The Reception of Jacques Ellul’s Thought in French Protestantism

Abstract

It is commonplace to observe that, during his lifetime, Jacques Ellul was better known in the United States than in France. This would seem to confirm the biblical adage according to which “a prophet is not without honor except in his own country.” Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that Ellul was a member of the National Synod (from 1947 to 1970) and of the National Council (from 1956 to 1968) of the Église Réformée de France (Reformed Church of France), respectively the legislative and executive bodies of the largest French Protestant denomination. Describing his situation in the Reformed Church, Ellul famously said that he was a part of a “minority within the Protestant minority.” (Protestants represent only 2 % of the French population.) Ellul was not kind to his own community; he considered self-criticism a precondition for social criticism. At the end of his last term in office in 1971, he was awarded responsibility for drafting a report on the state of theological education to be presented at the Nancy-Pont-à-Mousson Synod of 1972 (Ellul 1972). Despite this official recognition, many of Ellul’s opinions (concerning issues as diverse as the war in Algeria, Israel, Islam, apartheid in South Africa and Aides) received cold receptions, as attested by the avalanche of letters to the editor that his articles in the French Protestant weekly Réforme inevitably provoked. His criticism of church institutions also gave rise to many misunderstandings. Such was the case when, in Hope in Time of Abandonment, he proclaimed that the Holy Spirit had left the Reformed Church overly preoccupied with financial and real estate issues, as if the Holy Spirit was still present, “we would know about it” (Ellul 2004a). Or alternatively again when, on the eve of the regional Synod in autumn 1983, he predicted, in line with the Congregationalist ecclesiology he embraced at the end of this life, that the Reformed Church in France would disappear in less than 10 years were the Synods and all regional and national bodies not abolished with their authority returned to the local communities (Ellul 1983).