a vision I found so unlikely as to be left on the shelf.

 

In fact, I found Ellul deeply paradoxical—perhaps not surprising in a Christian who had read and valued all of Marx and whose favourite writers were Kierkegaard and Barth. A professor of sociology in a faculty of law and economics, one might think, would see his God-given vocation as contributing to his academic field, yes, and perhaps also branching out, in the worthy European tradition of the intellectual, to offer hard-headed and practical opinions also on the law, politics, and economics of the day.

 

Yet, as one of his main American expositors makes clear,

 

Ellul . . . proposes that the Christian find his vocation outside of his occupation—as Amos did his prophesying and Paul his apostleship. “On his own time” and in the situation where the Christian can exercise a bit of freedom, let him find activities that truly can witness to the age that is coming, that truly can be done in response to the call of God, that truly can be seen as a free service in behalf of God and the neighbor. Ellul cites his own volunteer work in a club for juvenile delinquents as an example of such vocation; his writing of Christian books would qualify as well. [Vernard Eller]

 

Ellul strongly pressed for freedom as a key marker of Christian life. So everything that was not free was compromised and therefore, well, not so much the Christian life. And, since most of life is like that—then, one wonders, what do we make of most of our lives? I found more helpful ethical guidance elsewhere.

 

Still, as the long career of American evangelical ethicist and Ellul champion David Gill makes clear—David just retired as the longtime president of the international Ellul Society—there is much here for evangelical Christians to ponder. Let me conclude with a few weighty “take-aways” that have always inspired me about Jacques Ellul.

 

First, Ellul painted on a very large canvas—the very nature of modern life!—and did so convincingly, out of wide scholarship and deep reflection.

 

Second, Ellul did so in a way that communicated clearly and, often, convincingly with non-Christians.

 

Third, Ellul was a lifelong churchgoer who nonetheless championed the value of reading Karl Marx. This openness to wisdom wherever one finds it prepared me to encounter Christian philosophers willing to champion all sorts of unlikely people, from Charles Taylor commending G. W. F. Hegel, to John Hare recovering the theology of Immanuel Kant, to Merold Westphal telling us that deconstruction was worthy of Christian attention. (Steve Evans’s lifelong devotion to Kierkegaard—a radical move in his younger days among Wheaton College types!—seems almost conventional by comparison.)

 

Fourth, much as I find Ellul’s politics uncongenial and unrealistic, I celebrate his willingness to consider seriously political options not even recognized by most North Americans, options that might yet spur some lively discussion in the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the New Democratic Party in Canada.

 

Finally, and in summation, Jacques Ellul stretched for me—and dramatically—the possibilities of a Christian mind fully engaging the world of contemporary culture. Imagine: a Calvinist Christian influenced by Marx and Kierkegaard teaching sociology in a secular university and advocating radical politics while teaching the Bible and serving the poor of his city in his private hours.

 

Encountering Jacques Ellul, therefore, was surprising indeed for a teenager recently graduated from a small Plymouth Brethren Bible school on the Canadian prairies.

 

It was also surprising, as it turned out, for his Marxist professor.