A New Reading of Jacques Ellul. Jacob Marques Rollison
full manifestation of this change. Chastenet supports this reading: citing a personal letter from Ellul, he writes, “It is only in the course of a series of studies on the Apocalypse, begun in 1965, that he oriented himself towards the thesis of universal salvation.”[58] So, from the mid-1960s to 1975, Ellul undergoes a serious theological shift culminating in Apocalypse, in which reading Ellul as a theological “religious postmodernist” is plausible. I develop why Apocalypse brings this movement to a climax, constituting a break with most of Ellul’s previous theological approach. With this in mind, my treatment focuses on Ellul’s works before Apocalypse to examine how his theology shifted leading up to 1975.
This reading casts fresh light on a standard reading of Ellul which emphasizes a dialectic internal to his work. It has often been said that Ellul’s work can be divided into two broad categories—one sociological and the other theological. These two ‘tracks’ employ two different methods of research which cannot be integrated with one another. There is certainly a great deal of truth to this, and it corresponds to how Ellul conceived of his work from the beginning. In his later work (i.e., 1970 and afterwards), Ellul places increasing emphasis on dialectic as a key to biblical interpretation, Jewish thought, and understanding his own work. But what exactly does dialectic mean? Certainly, it expresses a certain irreconcilable tension; but is this tension closer to a conversation, a dialogue, or to a logic, a principle of temporal development?
This book is the fruit of a chronological reading of roughly 40 of Ellul’s books and some 250 of his articles. My treatment of Ellul is therefore extensive (but not comprehensive). In this chronological reading, I was struck by the palpable difference between Ellul’s earlier and later theological works. To make sense of this change, I offer a reconstruction of his thought showing that dialectic is not a static element in Ellul’s work; it wavers between these two filiations, shifting from an early dialogue of presence to a later theological dialectic (in the sense of a logical development over time). This unique account of Ellul’s shifting—of a specific absorption of presence into dialectic—marks this book’s most original contribution among secondary works on Ellul, one that makes sense of Ellul’s later, more blunt assertions of universal salvation. In order to make sense of both the strong structure of Ellul’s planned oeuvre and its dynamism over time, borrowing Apocalypse’s subtitle, I suggest that Ellul’s oeuvre is an architecture in movement. It has a structure whose different parts mutually illuminate one another, but it is not static; it changes over time, and the movement as much as the structure reveal its meaning.
Ellul in Crisis
Beyond elucidating how presence and dialectic shift over time in Ellul’s work, this book also highlights an unexplored element of Ellul’s life: his personal wrestling with structuralist approaches to language. My reading unearths a clear admission of personal crisis. An examination of this crisis exposes a more finely-grained account of Ellul’s theological transition. Ellul opens his 1972 L’Espérance oubliée (literally, Forgotten Hope; translated as Hope in Time of Abandonment, 1973) by recounting having passed through “. . . a severe trial by which everything, once more, was put in question. And not only in my most personal affections, or in the meaning of what I could attempt to undertake, but also in what has constituted the center of my person—or at least what I believe, which constitutes the center of my person, this faith so indisputable and that I experience as so fragile.”[59] He relates the shift manifested in this book as arising from this crisis, describing a move from an “intellectual formalism” towards more living theology, and a concomitant distancing from Barth: “This didn’t cause much of a stir and it was legitimate: a simple affair of ‘good’ theology (i.e., Barthian), because it was all already there in Barth. But I didn’t know what I was saying. There is an intellectual formalism which, while transmitting the words richest in meaning, voids them of their meaning.”[60]
Ellul never explicitly elucidates this crisis. Considering his life and works during this period, I suggest four items which may have combined to constitute a crisis: first, the death of his friend and mentor Jean Bosc in 1969, and the failure of their work with the French Reformed church; second, the 1970 death of Yves Charrier, with whom Ellul worked with troubled youth, and this demanding work itself; third, the political and intellectual climate of France in May 1968, which saw his hopes in Czechoslovak Marxism crushed, and nation-wide student riots, which for Ellul reflected fragility and fear; and finally, the rise of structuralism in the mid-late sixties. I examine these at length in chapter 4. It is conceivable that items one and two alone could have constituted a serious personal trial. His experience with disenfranchised youth forced him to reconsider the notion of humanity employed in his theology as too abstract, and item three represents disappointment and change of focus. In any case, this list is not comprehensive. But the fourth item is most interesting for my inquiry, and the least explored.[61]
While Fasching’s “religious postmodernist” reading is plausible if Ellul’s work in and after 1975 is emphasized, I argue that Fasching situates Ellul and structuralism too comfortably close to one another. This permits Fasching to present a sanitized version of structuralism and a reading of Ellul lacking the nuance of Ellul’s full trajectory. An important division between Ellul and structuralism concerns their respective approaches to language, which share similar analyzes, yet take more or less opposite positions.[62] In Victor Vitanza’s reading, Lyotard’s goal (and that of postmodernity in general) is “community outside of language.”[63] Especially in Libidinal Economy, Lyotard aimed for a community with no outside, no exclusion—inclusion of all singularities. While this may evoke a generally accepted postmodern goal, Vitanza’s suggestion for what Lyotard meant by ‘singularity’ was not a Disney-esque view of each one as unique and special, like a snowflake; rather, Vitanza proposes the killer in the film Silence of the Lambs, who captures women in order to remove skin from various parts of their bodies to make a female suit to wear. In other words, in this book, Lyotard recognizes that the dream of full inclusion means a certain death to societal community. While Lyotard later distanced himself from this treatment, it is a significant admission on his part, and in this book he even desires such an outcome.[64] Clearly, this desire does not bode well for the utopian postmodern global city described by Fasching in his closing sentence cited above.
Presence as a Hermeneutical Key
I have mentioned that dialectic has often been touted as a hermeneutical key to Ellul’s works; of all available options, why focus on presence instead of, say, the relation between freedom and necessity, or between hope and abandonment? First, I focus on presence because it forms a central element of Ellul’s oeuvre from its conception to its conclusion.[65] From the beginning, Ellul conceived his oeuvre with a structure, forming a whole but not a system: “I have not actually written a wide variety of books but rather one long book in which each ‘individual book’ constitutes a chapter.”[66] Presence in the Modern World (1948) was Ellul’s intended introduction, and Reason for Being (1987) his conclusion. For the former, presence is clearly the driving factor; I show in chapter 1 that presence is at the heart of the conclusion as well. Furthermore, I include my interpretive summary of an unpublished handwritten article from 1936, “The Dialogue of Sign and Presence (Notes for a Christianity Learned by Heart),” to show that presence had a definitive content from the very outset (see Appendix I). Second, presence puts Ellul in dialogue with structuralism: many of these thinkers draw heavily on a Nietzschean critique of presence in their works, which for Ellul represented and contributed to a crisis of western civilization. And third, following his confrontation with structuralism, Ellul’s theology of presence shifts—allowing us to see the movement of his work’s architecture. There have been numerous treatments of Ellul’s theology and work as a whole, yet none have adopted presence as their primary focus.[67]
So what does Ellul mean by presence? I will not attempt a precise definition here, though a few remarks might helpfully situate Ellul’s use of the term. It may be instructive to start with how Ellul understands God’s presence. Unlike certain Christian traditions which heavily emphasize the eucharistic bread and wine