To Will & To Do
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To Will & To Do

An Introduction to Christian Ethics, Volume I

Jacques Ellul, Jacob Marques Rollison

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eBook - ePub

To Will & To Do

An Introduction to Christian Ethics, Volume I

Jacques Ellul, Jacob Marques Rollison

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About This Book

To Will & To Do presents one of the most significant theological contributions of the dynamic twentieth-century thinker Jacques Ellul. Benefiting from recent scholarship on Ellul and a discovery of a lost manuscript, this new edition renders the full text available in English for the first time, combining a fresh translation of Volume I with a first English translation of Volume II. Together, the two volumes constitute the introductory first part of Ellul's planned four-part treatment of Christian ethics. Volume I examines the origin of the problem of Good and Evil, outlines the contemporary morality of Western society, and provocatively sketches the paradox of an impossible and yet necessary Christian ethics. Volume II carries this discussion forward, outlining the characteristics and conditions of Christian ethics. It then treats the relationship between ethics and the legal texts of the Bible, the relationship between ethics and dogmatic theology, and concludes by reimagining the theological use of the "analogy of faith" for scriptural interpretation. In constant dialogue with Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Ricoeur, and many other theologians and philosophers, To Will & To Do constitutes a major intervention in twentieth-century theological ethics.

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Publisher
Cascade Books
Year
2020
ISBN
9781532676161
Part I
Origins
For it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.
—Phil 2:13 (NKJV)
Lay the cards on the table. When writing about morality, one must adopt an attitude of intellectual and personal humility from the outset. Any fakery would disqualify the work; for there can be no question of a merely intellectual construction when the search for the meaning15 of life is itself the search for how to live. Pretending to pursue a moral inquiry without presuppositions would be useless. Such an inquiry does not exist; we will have to demonstrate this. It is better to have clear presuppositions that one openly admits than to pretend to have none, which would only be ignorance or deceit. “Here, I wish I could wear a mask,” said Stendhal.16 And undoubtedly, anyone who writes about the conduct of life—that is, of that which constitutes the most secret fabric of their life, in its truth and its reality—will also say this. But this must remain only a wish; they may not wear a mask. They must give their account with an uncovered face. I confess, therefore, that in this study and this search, the criterion of my thought is biblical revelation; the content of my thought is biblical revelation; my point of departure is provided by biblical revelation; the method is the dialectic according to which biblical revelation is addressed to us; and the goal is the search for the significance of biblical revelation as it bears on Ethics. This rigor in no way implies that this book is addressed to Christians; on the contrary, I believe that its true value would come from a confrontation. Nor does it concern preoccupations exclusive to Christians—everybody in our decadent Western civilization is questioning the norms of their life—or at any rate, no more than biblical revelation is limited to the narrow circle of the elect: it speaks firstly of others. We will have to speak of the life and morality of the men and women of the world. Having thus affirmed my starting biases, having stated my position sharply enough that there can be no misunderstanding, I must say that I have no competence to write this book. I am neither a theologian nor a philosopher by profession. I possess none of the qualifications of the specialist, since in our time philosophy has become a technique and one is disqualified for not having climbed the steps of this edifice in an academic career. I am only trying to be human. I am trying to live fully in this time. I experience the anguish of the men and women who surround me. I know our common laxity in a society without structures and without norms. My occupation is to reflect, and I have undertaken to do so as a man, nothing more. It will happen that I will encounter numerous problems studied hundreds of times by specialists. I approach them with the innocence and the fresh eyes of the incompetent. I will refrain from giving a definition of Ethics. The reader may adopt any of the several thousand definitions that exist; all of them are partially correct, but only partially. The specialists will shrug their shoulders. Perhaps a man will hear . . .
1

