Here is the first discussion of our Lenten study of Presence in the Modern World.
And here is the link for next Monday’s livestream.
Ellul opens the book by retrieving a truth Christians perpetually strive to forget: the world is a scandal for faith, and this scandal must not be resolved but endured. Drawing on John 17, he establishes the basic paradox— Christians are sent into the world while belonging to another Lord, struggling not against flesh and blood but against “thrones, powers, dominations.”
Central to this first chapter is Ellul’s insistence that the Christian’s function is irreducibly particular. Christians bear a mission “unknown to people in their natural condition.” If they abandon it for humanitarian or religious busyness, “this will signify absolutely nothing.” Salt, light, and sheep are not metaphors but ontological descriptions.
The Christian is called to be, before anything else, a sign of the covenant God has made with the world in Christ.
The laity bear this vocation most acutely because they cannot escape into clerical separation. Sin has become structural and collective; Christians are implicated whether they wish to be or not.
Two false escapes present themselves:
The first is the spiritualizing move: retreating into inner religion while declaring material life neutral. Ellul calls this what Jesus calls it: hypocrisy. “God became incarnate; it is not our job to disincarnate him.”
The second is the moralizing move: attempting to Christianize institutions and coat the world in Christian values. Ellul is withering: “Daub the devil in gilt, dress him up in white; perhaps he will become an angel.” Both strategies share the same error; namely, they dissolve the scandal rather than inhabit it.
The genuine Christian position accepts a tension that admits no resolution. We cannot make the world less sinful, nor can we accept it as it is. This is not despair but the only fruitful posture— semper peccator et justus. And the stakes are theological as well as personal: “Theologians today no longer have anything to say to the world because the laity no longer exist in our churches.” The layperson living out this tension becomes the necessary medium through which proclamation makes contact with reality.
Ellul closes with the surprising indictment of the church’s response to Hitler as a parable of the larger failure. By fighting materially and blessing the guns rather than waging spiritual battle, Christians abandoned their specific role. “Materially triumphant,” he concludes, “we are spiritually vanquished.” True preservation of the world means standing at the intersection of God’s will and the world’s will to death— working in proclamation and deed together, trusting that “God is not preserving the world on the one hand and saving it on the other. He is preserving it by saving it.”
