A New Reading of Jacques Ellul. Jacob Marques Rollison
signification, at this juncture, his theology of hope as presence leads to a revised and restricted ethic based on Kierkegaard’s communicative incognito. In the new situation, the church will often refuse to speak its faith, but can still indirectly communicate its hope. Humiliation offers a linguistic approach focusing on speech as the fragile and non-violent expression of truth and the best hope for human community, rehabilitating language against structuralist emphases on text or image, critiques of language as violent, and hope for community outside of language. Treating Ellul’s Autopsy of Revolution (1969) and Apocalypse (1975), I draw out Ellul’s critique of Marx and Hegel as inscribing history within a dialectical progression, mechanizing it. This elucidates why Apocalypse constitutes a dramatic shift: Ellul reads Revelation as concerning the work of the eternal in history, but reads Marxist time into the biblical account, explicitly viewing Jesus Christ as the ‘synthesis’ of the work of God and human history. This departure from his earlier view of presence grounds the certainty of his belief in universal salvation.
I conclude by summarizing what this approach offers ethically to our current communicative situation, before reflecting on theological communication in dialogue with 1 Corinthians. Throughout, citations from French texts are my translation unless otherwise noted.
Notes
1.
The epigraph is from Brian Brock and Bernd Wannenwetsch, The Malady of the Christian Body: A Theological Exposition of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, vol. I (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016), 33.
2.
This and the following citations in this paragraph come from Jonathan Turley, “Viewpoint: In this impeachment, people only heard what they wanted to,” BBC News, 6 February 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51389540?fbclid=IwAR18DUe1l1aFAOg7 u-r0oGl4NUal-DVqRK6n2DR9IjvUdmQh1BLD8ZDddtY (accessed 7 Feb 2020).
3.
Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Vol. I, A–E, ed. and trans. Hong and Hong (London: Indiana University Press, 1967), 306; cited in Écoute, 34.
4.
Coakley made this remark during the presentation of Sarah Coakley, “Redeeming human nature according to John of the Cross: an early modern confrontation with ‘darkness,’” paper presented at Redeeming the Human conference of the Society for the Study of Theology, Durham University, 4–6 April, 2016.
5.
Michèle Le Dœuff, “Equality and Prophecy” (paper presented at the Power of the Word International Conference V—The Prophetic Word: Poetry, Philosophy and Theology in Conversation, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, September 13–16, 2017).
6.
The constitution of these thinkers as a “generation,” the distinction between these terms, and the “golden age” remark are elaborated in Why, discussed in chapter 4. Following Angermuller, I use “structuralism” to denote these thinkers as they were received in France in the sixties and seventies. The reader unfamiliar with this thought may opt to read chapter 4 before the rest of this book.
7.
Here is a short list of some anglophone academic theologians, with at least one publication interacting in one way or another with these French thinkers: David Brown, Continental Philosophy and Modern Theology: An Engagement (London: Blackwell, 1987, Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2012); “Durham Cathedral as Theology” (paper presented at Redeeming the Human conference of the Society for the Study of Theology, Durham University, April 4–6, 2016); Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 2008), and Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, Studies in Literature and Religion (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996, 2000); Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, coll. Contemporary Challenges in Theology, 1998); John Milbank, with Slavoj Žižek and Creston Davis, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Short Circuits (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009); with Slavoj Žižek and Creston Davis, Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2010); Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjević, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012); Paul S. Fiddes, “The Story and the Stories: Revelation and the Challenge of Postmodern Culture,” in Paul S. Fiddes, ed., Faith in the Centre: Christianity and Culture. (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, with Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2001), 75–96; Brian Brock, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2010); Miroslav Volf and William H. Katerberg, The Future of Hope: Christian Tradition Amid Modernity and Postmodernity (Grand Rapids; Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004); Kathryn Tanner, “Tradition and Theological Judgment in the Light of Postmodern Cultural Criticism,” in Tradition and Tradition Theories: An International Discussion, ed. Siegfried Wiedenhofer (LIT Verlag, 2006); David Toole, “Of Lingering Eyes and Talking Things: Adorno and Deleuze on Philosophy Since Auschwitz,” Philosophy Today 37, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 227–246; Mary McClintock Fulkerson, “‘They Will Know We Are Christian by Our Regulated Improvisation’: A Postmodern Take on Ecclesial Identity,” in The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 265–79; with Susan J. Dunlap, ed. Graham Ward, “Michel Foucault (1926–1984): Introduction,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, Blackwell Readings in Modern Theology (Oxford/Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 116–23; Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (London: Routledge, 2007); Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Jonathan Tran, Foucault and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2011); James K.A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000, 2012); Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996).
8.
Mary McClintock Fulkerson, “Ethnography in Theology: A Work in Process,” in Lived Theology: New Perspectives on Method, Style, and Pedagogy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 116.
9.
Ibid, 123.
10.
Ibid, 129.
11.
This statement highlights what seems to me to be a general characteristic of the Lived Theology project: the idea of ‘lived theology’ seems both to presuppose and necessitate a separation between theological discourse as a mode of intellectual reflection on the one hand, and daily life on the other. Without this separation, the project’s aim would be more easily assimilable to theological ethics.
12.
On ‘structuralist,’ see note 6 above.
13.
“I Am a Fighting Atheist: Interview with Slavoj Žižek,” conducted by Doug Henwood, Introduction by Charlie Bertsch, in Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, no. 59 (2002), https://bad.eserver.org/issues/2002/59/zizek. For examples of Žižek’s writings on Christianity, see Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Short Circuits (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? (London: Verso, 2000, 2001); see also The Metastases of Enjoyment, Radical Thinkers (London: Verso, 1994, 2005), 38–51. Some arguments in this section are treated in Jacob Rollison, Revolution of Necessity: Language, Technique, and Freedom in the Writings of Jacques Ellul and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Atropos Press, 2016).
14.
Žižek, The