Knowledge of the Good

The serpent said to Eve, “You will be like gods, knowing good and evil.” Such is the point of the departure. Before this decision of man, Adam never posed the problem of good and evil. He did not know them. He did not know that there was a good and an evil. He found himself in communion with the will of God, which he recognized directly in his relation of love with the Creator. His heart beat to the rhythm of the heart of God and his face was constantly turned toward the face of the Father, which he reflected for the world and for creation. He was free before God—which is to say that he could love him, as well as cease to love him. He was free before God—but this freedom in no way referred to some choice between doing and not-doing, between a yes and a no, the fruit of a laborious deliberation; by conceiving freedom in this manner, we demonstrate that we obviously no longer know anything about it; we disfigure and mutilate it, we mummify it. Precisely because it is freedom, freedom cannot be defined by the indeterminacy of choice in this way. It is neither the fruit of correct reasoning, nor of an autonomous will. Likewise, there is no test of freedom, since for Adam the free man, his freedom (of which he was ignorant) was a continual test unto itself, and its own proof—the offering of a joyous life in response to the gift of life that had been given beforehand. And here, by the intermediary of Satan, the awareness of an absence is produced, of a lacuna, of the missing link17 of this suddenly perceived chain that attached Adam to God, that—when unknown, was only play—once known, becomes a question. The awareness of a forbidden domain, which was joyful and obvious, now becomes a tragic absence. Before this moment, there was no moral conscience, no ethic. What is proposed therefore is not the grasping of good and evil, as if good and evil were objects, things within reach of Eve’s hand. They do not grasp good and evil. They only receive knowledge, comparable to that of Elohim. They will know that there is a good and an evil, that there is disobedience and obedience, that there is love and hate. They will know, too, that there is a yes and a no that they can say, and that can be said about them. But does this knowledge concern the content of good and of evil? The entirety of biblical revelation attests to the impossibility of such an interpretation. In the Bible, the Good does not precede God, the good is not God; the Good is the will of God. All that God wills is good, not because God is subordinate to the good, obedient to this good, but simply because He wills it.18 It is not the Good in itself that determines the will of God; it is the will of God that determines what is the Good. And there is no good outside of this decision. We will develop this in chapter 2.19
Let us not say that this is simple divine “voluntarism.” But affirming that the good is nothing other than what God decides (i.e., his commandment) means for man that the good is not his decision, nor a simple possibility. For this good has its own independent reality. The good is given, laid down by God (“he has told you, O mortal, what is Good” [Mic 6:8]),20 and man is forbidden from discovering it by himself. Man cannot act well except when he listens to the Word of God. For “what is said to man is the Word and work of divine election which has taken place and been revealed in Jesus Christ . . . What right conduct is for man is determined absolutely in the right conduct of God. It is determined in Jesus Christ . . . ‘to realize the good’ never means anything other than to become obedient to the revelation of the grace of God.”21 In all this there is neither a metaphysic nor an indication of the transcendence of the good, but the affirmation of the gospel, of the very movement of the Word of God. Only this Word allows us to say that “no one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18), for “He is the God who . . . has spoken of the good by doing it; He has spoken of Himself by delivering Himself up for us.” “What God wills of us is the same as He wills and has done for us.” Thus, only the “Name of Jesus Christ” legitimates that the good is the will of God. “We must seek the command of God only where it has itself torn off the veil of all human opinions and theories about the will of God and manifested itself unequivocally. We must seek it only where He has revealed Himself as grace . . .”
This also allows us to understand (and this is another difference from the theory of voluntarism) that there is never an abstract, general, divine command in itself, but only very concrete divine commands. Now, precisely, Adam cannot have any knowledge of this good in the situation where he is placed; first, because this would mean that the will of God is fixed, immobilized in an objectively perceptible content, permanent, without evolution; and that for man (who lives in time) God is definitively relegated to the past: God has willed. I know this will, which is the Good. I know the Good, and now God is limited to always wanting the same thing (this good) like a broken record, playing the same part over and over. In other words, if man could know the content of the good by himself, this would mean that God is not free. The result of the disobedience of man interpreted as knowledge of the good would thus be to give man an outstanding power, and to take away God’s freedom. But we must go further: if this were really the meaning of these words, it would mean that before his disobedience, Adam was unaware of the will of God; he accomplished it in the spontaneity of love, but he never penetrated its permanent content nor the secret of deliberation. And then, after the fall, Adam would be invested with this wonderful power of penetrating the mystery of the decision of God, he would know how God determines what is good. That which he never knew in love and communion, he now knows in disobedience and rupture.
Now that he has turned away from God’s face, he knows the mystery of God’s will! And he knows it by nature, of himself, autonomously, since it is a capability that he claims for himself! We can see the absurdity of this approach.
Finally, let us recall that this will of God is qualified throughout the Bible as “holy”: that is, definitively separate, intimate, autonomous, now radically separated from man who is not Holy. To say that this will is holy is thus to say that Adam cannot know it at all. Only the Holy One can be in conjunction with this will, but Adam is not this Holy One. It will take Jesus Christ to teach us who alone is conformed to the holiness of God, and that the only way—by grace, and when man has lost all his pretensions—is to be made to conform to God’s will and holiness concurrently. Man cannot know this will except when he is conformed to it because it is a holy will.22
And numerous biblical texts tell us that this is not the situation of man after the fall. He knows absolutely nothing of this will of God. He is totally unaware of the mystery of the decision of God’s love—the mystery that Paul tells us the angels themselves would have liked to contemplate. And we only discern it in Jesus Christ. How, then, would Adam have this power that the angels lack? Because he ate the fruit from the tree? What magical operation would have opened his eyes to se...

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