As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
Jacques Ellul died on May 19. The Washington Post noted
his passing in a few scant paragraphs. It went unnoticed here in
Detroit. Sojourners could readily devote an issue to
him—and did just that in June 1977, acknowledging a debt to
his thought and witness. He tutored many of us in theology and
social history.
Personally, I was introduced to Ellul’s writing as a
seminarian through Dan Berrigan, who was then reading the signs
of the time with the Book of Revelation in one hand and Jacques
Ellul’s Presence of the Kingdom (1948) in the other. Presence
was Ellul’s postwar manifesto—and nearly five decades
later it still rings true with an uncanny discerning prescience.
Removed as a professor of law by the Vichy government in 1940,
he spent World War II in the French Resistance, spiriting Jews to
safety. His postwar take on the times? Hitler won the war. The
Nazi spirit triumphed. The atom bomb was emblem of the necessary
"fact," the apotheosis of technique—of means
overwhelming and supplanting ends.
In this terrible dance of means which have been unleashed,
no one knows where we are going, the end has been left behind.
Humanity has set out at tremendous speed—to go
nowhere....Everything that "succeeds," everything that
is effective, everything in itself "efficient," is
justified.
There and then Ellul foresaw that technique was being freed of
value judgments, that human beings would relinquish their
"choice" and lose control of the means, that technics
would extend into every sphere and discipline of human life. He
anticipated the incipient totalitarianism of technocracy. In this
he proved prophetic in all the senses of that word.
Here, too, was the seed of his more widely read sociological
studies such as The Technological Society (1964 in
English—first in a series) and Political Illusion
(1967 in English). Ellul wrote some 43 books in all. A striking
fact of his work was that he tended to publish on parallel
tracks: Historical or sociological work would be matched with
biblical study.
With regard to the titles above, for example, The Meaning
of the City (a topical survey from Genesis to Revelation
radically pessimistic about human works and radically hopeful
about God’s grace in history) was the theological
counterpoint to the technological study, and The Politics of
God and the Politics of Man (a reading of 2 Kings)
illuminated the other.
Ellul clearly desired the scathing sociological works to stand
on their own as analysis, but he also wanted Christian readers to
live with the dialectical tension of the two tracks. For many
secular academics, his biblical theology was utterly unknown or
dismissed as little more than some quirky hobby. Here in Detroit,
a circle of lucid if verbose anarchists are Ellul devotees, yet
they were nonplused, dumbfounded would be more precise, to
discover that he was a Christian, let alone that faith was the
beginning and end of his work.
Ellul was himself an anarchist (also a Calvinist and a
universalist—do you get a sense of dialectic here? of lively
paradox?). He had roots in French personalism, though it seems
only of late that he has found an active and sympathetic reading
in the U.S. Catholic Worker movement.
Another attentive reader, close to my own heart, much
influenced by Ellul, was William Stringfellow. Little wonder:
Ellul’s work, though seldom using the language of the
principalities, did as much as anyone to unmask the powers,
exposing the mechanisms by which a given social reality—be
it technology, money, the state, ideology, violence,
propaganda—would take on a life of its own. And he could put
his finger on the "logic of necessity" by which human
beings would forego their freedom, conforming to the logic of the
system.
In the sociological works, "necessity" was nearly a
veiled synonym for "the Fall." Though excruciatingly
realistic, this was also his critique of realism. The vocation of
Christians, he thought, was to live by other logics, to be signs,
which is to say countersigns, of freedom.
He was himself such a sign. He remains a witness of
resurrection. And prompts our thanks to God: Amen and alleluia.
BILL WYLIE KELLERMANN, a Sojourners contributing
editor, is a United Methodist pastor and the editor of the
forthcoming A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of
William Stringfellow (Eerdmans, 1994).
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