Ellul Jacques. To Will and To Do

Pilgrim Press, 1969. — 159 p.A professor at the University of Bordeaux, a scholar versed in history, law, and sociology, Jacques Ellul is a Christian not by birth and inertia, the easy way, but by persuasion out of the torments of political turmoils in the France of the 30's and his own careful reflection. He has much of the ardor of a convert. His espousal of Christianity gives him a faith-standpoint from which his critical study in the fields of law, history, and social analysis is illumined. His published technical works-Propaganda, The Technological Society, and The Political Illusion, available in English-are testimony to his sharp competence as a student of the dynamics of Western society. To Will and to Do is his major treatise on Christian ethics. It fleshes out more fully the argument of his earlier book The Presence of the Kingdom. A closely reasoned statement of a conservative evangelical Protestant position, it proposes "to search for the significance of biblical revelation concerning ethics." It was not to the mother church of Rome that Ellul turned in his prodigal pilgrimage. He has been sharply critical of the Catholic tradition (see The Theological Foundation of Law: A Radical Critique of Natural Law). Have no doubt about it: Ellul is dogmatically Christocentric. "Everything derives from the fact that Jesus is God." In a manner reminiscent of the early Karl Barth (who with Dietrich Bonhoeffer is often cited), Ellul stresses the radical break between God's revelation and man's reason, between faith and culture, between the Christian life and natural morality of the most refined and genteel sort. At times the reader may be put off when Ellul speaks with the stiff tone of voice of a biblical conservative. ("It is all found in scripture, is a part of revelation, and nothing authorizes us to expurgate this or that text because it doesn't please us.") Yet Ellul's position is not that of the Biblethumbing pulpit-pounder. His simplicity of assurance lies on the other side, not this side, of sophistication. And he avoids the peril of using the Bible as a moral rule-book, for "morality of scripture is not made of rules but of a certain manner of life." His final position is somewhere quite beyond the thickets of natural law casuistry, the abyss of an anomic contextualism, and the escape of simple biblical piety. He ends with a paradox: the impossibility of and the necessity for a Christian ethic. It is like the paradox of a Saint Paul living "between the times," necessarily under the old law and yet in the new spirit. It is like Luther's paradox of life within the two realms. Just how Ellul proposes that the Christian is to cope with this ambiguity of daily life, as justified by grace in the forgiving work of God in Christ, glad and free, yet perplexed and bound by the pressing hard choices of his political existence, the reader is invited to pursue for himself.