Where should Christians side?

Here are some very interesting quotes from Jacques Ellul in the book In Season, Out of Season. (HT Scott B. from the Christarchy Facebook Group.)

"The anarchist milieu is the only one in which I often feel ease. I am myself there. On the other hand, I am not at ease either in the right-wing milieu, which doesn’t interest me, or in the left-wing milieu, for whom I am not overly a socialist or even less a communist. And I am not at all, really not at all at ease in the milieu of the Christian left…"

"Jesus does not represent a-politicism or spiritualism. His is a fundamental refusal to conform to political authority… He challenges every attempt to validate the political realm and rejects its authority because it does not conform to the will of God"

"I had seen the failure of the Popular Front in 1936; the failure of the personalist movement, which we intended to be revolutionary and which we tried to start on a modest scale; the failure of the Spanish revolution, which had great importance for Charbonneau and me; and the failure of the liberation [of France at the close of World War II]. All of this formed an accumulation of ruined revolutionary possibilities. After this, I never believed anything could be changed by this route."

"There is no possible continuity between man’s actions on earth and God’s establishment of his kingdom…. Man can’t achieve good on his own. And I again have to clarify here. The good of which Scripture speaks is not the equivalent of moral goodness but a condition of conformity to God’s will. And the good that any moral philosophy describes to us may not necessarily coincide with God’s will as it is shown to us in the revelation. In other words, when we say that man can’t do good on his own, it means that man can’t do God’s will with out God."

"I was hostile to the politicization of the church, the primacy of politics; I was strongly against a well-known slogan: ‘Seek first the political kingdom and all these things will be added unto you.’ … The popular opinion held that Christianity should be expressed above all in service… I maintained that service means nothing if there is not an explicit proclamation of the message of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior."

"Should Christians join existing movements, those that are most just; should they, for example, side with the poor man; or does Christianity have something really specific and unique that should not be mixed up with anything else? Does God want to carry out a different action in history through Christians, who consequently don’t need to adopt ready-made plans and doctrines? I am totally in favor of the second perspective…. [So] it is not a matter of founding a party or a Christian labor of union or of uniting Christians around a social doctrine of the church. Nor is it that Christians should join any particular party."

We are always and only partisans of Christ.

Norman Horn

Norman is the founder and editor of LibertarianChristians.com. He holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from the Austin Graduate School of Theology.

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