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Ellul doesn't mention it (perhaps things were different in postwar France), but the resemblance between banks and temples is only too clear-whether it be the pseudo-Greek facades that used to be so popular, the predictable pinstriped vestments of the hierarchy, or the way in which the sacramental symbols are dispensed on marble altars. Indeed, our society seems more committed to rescuing one major bank from failure than it does to saving millions of fetal lives.

Did Adeney say Ellul exhibited "the tendency to excess of seminal minds"? Indeed. Ellul thinks Christians can show their freedom from money's power by rejecting the employer-employee relationship, repudiating profit making, and refusing to store up money in rainy-day savings accounts (though he allows saving for a specific project).

Whatever his excesses, Ellul is right when he suggests that we need to practice a little sacrilege against Mammon's rule. The last thing Christians need to do is to genuflect before Mammon's altar. "There is one act par excellence which profanes money by going directly against the law of money," Ellul writes, "an act for which money is not made. This act is giving" (p. 110).

Ellul is enthusiastic about giving. "It is … the penetration of grace into the world of competition and selling" (p. 110). He encourages giving to God and giving to people. Gifts made purely to God's glory—the use of money for absolutely no practical value—are the greatest profanation. When we give to people, we must give freely, not letting giving be a way of obligating the receiver, demanding gratitude, or affirming the superiority of the giver over the receiver. "Almsgiving is Mammon's perversion of giving" (p. 112).

But wait a minute. If money is so evil, shouldn't we, like the desert fathers, leave society in order to live out an ideal of Christian poverty? Or shouldn't we at least concentrate on living as simply as possible while serving as salt and light in the midst of society? No again, says Ellul, for that places far too much importance on money. Then what shall we do?

Ellul won't tell us. And that's typical. Brethren theologian Vernard Eller explained it this way: "Ellul has little or no interest in conceptualizing the faith, in teaching people to think it correctly and arrange it into a rationally satisfying arrangement of ideas. To make the gospel this would be, for him, to miss its true power, dynamic, life, and excitement. No, Christianity is a matter of lived and living relationships" ("Jacques Ellul, the Polymath Who Knows Only One Thing," Brethren Life and Thought, Spring 1973).

That approach can produce anxiety, suspicion, or disgust in the reader who demands clarity and cannot tolerate ambiguity. On the one hand, Ellul condemns just about everything that has to do with money or economic systems. On the other, he talks about Christians earning money and participating in those necessarily false economic systems, as long as they have their eyes open. As Gill said, Ellul "takes everything away" and then "gives it all back with … an inspiring vision of hope and freedom." Thus, in Ellul's intellectual adventure, there are few answers, but much grace.

This article was originally published in the February 15, 1985 issue of Christianity Today.

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