459 - The Humiliation of the Word

The Humiliation of the Word
Jacques Ellul
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1985. 285 pp. $14.95.

This is a provocative celebration of the unique authority of justification by faith. Its thesis is that faith is a response to the revelation of God in the Word of Christ and that revelation comes through the inescapable character of the spoken word.

It is at the same time a very feisty critique of the contemporary preoccupation with images, symbols, graphic displays and every conceivable attempt to reduce discursive knowledge to any visual format.

Yet it is still more than this. Ellul establishes a spiritual link between idolatry and the separation of the act of seeing from the spoken word. There is a very special value in the spoken word, and when we flee from its rigorous intellectual demands to the more simplistic responses of visual display that abound in television, advertising, and statistical measurement, we are jeopardizing the uniquely human response to the God who continues to speak only through the spoken word.

This is a Gallic book which runs along the precarious borders of cynicism. However, at the end of this critique of contemporary culture, the author guides us gently to the potential for reconciling the spoken word with vision, to the prospects for renewing and recovering the language which bears the Christian faith.

Read this book in fear and trembling. It is intended to lead us in the peculiar power of Christ to set us free from the attempt to walk by sight and not by faith. It is a very controversial book, and in that lies the value of encountering it.

Richard A. Ray
First Presbyterian Church
Bristol, Tenn.