Ellul begins with a contradiction that he considers radical. How could the texts of the Law, the prophets, Jesus, and Paul have given rise to a civilization whose institutions, values, and practices are, in his view, almost entirely opposed to them? It is not enough to separate pure doctrine from unfortunate applications. Biblical revelation itself makes practice decisive: in the parable of the house, hearing without doing is building on sand. Paul does not cancel this principle by proclaiming salvation through grace, since received faith is meant to produce works. The historical conduct of Christians is therefore an internal problem for their witness, not merely an external misunderstanding.

Ellul takes accusations against the churches seriously while rejecting historical caricatures that make them indiscriminately responsible for every Western evil. The existence of Francis of Assisi, Las Casas, the Synod of Barmen, or hidden individual faith does not erase the dominant tendency. Conversely, recent support for democracy, socialism, trade unions, or altered sexual norms does not prove that the contradiction has been overcome. For Ellul, a church that successively embraces each age’s victorious values continues the same pattern of assimilation, even when its current positions reverse those it held yesterday.

The word “Christianity” already signals the mutation. Its “ism” turns a living word and a singular history into an exploitable doctrine, much as the thought of Marx or Kierkegaard became ideology among their successors. Ellul sometimes uses X to designate revelation centered on Jesus Christ before its capture by a system. In his account, this revelation is subversive toward ordinary powers: money raised into a master, political authority made absolute, religion treated as a separate sacred domain, and morality understood as humanity’s sovereign power to determine good and evil.

This last opposition is crucial. Ellul reads neither biblical commandments nor Paul’s exhortations as an autonomous moral code. The knowledge of good and evil in Genesis supports his claim that human beings usurp God’s place when they construct a universal system by which to judge and justify themselves. Biblical ethics would instead be concrete, risky, responsible obedience, without the security supplied by an impersonal rule. Likewise, the kingdom that is not of this world validates no earthly kingdom, and freedom through the Spirit cannot be reduced either to individual independence or to institutional order.

The initial structure of subversion now becomes visible. A minority proclamation, bordering on anarchism in the non-doctrinal sense that it refuses to sanctify power, threatens the social order. Society absorbs it, bringing Roman law, Greek philosophical categories, political techniques, and elite interests with it. Theology converts biblical narratives into coherent systems; wealth donated to the church becomes a means supposedly sanctified by its ends; mass conversion replaces the small community with a population requiring supervision. Ellul does not primarily describe a conspiracy by cynical leaders. He traces a sequence of plausible and often devout accommodations whose combined effect gradually reverses the word they claim to serve.

The first extended case is the movement from biblical desacralization to a new production of the sacred. According to Ellul, the Hebrew Bible radically separates Creator from creation, attacks divinities lodged within things, and forbids representations of God. The world is thereby emptied of mysterious resident powers; the word, not the visible image, becomes the link with God. Holiness means separation and otherness, not the presence of a sacred force available for human use. The earliest Christians continue this movement so forcefully that Romans regard them as atheists and destroyers of religion rather than adherents of one additional cult.

Yet the social need for sacred places, objects, and intermediaries returns. Rural beliefs are absorbed, local divinities are associated with saints, buildings receive special consecration, and communion acquires a sacral materiality. Ellul interprets the doctrine of the real presence, the efficacy attributed to sacraments, and the priest’s specialized function as stages in the reconstruction of religion. As a positive representative of the sacred appears, its negative counterpart takes shape in the sorcerer and in the devil’s earthly power. Even Protestantism, born from a vigorous desacralization of medieval religion, is not immune to comparable processes.

The same logic transforms faith into morality. Grace, pardon, and freedom require a maturity that is difficult to sustain in a large community. Mass conversion therefore calls forth rules, supervision, and above all obedience. Ellul recognizes that moralization also answers concrete crises. Confronted by destructive conduct in the Roman world and by later periods of insecurity, the church seeks to protect the weak and stabilize common life. But an emergency response becomes a permanent definition of Christianity. A living relationship with God is replaced by a code that classifies, constrains, and reassures.

His discussion of women illustrates this displacement. Ellul emphasizes their place in the resurrection narratives and in the earliest communities, where they pray, prophesy, evangelize, and exercise responsibility. He rereads Pauline passages commonly used to establish male domination alongside their neglected counterparts, especially the demand that a husband give himself for his wife. He argues that when the church favors law, control, and values associated with power, it selects texts that neutralize women. The section also contains broad claims about masculine and feminine values, which he presents as historical tendencies rather than descriptions of every man or woman.

The chapter on Islam then proposes a series of influences between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Ellul attributes to contact and rivalry with Muslim societies a strengthening of canon law, the union of religious and political authority, holy war, certain forms of mysticism, and a fatalistic understanding of divine omnipotence. He also links religious expansion with colonization. These are his historical theses, offered schematically and sometimes acknowledged to require a detailed study he does not provide. Their role in his argument is specific: Christianity responds to a competing power by entering its field, borrowing its forms, and eventually presenting those borrowings as natural consequences of its own revelation.

