byJacques Ellul
The Other Side, Sept. 1987, pp.16-25
In the minds of most of our
contemporaries, Christianity primarily means morality. The spiritual aspect of
our faith, except among a few, is forgotten. Many of us Christians are equally
confused. We have forgotten that God’s revelation has nothing whatever to do
with morality. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
The Torah, as God’s Word, is God’s self-revelation.
It lays down what separates life from death and symbolizes the total
sovereignty of God. Similarly, what Jesus says in the Gospels is not morality
but consists of practical directions by way of example.
There is simply no moral system in the revelation of
God in Jesus Christ. There are no moral precepts that can exist independently
in some way, that can have universal validity, and that can serve the elaboration
of a moral system. Not only that, the whole revelation of God in Jesus Christ
is against morality. The proclamation of grace, the declaration of
pardon, the opening up of life to freedom – these are the direct opposite of
morality.
As Genesis shows, the origin of sin in the world is
not knowledge. No, the origin of sin in the world is the “knowledge of good and
evil.” What is not acceptable to God is that we should decide on our own
what is good and what is evil.
Biblically, the good is the will of God. That is all.
What God decides, whatever it may be, that is the good. When we
construct a morality, when we say what is right and good, that is when
we are radically sinners. To elaborate a moral system is to show oneself
a sinner before God. Even if the conduct we espouse is “good,” our own “good”
has been substituted for the will of God, which is the only good.
This is why Jesus attacks the Pharisees so severely.
They are the most moral of people. They live the best lives. They are perfectly
obedient and virtuous. But they have progressively substituted their own
morality for the living and actual Word of God that can never be fixed in
commandments.
In the Gospels, Jesus constantly breaks religious
precepts and moral rules. He gives as his own commandment, “Follow me,” not a
list of things to do or not to do. He shows us fully what it means to be a free
person with no morality, simply obeying the ever-new Word of God as it flashes
forth.
Similarly, Paul attacks what might seem to be
morality in Judaism, human rules and precepts not coming from God at all. The
great mutation is that we have been freed in Jesus Christ. The primary
characteristic of free people is that they are not bound to moral commandments.
“All things are lawful,” Paul twice proclaims. “Nothing is impure,” he teaches.
We find the same message in Acts. We are as free as
the Holy Spirit, which comes and goes as it wills. This freedom does not mean
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doing anything at all. It is the freedom of love. Love, which
cannot be regulated, categorized, or analyzed into principles or commandments,
takes the place of law. The relationship with others is not one of duty but of
love.
How many times we read that “Christian morality is
superior to all others”! Yet, even if there were such a thing as Christian
morality, such a claim could hardly be true. We find honest and virtuous
people, good husbands, wives, and children, scrupulous and truthful people
outside of Christianity – and more, perhaps, than there are Christians.
No, revelation is an attack on morality, as is
wonderfully shown by Jesus’ parables of the kingdom, of the prodigal son, of
the talents, of the eleventh-hour laborers, of the unfaithful steward, and many
others. In all the parables, the one who serves as an example has not
lived a moral life. The one who is rejected is the one who has lived a
moral life.
This does not mean we are counseled to become
robbers, murderers, adulterers, and the like. On the contrary, the behavior to
which we are summoned surpasses morality – surpasses all morality, for all
morality is an obstacle to encounter with God.
Love obeys no morality. Love gives birth to no
morality. None of the great categories of revealed truth is relative to
morality or can give birth to it; freedom, truth, light, Word, and holiness do
not belong at all to the order of morality. What they evoke is a mode of being,
a model of life that is very free, that involves constant risks, that is
constantly renewed.
The Christian life is contrary to morality because it is not
repetitive. No fixed duty has to be done no matter what course life may take.
MORALITY ALWAYS INTERDICTS THIS MODE OF BEING> It is an obstacle to it and
implicitly condemns it, just as Jesus is inevitably condemned by moral people.
One of the basic dramas in the history of Christianity, then,
has been the transformation of this free Word into morality. This was the most
decisive setback to the Christian mutation. Here again, it is very hard to see
why it should have happened. But seemingly the Christian masses found it
difficult to live in this spirit of freedom and love. Norms had to be imposed.
Duties had to be indicated.
From the end of the second century, the church could
not avoid multiplying moral rules in antithesis to the gospel. Conduct
conforming
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to a certain moral code became the criterion of the
Christian life. Piety and prayer was transformed into moral rules. Christianity
took on the appearance of a moral system, and theology underwent profound
modification with the according of a new prominence to works.
The Lutheran Reformation brought a break with this.
