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.
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