Political perversion is the most fully developed case. Ellul argues that the Bible, particularly the New Testament, refuses to confer sacred value on political power. He disputes readings that portray Jesus as a national or social revolutionary whose project the evangelists later spiritualized. The few episodes cited, including the two swords and the expulsion of the merchants, do not establish a strategy of revolt. Jesus’ refusal of domination, his unwillingness to defend his kingdom by force, and the disciples’ survival after his death lead Ellul toward a position he calls antipolitical, though he does not identify it with modern anarchist doctrines.

The Constantinian turn gives this opposition its decisive historical form. After Constantine’s victory, the church receives wealth, influence, and imperial support; in return, it gives the ruler religious legitimacy. Ellul interprets the exchange as the church’s acceptance of the temptation Jesus refused when offered the kingdoms of the world. The mechanism outlives particular regimes. Monarchical, nationalist, National Socialist, communist, or socialist power can all receive adapted theological justification. The scandal is not merely believers’ opportunism. It is the recurring claim that established power is good, joined to the church’s attempt to obtain security, money, or freedom of operation from it.

The alliance also changes the church internally. Bishops become administrators and civic protectors; the institution imitates the state’s law, hierarchy, and organization. Resistance does occur, as with refractory priests, Barmen, or Polish Catholic opposition to communism, but it is often conditioned by the regime’s hostility to the church. Once accommodation becomes possible, resistance may subside. Yet for Ellul the gospel introduces a break into every established order. Its political consequence is neither religious government nor withdrawal, but action to make the world livable without identifying any provisional achievement with the kingdom of God.

The chapter on nihilism develops a broader paradox. Christian desacralization made nature available for study and use; once faith in creation disappears, that availability can become limitless exploitation. Likewise, when secularization removes grace, pardon, resurrection, and promise while preserving isolated remnants such as guilt, negation of inherited values, or the demand for absolutes, it can produce contempt, despair, and loss of meaning. Ellul does not make Christianity the sole cause of modern nihilism. His claim is that revelation broken into separate elements generates effects opposed to its fundamental antinihilism.

The heart of the problem is finally anthropological and theological. Gratuitous grace offends the desire to earn and possess righteousness; nonpower contradicts the will to dominate; freedom requires choice without the shelter of a rulebook; hope commands action without promising that history will permanently establish peace or equality. Ellul then names the “dominions and powers” that capture these gifts: Mammon imposes exchange upon grace, the state absorbs freedom, accusation contradicts pardon, and truth becomes a system or an idol. He explicitly presents this spiritual explanation as a matter of faith. It supplements rather than replaces the social, political, and intellectual mechanisms already described.

The final movement prevents the indictment from becoming a total condemnation of the church. Ellul insists that historical accusations must be heard, their core of truth identified, and their exaggerations rejected. He refuses both an apologetic that invokes a few saints to evade the dominant pattern and propaganda that reduces centuries of Christianity to coercion, ignorance, or oppression. This double requirement preserves the most painful question: if Christ remains with his people and the Spirit is the Spirit of truth, freedom, and love, how could the inversion have become so extensive?

His answer does not rest on the institution’s natural goodness or sociological immortality. The church can err, harden, and make the Word unrecognizable. It persists because God, within the faith Ellul sets forth, remains faithful to his promise and limits the powers of destruction, just as death in the biblical texts possesses real but bounded power. Such faithfulness does not erase history. It makes possible the unpredictable reappearance, from within a compromised institution, of a word no organization owns.

Ellul finds signs of this reappearance in Francis of Assisi, Celestine V, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Luther, Müntzer, Las Casas, Kierkegaard, Kagawa, and Karl Barth. He also points to popular awakenings, the Quakers, Wesley, some Latin American theologies of liberation, Solidarity in Poland, Soviet Baptists, and Christian intellectuals in the USSR. These examples do not share one doctrine or institutional form. What connects them is their response to a spiritual and political crisis through renewed biblical commitment, often arising from the margins rather than the administrative head of the church.

The Word thus has a paradoxical property in Ellul’s argument. Once a group believes it can use the Word to guarantee a philosophy, regime, morality, collective identity, or its own justification, it turns to dust in its hands. Yet because it does not belong to those who exploit it, it can be spoken afresh and begin its disruptive work again. Ellul draws a severe conclusion about reform: legal and administrative improvements are insufficient. Organization and clericalization reproduce the transgression, while renewal frequently erupts through peripheral persons or groups and passes through conflict and severe testing.

The book’s force and limitation lie in this combination. Institutional history, sociology, exegesis, and spiritual interpretation are constantly connected, but they do not offer the same kind of evidence. Historical comparisons, especially those concerning Islam, must be distinguished from the biblical principles Ellul invokes and from his theological reading of the powers. The governing test nevertheless remains clear: each practice is to be compared not with an idealized church, but with the grace, freedom, nonpower, word, and responsibility that Ellul discerns in revelation. His final judgment remains open. Historical Christianity may struggle against Christ, but it never wins decisively; no established form therefore closes history or removes the need for renewed discernment.