Jacques Ellul and Morality

I have been reading Jacques Ellul's "The Subversion of Christianity" lately, and one of the most striking points he makes is that Christianity is not a system of morals, and that it is in fact opposed to all mere "systems" of morality. All systems of morality, he says, arise from mankind's attempts to order themselves apart from God's Law and Kingship. Thus morality is a human attribute, but not a specifically Christian one. Or, in other words, people (like Muslims!)can be moral apart from Christianity. The puzzling part of this is that he does not say that moral systems should be entirely done away with. I guess he has a pragmatic approach and believes that people basically work out the best morality for themselves among themselves, and that this is a necessary part of being human. Living as a disciple of Christ, though, he says, requires one to maintain an ironic distance from all such human systems of behavior-ordering, since one might be required at any time to do something that goes against the accepted morality. God's righteousness (which transcends all moral systems) calls us to a higher purpose than merely being moral. Thus, Christ did not die in order to give us a better moral system. He died in order to give us new lives -- lives characterized by freedom, creativity, and (oftentimes) dissent from the prevailing systems.

More on this in a later post.