A New Reading of Jacques Ellul. Jacob Marques Rollison
as constituting the privileged locus of Christ’s present action and lordship.[68] God’s presence thus grounds an ethical call for the church’s presence—i.e., to constantly attend to the guidance of the Holy Spirit as she lives out her role as ambassador of the Kingdom of Heaven vis-à-vis the world, as a sign of God’s current presence among humans. Stemming from his conversion experience, Ellul understands the Holy Spirit not as a principle of community or a permanent feature of creation, but as a person of the triune God acting freely in the world at specific times and places of the Spirit’s own choosing. Consequently, this approach to God’s presence means that a constant thrust of Ellul’s theology is the inability to ever grasp, control, or fully explain the freedom of the Spirit—despite what Ellul sees as the church’s constant attempts to do so, whether by capturing it in an institution, enclosing it in a theology, or installing it as a predictable and logical principle of historical events. This also explains Ellul’s concern with technique: as precisely this process of systematic grasping and controlling, technique excludes presence.
Ellul’s protestant reading of biblical theology, furthermore, foregrounds God’s spoken Word as God’s chosen mode of presence with humans, the privileged medium for God-human relations. Ethically, the church should thus live the Word, should be the bodily presence of God’s word in space and time, in the hic et nunc. A theological ethic of presence is thus indissociably linked to the modalities and characteristics of the presence of God.
These summary remarks show that presence closely intertwines with several other themes: spoken language, embodiment, signification and meaning, a certain understanding of space and time, free action, etc. The difficulty of presence comes from trying to think all these themes together. But if this thinking is done, it becomes plain that understanding presence will have ethical implications for thinking of and relating to language, the human body, space and time. Adapting Kierkegaard’s description of Christianity as an existence communication, we might say that presence is Ellul’s attempt to describe preconditions for the communication of Christianity—and to do so in a historical moment in which these conditions are less assumed than ever. These preconditions include bodily presence, in space and time, and meaningful spoken discourse. This simple trio offers a schema to diagnose the problems which major late modern developments in media and communications pose for Christian witness, and thus a ground for discussing what form such witness might take under these new conditions. I must note that while my treatment of Ellul on presence might border on a metaphysical description or criteria for ‘true’ or ‘real’ presence, it is not intended to give a systematic theology of presence, but to highlight what presence meant ethically for Ellul.
Scripture already notes a close link between space, time, the spoken word, and Christ’s presence, as in statements like that of Paul in Rom 10:6–8 (citing Deut 30:14):
But the righteousness that comes from faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (that is, to bring Christ down) “or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim).
At its most basic, this book aims to be nothing but an extended meditation on these themes. The communication ethics which I find in Ellul invites the church to abandon philosophy and eschew propaganda, to speak as the church, in temporal, embodied, and hopeful communication rooted in God’s faithful presence.
Summary of Argument
This book is divided into two sections: architecture and movement. In Apocalypse, Ellul thinks that the only way the book of Revelation can be understood is through a global understanding of the book’s symbolism in its overall biblical context, combined with a look at what the movement of the book does with this symbolism—i.e., the book’s symbolic architecture and its movement.[69] I emulate this in my reading of Ellul, arguing that presence allows us to see both the architecture and movement of his theological ethics. “Architecture” describes constitutive elements of Ellul’s thought necessary to comprehend the study of Ellul’s historical evolution in “Movement”: grasping the movement presupposes a study of the structure. It is helpful to note that “Architecture” treats presence indirectly, laying the groundwork for understanding the term; the fullest discussion of what presence means comes in chapter 3.
Chapter 1 of “Architecture” focuses on Ellul’s 1987 book Reason for Being: Meditations on Ecclesiastes, naming presence as a central theme in this conclusion to Ellul’s corpus. I argue that Reason most clearly displays the epistemological core of Ellul’s theology. Ellul reads Qohelet (Ecclesiastes’ prime narrator) and Kierkegaard through each other, seeing both as ironic anti-philosophical thinkers who wrestle with temporal limits. Kierkegaard’s focus on “contemporaneity with Christ” forms a central element of Ellul’s understanding of time, but Ellul modifies this by reading Kierkegaard through Qohelet. This describes the present time within which presence as an ethical term takes on meaning, showing how this present links time, language, and humanity. This treatment locates the concrete theological source and explanation for the relation of God to the world within which Ellul’s ethics is situated. Further, Ellul’s Qoheletian reading of Kierkegaard modifies Kierkegaard’s irony. While Kierkegaard wrote with an ironic relation between his words and his life, often saying the opposite of what he meant, Ellul’s irony is serious and self-critical. This serious relation to words makes structuralism’s emphasis on the separation of word and speaker so crucially problematic for Ellul.
Chapter 2 of “Architecture” examines the other side of the dialectic, featuring Ellul’s approach to Marx and his institutional studies and tracing Ellul’s sociological account of the destruction of language. Even in Ellul’s sociology, the present links time, language and humanity. Ellul thus has sociological (in addition to theological) reasons to oppose static thought, implying that the sociology-theology ‘dialectic’ in Ellul’s thought is irreducible to either mode of thought. Rather, it is often a matter of discerning whether Ellul makes a given move for primarily sociological or theological reasons. Further, societal institutions are a present work of God in Christ, linked to language; propaganda and the societal destruction of language are thus dangers for the communal life of western society.
Chapter 3 (the first of “Movement”) focuses on presence in Ellul’s theological ethics. Ellul’s theology and experience of presence led to a Christian ethics of signification. I demonstrate how presence operated in Ellul’s works before his crisis and interaction with structuralism (which happens around 1965–70) by focusing on Ellul’s major ethical works before these dates. I especially focus on two untreated works: Ellul’s unpublished 1936 article “The Dialogue of Sign and Presence (Notes for a Christianity Learned by Heart),” and the recently published second half of To Will & To Do.[70] Ellul used the word presence to name a mutually-implicating triple dialogue between sign and presence, body and spirit, and time and space. This triple dialogue and the themes in Dialogue recur and give shape to Ellul’s entire ethical corpus.
Chapter 4 treats France’s societal and Ellul’s personal crises in the 1960s. I contextualize the instability of French intellectual life within the rise of new media, a changing university structure, and the rapid rise to prominence of structuralism. The latter is understandable as a Nietzschean critique of presence, implying critiques of the human, history, and language. Ellul’s copy of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) is examined, detailing his reactions from his margin notes. I draw out Ellul’s reactions to Foucault and structuralism in his writings from this period, demonstrating sociological critique and intense theological questioning of presence. I then show the beginnings of Ellul’s theological response in his discussion of Christ’s cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?,” interpreting it as expressing hope and grounding communication which takes presence seriously, even in apparent abandonment.
Chapter 5 uses what has been learned to elucidate two of Ellul’s post-crisis books, L’espérance oubliée (1972) and La parole humiliée (1981), as responses to structuralism. In the former, Ellul