Jacques Ellul

Being a Transforming Presence

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

As followers of Jesus it is as imperative for us to fight every inclination toward dualism as it is to fight against legalism.  While legalism is widely recognized as relating wrongly to the Law, the error of dualism is not as widely acknowledged in our Evangelical circles.

Simply put, dualism is like split vision, seeing things only as either spiritual or secular.  All things are spiritual.

Walt Mueller reminds us that there are two kinds of dualism common in the church:

  1. Escape – When personal salvation is viewed as an escape from the world into the church, and that the world around us is then to be avoided.
  2. Segregated Spheres – Believing God is only concerned about the spiritual dimension of our lives, we dedicate our spiritual lives to the Lord, but then are shaped by the world in our professional and social lives.

Jacques Ellul offers this critique:

This dissociation of our life into two spheres: the one “spiritual” where we can be “perfect”; and the other material and unimportant, where we behave like other people; is one of the reasons why the Churches have so little influence on the world… All we can say is: That is the exact opposite of what Jesus Christ wills for us, and of that which he came to do.

Here are three teachings of Jesus that should remind us that God intends for his people to engage the culture around us.  We are not to avoid it. We are to attack it stealthily.

Matthew 5.13 – Salt of the Earth

Matthew 5.14 – Light of the World

Matthew 10.16 – Sheep among Wolves

The Presence of the Kingdom

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Jacques Ellul offers a profound insight about how we, as Christians, are to adopt as a priority an Incarnational approach to ministry.   Incarnational  ministry literally means: In the flesh.  It means going where people are, and understanding their real situations, rather than primarily trying to draw them to us with various forms of entertainment and shallow promises.  The Incarnational approach allows us to infiltrate the cultures of the world, and the sub-cultures of our community, to become agents of transformation.

Reflect for a little while about what Ellul writes:

The will of the world is always a will to death, a will to suicide. We must not accept this suicide, and we must so act that it cannot take place. So we must know what is the actual form of the world’s will to suicide in order that we may oppose it, in order that we might know how, and in what direction, we ought to direct our efforts.

The world is neither capable of preserving itself, nor is it capable of finding remedies for its spiritual situation (which control the rest). It carries the weight of sin, it is the realm of Satan which leads it towards separation from God, and consequently towards death. That is all it is able to do.

Thus it is not for us to construct the City of God, to build up an “order of God” within this world, without taking any notice of its suicidal tendencies.  Our concern should be to place oursleves at the very point where this suicidal desire is most active, in the actual form it adopts, and to see how God’s will of preservation can act in this given situation.

If we want to avoid being completely abstract, we are then obliged to understand the depth, and the spiritual reality of the moral tendency of this world; It is to this that we ought to direct all our efforts, and not to the false problems which the world raises, or to an unfortunate application of an “order of God”  which has become abstract… Thus it is always by placing himself at this point of contact that the Christian can be truly “present” in the world, and can carry on effective social or political work, by the grace of God.

~ from The Presence of the Kingdom