1700 years out....

 Jacques Ellul questions the morality of human governmental structures, including government and politics of the church. Ellul self identifies as a Christian Anarchist, one who opposes authority without resorting to violence

In The Subversion of Christianity Ellul describes the hijacking of Christianity by politics and implicates the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine and the anxiety over a growing church filled with non literate individuals, unschooled in Jewish history and tradition, as two factors that lead to the development of rules and the consolidation authority and power in the hands of a few elites. The Biblical story of God’s relationship to his people provides some evidence to support these ideas. 

The Bible is full of stories about human authority gone wrong and God’s attempts to fix it either by direct intervention (divine wrath, divine pleading, Jesus) or by intervention of his emissaries (AKA the Prophets, enemies, etc.).  It also appears that God may have tried to re-establish a direct relationship with his people when he called them out of  Egypt, one in which his presence walked with them as it had walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But the people rejected the offer of God and asked for a human king. After centuries of kingship, exile, and priestly authority, Jesus brings the presence of God back to the people and walks with and amongst them and in opposition to the unjust authority of religion. When he leaves he puts the very presence of God in the hearts of human beings in the form of the Holy Spirit.

free to fly and go!!!by faith alone in christ alone

 Like Barth and Brunner before him, Jacques Ellul makes a distinction between the true faith and a institutionalized, world-encrusted religion. In "The Subversion of Christianity," Ellul condemns the Christian religion as a faith subverted by the world. He decries the triumph of philosophy. Theologians readily begin with the biblical witness or revelation but then quickly leave it behind. In a desire to reach the truth, they develop moral codes, philosophical systems, and metaphysical constructs. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer questioned the relevance and morality of the Western form of Christianity in Letters and Papers from Prison.

Bonhoeffer wondered if religion in its present form was in the way of people experiencing and communing with God, whether religion took God out of the center of the community and placed him in a temple or in heaven, somewhere far away from humans. Bonhoeffer wanted to reverse the Exile of God and put him squarely back into the life of the people.

Peter Rollins calls his theological project Pyro-theology.  Pyro-theology calls us to bring ourselves and all that we love into the center of the “white-hot fire that burns up all we believe about ourselves, our gods and our universe” (http://peterrollins.net/?p=2390).  Rollins calls us to a life of questioning religious doctrines and the structure of the church steeped in a modernist worldview. 

He calls us to wrestle with God. Rollins has a parable in The Orthodox Heretic by the same name that is similar in theme to The Adjustment Bureau, God rewards the one who wrestles with him, the one who knows his character and the character of love, rather than the one who is merely obedient.

The work of Rollins, Bonhoeffer, and Ellul, challenges us to break through the prison walls of Western theological structures and to embrace the God at the center of our village.