Embracing contradictions

This month for the theology reading group we are looking at The Presence of the Kingdom by Jacques Ellul.
I was keen to read an Ellul book because of interest stimulated by a devotional book, that springboards off Ellul, that had a big influence on me. [The book is written by Charles Ringma who hosts the theology reading group.].

Many, including Ellul himself, consider this is the first Ellul book that people should read.
The second edition has a very helpful introduction by Daniel Clendenin.
He states ``Perhaps the single most important factor for Ellul interpretation is an understanding of his passionate adherence to dialectic".
Ellul states ``dialectic is a procedure that does not exclude contraries, but includes them.''
Here Ellul's approach has similarities to that of two large influences on his thinking: Karl Marx in sociology and Karl Barth in theology.
Ellul states that in the Bible, ``we constantly see two contradictory, apparently irreconcilable things affirmed, and we are told that they always meet to wind up in a new situation.'' Concrete and important examples include the following:

• God is beyond time and history. But he enters both through the incarnation of Jesus.
• We live in the ``Now but Not Yet'' of the Kingdom.
• Salvation is by grace alone but cannot be divorced from works.

There are also many others in the teachings of Jesus, such as ``the first will be last; the last will be first.''

Ellul presents a dialectic of social reality, where tension exists in five ways:

• ideology versus reality
• action and consequences
• the whole and the parts    [cf. emergence!]
• social and spiritual
• radical ambivalence of action

Sociology and theology present a critical counterpoint (dialogue partner) for one another.
Here there are certain parallels to John Stott's concept of  ``double listening.''