Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 70
“The church in the spiritual and theological sense always contains a current that is hostile to political power, that is revolutionary and anarchical. But this is not the current that society as a whole, and especially the political authorities, recognize as the church. If these many movements have failed, it is primarily because of their intrinsic nature. Spiritual currents cannot last. When they attach political power, this power attacks them in return and proclaims that the true church is that which is in alliance with it.”
Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 132
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Jacques Ellul 125
French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarch… 1912–1994Related quotes
                                        
                                        Source: Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938), Ch. 1 "Anarchism: Its Aims and Purposes" 
Context: Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our times, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the present capitalistic economic order Anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon co-operative labour, which would have as its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society, and would no longer have in view the special interest of privileged minorities within the social union.
In place of the present state organisation with their lifeless machinery of political and bureaucratic institutions Anarchists desire a federation of free communities which shall be bound to one another by their common economic and social interest and shall arrange their affairs by mutual agreement and free contract.
                                    
                                
                                    “We are told by the word of the Gospel that in this His fold there are two swords—a spiritual, namely, and a temporal. […] Both swords, the spiritual and the material, therefore, are in the power of the Church; the one, indeed, to be wielded for the Church, the other by the Church; the one by the hand of the priest, the other by the hand of kings and knights, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.”
                                
                                
                                
                                
                                    
                                    In hac ejusque potestate duos esse gladios, spiritualem videlicet et temporalem, evangelicis dictis instruimur. […] Uterque ergo est in potestate ecclesiae, spiritualis scilicet gladius et materialis. Sed is quidem pro ecclesia, ille vero ab ecclesia exercendus, ille sacerdotis, is manu regum et militum, sed ad nutum et patientiam sacerdotis.
                                
                            
Unam sanctam (1302)
Source: 1970s-1980s, The Limits Of Organization (1974), Chapter 1, Rationality: Individual And Social, p. 26
Source: Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
                                        
                                        From the 2013 speech at the Harvard India Conference conducted by Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School of Government at Boston, USA. 
 Great Andhra, 2013. http://www.greatandhra.com/viewnews.php?id=44770&cat=10&scat=25 (retrieved Apr. 29, 2013) 
Politics