Kindred Mind and Brother

It is difficult for me to comment upon the work of Jacques Ellul and its significance for Americans because of a sense I have that any remarks of mine about Ellul will be superfluous, if not self-serving.

Ellul and I have been friends for about twenty years and during that time have had a dialogue, mainly through our correspondence. We enjoy an affinity and have found much in common. In the church, we are both laymen, if somewhat disaffected from the ecclesiastical establishment. Professionally, we are both lawyers, though often uneasy about such an identification. Politically, we are both committed to representative and participatory government, consider political issues without heavy ideological passion or any similar encumbrance, and we both have some direct practical experience in public office, of roughly comparable status--Ellul, formerly, as Deputy Mayor of Bordeaux; myself, lately, as Second Warden of Block Island.

Analytically, our views are quite similar, though variously influenced by our differences of nationality and citizenship, on basic social issues like war, consumption, race, technology. We are both nonacademic theologians, and in our respective books in the realm of theological ethics there appears a very strong topical parallelism--e.g. skepticism toward natural law, the importance of the dispossessed and the oppressed, a concern for understanding the principalities and powers, attempts to elucidate the political reality of the demonic, an effort to comprehend the relationship of the apocalyptic to the eschatological, and the impact upon ethics of that relationship. I attribute this correlation in our writing to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, though some may think it mere coincidence, since Ellul and I have never had prior consultations about what each has been thinking and publishing.

Yet if I thus recognize Ellul as a kindred mind, and more than that, as a brother in Christ, that does not hinder me from appreciating and affirming the contribution of Ellul to Americans who profess or seek a biblical lifestyle and witness. That is, of course, to be found in Ellul’s exemplary use of the Bible. Ellul beholds the biblical testament in a way which confesses the viability and vitality of the word of God in common history, and not only “once upon a time” but here and now. Ellul has entered into a confessional relationship with the word of God in his study of the Bible which illuminates the characteristic and historic activity of the Word of God in our contemporary setting. Ellul represents the recovery of the most elementary attribute of biblical faith: the discernment of the life of the word of God in common history, at once verified in the Bible as such and in each and every event subsequent to the biblical era.

In that discernment all things are transfigured. That is why, as it seems to me, Ellul’s words are so threatening and so appealing.

When this article appeared, William Stringfellow was a contributing editor to Sojourners, an attorney, lay theologian, and social critic. He is the author of An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land and several other works.