Ellul: "know the world more profundly"

“Day after day the wind blows away the pages of our calendars, our newspapers, and our political regimes, and we glide along the stream of time without any spiritual framework, without a memory, without a judgment, carried about by ‘all winds of doctrine’ on the current of history. Now we ought to react vigorously against this slackness — this tendency to drift. If we are to live in this world we need to know it far more profoundly; we need to rediscover the meaning of events, and the spiritual framework which our contemporaries have lost.

This will be a difficult enterprise, for it is new and humble. But "all things are ours," that is, for us as Christians, and we are able to undertake this new work....

The Bible tells us that the Christian is in the world, and that there he or she must remain. Christians have not been created in order to separate themselves from, or to live aloof from, the world. When this separation is effected, it will be God's own doing, not man's.


...If this, then, is the Christian's situation, what part should he play in the life of the world? It is only too easy to reply: to "witness," to "evangelize," or "to lead a Christian life," or again "to act according to the will of God." All this is true, of course, but so long as it is not really understood, so long as each answer is only a traditional formula, it leads us nowhere.

...What the church ought to do is to try to place all people in an economic, intellectual - yes, and also in a psychological and physical - situation, which is such that they can actually hear this gospel - that they can be sufficiently responsible to say yes or no, that they can be sufficiently alive for these words to have some meaning for them. The secret of their choice belongs to God, but they should be able to make a decision; it is up to the church to see to it that they are not placed in such conditions that they cannot react otherwise than as swine, to whom pearls have been thrown. "Cast not your pearls before swine" - but men must cease to be swine, and this is not the work of grace, it is a human work, which man is quite able to achieve, though it is terribly difficult to do; Christians in particular are called to this work, because it is possible for them to see the true situation of man better than other people, and because they can see, better than others, where all this ought to lead, and what is its aim.

When we seek to discover effective action for the church, owing to the necessity for its intervention in the world, it seems as though its first objective should be the creation of a style of life."

- Jacques Ellul, "The Presence of the Kingdom"