Description: Man's freedom--God's omnipotence: how can they be reconciled? That question is central to this penetrating study of political action and the prophetic function. Ellul's answer to that question, though based on events recorded in the Second Book of Kings, is immediately relevant to contemporary issues and to the church today. Emerging from these reflections is an eloquent testimony to the immense love of God--"which not only creates and saves, but which also in its incomprehensible humility wants to associate man with its work."
Brief description: Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), a French sociologist and lay theologian, was Professor Emeritus of Law and of the History and Sociology of Institutions at the University of Bordeaux. He wrote more than forty books, including The Technological Society, The Humiliation of the Word, and The Technological Bluff.
Review Quotes: ""Denouncing in this book the contemporary triad of Babel, Dionysius, and Prometheus, standing in sharp opposition to the prevalent tendency of many a theologian for whom the ultimate theological problem is a political one, Ellul agrees that all our political illusions and all our social visions and their compromising revisions are merely vain attempts to conceal the fact that the real political problem is a theological one. And, both bedazzled by the audacity of his argument and stung by the mordancy of his style, the reader is finally disarmed by the simplicity of Ellul's faith."" --Gabriel Vahanian