But the downward slope was so steep that immediately after the first generation
of reformers had rediscovered Christian freedom, there was a return to moral
rigidity, and morality again achieved domination over “life in Christ.” We have
to be clear about the fact that the one inevitably excludes the other. If we
“live in Christ,” as Paul puts it, there is no morality. If we observe
morality, no life in Christ is possible.
One cause of all this was the churching of the
masses. But an equally decisive factor was the prodigious immorality of the
societies in which the church found itself. As this immorality was especially
flagrant in the sexual sphere, the moralizing reaction came principally in this
area. Women were the chief victims. Antifeminism remains one of the important
points at which Christianity’s betrayal of God’s revelation is most apparent.
It has become commonplace to affirm that Christianity has
been antifeminist, that it has kept women in bondage, that it has treated women
as minors, and more. Many appeal to texts in the Old Testament and in Paul.
Some have even tried to portray Paul as the founder of antifeminism.
Others have tried to justify the Bible and Christians
by saying that they were simply following the patriarchal customs of the
period. This excuse is in fact a terrible condemnation, for it testifies to the
lack of Christian freedom relative to the customs and ideologies of the age.
Now, it is true that there have been periods when a
patriarchal form of society has been dominant, such as in Judaism during the
third and second centuries before Christ and in Rome during the same period.
But it is absurd to describe all traditional societies as patriarchal. Rome in
the first century A.D. was no longer patriarchal in the strict sense. Except
for voting in elections (a not insubstantial matter), women had equal rights
with men. They were not kept at home to raise the children.
Similarly, in the Seleucid empire in the first
century B.C. (and later) women were fully free. It has been shown that they
were at work in all the higher professions, as bankers, shipowners, business
people, and entrepreneurs of all descriptions, and that they freely handled
large sums of money. In the Germanic tribes that invaded Europe, women again
had fairly privileged status; they took part in battles and had equal rights
with men.
It is true that with the collapse of the Roman
empire, the status of women suffered a sudden decline. But from the twelfth
century there were new movements toward legal and economic equality between men
and women, movements which continued largely unabated until the eighteenth
century. Throughout this period, Western society cannot be described as
uniformly patriarchal. Rather, the nature of society varied according to time
and place.
The later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see
astonishing regression in the status of women in every field. The common mistake
of nonhistorians is to think that because this was the position in the
nineteenth century, it must have been worse in the sixteenth and worse again in
the thirteenth and so on. They have a naïve belief in constant progress. In
general, however, the thesis of a universally prevalent patriarchal society is
not valid.
Nevertheless, a problem remains. The biblical texts
are very favorable to women – or are at least neutral, according to local
circumstances. Yet in later Judaism and in certain strands of Christianity,
these texts have been taken in such a way as to become completely hostile to
women. This poses a serious difficulty.
In the Hebrew Bible, women occupy and important
place, as witness the political role of Esther, Judith, and Rahab, the prophetic
role of many prophetesses, the role of Rebekah, and the role of the female “judges” in Israel. Texts such as the
Song of Songs and Proverbs 31 display the essence of feminine symbolism.
More theologically, if we return to the Genesis text,
we are astonished at the usual misunderstandings: Eve is inferior, it is said,
because she is created after Adam. This superb logic makes Adam inferior
to the great lizards after which he was created. Creation is in fact an
ascending act, and Eve, who is created last, comes at the climax as its crown
and completion. Again, it is said that Eve is inferior because she is not made
out of primal clay but out of a part of Adam. This is equally absurd reasoning,
for Adam, who carries the name Earth, is made out of inanimate matter, but Eve,
who carries the name Life, is
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made out of animate and hence superior matter.
There remains, of course, an argument that is
repeated again and again in later Judaism and in some branches of Christianity.
Eve, it is said, was the first to sin. She gave sin an entry into the world.
She is thus guilty and must be subject to her husband. Again, this is absurd
reasoning, for it is hard to see how Adam can have any claim to superiority
when in this test he shows himself unable to rule his wife, falls into the
simplest of traps, and is in no way worthy to be the head. But was not woman
tempted first? Indeed she was. And this leads to the invoking of absurd
arguments according to which she is less intelligent, easier to seduce, weaker,
and the like.
There is in fact a better theological reason for her
being tempted first. If she is the supreme achievement and perfecction of
creation, it is through her that the serpent must attack the rest. She does not
resist. But neither does the man. We may simply recall the famous Chinese
proverb that it is by the head that the fish decays.
