98 - Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World

Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World
By Jacques Ellul
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1983. 287 pp. $19.95.

Jacques Ellul is not the first French jurist to write theology. There was one in the sixteenth century, whose name is more widely known. But there are considerable differences between them. When Calvin experienced that "sudden conversion," on which he is so reticent, he forsook the law and devoted all the powers of his logical and legal mind to the exposition and propagation of the evangelical faith. Ellul, a professed convert to Christ, became professor of law and, later, of the history and sociology of institutions, at the University of Bordeaux. While he has written a number of studies on biblical and theological themes, he has also written a series of broad-sweeping and, generally, pessimistic analyses of the human situation in these latter decades of the twentieth century.

Calvin commanded a comprehensive knowledge of theology from the ancient fathers to the writers of his own time. Ellul concentrates his theological attention on Kierkegaard and the early Barth, and regards those who have written since as of less consequence. And Calvin presented his thought calmly and judiciously, with conviction but without passion. Ellul is a theologian of passion, who writes with power and permits himself sweeping statements and wholesale judgments which arrest attention, but hardly carry conviction.

The book is one of three which Ellul planned to write on the three Pauline "virtues" of faith, hope, and love. The books on hope and its consequent ethics have already appeared. The present volume is to be

99 - Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World

followed by one on the ethics of holiness. The volumes on love and the ethics of relationship remain to be written.

Ellul seeks to clarify the nature of faith by contrasting it with belief. The book begins with a dialogue between two individuals, named Monos and Una, who represent different perspectives but who together bring out the complexities and ambiguities of the subject. Monos is painfully conscious of the baleful effects of belief in human affairs and exposes them in a manner reminiscent of Eric Hoffer in The True Believer. Una is more conscious of the indispensability of belief in all our human enterprises, though by no means blind to the darker side on which Monos dwells.

In the second part of the book, the author offers his own statement of the difference between belief and faith, and he elucidates it with a statement of the difference between revelation and religion. The difference is portrayed as an absolute contrast. Religion is the human attempt to ascend to God (Tower of Babel); revelation consists in God's descent to us, culminating in the coming in Jesus Christ. Ellul reaffirms the absolute contrast which Pascal drew between the God of the Bible and the God of the philosophers. The distinctive feature of the former is that God cannot be known apart from a freely decided revelation for no reason; for God is incomprehensible, inscrutable, and unpredictable, decreeing the good in an absolutely Scotist manner with faith responding to this revelation with no purpose in view.

When the contrast between the God of revelation and the God of the philosophers is presented in this extreme way, the question arises whether the statement of the God of revelation has not been revised and refined by philosophical criticism until it has been reduced to a formality without content. Ellul is on firmer biblical ground when he describes faith as a movement from remembrance to prophecy; for the fundamental attribute of the biblical God is faithfulness (emunah), to which human faith is the responsive Amen.

It is in the third and last part of the book that the prophetic tone is most audible. Ellul assumes the mantle of Jonah, as he proclaimed to the people of Nineveh, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." But, unlike the reluctant prophet, who attempted to flee from God until God caught up with him and brought him by a means resembling death and resurrection to his appointed destination, Ellul delivers his message with vigor and eloquence, if not with relish. He draws up a catalog of the ills that afflict us, oppression, violence, strife, torture, poverty, hunger, and the like, which abound in the countries of Africa and Asia, and the symptoms of moral and spiritual anomie that appear in prosperous Europe and the United States-which all add up to make this the worst of all possible worlds. The illness from which we are suffering is clearly terminal: "Yet forty days and..."

While the facts he cites are mostly irrefutable, the passionate and unqualified manner of his statement of them detracts from the persuasiveness of it. Ellul is aware that the media with their selective

100 - Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World

outpouring of horrors, crimes, and disasters have a powerful effect on the public's perception of the world. It is a question whether the scholar who feeds on a diet of reports of researchers and the writings of editors, columnists, sociologists, and "Paris intellectuals" (a group for which Ellul has a strong antipathy) is not subject to a similar risk. The question is raised by Ellul's wholesale denunciation of politics as "the home base of the demonic" and his total blindness to the possibility of improvement of the human condition through political action (which is wholly given to the lust for power).

Here, perhaps, we may detect the difference between the French and the American revolutions, and behind that, more faintly, the difference between prophecy and apocalyptic. It may also be pertinent to observe that Jonah's prophecy of impending doom for Nineveh, which Ellul takes for his text, is torn from its context in the progression toward the climax of the story, which tells how the success of his preaching drove Jonah into a searing passion as he was confronted with the compassion of God toward the 120,000 people of Nineveh (who counted them?), who were woefully lacking in judgment, and, since there is no limit to the compassion of God, "also much cattle."

Ellul's final message is a call to repentance and faith, which he interprets as a kind of leverage by which the Wholly Other Transcendent may become an active reality here and now. Faith calls us to exodus and exile and to hold to the word of the kingdom, on which it pivots as on an Archimedean point and calls this world in question, promising the future that only God can bring.

Ellul's treatment of faith as the only "cosmic lever to change everything" is extremely brief and highly problematical. Perhaps he intends to spell it out in a more detailed and persuasive manner in the promised volume on ethics, which is to follow.

George S. Hendry
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey