A humble enterprise

Ellul's caution in the conclusion to The Presence of the Kingdom:

Day after day the wind blows away the pages of our calendars, our newspapers, and our political regimes, and we glide along the stream of time without a judgement, carried about by "all winds of doctrine" on the current of history, which is always slipping into a perpetual past.  Now we ought to react vigorously against this slackness--this tendency to drift.  If we are to live in this world we need to know it far more profoundly; we need to rediscover the meaning of events, and the spiritual framework which our contemporaries have lost.  This will be a difficult enterprise, for it is new and humble.  But "all things are ours," that is, for us, as Christians, and we are able to undertake this new work.  

[...]

In so doing, we need to avoid...adopting, purely and simply, one of the attitudes of the world, that which seems to be most in harmony with the Christian ideal, and then becoming Communist, Liberal, Pacifist, Personalist, and so on, according to one's taste and sentiment, which we then justify by appealing to some Christian truth.  But to do this, under the pretext of being "in the world," actually means belonging to the world.  Christians who do this are no longer acting as "leaven" in the world--they have capitulated to it.  They are simply agreeing with the world, walking in the same way, adopting its method, and, in spite of appearances, simply fostering the devil's work in the world.

-Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom, 2nd ed. (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishing, 1989), pp. 114-119.