Abstract
Introduction
In recent years, renewed attention to the theological-ethical legacy bequeathed to the church by the twentieth-century French Protestant thinker Jacques Ellul has amplified the international reach of his thought, our access to and understanding of the full detail and scope of this thought itself, and its relevance as a road-map for navigating the ethical challenges of the twenty-first century. In this article, I will use these elements as a schematic lens for examining four texts on freedom which have been published or re-published in the last three years. Doing so will allow me to bring new manuscripts by Ellul and new secondary research to bear in interpreting his writings, in hopes of putting them to their intended use of offering the church prophetic coordinates by which to orient herself and freely respond to the challenges presently confronting her. Far from claiming to exhaust the resources and insights available in the 2,000+ pages which constitute these four volumes, I will simply underscore some of what recent research and new publications allow us to see again or for the first time, as well as what I take to be some significant contributions for the contemporary church.
Fresh Perspectives from Recent International Research
In the last several years, Ellul's work has received renewed attention both from French and international researchers and a larger public in general. Within France, his publishers describe his works as undergoing a ‘necessary rediscovery’. (See the back cover of the three volumes published by Labor et Fides reviewed here.) Recent original and renewed translations of several of his works into Dutch, German, Italian, English, and even the quasi-totality of Ellul's massive published corpus into Korean cannot keep pace with new French editions of texts discovered in the archive of his writings in the possession of the Ellul family. 1 Among these four volumes, Vivre et penser la liberté (henceforth Vivre) and La loi de liberté (henceforth Loi) are some of the richest fruits of this archival enterprise.
This rediscovery has both fed and benefited from enriched and fresh perspectives on Ellul's work as a whole. Several new dissertations and monographs have appeared which situate Ellul more robustly in his time and the conversations in which he was engaged. 2 Major elements deriving from these studies include a proper emphasis on Ellul's lifelong dialogue with his dear friend Bernard Charbonneau (1910–1996). A self-declared ‘post-Christian agnostic’ who later came to recognise the ‘Christian origins of [his] love for freedom and nature’, 3 Charbonneau provided Ellul with an intellectual sparring partner, especially on the topic of freedom. The two friends’ ‘shared thinking’ (pensée commune) on freedom spanned their entire oeuvres and linked them so tightly together that they are most fully understood in relation to one another, even if this relation might best be described as an uncomfortable tension. While Ellul's hopeful freedom was unremittingly theological and defined explicitly in relation to the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ, Charbonneau's agnostic and intransigent freedom was defined in dialogue most prominently with nature. Close comparison between the two, especially on freedom, allows us to recognise elements in Ellul's works as stemming from this dialogue. For example, the critiques of the church in Ellul's late text The Subversion of Christianity or certain passages in Éthique might just as easily have been written by Charbonneau; similar critiques can be found, for example, in Charbonneau's Quatre témoins de la liberté. 4
Thinking with both Ellul and Charbonneau together highlights a second element of their collectively renewed reception, especially in France: the two are increasingly understood to be at the origins of political ecology—most notably by the ‘de-growth’ (décroissance) movements—and therefore (especially in Ellul's case) as forerunners of contemporary strands of ecotheology. Indeed, Ellul's rediscovery also benefits from and bolsters what might be called Charbonneau's own rediscovery. 5 The two friends maintained a constant focus on the need for human individuals and societies to freely establish limits—to the ever-expanding reach of the state into daily human life, to the prodigious economic growth which described France during its prosperous post-war period known as the ‘trentes glorieuses’ and beyond, and to the continual drive for efficiency and technological control which characterises most ‘developed’ countries in the global West and elsewhere. This focus began with their involvement in French ‘personalist’ movements in the 1930s, but spanned their entire careers, gaining some notoriety with the rise of ecological concerns in the 1970s and 80s (which they roundly criticised). Their constant insistence that we cannot have unlimited growth in a limited world was not always well-received in their lifetime, but it might make their friendship an attractive prophetic precursor and source for contemporary ecotheologies.