A second basic truth, as Paul reminds us in 1
Corinthians 11:7, is that woman is the glory of man. (Many modern versions do
not use the word glory. They show a concern to attenuate and weaken the
biblical text, making it more banal. Thus they do not translate doxa
here as glory but as reflection, which is basically the opposite theologically
of the Hebrew conception of glory.)
Now this passage has often been misconstrued as
teaching a hierarchy from God to man and man to woman. But this is not its
point or its purpose. Following Barth and others, I have often recalled that
glory is revelation. God is glorified when God is revealed as God is. Jesus
Christ glorifies God when he reveals God to us as the God of love who is also
the Father. We ourselves are called upon to be the glory of God as we live in
God’s image, as we show by what we are who is the God to whom we bear witness.
In this passage then, Paul adds that the woman is the glory of the man; she
reveals him; she shows what a human being truly is.
Relating this to the temptation, we see that Eve
brings to light the fundamental reality of Adam. She shows him to be weak,
undiscerning, fluctuating, ambitious, and desirous of equality with God. She
simply reveals this. Both are equally at fault, and the condemnation (as
commentators and theologians should remember) is more severe for the man, since
he is given no hope. The woman, on the other hand, has a double promise that
carries double hope: that she will transmit life and that her posterity will
crush the serpent.
Insistence has often been placed on the positive
attitude of Jesus toward women. Jesus receives both men and women on an equal
footing. He cures sick women as well as men and does not repel the adulterous
woman or Mary Magdalene. Naturally, it has been noted that he chooses only men
as his disciples. But to this one may make the radical reply that he first
reveals his resurrection to women. Both in the Synoptic Gospels and in John,
women are the first to receive this supreme revelation. Women become the
“evangelists” of this resurrection by carrying the news of it to the disciples.
Women receive the first witness to eternal life. This is theologically
consistent, for it is a fulfillment of the name Eve and of the promise about
the serpent. Compared to this, all else is secondary.
It is important that Jesus affirmed monogamic
marriage and its indissolubility. But this pales in comparison with his
complete reversal of the judgement of his age concerning the transmission of
truth by women. We should also not forget the decisive role of women in the
primitive church. Women are its founders and pillars. They act as missionaries,
as Paul often shows, and they bear responsibility for churches (Rom. 16, Col.
4, Phil. 4). Externally, we have curious testimony in the famous letter of
Pliny to Trajan in which he writes about female ministers.
We should also remember that women have spiritual
gifts, such as deaconhood, prophecy, and speaking in tongues (Acts 2; 12; 21).
One may thus say that there is a clear-cut accession to utterance and to
equality with men. Paul, too, recognizes that women have the gift of public prayer
and prophecy (1 Cor. 11:5). Finally, he affirms total equality when he says
that in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, slave nor free.
The opinion soon arose, however, that Paul is a
frightful misogynist and that we should focus only on those other texts in
which he speaks about the obedience of women to their husbands, their
inferiority, and the need for reservations about them in certain church
affairs.
Fundamentally, the mistake has been to make moral
laws out of these passages. Cutting one’s hair was a sign of prostitution. So
Paul tells Christian women not to do it, since they are not prostitutes. But we
must not make of this an imperative.
The matter of subordination is more important. When
Paul speaks about hierarchy, it is in the context of what Jesus himself said
and showed, namely, that the greater must be the servant of the lesser, that
the hierarchical superior must serve the hierarchical inferior. The stronger
must not exercise power and authority but put them, and self, at the
disposition of the weaker. Paul calls no one to a macho life style. He calls us
all to a life of nurturing and caring, a life modeled on Christ’s
self-giving love of the church. Tragically, the church has often misunderstood
Paul’s theology, retaining only half his teaching and transforming this half
into a moral duty and a type of legal organization in which women inevitably
find themselves on the bottom, the exact opposite of what Paul intended.
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All too often, what has been deformed remains deformed.
Christianity has become primarily morality. It is imposed as such. It is a code
of conduct. No question of freedom or transgression arises. People – especially
women – are not told to love God and do as they like. Faith is no longer the
center from which all else derives. No, that is too dangerous. It is too open.
One must not appeal to individual responsibility or initiative. The main virtue
that is everywhere developed in the name of the church is obedience.
The spiritual vacuum left by the church has often
resulted in an explosion of mystics on the one side – and heretics on the
other. The mystics are in some cases admirable and respectable people who
deserve our praise. But only too often dubious trances, a mixture of repressed
and unbridled sexuality, and ambiguous and sometimes perverted practices come
to expression in them. The heretics? Many of them, such as Wycliffe, Huss, and
Savonarola, seem to be fighting for true faith, the purity of the church, a
return to the sources of the gospel, the affirmation of freedom in Christ, and
the primacy of love.
