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what Ellul called on the Church to do in Jesus and Marx: “On all levels and in every aspect of our society, the poor are rejected, mistreated, and forced more deeply into their poverty. Christianity should have taken up the cause of the poor; better yet, it should have identified with the poor. Instead, during almost the entire course of its history, the Church has served as a prop of the powerful and has been on the side of exploiters and states”
Christ-imitating social enlightenment arose from the New Testament ethos, but rarely through the established Church. The Enlightenment thinkers were denounced as heretics. Secularists and deists, the very people the Church most hated and feared formed and articulated Enlightenment policies. Thus Jesus’ prophetic theme of a building founded on the corner stone “rejected by the builders” (Psalm 118:22) continued replicating in the humanist Enlightenment. In spite of being largely rejected by the Church a new Jesus-leavened order was born.
I have a nagging question though: if we’re nothing, why bother to convince us of our nothingness? Who cares?
Does church help you to become the sort of person you’d pick to be stuck on a desert island with? Good! Go! Does it hurt your chances of becoming that person? Run!
The humanities are about one thing: the soul. Declare the soul dead or mere brain chemistry and the humanities die.
It seems to me that a spiritual sensibility is built into human nature. Formal religion may or may not disappear but art, love and a desire to find beauty will remain. And humans will still strive to live according to spiritual values found only in their own heads that are contrary to nature so to speak.
“We had no interest in being the biggest if we weren’t the best,” guitarist Dave “The Edge” Evans told Rolling Stone in 2004. “That’s the only way being the biggest would mean anything.”
