To Will and To Do Vol I: An Introduction to Christian Ethics [Paperback]

A new translation of Jacques Ellul's landmark theological contribution, including the second volume in English for the first time.

In To Will and To Do, twentieth-century French thinker Jacques Ellul presented his landmark theological contribution, yet the full text has never before been available in English. Incorporating recent insights on Ellul, and benefitting from the discovery of a lost manuscript, this new publication remedies this, combining a fresh translation of Volume One with a first English translation of Volume Two. Together, the two volumes constitute the first part of Ellul's planned four-part treatment of Christian ethics.
In Volume One, Ellul examines the origin of the problem of Good and Evil, surveys the contemporary morality of Western society, and provocatively sketches the paradox of an impossible and yet necessary Christian ethics. In Volume Two, he carries this discussion forward, outlining the characteristics and conditions of Christian ethics, and analysing the relationship between ethics, the legal texts of the Bible, and dogmatic theology. He concludes by reimagining the theological use of the 'analogy of faith' for scriptural interpretation. Throughout, Ellul remains in dialogue with Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Ricoeur and others, helping to cement To Will and To Do as a major intervention in twentieth-century theological ethics.GBThis is a landmark publication. This would be true if only for the vast improvement on a fifty-year-old translation and new scholarly apparatus. But the real buzz is that this first volume will be followed by a previously unavailable second volume of the work that Ellul himself understood as his theological masterwork. Jake Rollison masterfully explains why this book offers Christians today a wholly new, and genuinely exciting, Jacques Ellul.Jacob Marques Rollison's careful and fluid translation of these two volumes of Ellul's introduction to Christian ethics does an immense service ls