But it was now too late. The church had acquired the
habit of reacting on the moral and institutional level. It had ceased to be a
faithful servant of the Lord of the poor, of the Savior who gives us freedom in
love. It had taken up the cudgels for morality and order at all costs.
Obedience is now surpassed. We have an absolutizing of the institution and a
triumph of morality. Everything comes down to this. The popes use laws to fight
the corruption of the clergy. The church uses organization in its fight for
unity.
The truth of the revelation of God in Christ is
totally lost because the church has missed its way in its desire to reply to
the challenge of immorality. Instead of tracking the perversion to its source,
that is, to its spiritual foundations, it has tried to deal with the results,
forgetting the spiritual vacuum that the church itself played a part in
creating.
On this point, Julian the Apostate was right.
Immorality in the Christian era has often resulted from the clash
between paganism and Christian preaching, for Christian preaching destroys
ancient beliefs and religions. It promotes love over order, fraternity over
hierarchy, freedom over law. All too often, society lost its roots, references,
and traditions – without finding the vitality of new ones in Christ.
When the church embraces all of society, when the
church takes charge of political and social problems, when the church seeks to
establish social order and apply Christian principles in every sphere, then
revelation becomes morality. Here is the supreme betrayal of the prophets, the
gospel, and the first Christian generation. The more Christian morality
develops, the more hypocrisy and Pharisaism develops. The result is inevitable.
Take priestly celibacy. Certain people have a
vocation to be celibate, to dedicate themselves to God in this way, which is
one possible way of serving God. Perhaps they also have a vocation to seek the
priesthood. This is good. But when celibacy is made a law or obligation or rule
for all priests, when, without any vocation, it is made a condition of the
priesthood, then one of two things happen: either those who have a true
vocation to the priesthood but not to celibacy are set aside or, inevitably,
there is a cover-up of falsehood and hypocrisy. Here, as elsewhere, law is a
bad thing. And it is not I who say it but St. Paul.
Theologians make exactly the same mistake in
political and social matters. Instead of taking the path indicated by Paul (a
faithful expositor of the work of Jesus), they put themselves on the same level
and in the same field as the world. A political question, they thought, should
be treated as a political question, a social question as a social question. The
gospel becomes morality.
But let me now return to antifeminism, for I believe that the
victory of law over gospel, of morality over love, is the essential reason for
the adoption of an antifeminist stance in the church. This is what led
theologians to reject women against all rhyme or reason. One need only point to
the fact that the theologians who are most supremely and passionately concerned
about moral questions are also the most anti-feminist (Tertullian, for
example).
I am not saying that moralism leads to the exclusion
of women because women are more immoral than men or constitute a trap into
immorality. The reason is much deeper than that. A moralistic attitude is
essentially a masculine one. It is an attitude of judgement, of stiffness, of
rigidity, of the calculation of debits and assets, of classification, of
designation, of
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the establishment of what should and should not be
done. None of this is by nature feminine.
Let me explain what I mean by masculine and feminine.
I am not thinking solely of man and woman as they are defined by gender. I do
not think there is a nature that is original to man and another that is
original to woman, that there are stereotypes that may be traced back to genes,
and that all men are masculine and all women feminine.
We must not ignore the genetic heritage, but this is
not determinative. Gender roles and values are the product of a genetic
heritage and cultural milieu in proportions that cannot be fixed. Because of
their vocation as mothers, for example, women incline to such values as life,
an interest in small things, a concern for the weak. But because of their
exclusion from socio-political functions, they have been led to develop many
other values and to establish inter-human relationships on foundations
different from politics, competition, and force. In primitive times, when life
was dangerous due to war, wild beasts, and the hostility of nature, men
striving for material existence managed to take authority and domination,
reducing women to a secondary role. This helped produces two orders of values:
the masculine values of force, rule, power, the seeking of big things, a spirit
of conquest, courage, and order; and the feminine values of love,
sensitiveness, the protection of the weak, imagination, and giving.
Naturally, all men and all women are not like this.
Some men wonderfully embody feminine values – Jesus Christ first of all – and
some women want only to act like men and embody the masculine role.
Unfortunately, the latter is the tendency in some feminist movements,
especially those which think the only hope of women is to be identical to men,
to adopt the values of men, and to fill the same role as men in society,
inadequate as that has been.
Confronting social ills and immorality, the masculine
mind finds only one solution: that of making laws and setting up rules and
sanctions. Some women have this “masculine” mind too. There are strict and
rigid women who support order and represent law.