A third element of recent secondary focus might be seen as the obverse of the previous two: if Ellul (and Charbonneau) were both concerned by the excess and disproportionality which they saw on the rise throughout the twentieth century, their shared search for truer proportions to human life manifested in their focus on the temporal, relative, embodied and symbolic elements of human existence. For Ellul, I have argued that this focus is named by his use of the term ‘presence’ as a guiding structural element of his ethical thinking; Charbonneau similarly spoke of ‘incarnation of certain values’. 6 Understanding the tension in the shared thinking between Ellul and Charbonneau makes Ellul a model of critical collaboration and engagement which might be of particular interest in our increasingly politically polarised times. This set of themes also allowed me to track developments in Ellul's dynamic theological ethics as he responded to the rise of French structuralism and shifting societal and media conditions in the second half of the twentieth century. Since during this period understandings of the kind of proportionality sought by Ellul and Charbonneau became less of a widely assumed ground for conversation in France, Ellul is thus understandable as a critical theological travelling-companion to well-known French thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, but also as a precursor to thinkers such as Paul Virilio (as Michael Morelli has convincingly demonstrated), 7 who continues Ellul's search for a certain ‘proportion’ (if with notably different contours). 8
A Fuller Picture of Ellul's Theological Ethics
If we consider that Ellul (in imitation of his chief extra-biblical theological source, Søren Kierkegaard) conceived all his writings to be read as a dialectical totality in which the relation between the parts is crucial to understanding the whole, access to newer writings implies that a full understanding of Ellul's project and its contribution is yet to come. As with Kierkegaard, the fuller one's access to the whole corpus, the more complete one's understanding can be. Ellul's faithfulness to Kierkegaard led Jean-Luc Blanc to declare that ‘Ellul is Kierkegaard in the 21st-Century!’, 9 but posthumous archival explorations have shown this to be true in a way Blanc could not have known. Among Ellul's unpublished texts, one manuscript in which Ellul unveiled his view of the correspondences between particular ‘sociological’ and ‘theological’ works is titled ‘The Point of View on My Work as an Author’, effectively copying the intention of Kierkegaard's work of the same name. 10 It has been long-known that Ellul drank deeply at the Kierkegaardian spring, but increased attention to the profundity and manner of this filiation marks another contribution of recent archival research.
This increasingly ‘full picture’ of his thought is especially true concerning Ellul's volumes of theological ethics, which represent his most lengthy and substantial contributions among his theological writings. A major step towards a complete view of Ellul's ethics was made with the 2018 publication of the second volume of his introduction to Christian ethics, To Will & To Do, the manuscript of which had been lost for over half a century. In that case, the discovery of this lost manuscript was rather unexpected, since its existence was by and large unknown. By contrast, we eagerly hope that coming years will see the publication of the 1,000+ page manuscript of Ellul's Ethics of Holiness, which will complete what is known to exist of Ellul's ethical project. (If the Ethics of Freedom corresponded to hope, and Ethics of Holiness to faith, it is surmised that Ellul never completed a manuscript of his projected Ethics of Relationship, corresponding to love.)
Thanks to these advances in the state of his corpus, its international reach, and new research, we can see these four new editions in clearer light than ever before. The new editions of Éthique de la liberté (henceforth Éthique), which includes volumes one and two, and Les combats de la liberté (henceforth Combats, which constitutes the third volume, but which can be read independently of the other volumes) nicely present previously published material in an attractive paperback format. (For comparison, the extant English edition of Ethics of Freedom was based on an early manuscript lacking volume II completely and parts of the other volumes were rearranged and reworked before their initial French appearance.) Conversely, Vivre and Loi present mostly previously unknown material which helps contextualise the old material. 11
A Prophetic Orientation for Twenty-first-Century Christian Ethics
I will now turn to the content of the volumes, first to highlight new perspectives which the previously unpublished texts provide, before describing some of the content of Éthique which I think offers suggestive material for twenty-first-century ethical challenges.
