"Jacques Ellul is without doubt one of the most powerful Christian thinkers of our day...The Ethics of Freedom bristles with insights that challenge the intellect as sharply as they challenge our secular predilections."
—Publishers Weekly
Jacques Ellul
THE ETHICS OF FREEDOM
translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley
Freedom, writes Ellul in his preface to this provocative new work, "is the location and condition and arena of all Chris-tian ethics."
Freedom is the ethical aspect of hope—not hope in the sense of wishful thinking or a vague confidence that things will turn out all right, but hope as a creative human response to what God has done for us. Hope and freedom are possible because of the resurrection of Christ, which did away with that necessity in the order of things whose ultimate expression is death. God's decisive act in Christ is the "already" of the ethics of freedom; there is also another side to it: the challenge that God's kingdom is not yet realized fully.
Because of what God did in Christ, the Christian, once booked for death, is destined for life. This is an about-face so radical that next to it the agents of change on which so many pin their hopes today—"new politics," clever economics, technical wizardry, violence-show themselves as illusory and ineffectual.
But if the freedom which Christ brings is radical, it is by no means to be confused with either capriciousness or autonomy. Biblical freedom is freedom for God, which expresses itself in obedience. It is marked by prayer, by confession, by reading Scripture as a summons to life.
Like it or not, Ellul says, we are implicated in the world. Our freedom is not absolute or intrinsic. And that means that the ethics of freedom cannot be a series of easy answers. Confronted by the practical questions treated in Part IV of the present volume—questions of politics, revolution, violence, sex, money-this kind of ethics does not respond with an elaborate code of specifics. Instead it elucidates the relations to society, men, and things that freedom implies, and it gives precise articulation to the problems that arise.
In the words of the French title of Book I, freedom is a flame—and in the final analysis there can be no final analysis. Yet the penetrating challenge posed to contemporary clichés, which has come to be a hallmark of Ellul's writings, marks this as a major contribution from a leading theological thinker.