readers who did not realize the double entendre of the title,
and thus thought that Ellul was engaged in Christian-
bashing. God forbid, for Ellul was an extremely astute
Christian who did, indeed, critically expose Christian
religion, but admirably expounded the reality of
Christianity in the living Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, it was
Jacques Ellul who, in the aforementioned book, sought to
explain that Christianity is not an ...ism, and thus provided
the germinal idea for this chapter. It will be instructive to
quote what he wrote, and allow it to serve as a springboard
for our further elucidation.
“A word ending in ‘ism’ denotes an ideological or doctrinal
trend deriving from a philosophy. Thus we have positivism,
socialism, republicanism, spiritualism, idealism, materialism, etc.
None of these words, however, denotes the philosophy itself. In
fact, it might be directly opposed to it. Marx and Kierkegaard both
tried to prevent their thinking from being reduced to an ideological
mechanism. But they could not stop their successors from freezing
their living thought into one (or many) systems, and in this way an
ideology arose. Even Sartre accepts the term existentialism without
seeing how it perverts what he is saying. The moment the mutation
takes place from existential thinking to existentialism, a living
stream is transformed into a more or less regulated and stagnant
irrigation channel, and as the thought moves further and further
away from the source it becomes banal and familiar.
The suffix ‘ism’ injects something new into a well-marked and
well-defined complex. As originality is eliminated and replaced by
commonplaces, the life and thought lose their radical and coherent
character. The well-defined complex is now vague and fluid.
Passages are dug out in all directions. From the point of departure
various possibilities open up for exploitation, and they are in fact
utilized. There thus comes into being a curious complex formed of