In Loi, we see how Ellul's careful reading of the book of James figures heavily in structuring his ethical thinking. As elsewhere, Ellul's hermeneutic approach seeks a unified intention in the text which seeks to combine apparent contradictions by uncovering a deeper logic. He disagrees with interpreters who set James against Paul, seeing the ‘royal law’ of loving God and loving one's neighbour as oneself and James's ‘law of freedom’ as one and the same (p. 113). In commenting on James’s description of divine wisdom (James 3:17), Ellul notes that it implies a dialectic between holiness (which involves separation) and love (which implies creating a new relation) defined by freedom (Loi, pp. 143–45). After the separation of holiness breaks up natural communities (a process which Ellul examines in volume I of To Will & To Do), Ellul then grounds what he variously calls his ethics of ‘signification’, ‘witness’ or ‘communication’ on this freedom: ‘It is a matter of creating a new mode of relation, communication, listening’ (pp. 144–45). This latter process—namely, the creation of a new signification—is examined towards the end of volume II of To Will & To Do, especially regarding the Mosaic law. The same relationship also structures volume II of Éthique, in the dialectic between involvement and disengagement: separation is necessary for holiness in freedom, which is a pre-requisite for the new relation of love.
The collection of articles, lectures and excerpts presented in Vivre (meticulously and eruditely annotated and supplemented with elements from further unpublished texts by Jean-Philippe Qadri) demonstrates that freedom was a lifelong and central concern for Ellul, both in his life and thought. Among the various excerpts included therein are early, personal prayers showing a young Ellul seeking God's will for his own life (Vivre, pp. 311–13); sociological essays sketching ‘structures’ of freedom (cf. chapter 1) or tracing its evolution in contemporary dialogue (e.g., chapters 2, 5, 8, 10); studies of biblical themes or passages relating to freedom (most notably, the study of the recurring biblical theme of the desert in chapter 15); a meditation on Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses (ch. 16); and press articles showing Ellul's interventions in contemporary socio-political questions (chapters 22–32). Perhaps most notably for the present forum, several chapters reproduce lessons from a dossier found in the archive titled ‘Lessons on the Theology of Christian Freedom’, which Qadri describes as ‘preparatory notes for Bible studies given between 1971–1973’ (p. 29). Qadri aptly writes: ‘These are an occasion for discovering Jacques Ellul who, while rereading Les combats de la liberté and preparing to rework the text, is condensing and updating his thought for the diverse audience who attended bible studies in his house during the week after work’ (p. 30). This comes through clearly in the lessons themselves, which include questions of the difference between freedom and autonomy and the ambiguity of freedom (ch. 13); Ellul's view that biblical freedom is a lived existential reality more than an explicit doctrine; his late, ceaseless emphasis on understanding God primarily as liberator (ch. 17); some of Ellul's most concise and winsome descriptions of scripture, freedom as movement, and the need to understand created realities as penultimate, relative, but humbly meaningful (ch. 18); and eschatological sketches depicting the ‘Accomplishment of Freedom’ as the ‘end of mediation’: ‘Only the unmediated relation with God is total freedom’ (p. 480). Occasional repetition among the essays serves to reinforce the importance of certain themes, such as the centrality of 1 Cor. 10:23, which Ellul sees as orienting the ‘law of freedom’ in relation to the glory of God and the love of one's neighbour (cf. chs. 11 and 19; see also Éthique, pp. 310ff). Another significant element of this volume is its singular contribution to bibliographical material on Ellul's life—both in Michel Rhodes’s preface, which highlights Ellul's strong reputation among his students due to his participation in the French resistance during World War II, and his educator's concern for ‘how to transmit that which cannot be transmitted—i.e., the taste for freedom’ (p. 12)—and in Ellul's press interventions, such as his 1949 article criticising French government policy regarding ongoing retention of German prisoners of war (ch. 23).
Finally, the three tomes comprising Éthique and Combats contain some of Ellul's most developed and least-read theological ethical insights. When I purchased tome II of Éthique from the publisher in 2017, I received the original edition published some 40 years prior, which had never sold out. We might say that some of Ellul's published theological-ethical texts have lay dormant in plain sight for forty years, awaiting the present ‘necessary rediscovery’!
