Ty Simmons, the face of Covenant Seminary, with whom I happen to live, has written an excellent guest post on Trevin Wax's blog over on The Gospel Coalition. You'd do well to read it. A highlight to get you interested:
Here is my confession: I assuage my guilt with beauty. In my struggles with sin, in my struggles with addictions, in my struggles with inclinations of the heart, I have sought out beauty alone to make me feel better...I do not continue down the narrow path because the beautiful sentence I have just read has atoned for my sin or the music I've been listening to brought me to tears.
[...]
I long for beauty to save me and she continually proves an impotent savior.
A writer, he is.
Check out T. David Gordon's review of Brent Layham's new book iPod, YouTube, Wii Play. Looks like an helpful discussion of the impact of digital media on Christian discipleship.
Ellul is getting some attention! Head over to Second Nature Journal to get the highlights of a recent review of Understanding Jacques Ellul, or head to Cardus to get the whole thing. Ellul is taking over the world! Just kidding. That will never, ever happen. Mostly because he's dead, and also because people get offended by him really, really quickly.
So I just picked up a book called Understanding Jacques Ellul, by three professors at Wheaton (Jeff Greenman, Read Schuchardt, and Noah Toly). More Ellul! It never ends! Anywho, I HIGHLY recommend it to everyone everywhere if a.) you have tried to read Ellul and find him dense and difficult to follow (which he is), b.) you want to get a grip on the interconnectedness between media ecology, technology, religion, politics, and the Christian life, c.) you love Ellul, or d.) you're alive and can read.
Here's what these guys have to say about Ellul and the city:
...he believed [the city] was the most significant human achievement--even the sine qua non of a host of other achievements--but he believed that this achievement represented a fundamental rejection of God and God's promises. Self-expression and self-realization, for Ellul, are expressions of our sinfulness, even when the issue in great achievements.
[...]
For Ellul, Christians are called to the city in imitation of the ministry of Jesus Christ, whose work in Jerusalem represented both martyrdom and miracle. Christians are without question called to live and work in the city. In doing so, they represent the presence of God in the midst of the self-assertion, self -realization, and self-sufficiency of human beings--the body of Christ, as God's greatest accomplishment in the midst of the greatest accomplishment of his rebellious creatures. Our presence in the city should signify and symbolize what the heavenly city of God will be like and that it will be different from the city of man. For this betrayal of the city and the self-sufficiency that it symbolizes, Christians should expect rejection and suffering. In other words, they should expect to follow Jesus' footsteps into martyrdom.
If the city does not reject us, then this is, strictly speaking, miraculous. Like the resurrection and ascension, this is a supernatural even that requires God's intervention. For the people of faith in a God who performs miracles and rules over nature, this is perfectly conceivable, even if it is both unexpected and unlikely. For this reason, Christians should not prejudge whether our faithful representation of God's judgment upon and adoption of the city, of the promised triumph of faith over self-assertion, self realization, and self-sufficiency, will result in miracle or martyrdom. That is up to God. We know we are called to the city. We cannot know whether our calling is to martyrdom or to miracle.
-Jeffrey P. Greenman, Read Mercer Schuchardt, and Noah J. Toly, Understanding Jacques Ellul: (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), pp. 70-73.
At the moment, its pretty popular to be an "urban church" or to be "intentional" about "loving the city", etc etc. I think this is excellent. However, I have wondered how often, in the name of affirming the goodness (image-bearing) of all that goes on in the city--art, music, culture, community--we cease to embody (as Ellul would say it) the presence of the Kingdom in the city. Or, using Ellul's terms, how often does it seem a miracle that the city does not reject us?
Ellul's caution in the conclusion to The Presence of the Kingdom:
Day after day the wind blows away the pages of our calendars, our newspapers, and our political regimes, and we glide along the stream of time without a judgement, carried about by "all winds of doctrine" on the current of history, which is always slipping into a perpetual past. Now we ought to react vigorously against this slackness--this tendency to drift. If we are to live in this world we need to know it far more profoundly; we need to rediscover the meaning of events, and the spiritual framework which our contemporaries have lost. This will be a difficult enterprise, for it is new and humble. But "all things are ours," that is, for us, as Christians, and we are able to undertake this new work.
