It Is Inconceivable That The God Who

Enclosed Within His Artificial Creation, Man Finds That There Is “no Exit”; That He Cannot Pierce The Shell Of Technology Again To Find The Ancient Milieu To Which He Was Adapted For Hundreds Of Thousands Of Years . In Our Cities There Is No More Day Or Night Or Heat Or Cold. But There Is Overpopulation, Thralldom To Press And Television, Total Absence Of Purpose. All Men Are Constrained By Means External To Them To Ends Equally External. The Further The Technical Mechanism Develops That Allows Us To Escape Natural Necessity, The More We Are Subjected To Artificial Technical Necessities.

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).

We Are Not To Make The Torah Into God Himself, Nor The Bible Into A "paper Pope." The Bible Is Only The Result Of The Word Of God. We Can Experience The Return Of The Word Of God In The Here And Now, The Perpetual Return Of The Actual, Living, Indisputable Word Of God That Makes Possible The Act Of Witnessing, But We Should Never Think Of The Bible As Any Sort Of Talisman Or Oracle Constantly At Our Disposal That We Need Only Open And Read To Be In Relation To The Word Of God And God Himself.

And An Apprenticeship To Whatever Gadgetry Is Useful In A Technical World

Our Civilization Is First And Foremost A Civilization Of Means; In The Reality Of Modern Life, The Means, It Would Seem, Are More Important Than The Ends.