Certainly, some elements have aged less well than others, and this was partly intentional; Combats especially was intended to address its time, and Ellul wrote that something like it would have to be redone every so often. However, the lengthy delay and much reworking of the manuscript before its publication—and this precisely during a most dynamic period of Ellul's life and French society—means that early emphases on an ethics of presence and later dialectic-driven interpretations coexist with some harmony, but also in a way that makes the structure of the whole sometimes difficult to discern. 12 A crucial footnote (notably absent from the extant English Ethics of Freedom) explains that Luther's ‘free from’ and ‘free for’ binary, taken up in the contemporary period by Ricoeur, is structurally central: ‘Our whole progression is constructed as a function of these distinctions’ (Éthique, p. 118 n. 28). With this in mind, Ellul's Éthique could be read as a training manual, a pedagogy in the taste for freedom, or perhaps a sort of contemporary protestant spiritual exercise. Volume I starts with the contemporary human reader's condition of alienation, confronting them with their liberation in Christ, then moves through ‘freedom from’ towards ‘freedom to’ by beginning to specify the existential and ethical nature of this freedom in communion with God (part 1). In light of volume II of To Will & To Do and Vivre, we can see that Ellul's recasting of Pauline ‘slavery’ language as ‘alienation’ in the opening chapters in Éthique finds him attempting precisely the forging of a new relation with a new signification—that is, carrying out his ethics of witness as developed in his earlier writings—in relation to Marxism, which was seen as revolutionary and morally progressive by much of French society for no small portion of the century. Part two of volume I continues designating what this freedom is not—it is not reducible to ‘virtue’ or choice’. Ellul then majors on ‘freedom from’—from ourselves, fear, our works, our past, the Powers. He describes the qualities of this freedom in the Word of God (freedom of research, freedom towards revelation, freedom of critique). The stage is now set to display the structure described concisely in Vivre: everything is permitted, but this ‘law of freedom’ is oriented by the glory of God and love of the neighbour. Part three of volume I teaches the reader to take up her freedom—first, by becoming aware, both of Christ's liberating work for me, then of my own alienation amidst the necessities of the world in which the promise of Christian freedom must be lived out; second, by not allowing this freedom to result in new slavery—via entrapment in a morality or immoralism, by making freedom a pretext for sin, or by seeking justification for oneself other than in Jesus Christ. The closing chapter of volume I emphasises the rupture of social unities instigated by liberation in Christ, and criticises the church for its repeated failures to understand the challenge of Christian freedom (in a chapter inspired by Charbonneau), throwing down the gauntlet for lived freedom in the contemporary world.
Having traversed the ‘negative’ work of the ‘free from’, of clearing away alienation and false approaches to or applications of Christian freedom, tome II of Éthique begins a slow movement towards the ‘free for’, providing increasingly precise positive descriptions of the new life in Christ, still organised around life in God's presence and the ethics of ‘witness’ or ‘signification’. It starts by discussing the ‘law of freedom’, before what I consider one of the most beautiful sections in Ellul's corpus treating ‘The Categories of Freedom for Ethics’. These categories are the useless, the provisory, and the relative, demonstrating stark opposition to the use-value characterising the ‘technological society’, the desire to think and act in eternal categories improper to human temporality, and the absolute in the presence of which no freedom is possible. Ellul then christologically considers God's wisdom, leading to his ethics of self-restraining ‘non-power’. Ellul finds that human works have no intrinsic meaning, but are only ultimately meaningful when inscribed in God's work. Having set aside multiple misunderstandings or false approaches, and after situating human identity far from any metaphysical absolutes, as totally relative yet deeply precious and important, Ellul underlines a biblical call to ‘Be human!’ (pp. 532–50) Ellul then begins moving towards Luther's ‘free for’ by specifying that no fixed position is possible, that the Christian life must be a free dialogue, a movement between engagement and disengagement according to the times and circumstances. He describes the church as a new community which does not erase human individuality (as does the ‘mass’ or political dictatorships which build on ‘collective freedom’), and the ‘new human’ as the ‘man without lust [or covetousness; fr. convoitise]’ (pp. 590–626). This ethical theological anthropology does not describe what humanity ontologically is; instead, humanity is freed from ontological concerns, called to live in gratuitousness, characterised by availability towards God and others, and to respond to grace with free offerings or gifts.
