My thinking about ethics, good works and social responsibility has led me to read The Presence of the Kingdom by Jacques Ellul (1912-1994). Ellul was a committed Christian (a theologian, pastor and author) who was deeply influenced by Marx; but who found both contemporary Christianity as expressed by the church and Marxism to be insufficient guides for living as a Christian in a "suicidal world." He writes from the perspective of one who lived through the Nazi scourge as part of the French resistance, and from his observations of post-war reconstruction (he'd thought that the devastation of war would allow for the construction of a new civilization and was stunned by how quickly the pre-war status quo was resumed). I may be late to this party (it was first published in 1948), but it is a breathtaking study of the tension of the Christian's position in the world, which is to be "salt, light and sheep" (especially since everyone in the world is more interested in being a "wolf").
He wrote that what Jesus Christ calls "hypocrisy" is to give up an attempt to live out one's religion in the world. To be "salt, light and sheep" are not mere metaphors (the kind of abstraction that he felt rendered the church impotent in the world), but rather a stark reality: Christians are to meet the concrete, discrete situations of daily life in the world as "light" ~ giving meaning and direction to history (all history is God's history); "salt" ~ to be visible signs of the new covenant in that our life and words should manifest the covenant so the world can see what that means; and to be "sheep in the midst of wolves" ~ another kind of sign of the reality of God's action ~ we cannot be a purifying sacrifice, but we have a share in the same kind of sacrificial living witness.
The church fails to do this when (1) we attempt to "moralize" the actions of the world by trying to create institutions that are not "too shocking for the Christian conscience," and thus live continuously "on the bridge" between the world and the Kingdom of God; and (2) when we try to decrease our sin by increasing our virtues (the idea that we can "improve" the world).
We become caught between two necessities: it is impossible for us to make the world less sinful; and it is impossible for us to accept it as it is. An oversimplification of Ellul's thoughts about how to live in this tension, is that through the Holy Spirit God uses material means by using human beings as instruments:
"...it is this human instrument that our churches lack; that is why, when the gospel is preached its message no longer reaches the world. The channel through which the gospel should reach the world - and does not - ought to be the 'layman' living the tension...as the point of contact between the ideologies of the world in which he lives and theology - between economic realities and the forgiveness of Jesus Christ for those realities..."Just as the Cross placed Jesus at the "point of contact" between the economic realities of the world and the forgiveness of Christ for that reality, every Christian is called to be a "point of contact" by taking up positions that place him- or herself between two forces, two"currents": the will of the world and the will of God.
