Jacques Ellul, Harvie Conn and Herman Bavinck on Change

I have come across three quotes recently that speak of the need for change in the way we do church and ministry and these have me doing some thinking.  I was going to write some more of my own thoughts here, but they are still in formation, so I'll just share the quotes with a couple of annotations and will try to come back to them later.

Alan Hirsch at the Forgotten Ways quotes Jacques Ellul as follows:

“No doubt some will reply that God is not a God of disorder, incoherence, or arbitrariness, but a God of order. Of course he is. Unfortunately the whole of the Old Testament shows us that God’s order is not that which we conceive and desire. God’s order is not organization and institution (cf. the difference between judges and kings). It is not the same in every time and place. It is not a matter of repetition and habit. On the contrary, it resides in the fact that it constantly posits something new, a new beginning. Our God is a God of beginnings. There is in him no redundancy or circularity. Thus, if his church wants to be faithful to his revelation, it will be completely mobile, fluid, renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imaginative. It will never be perennial, and can never be organized or institutionalized. If the gates of death are not going to prevail against it, this is not because it is a good, solid, well organized fortress, but because it is alive; it is Life that is, as mobile, changing, and surprising as life. If it becomes a powerful fortified organization, it is because death has prevailed.” — The Subversion of Christianity

There are all kinds of objections that can be raised to Ellul's comments, and I think these objections are accurately summarized by Harvie Conn in some comments on the problem of contextualization and syncretism.  Ellul wasn't using the language of contextualization in the preceding quote, but the mobility and fluidity he speaks of in that context is similar to the issues of contextualization that Conn deals with in his book Eternal Word and Changing Worlds:

Mention the word “contextualization” in Reformed and evangelical circles and sooner or later another word pops up—syncretism. Why? There are many answers to that question. Most certainly a basic one is our legitimate concern that the authority of the Bible will become lost in the plethora of localized theologies. If we start with our particular, historical situation, what will happen to the once-for-all character of the Bible as norm? In constantly taking account of the receptor cultures, isn’t hermeneutic in danger of letting the medium become the message and the message become a massage? Will the “sameness” of the Bible get lost in a diversity of human cultures?

The answer to all of Conn's questions can be "yes" but they will not necessarily always be yes.  Conn was writing in a reformed/calvinistic context and my guess is that it would be the reformed and calvinistic folks who would have the greatest difficulty with the words of Ellul.  Yet, before we throw Ellul out, the great Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck advocated a kind of fluidity and mobility that comes close to Ellul.

All the misery of the Presbyterian churches is owing to their striving to consider the Reformation as completed, and to allow no further development of what has been begun by the labor of the Reformers . . . Calvinism wishes no cessation of progress and promotes multi-formity. It feels the impulse to penetrate ever more deeply into the mysteries of salvation and in feeling this honors every gift and calling of the Churches. It does not demand for itself the same development in America and England which it has found in Holland.

This only must be insisted upon, that in each country and in every Reformed Church it should develop itself in accordance with its own nature and should not permit itself to be supplanted or corrupted by foreign ideas.

This is all the more reason to think that those of us in the reformed tradition need to devote a greater portion of their time and mental energies to releasing creativity instead of merely preserving the traditions.

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