A line in Éthique hints that Combats aims to incarnate the prophetic dimension in regards to contemporary society: ‘The prophets … are always and for all, the fighters of freedom [les combattants de la liberté]’ (Éthique, p. 196). Even while it retains elements which read as if written in earlier decades, Ellul's ‘fight’ here indeed reads as critical interaction with major loci theologici and broader discussions in French society in the 1970s and 80s. If the rediscovery of the relative, provisory and useless might be read as Ellul's approach to an existential theology of creation, Combats’ opening chapter on Christians as ‘Strangers and Pilgrims’ emphasises eschatological tension via hope in God's promise of his presence and the freedom given by this orientation, which is a condition of possibility for witness. Ellul's longstanding critical relation with politics and revolution receives significant attention, with Ellul majoring on the prophetic ‘dialogue with the sovereign’ (ch. 6). Long sections are devoted to Ellul's critique of much of liberation theology, essentially for failing to maintain the separation of ‘holiness’, evacuating the specificity of Christian ethics into political categories (though his long literature review treats different strands of liberation theology with nuance and care). Completing the movement towards ‘freedom for’, Combats finishes with concrete examinations of ‘Freedom in the things of life’, especially work, family, money and sex. Ellul noted in the preface to the English Ethics of Freedom that ‘every question needs to be seen from the standpoint of [the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love]. But each expresses a specific type of behaviour.’ 13 These volumes, then, see these lived issues through freedom in light of hope, and we should expect similar sections in the Ethics of Holiness seen in light of faith.
Since Ellul sees freedom as an affair of addressing individuals (who are nonetheless in community), rarely does he dole out ethical prescriptions to a larger body such as a nation, a state, or a larger civilisational grouping. However, in what might be both his most explicit exploration of the prophetic role on a large scale and his most positive institutional recommendation for the West as a whole, Ellul describes a very possible policy of re-orienting Western institutions and re-orienting production towards providing artisanal, specialised, high-quality products designed to fulfil basic necessities for those who do not have them, especially in regard to the Majority world. He claims his proposed programme (which is based on detailed dialogues with at least seven other major thinkers including André Gorz, Radovan Richta, Ivan Illich and others) is ‘perfectly doable both technically and economically. But it obviously implies a conversion which would be simultaneously economic, psychological, moral, spiritual, and political … But if nothing changes, we are heading irremediably towards what will probably be an ultimate catastrophe’ (Combats, pp. 395–96).
Ellul's interesting closing section on ‘woman and freedom’ finds that ‘the condition of woman is literally the test of an entire society’ (p. 456), and while it undoubtedly reflects the language and discursive contours of the late twentieth century, it is exemplary of his attempts to seek the relative, humble and fragile creaturely reality behind politically inflated discourse. As such, it might serve as a critical inroad to contemporary discussions of theological ethics of gender. Ellul affirms that Western culture has indeed constructed masculine and feminine roles in hard and painfully unequal manners. In response, he notes three errors to avoid: first, the ‘modern error’ (p. 457) which seeks feminine autonomy (which Ellul continually opposes to freedom) precisely in the fact of access to formerly ‘masculine’ roles; second, seeking a female ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ which determines woman in this or that way; and third, making woman into a spiritual incarnation of freedom in herself apart from Jesus Christ. Situating gender in this context would affirm that it (like all creaturely realities in Ellul's view) is a constructed, temporal and relative reality (thus resisting metaphysical or essentialist approaches), but that ‘relative’ implies neither ‘unimportant’, nor that it should be reconstructed in just any way. Instead, the relativity of the construction implies a fragility which requires care.
Conclusion
Certainly, much more could be said. And to paraphrase Proverbs, one who writes so much is bound to err. Certain elements of Ellul's Éthique are unhelpful, unnecessarily abrasive, and (especially given shifting communicative and identity concerns in much of the West over the last fifty years) are perhaps better left without rediscovery. But on the whole, Ellul's focus on the necessity of freedom for true witness and encounter is a lesson unfortunately forgotten or unknown for our generation so immersed in propagandistic approaches to communication that we have a hard time imagining anything different. And at a time when theological ethics (like most disciplines) and the church more broadly grapple with challenges posed by ecology, technology, shifting sexual-ethical norms, global pandemics, and even the threat of widespread European war (as I write, Ukrainian forces are fighting to maintain control of Kiev against Russian invasion), I propose that at their best, Ellul's theological ethics might be heard as the voice of a contemporary prophet of hope and reconciliation, calling us to live before God in freedom.