Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is โno exitโ; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years . In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities.
Jacques EllulChristians should be troublemakers, creators of uncertainty, agents of a dimension incompatible with society.
Jacques EllulNo matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.
Jacques EllulFor the word is dialectical in itself and at the same time is integrated into the whole of existence. By this I mean that the word is intended to be lived.
Jacques EllulGod is always present, always available. At whatever moment in which one turns to him the prayer is received, is heard, is authenticated, for it is God who gives our prayer its value and its character, not our interior dispositions, not our fervor, not our lucidity. The prayer which is pronounced for God and accepted by him becomes, by that very fact, a true prayer.
Jacques EllulWe are not to make the Torah into God Himself, nor the Bible into a "paper pope." The Bible is only the result of the Word of God. We can experience the return of the Word of God in the here and now, the perpetual return of the actual, living, indisputable Word of God that makes possible the act of witnessing, but we should never think of the Bible as any sort of talisman or oracle constantly at our disposal that we need only open and read to be in relation to the Word of God and God Himself.
Jacques Ellul