A New Reading of Jacques Ellul: Presence and Communication in the Postmodern World

by Jacob Marques Rollison

Publisher:

Lexington Books

, 2020

Overview

This book presents an original and dynamic reading of the twentieth-century French sociologist and theological ethicist Jacques Ellul. Adopting Ellul’s use of ‘presence’ as a hermeneutical key to understanding his work, it examines the origins of Ellul’s approach to presence in his readings of Kierkegaard and the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, highlights the central structural role of presence in Ellul’s theological ethics, and elucidates a crucial turning point in Ellul’s theology following a personal crisis in Ellul’s faith and life. Drawing from numerous unpublished and untranslated texts, Jacob Marques Rollison argues that this crisis involves confrontation with a critique of presence manifest in Ellul’s reading of and engagement with Michel Foucault. Marques Rollison distills Ellul’s sociological critiques and theological responses to this crisis, presenting Ellul’s evolving theology against the background of major shifts in French intellectual life. In doing so, the author simultaneously calls for renewed engagement with Ellul’s prophetic thought, critically appraises Ellul’s dialectical theology and Marxist inheritances, and develops a robustly Protestant approach to theological communication ethics for our time.

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Questions in Dialogue

Part I: Architecture

Chapter 1: Reason for Being: Ellul’s Existential Epistemology of the Present

Chapter 2: Community in the Present: Marx, Institutions, and Language

Part II: Movement

Chapter 3: The Dialogue of Sign and Presence: Presence and Signification in Ellul’s Theological Ethics

Chapter 4: Crises in Communication

Chapter 5: A Hopeful, Spoken Incognito: Presence in the Postmodern World

Conclusion: The Mystery of the Word

Appendix 1: Interpretive Summary of Ellul’s Article “The Dialogue of Sign and Presence” (1936?)

Appendix 2: Ellul’s Honorary Doctorate from the University of Aberdeen

Bibliography

About the Author

Praise for A New Reading of Jacques Ellul

Jacob Rollison has woven together numerous strands in the study of Ellul’s writings, presenting a fresh, welcomed challenge to postmodernist trends that devalue the role of language in today’s world. Anyone interested in a theologically-informed ‘ethics of communication’ will profit greatly from this engaging book.

This book represents the arrival of a new generation of serious scholarship on the intellectual legacy of Jacques Ellul and his renewed significance to the pursuit of theologically responsible understandings of our current social and cultural situation in the West. Working on the basis of sustained research into the archive of Ellul’s writings, Rollison offers an account of Ellul’s thinking centred on the concept of presence that is ambitious to confront the heuristic and dialogical challenges of our time. Alert to Ellul’s influences, formative engagements and development, Rollison offers a new understanding of Ellul’s intellectual project as a whole and suggests something of its real continuing import to contemporary theology and ethics.

Jacob Rollison offers us an excitingly new Ellul for an information age, or better, reads the old Ellul comprehensively and with breathtakingly new insight. Rollison traces previously unnoticed shifts in Ellul’s thought and indexes them with newly-unearthed biographical details as well as linking his thought for the first time to the main philosophical currents of Ellul’s contemporary France. Announcing Christ’s presence to modern humanity, Ellul resources contemporary Christians desirous of being genuinely present to a world increasingly talking past one another.

Twenty five years after his death, Jacques Ellul is more alive than never with this fascinating book. He shows which would be the actual presence of the Christians in the postmodern world. Very stimulating!

Jacob Marques Rollison’s A New Reading of Jacques Ellul is an innovative and bold attempt to introduce a new way of thinking about Jacques Ellul’s entire body of work. A member of the board of directors of the International Jacques Ellul Society, with a PhD in theological ethics from the University of Aberdeen, he is well suited to the task of reinvigorating the study of Ellul for today’s students...Readers might find this to be a bit ambitious for a single-volume work, but I am happy to report that Rollison has succeeded admirably in each of his stated objectives.... I highly recommend this book’s ‘presence’ on your bookshelf.

Product Details

• Title: A New Reading of Jacques Ellul: Presence and Communication in the Postmodern World
• Author: Jacob Marques Rollison
• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Print Publication Date: 2020
• Logos Release Date: 2022
• Pages: 316
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9781793604354, 9781793604347, 1793604347, 1793604355
• Resource ID: LLS:9781793604354
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T21:59:49Z

About Jacob Marques Rollison

Jacob Marques Rollison is an independent scholar living in Strasbourg, France. He is the author of A New Reading of Jacques Ellul: Presence and Communication in the Postmodern World (2020). He has recently translated Ellul's two-volume ethical treatise, To Will & To Do.