A New Reading of Jacques Ellul. Jacob Marques Rollison
is a hermeneutical key, not the hermeneutical key; on the many ‘keys’ proposed for reading Ellul, see Resisting, 60–62.
66.
Conversations, 22, cited in Resisting, 52. Goddard (Resisting, 31, 52–53) dates the formation of this plan to 1942–43, but notes the possibility of its conception as early as 1936.
67.
Rognon’s focus on dialogue is not far off, nor is Gill’s focus on the Word of God in Ellul’s ethics; both are inextricably linked to presence. (See Pensée, and David Gill, The Word of God in the Ethics of Jacques Ellul (Metuchen, NJ, and London: The American Theological Library Association and The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1984).) Goddard’s treatment in Resisting comes the closest to presence: his treatment of Ellul’s ethics opens with the statement “For Ellul, the Christian life is to be understood primarily as a form of presence in the fallen world. The character of this presence can be summed up in the phrase ‘in this world, not of it.’” (Resisting, 102.) For Goddard, the relationship between God and the world drives Ellul’s thought, with rupture and communion characterizing this relationship. I think he is right; my treatment of presence aims to specify this relationship. Particularly, I show that this relationship can be illuminated by Ellul’s reading of Kierkegaard and Ecclesiastes together, leaving a modified version of Kierkegaard’s search for the “contemporaneity of Christ” as a constitutive element of Ellul’s view of God’s presence in the present time.
A few articles take up presence as a driving theme. Stephanie Bennett rightly emphasizes the important relation between time and space. (Stephanie Bennett, “The Presence of the Kingdom Online: Exploring the Virtual Church in Light of Jacques Ellul’s Techno-Religious Discourse,” paper presented at Jacques Ellul Centenary Conference, Wheaton, IL, July 9, 2012.) Matthieu Gervais rightly notes that for Ellul it is a question of “thinking eternity and acting in the present” (though I clarify what Ellul means by eternity), and above all that Ellul’s commentary on Ecclesiastes treats this theme; I pursue this in greater depth. Less apt is Gervais’s view of Ellul’s time as a “line of time” punctuated with variable events. (Matthieu Gervais, “Penser l’éternité et agir au présent: l’histoire dans le mouvement paysan et dans la pensée de Jacques Ellul,” in Comment peut-on (encore) être Ellulien au XXIème siècle? Actes du colloque du 7, 8, et 9 Juin 2012 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2014), 424–443.) A recent volume, Jacques Ellul, une théologie au present, takes up the question of presence directly. Proceeding from an October 2014 conference in Geneva, the five authors offer various approaches to presence. In this volume, Christophe Chalamet’s critical engagement with Ellul raises questions of presence seriously and helpfully, though he departs significantly from Ellul by emphasizing eucharistic presence. (Christophe Chalamet, “L’espérance comme provocation et comme invocation,” in Jacques Ellul, une théologie au présent (Le mont sur-Lausanne: Éditions Ouverture, 2016), 53–73.) Daniel Cérézuelle focuses on the element of incarnation, a crucial ingredient of Ellul’s presence. (Daniel Cérézuelle, “De l’éxigence d’incarnation à la critique de la technique,” in Ibid., 74–94.) I develop a notion of presence that goes beyond these treatments, carrying their questions further and including some of them.
68.
T.F. Torrance sees the eucharist-focused conception of presence as a Lutheran adaptation of the “Patristic doctrine of the communication idiomatum” and conceptions of presence derived from Aristotle by Occamist thinkers. Torrance views this conception as creating an ultimately problematic separation of space from time, and sees it at the root of many contemporary theological problems. Cf. Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1969, 1997), esp. 32–40. Indeed, while doing so remains to be developed in a future endeavor, setting my reading of Ellul’s ethical approach to space and time against Torrance’s account might qualify Ellul’s approach as a distinctively Reformed ethics of space time. However, this would be far from a clean integration of the two theological thinkers; Torrance’s emphasis on scientific method and an ontological order of creation would certainly give Ellul pause. This critique is not dissimilar from that expressed in Philip G. Ziegler, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), esp. 114–120.
69.
Cf. Apocalypse, 20.
70.
See Sources.
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