Nevertheless, in most of history’s periods of vast
immorality women have not tried to master all the problems of their age by
moral and legal rules. Instead, they tried to set up interhuman relationships
on a basis of understanding, love, toleration, flexibility, and the sheltering
of the weak. They obviously did not have immediate success. Their responses
seldom seemed adequate or strong enough for the brutality of the age. Action
along these lines had to be slow and less obvious. Yet it was more basic. It
went to the heart of the question. It was the only response that offered long-term
hope.
I do not deny that government must make laws or that
we need police and the courts. I am simply saying that this is a makeshift that
enables us to dam up the evil; it never solves anything. What happened was that
Christians and the church adopted this attitude and took this course – even
though all evangelical teaching is against it.
One might have expected Christians to replace false
love with the true love that comes from God. One might have expected to see
Christians substituting agape for the world’s conquering eros. Or
putting the spirit of service in the place of the spirit of domination. Or
rejecting punctilious legalism in favor of an open and
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supple human relationship. Or boosting the personal
in place of the social. Or exalting personal appreciation in place of valid
rules. Or looking on the heart rather than external conduct. Or maintaining
everywhere a living flexibility in place of an ordered rigidity. In short, one
might have expected to see Christians and the church, even at the cost of
unavoidable sacrifice and suffering, embodying and maintaining feminine values
in the bosom of a brutal society.
But instead the church chose the spirit of constraint
and domination. It rejected the gospel. It set up the primacy of law and
morality over faith, hope, and love. By this fact it essentially, if not
exclusively, eliminated women, reduced them to a secondary role, and submitted
them as well to its law and moral judgements.
The church has rejected women as living witnesses to
the gospel. Law, once again, has become an expression of evil, an embodiment of
the temptation in the Garden of Eden. By subjecting women to the judgement of
moralism, the church has lost its vocation and departed from its God. The
biblical revelation puts women at the very center of God’s will for the race.
But the church, treating women as minors, has made them an object of repulsion
and distrust.
In itself, the gospel is good news. It is grace, joy, freedom
and love. In human relationships, it means flexibility, finesse, concern for
the little, the protection of the weak, and openness. Its transformation into a
morality of duty and judgement, provoked by the immorality of surrounding
society and regarded as the only possible result and response – this is what
led to the exclusion of women from their place and vocation, their rejection
from circles of responsibility. Men were the ones who carried out this
operation, who tried to protect their own group as if threatened by violent
military aggression.
From the viewpoint of men, two things had to be done.
Women had to be neutralized. And a theological justification for this position
had to be found. Neutralizing women was the first priority because the
revelation of God in Jesus Christ, as given throughout the Bible, assigns to
women (the Living One) all the values of life (and not of social well-being).
The church finds three ways to neutralize women, by
now familiar. One, it imposes on women silence, passivity, obedience, and
self-effacement, as though such things were valid for all women. Two, it makes
the status of virginity superior to all others, thereby excluding women from
their social role and from their true nature as those who bear and transmit
life.
Thirdly, the church engages in idolizing the Virgin
Mary, who becomes a model of submission (“Be it unto me”). By exalting women in
the ideological sense, men find it possible to maintain a clear conscience
while virulently abasing women in the real sense.
As the process of neutralization developed, theologians
had to prove that the exclusion and abasement of women had good biblical and
theological foundations. There thus came into being the vicious reading of
Scripture that I earlier alluded to. Spiritual passages about women are
avoided. Texts are wrested from their context. Statements of fact about a
particular historical and cultural situation are twisted into eternal
imperatives. And important passages of Scripture, such as the putting of Eve’s
creation last, are read in their exact opposite sense.
None of this is surprising. Whenever the gospel
becomes morality the same mistakes are made. Once the church seeks to impose a
moral, political, or social “solution,” it inevitably seeks to add a small
whitewash of theological terms or biblical references for anybody who wants
them.
Today’s Christians, like those under Constantine,
seldom deviate from the pattern. We first take up political or moralistic
positions. Then we toss in some theology to justify our self-serving
victimization of others. Twisting verses from their contexts, we banter around
some Scripture to give ourselves a good conscience. We seek validity for our
use of the term Christian.
But when faith has become ideology, when love has
been replaced by law, and when gospel has been subverted by morality, there is
no longer any point to calling ourselves Christian. The gospel is lost. The
hope is gone. And the spiritual roots of our world’s very real problems have
once again gone unaddressed.
The antifeminism of the church is but one example of
a tragic, two-thousand-year-old pattern, a pattern of perverting the will of
God, a pattern of turning Christianity into the exact opposite of what we have
been shown in the life and death of Jesus Christ.
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