Women are the most spectacular instance of this. After a period of independence that came with the spread of Christianity, they were relegated to a l… - Jacques Ellul

Whereas the good news had first been published for its own sake with no concern for success, now ineluctably success brought, as always, a desire for it. … They were not aware of what was happening, namely, that society was inverting Christianity instead of being subverted by it.

I believe that the biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power. It incites to "counterpower," to "positive" criticism, to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally, if we may use a modern term, to a kind of "anarchism" (so long as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the nineteenth century).

Certainly everywhere in the church there are examples of the rich who give up all things, who become poor for God. They did exist. But in doing this, they either chose the hermit life and withdrew from the life of the church, or they were canonized and held up as miraculous instances of sanctity, that is, they were excluded from the concrete life of the church, set outside the church as “saints” whom, of course, there was no question of ordinary people ever imitating.