The threefold decision to hope
John H Friday 3rd August, AD 2007
So what does hope look like? Ellul emphasises that what is needed is not a theology of hope, but hope itself: hope as an attitude of mind and a way of life. Hence the final part of Hope in Time of Abandonment (see previous posts: 1 | 2 | 3), “And in the beginning was hope”, has as its subheading, “Tentative proposals for an ethic of hope” (emphasis added).
To be honest, I found this section of the book something of a struggle. Ellul is even more opaque than usual here, especially as regards Christian involvement in politics. Ellul warns against confusing “socialism or the secular city with the Kingdom of God” (p.257), while at the same time insisting that “it is important for the Christian to join a revolutionary movement” (p.251). It didn’t help that my dominating thought while reading this section was, “So, are you going to tell me I have to quit my job or what?”, which didn’t exactly make for an open and receptive frame of mind. I think I need to re-read these chapters at some point.
However, it is worth looking at Ellul’s description of “three attitudes” by which hope is expressed and upon which it rests. These are as follows:
1. Waiting
This is one of the most provocative and difficult sections in Ellul’s book. His grand master-plan for restoring hope to the church and the world is (ta dah!): do nothing. Or rather: wait. As he writes:
The person of hope is the person who waits, and with a pessimistic waiting, for normally nothing should happen.p.259)
Again, Job is the model for this:
Job waits, and his friends never tire of proving to him that this is absurd (which it is), that he is wrong (which he is), that God will not come (which is true) … Still Job waits.
As with Job, the waiting to which we are called – “waiting for the return of Jesus Christ, for the coming of the Kingdom and for the Word of God and of the Holy Spirit here and now” – is not an “empty, passive, hollow, drowsy waiting”. Rather, it is the constant, untiring cry of Maranatha (“Our Lord, come!”), “kept up every day of a person’s life without stopping”.
Ellul puts this very strongly, in a manner that even he admits is “absurd” and “ridiculous”:
Do not believe it when someone tells you there is some other Christian duty than the absolute, ultimate, and energetic waiting. Do not believe it when someone tells you that the good of mankind demands of you something other than that waiting.
Now, if you’re anything like me, you’re probably recoiling a little from what Ellul is saying here (not to mention when he says things like, “Indolence is exemplary in a civilization of work”). But at the very least, Ellul provides a salutary corrective to our tendency to “fill every waking sacred and secular moment with the noise, bustle and mindless activity of disaffection and despair” (as Joel put it on the BHT the other day).
2. Prayer
The second thing on which hope rests is prayer. Prayer seems useless in a technological age, “just a bit of magic assist of ages ago”, something “unworthy of modern man”. Plus we are “attracted by action”, in comparison with which prayer is “boring”:
And yet, we must grasp and understand that without prayer there is no hope, not the slightest. Conversely, the abandonment and loss of interest in prayer is exactly the spiritual proof that we have no hope. The person who claims to be full of hope but fails to lead a life of prayer is a liar.
If hope is “man’s answer to God’s silence”, then it is prayer by which we demand the fulfilment of God’s promise, a promise that “throughout the Bible … is linked with the ceaseless outcry of prayer”. Without prayer, God’s promise and its fulfilment would be (from our perspective) blind, impersonal forces. “But if I engage in prayer, then hope is born”.
3. Realism
The third foundation for hope, the third attitude characteristic of hope, is realism. It is only hope that enables us to look at reality as it really is, without “illusions and rationalizations”:
Without hope, reality becomes an unbearable mechanism, a continual damnation, a source of fear and apprehension which cannot be appeased. (p.275)
(I’m reminded of T.S. Eliot’s line: “human kind/Cannot bear very much reality”.)
Conversely, “without realism hope has no reality”:
Hope does not begin to exist except in the harshness of an expanding implacable force, in the unanswerable nature of the problems confronting the person, in social oppression and mechanization, in the midst of conflict. Elsewhere, one has no use for hope. One gets along quite well without it. (p.278).
Looking at the world with realism will inevitably result in pessimism about the world and the direction it is taking. However, as we have seen elsewhere, it is that pessimism which forms the context for hope.
Conclusion
The decision to wait, pray and look at the world with realism “by no means produces hope automatically”, Ellul concedes. Rather:
To take up those options is to live hope already in a series of acts. Hope is always the product, the exceeding work of the Holy Spirit, but our decision appears not only as the lived expression of the hope given to us. It appears also as a challenge flung at the Holy Spirit in order that this hope might be possible. Hope itself is then hoped. (p.283)
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- Comments(3)
Hmm. I’ll have to think about this. On a different site, I left a comment regarding Luther’s “Sin boldly” advice to Melanchthon (which I see you’ve written about, too). If Ellul is serious about revolution (and I think he is, given his political background), then there must be the risk of action, with the real possibility that we’ll have to repent of something. So I’m drawn back to Kierkegaard and his remarks about deliberation/reflection vs. passion/action in Present Age:
My sympathies with K. notwithstanding, however, it must be borne in mind that he was writing in 1846: before the European revolutions, before the 20th century, before the global dominance of capital, etc. So Ellul brings the perspective earned from technological society and its particular form of life. K’s diagnosis is more applicable to our current age of information and global capital than to his own time. I wonder if Ellul was familiar with this work. I need to study Ellul more closely–thanks for the provocations!
Hi Joel: thanks for this. Good to have someone interacting with these posts.
Ellul’s argument in this last section is pretty difficult to follow, and it is quite likely I have not entirely captured it accurately. I certainly don’t think his “waiting” is quite the same thing as saying we should be inactive, and nor is it the same as what Kierkegaard seems to be referring to as “Reflection”. More that we shouldn’t get subsumed within the “here and now” concerns of political movements.
[...] The authoritarian instincts of Tony Blair and now Gordon Brown on “security” issues is one of the most troubling features of this government, a government that in many other respects I continue to support. Reading Ellul recently has helped me understand the nature of the tension I feel about the Labour government, especially his comments on the nature of Christian “realism” and the application of the “pessimism of hope” in the area of politics. [...]