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Silences: Jacques Ellul’s Lost Book by Yannick Imbert Abstract: In this article, I shall attempt to show how Ellul tried to go beyond the dialectical tension between his sociological and theological works. This thesis, however surprising as it may sound to many Ellulian readers, is supported by the power and importance of poetry for Ellul. To do so, this article will draw some insights from Ellul's poetical work Silences. We will consider a few brief examples of how Ellul integrated in a single creative movement two aspects of his works he always claimed to be separate. In this way, poetry demonstrates who Ellul really was: un homme entier (a complete and consistent human being) Bio: Yannick Imbert is professor of apologetics at the Faculté Jean Calvin (Aix-en-Provence, France). http://www.facultejeancalvin.fr He holds a postgraduate degree in Intercultural Management and Religious Mediation from the Institute of Political Science (Aix-en-Provence, France), and completed his PhD in theology at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia PA) on the philosophical and theological background of J. R. R. Tolkien’s theory of fantasy writing. He is interested in the interaction between literature and faith, including the importance of the “word” in Ellul's works.
Introduction Ellul often maintained that his works were to be seen as dialectically connected, each sociological work being intimately connected to, and answering to, a theological one. This procedure has led some to believe that Ellul's works could be thought of apart from one another, especially that one area could be thought of apart from the other. Ellul himself gave this impression when making his theological statements and convictions sound like merely personal convictions.[1] In doing so, he allows for the disconnection of his sociology and theology.[2] This, in part, is the result of his almost radically consistent dialectics. However, this brief study wants to challenge this assumption in looking at Ellul's poetry.[3] This article aims to do so through the study of a book that, to the best of the author's knowledge, has never been studied before, namely, Silences, one of the two volumes of Ellul’s poetry. Silences has been chosen rather than Oratorio, the second volume of Ellul's collected poetry, the latter being a poetical commentary of the book of Revelation, as Lynch indicated: “These poems, divided into five chapters, form a unified whole narrating Ellul's vision of the Apocalypse.”[4] However, this article will focus on Silences, since the main thesis of this study is that all the works of Jacques Ellul are integrated in Silences, making this work a holistic presentation of his sociological and theological studies. In fact, Silences is a more integrative collection of poetry than Oratorio, and has a “wholeness” that more clearly takes its inspiration from all of Ellul's works.[5] © 2014
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Ellul Forum #54
April 2014
Yannick Imbert