Читать книгу A New Reading of Jacques Ellul - Jacob Marques Rollison - Страница 13

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).

Within Ellul’s corpus, Fasching is correct that Ellul’s Apocalypse: Architecture en movement (1975) marks the 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.