Jacques Ellul was a French theologian and political activist. The following excerpts are from his book The Presence of the Kingdom, Chapter Two “Revolutionary Christianity”. I think it is one of the best descriptions of the practical point of early Christian expectations of a soon-to-come end of the world. Regard yourself as primarily a citizen of a different world, a perfectly just kingdom of God. Your task is to try to be as much as possible a representative of divine Rightness in a present world often ruled by forces that are not right.
From Jacques Ellul:
The first condition [for being a Christian] is a well-known truth, but its reality is not sufficiently understood:
The Christian belongs to two Cities. He is in the world, and he has a social life. He is the citizen of a nation; he has a place in a family; he has a situation, and must work to earn money; the setting of his life is the same as that of other men; he lives with them; he shares with them the same nature and the same conditions. All that he, does in this world, he ought to do seriously, because he is bound up with the life of other people, and must not neglect what are called ‘duties,’ since he is a man like everyone else. On the other hand, he cannot wholly belong to this world…
The Christian… is the citizen of another Kingdom, and it is thence that he derives his way of thinking, judging, and feeling. His heart and his thought are elsewhere… He may be in this world, it is true, but all his ‘ties’ are elsewhere… When we speak of ‘this world,’ we are referring to concrete realities: the nation, the State, the family, work… To all this the Christian cannot swear an unconditional loyalty. His first duty is to be faithful to his Lord.
Now the two Cities to which he belongs can never coincide, and… so long as he is upon earth he cannot possibly renounce the one or the other; on the other hand, he cannot be satisfied with the fundamental dualism in which he is involved… Thus he is obliged to accept this tension, this opposition, and the results from the acceptance of this inner tension — because he knows that the two orders can never be equated with one another, that the opposition between this world and the Kingdom of God is a total one.
But it is an intolerable situation, which causes acute suffering, and it is not a satisfying statement. The Christian can never regard himself as being on the winning side… Bound up with the lives of other men… he cannot accept the view that they will always remain in their anguish and their disorder, victims of tyranny and overwork, buoyed up only by a hope which seems unfounded. Thus he must plunge into social and political problems in order to have an influence on the world, not in the hope of making it a paradise, but simply in order to make it tolerable, not in order to diminish the opposition between this world and the Kingdom of God, but simply in order to modify the opposition between the disorder of this world and the order… that God wills for it…
The Christian is essentially a man who lives in expectations This expectation is directed towards the return of the Lord which accompanies the end of time, the judgment, and proclaims the Kingdom of God. Thus one who knows that he has been saved by Christ is not a man jealously and timidly attached to a past… but he is a man of the future, not of a temporal and logical future, but of the eschaton, [the end of the world] of the coming break with this present world.
Thus he looks forward to this moment, and for him all facts acquire their value in the light of the coming Kingdom of God, in the light of the judgment, and the victory of God. The actual events of our world only acquire their value in the light of the coming Kingdom of God. It is the imminence of the Return of Christ which gives genuine seriousness to each actual event, and, indeed, it is through this fact that each actual event acquires its true content.
Now in this matter the Christian… by his action and by his thought [must] bring this ‘coming event’ into the life of this present world. He has to carry into the actual world of the present day elements which belong to the eschaton…
This then is the revolutionary situation: to be revolutionary is to judge the world by its present state, by actual facts, in the name of a truth which does not yet exist (but which is coming) – and it is to do so, because we believe this truth to be more genuine and more real than the reality which surrounds us. Consequently it means bringing the future into the present as an explosive force. It means believing that future events are more important and truer than present events…
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