[...]
In so doing, we need to avoid...adopting, purely and simply, one of the attitudes of the world, that which seems to be most in harmony with the Christian ideal, and then becoming Communist, Liberal, Pacifist, Personalist, and so on, according to one's taste and sentiment, which we then justify by appealing to some Christian truth. But to do this, under the pretext of being "in the world," actually means belonging to the world. Christians who do this are no longer acting as "leaven" in the world--they have capitulated to it. They are simply agreeing with the world, walking in the same way, adopting its method, and, in spite of appearances, simply fostering the devil's work in the world.
-Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom, 2nd ed. (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishing, 1989), pp. 114-119.
If Wendell Berry's list left you wanting more, check out Jacques Ellul's list of "76 reasonable questions to ask about any technology", divided by category (Ecological, Social, Practical, Moral, Ethical, Vocational, Metaphysical, Political, Aesthetic). They're actually very revealing things to consider, and most are pretty simple (so don't be intimidated by the number!).
Some of my favorites include:
-Is it ugly?
-What noise does it make?
-Does it require a bureaucracy for its perpetuation?
-What aspect of the inner self does it reflect?
-Does it express love?
-Does it express rage?
-What does it allow us to ignore?
-What are its effects on the land?
-What are its effects on the planet and the person?
And these two questions are the first two we should ask, in my opinion, when considering any technology, as they lead to all the others:
-What is gained by its use?
-What is lost in using it?
And, in light of your answer to those two, I would add the following:
-Are you OK with that?
Back to Ellul, after a brief hiatus. Had to stop for a few weeks and breathe again. Consider his assessment of our culture with regard to means and ends:
The first great fact that emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become "means." There is no longer an "end;" we do not know whither we are going...we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere. The end (by this I mean the collective end of civilization, for individuals still have their own ends--for instance to succeed in a competition, or to get a higher salary, and the like) has been effaced by the means. Thus man--who used to be the end of this whole humanist system of means--man, who is still proclaimed as an "end" in political speeches, has in reality himself become the "means" of the very means which ought to serve him: as, for instance, in economics or the State. In order that economics should be in a good condition, man submits to the demands of an economic mechanism, becomes a total producer, and puts all his powers at the disposal of production. He becomes an obedient consumer, and with his eyes shut he swallows everything that economics puts into his mouth. Thus, fully persuaded that we are procuring the happiness of man, we are turning him into an instrument of these modern gods, which are our "means."
-Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom, 2nd ed. (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishing, 1989), p. 51.
Whither are we going? See Revelation 21.
Sinclair Ferguson on the kingdom of God and the Sermon on the Mount:
A paradox lies at the heart of the kingdom. On the one hand it has already come near (Matt. 4:17, 23)...But in another sense, it is still to come. That is why Jesus teaches us to pray to God, 'Your kingdom come' (6:10). How can the kingdom be here, and yet lie in the future?
[...]
The kingdom of God has come, in Jesus. Through faith in him, we enter the kingdom. It belongs to us. But we live in 'the kingdom of the world' (Rev. 11:15), although we do not belong to it. We belong to a new order of things, a new age altogether, a new humanity in Christ. But that new life has to be lived out within the context of the old.
[...]
That kingdom will be consummated only when Christ returns and transforms the kingdom of this world into his own kingdom, publicly putting everything under his authority. But the Sermon on the Mount is not about there and then; it is about here and now. It its not asking us whether we will live a Christlike life in heaven. It is calling us to lead that life on earth, as Jesus himself did to perfection. It is not a sermon about an ideal life in an ideal world, but about the kingdom life in a fallen world.
How do you react?
Sinclair Ferguson, The Sermon on the Mount, pp. 7-8, 10.
