Jacques Ellul - Church Quotes

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Once the church is ready to associate with instituted power it is obliged to associate with all and sundry forms of the state. The scandal is that each time the church seeks to justify both its adaptation and the existing power. It continues to legitimize the state and to be an instrument of its propaganda.

Jacques Ellul
The church in the spiritual and theological sense always contains a current that is hostile to political power, that is revolutionary and anarchical. But this is not the current that society as a whole, and especially the political authorities, recognize as the church. If these many movements have failed, it is primarily because of their intrinsic nature. Spiritual currents cannot last. When they attach political power, this power attacks them in return and proclaims that the true church is that which is in alliance with it.

Jacques Ellul
It is frightening to see how easily the church accepts all this. Hardly had it achieved peace before it itself began to persecute. … It commenced the persecution of heretics, and primarily, of course, those who contested the truth and validity of this alliance of empire and church.

Jacques Ellul
Certainly everywhere in the church there are examples of the rich who give up all things, who become poor for God. They did exist. But in doing this, they either chose the hermit life and withdrew from the life of the church, or they were canonized and held up as miraculous instances of sanctity, that is, they were excluded from the concrete life of the church, set outside the church as saints whom, of course, there was no question of ordinary people ever imitating.

Jacques Ellul
The church buys the possibility of maintaining itself sat the price of concessions. … In so doing it disavows its martyrs. [Martyrs] want to obey God, not men. But the church trades its support for advantages, honors, titles and money. It comes under the rule of mammon. Finally, it lets itself be bought so as to gain facilities for its celebrations, its evangelism, its good works, its preaching of the good Word. But Satan rejoices at all this, for as this gospel is not based on the cornerstone, on Jesus Christ, but on the power of the world thanks to which it is propagated.

Jacques Ellul
Jesus told his disciples they were a little flock. All his comparisons tend to show that the disciples will necessarily be small in number and weak: the leaven in the dough, the salt in the soup, the sheep among wolves, and many other metaphors. Jesus does not seem to have had a vision of a triumphant and triumphal church encircling the globe. He always depicts for us a secret force that modifies things from within.

Jacques Ellul
The church … is always at the service of the political power that is either in place or in course of being installed. It goes on to serve the Holy Roman Empire but also the kings of France who split off from it. It will bless all the monarchs who seize power in ways that are tragic, tempestuous, and often bloody and unjust.. It legitimizes everything. This is logical once it associates itself with the existing power.

Jacques Ellul
Very quickly the church found intolerable and inapplicable features in what Jesus Christ demanded and proclaimed. Let us simply take two themes. First, he tells us to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. But how can anyone take this impossibility seriously? … Again, Jesus says, Go, sell all your goods, give them to the poor, and then come and follow me. How are we to take this? …

Jacques Ellul
The gospel and the first church were never hostile to women nor treated them as minors. … When Christianity became a power or authority, this worked against women. A strange perversion, yet fully understandable when we allow that women represent precisely the most innovative elements in Christianity: grace, love, charity, a concern for living creatures, nonviolence, an interest in little things, the hope of new beginnings—the very elements that Christianity was setting aside in favor of glory and success.

Jacques Ellul
The combination of Christian truth and political power led to the creation of the complex that we know so well. … The emperor endows the church handsomely, helps it in all that it does, aids it in its mission. The church supports the emperor's legitimacy and assures him that he is God's representative on earth.

Jacques Ellul
We have to admit that there is an immeasurable distance between all that we read in the Bible and the practice of the Church and of Christians.

Jacques Ellul