A New Reading of Jacques Ellul. Jacob Marques Rollison
community, by tradition, or by the body; in technical discourse, the word has only a systemic and contextual meaning that eschews the individual speaker or reduces words to the ravings of the merely individual, for example, to the discourse of the mad, which so fascinates many French intellectuals from Lacan to Foucault.[35]
And Hauerwas: “I was in seminary when I read The Presence of the Kingdom. I am sure I did not understand it then and I am not sure I ‘get it’ now, but I understood enough to see here Christian language was working.”[36]
Gilbert Vincent gives the only essay-length treatment of Ellul and Foucault.[37] Vincent notes both the labor involved in juxtaposing the two thinkers, and their overlap. Both transcend disciplines, employ “phenomenological” styles, and reject traditional philosophy, shared radical epistemological critiques, “engaged themselves in converging progressions, not hesitating to interrogate the proud self-confidence of the modern subject . . .”[38] Both “renounce the paradigm of the instrument, paradigm of the human grip on the world . . . to recognize a strongly disturbing novelty, that of technique.”[39] Both are anti-Cartesians, believing that technique can alter who we are. The unclassifiable nature of both is their strength.[40] Crucially, their respective “anti-humanisms” proceed from critiques of all “onto-theology,” decisively establishing broad commonality between Ellul’s thought and Foucault’s Nietzschean critiques. Vincent notes that Ellul’s Barthianism allowed him a “theological anti-humanism.”[41] For Vincent, studying Foucault adds a historical component to reading Ellul.[42] He importantly asks whether the critiques of both thinkers overwhelm subjective freedom altogether, and also notes that Ellul precedes Foucault with something similar to the latter’s “biopower.” Finally, he notes the analytic and prophetic force of Ellul: “we should admit his intellectual power of anticipation to be among the most remarkable.”[43]
Ellul—A “Religious Postmodernist”?
Though he ignores Ellul’s theology, Vincent establishes Ellul as closer to structuralist tradition than his readers may be wont to think. This book addresses Ellul’s theology, and it is precisely here that things become more interesting. Fasching, who does include Ellul’s theology (which he knows very well) dubs Ellul’s theology “post-Christian,” positioning Ellul and Lyotard on the same side of the barricade.[44] With a nod to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, Fasching focuses on the liberating force of decentered metanarratives, by which “Globalization created the postmodern city . . . The collapse of a metanarratives does not mean they disappear but that they function differently.”[45] Fasching traces this collapse to Nietzsche, suggesting that “the social sciences did not just report the death of God, they provided the knife with which God was murdered. In such an apocalyptic world, Nietzsche argued, norms would have to be replaced by the will to power and the transvaluation of all values . . .”[46]
For Fasching, “Ellul’s work can be understood as an exercise in postmodern, post-Christian theology.”[47] Viewing The New Demons and Apocalypse respectively as the “Rosetta stone of Ellul’s authorship” and Ellul‘s “crowning theological work,” Fasching compares Ellul’s critical approach to Derrida’s deconstruction, juxtaposing Derrida’s late work and Ellul.[48] Crucially, Fasching claims: “Ellul is a religious postmodernist. His religious postmodernism is able to deconstruct the endless dialectic of absolutism and relativism (the totalist temptations that feed each other in a technicist civilization) that plagues secular postmodernism and so exorcise the “new demons” of the postmodern world.”[49] Fasching develops this ‘religious postmodernist’ Ellul, emphasizing the repeated biblical injunction towards hospitality: “Hospitality is the direct embodiment of the holy” and “God is not found in sameness but in difference.”[50] Crucially, Fasching interprets a phrase in Ellul’s Humiliation of the Word (“. . . projects, utopias, intentions and doctrines—all these belong to the order of truth, and are known and created by the word”) as a “startling statement,” a “rehabilitation” of utopia.[51] He concludes the section thus: “Ellul’s apocalyptic critique. . . opens the door to the participation of Christians in the invention of a global ethic that might assist in helping human beings of all religions and cultures give birth to their utopian hopes.”[52] Finally, Fasching proposes the postmodern city realized as utopia/eschaton: “Even the contemporary postmodern global technicist city, once desacralized, becomes open to its truly utopian destiny as the City of God, in which (to paraphrase the story of Pentecost) each speaks his or her own language and yet each is understood by all.”[53]
All of the secondary treatments mentioned have treated Ellul and structuralism as parallel lines, intersecting thematically but never actually. This is demonstrable with reference to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: despite various comparisons to Ellul’s thought, the secondary literature never notes that Lyotard’s book cites Ellul’s The Technological Society and The Technological System.[54] The present book, by contrast, sees Ellul as contemporary with structuralism, seeking Ellul’s approach to these thinkers and his explicit and implicit responses to them.
A Different Ellul?
My reading offers a different portrait of Ellul from that presented by
Fasching. While Fasching is right to have juxtaposed Ellul and structuralism, his approach to both is worthy of investigation. I will emphasize the dynamic aspect of Ellul’s work: his views change over time, an element that has not received sufficient attention in interpreting his work.[55]
Ellul admits to a dynamism in his work, one that might furnish Fasching’s view of Ellul as a comfortably ‘religious postmodernist’—for example:
I am not a ‘Calvinist,’ and if my reading of Calvin influenced me for a time, I have since distanced myself from him very significantly. Nevertheless, it is certain that the failure of almost all the attempts that I was able to make in a direction that I considered revolutionary gave me a very strong feeling . . . that radical political change is impossible. Has this modified my theology? . . . my evolution goes from a negative radicalism towards a more open theology, and I believe, since about 15 years ago, more humanized. I do not think I have grown soft but I am less sectarian. In 1940 and again in 1945, theologically speaking, I was intransigent, I thought that there is “one” theological truth. I no longer believe this at all. My evolution has been in the direction of an opening . . . I thought that the world is separated from God, thus, ‘bad.’ I still believe this. But while I believed in a division in the judgement of God between lost, condemned men (to manifest the justice of God), and others who would be saved (to manifest his love), I am currently convinced of universal salvation, and I firmly believe that human history finally ends in the new creation with the resurrection.[56]
He elaborates the personal significance of this change:
This was a considerable mutation of my theological perspective, as is my absolute certainty that the encounter with Jesus Christ is not situated only at the level of a clear explanation of the faith but at the level of life . . . Insofar as I have come to this certitude of universal salvation, the explicit confession of Jesus Christ is not a condition of salvation . . . In these conditions, is it still worth the effort to proclaim Jesus Christ and talk about him? I reply yes, without hesitation, for when I find myself in the presence of completely hopeless people, crushed by woe, by the absence of a future, by injustice or loneliness, I must transmit to them the reason that I have found myself to hope and to live. In other words, the proclamation is no longer “Convert, or I’ll kill you,” but “You want to kill yourself, convert so you don’t kill yourself.”[57]
Ellul’s theology thus clearly shifts from a Calvinist double-predestination towards a firm belief in universal salvation. It remains an outstanding question whether Ellul’s comments on his new openness simply describe a change internal to his Christian faith and its effects on him, or concern all theological truth (more akin to Fasching’s reading).
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