In 1963, Jacques Ellul published a sequel to his earlier work, The Presence of the Kingdom. Ellul’s second discussion of the nature and significance of the
kingdom of God was titled, False Presence of the Kingdom.
Having used the earlier book to lay out his understanding of what the kingdom of God is and how the Christian church ought to be living within that kingdom, Ellul now goes on to diagnose what he believes are the most common misunderstandings and misappropriations of the New Testament kingdom theology.
As always, Ellul gives today’s reader a lot to think about and to digest, most of it rather uncomfortable but absolutely necessary and, hopefully, not entirely indigestible.
Below is today’s excerpt from Jacques Ellul’s False Presence of the Kingdom (all emphasis mine). I quote a section where Ellul focuses on the classic distinction between fact and value and the modern error of assuming that facts have a self-evident, intrinsic value of their own.
By the way, as I write this, I am thinking of several recent conversations with fellow Christians who said things to me that are perfect examples of the problem Ellul is critiquing:
If one attributes inherent value to fact, and if the moment the fact exists it is useless to bring an ethical or spiritual judgment to bear upon it, then I say that this should be carried to its logical conclusion. Capitalism? It’s a fact. War? It’s a fact. Parachutists? It’s a fact. Torture? That’s a gross fact. . . One is quite simply hypocritical and dishonest in advancing the argument that one is faced with a fact, and that moral judgment is to be avoided on that account.
There remains, moreover, the question why one employs that argument. The answer, alas, is easy. . . one avoids debate by eliminating the moral problem on the ground that facts elude such judgment. . . (If) a fact is a final value, one yields to the fact. Nothing can be done about it. Whenever, in an ordinary argument, one person is able to say to the other: “First of all, it’s a fact,” there is nothing to be said in reply.
To give up passing judgment on a fact, to assume that all one can do from then on is to yield to it, to adjust to it, that is precisely and totally to abandon the Christian life in its entirety. There is no position more radically anti-Christian than to give way to a fact. It is to accept fate. It is to agree that the material factor is the determining one. It is to agree that the Christian life is nothing but a morality. At the same time, it is a renunciation of spiritual discernment, and of the possibility of injecting truth into the context of reality.
That entails enormous consequences, which, to be sure, are never foreseen by those Christians who think they are realists because they announce: “It’s a fact.” . . . (Such) Christians obey the world’s logical inconsistencies. Their thinking is so unstable that the very ones who accept fact as final judgment in matters of technology, progress, mass culture, economic growth, urbanization, etc., are the same ones who reject fact in the case of colonialism or of the present government. But perhaps, again, this is nothing but a conformism . . .
Once again, let’s make it clear that it is no part of our thinking to deny the facts, or to say that they do not have to be taken into account. What we are saying is simply that it is a gross intellectual error to transform fact into a value, to conceive of fact as being or as containing a value in and of itself. We are saying it is a gross moral error to renounce judging a fact, that is a gross spiritual error to urge man to bow before fact, that is to say, before the fatality of whatever exists.
I used to have a personal mantra that I would repeat to myself in times of difficulty. I’d say too myself:
I will only deal with what’s real in order to strive for God’s ideal.
That’s what Ellul is talking about. What’s your kingdom mantra?
