Admittedly, there isn't too much going on in this section. Ellul merely outlines four challenges that Communism brings to Christianity: Justice, the significance of poverty, the relationship between practice/preaching (i.e. theory/praxis), and materialism.
With regard to the first, justice, Ellul points out that contemporary society is, in every way and on every level, unjust. Furthermore, since Christianity has been the dominant socio-cultural touchstone of Western society for the last twenty centuries, contemporary injustice is inextricably linked to the phenomenon of Christianity. Contemporary Christianity, as a whole, has made no effort to change this -- while Communism has.
The second:
Christianity should have taken up the cause of the poor; better yet, it should have identified with the poor. Instead, during almost the entire course of its history, the Church has served as a prop of the powerful and has been on the side of exploiters and states. The Church is numbered among the "Powers"; it has sanctified the situation of the poverty-stricken." (Ellul, 6)Meanwhile, "Communism sides with the poor. [...] No matter what kind of poverty the poor suffer, the Communists are on their side, and the Communists are alone with them. Consequently, they accomplish what Christianity preaches but fails to practice." (6)
That last phrase leads into the third challenge of Communism: the connection between theory and praxis, or -- put in more religious terms -- between preaching and practice. Ellul here notes that within Christianity the two are divorced: "We teach love our neighbor and we exploit him; we preach about justice and produce injustice, etc." To present the challenge of Communism, Ellul has to accept the "No real Communist society has ever existed" argument -- which is problematic in and of itself, as well as within the context of Ellul's work here -- but nevertheless he draws a reasonable line of connection within the tactical realm of Communism between theory and praxis: "If you take seriously what Marx, and later Lenin, wrote concerning tactics, you see that its applications in the Soviet Union and in Prague, the violation of rights in Poland in 1947, etc -- all these are perfectly consistent with their writings." (7)
The fourth challenge is, to me, the most interesting -- that is, the challenge of materialism. Now, in my experience, the conventional, contemporary "Christian" response to materialism (which, more often than not, is a response to a particularly dogmatic strand of scientific materialism) usually goes something like, "Oh, how terrible! You deny the spiritual realm, the realm of the unseen, and reduce all life to this dust that we are and that we inhabit! You are missing so much more!" Ellul's own response could not be further from this. He welcomes the challenge of materialism, claiming that it highlights the regression of Christianity into "a kind of disembodied spiritualism" that is totally contrary to the most basic elements of revelation -- i.e. the material and temporal intervention of God in the Old Testament, the material and temporal manifestation of God in the person of Jesus Christ, etc.
In Ellul's own words:
[God] enters the concrete life of His people and does not withdraw them from the world. He participates in history. The entire Old Testament is political history and not at all religious. It exalts the body, love in its carnal reality (the Song of Solomon!), and shows that nothing is experienced without the body. There exists no separation between a soul one could consider important and a body looked on as vile and lowly. (7)
Now, some comments of my own:
At first glance, the first challenge seems fairly self-evident. Christianity has been dominant and injustice has thrived -- therefore, Christianity is linked to the thriving of injustice. However, this assertion is more problematic than it may first appear. The "Christianity has produced injustice" thesis, if taken in conjunction with a positive value judgment concerning the appropriateness of pursuing/salvaging/returning to/saving Christianity, necessitates that there be a fundamental disconnect between some "pure" kernel of Christianity -- Christianity as it should have been -- and its actual historical manifestation. In other words, if we admit that historically Christianity has been an indefensibly terrible thing, then we cannot defend the historical manifestation of Christianity -- we must instead appeal to some idealistic notion of a Christianity more like Christianity than itself. (Lacan tempts me here, but I shall restrict myself to Ellul's ground for the moment.)
This appeal to an ideal Christianity is parallel to another argument that Ellul is forced into accepting: that there never has been a true Communist society. Now, in a certain sense, this is of course true, because national Communist revolutions are by definition still constrained within the bourgeois framework of the nation-state -- the "true" Communist revolution must be global, or it is nothing. That being said, Ellul himself asserts a connection between theory and praxis within Communist history, so for our purposes, we cannot rule out the existence of -- as it were -- shades of Communism.
In turn, this reminds me of one of Žižek's observations concerning his youth in Yugoslavia: whenever something would go wrong, the leaders would assert that this was due to the country "not being Communist enough." A similar parallel can be seen in neo-liberal responses to the recent Great Recession: in their analysis, the recession was the result of the market "not being free enough" or America "not being capitalist enough." Now, in both of these cases, the ideological appeal is clear. It is not as if the historical manifestation of a system is the corrupt, ideologically contaminated version, while the ideal system is pure, etc; rather, the very appeal to an ideal is itself a contaminated, ideological move.
So can we not draw the same conclusions regarding the move to blame the failures of Christianity on "not being Christian enough?" Is not the appeal to an ideal, pure, unadulterated kernel of Christianity the ideological (and consequently, historically and politically bound) move par excellence? Should we not therefore be distrustful of perpetual calls to return to the practices of the early Church, ground ourselves in the "true essence" of Christianity, etc?
This is why Ellul's seemingly joyful embrace of the materialist challenge is most intriguing to me; if we name ideal Christianity as ideology, then we are left with the Pascallian/Althusserian/Žižekian reading of belief and action -- that is to say, beliefs/ideals exist only insomuch as they are manifest as actions, as interventions in the material world. If Christianity is truly materialist -- no, that is the wrong way to phrase it, because such a question appeals to an ideal -- if Christianity can become materialist (in a Lacanian sense of retroactive "quilting"), then it may be able to answer the four aforementioned challenges.
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