If You Are the Son of God

This significant book, written a few years before his death, presents Ellul's fullest understanding of the meaning of Jesus' life. One finds all of the major themes of Ellul's writings. The first half of this book deals with Jesus' sufferings, which are by no means limited to Good Friday. Through Jesus' identification with ""the whole human condition,"" we are offered the possibility of both enduring and overcoming suffering.

Similarly, the temptations are understood beyond the wilderness temptation narrative since Jesus experiences them throughout his ministry. Ellul believes temptations are ultimately human avenues for tempting God, and so focuses on the discussion power and ""non-power,"" be it on personal or political levels. Appropriately, Ellul enters into the passion narrative not simply in the context of suffering but in the context of temptation, where Jesus could have easily ""proved his divinity,"" but chose instead to reveal both the character and way of God.


""As always, Ellul is full of bold ideas and assertions, brilliant and original flashes of insight, and debatable conclusions. But this is vintage Ellul in that we encounter a free, creative, thoughtful, passionate, and controversial wrestling with the biblical foundations of the faith. . . . No one leaves Ellul without being challenged to their roots, but at the same time helped to better understand and more fully appreciate the Bible and its central figure.""
--David Gill, from the foreword

""In his usual incisive way, Ellul wants us to get much closer to the human Jesus as a way of understanding God's radical identification with the woundedness of the human condition and our call to follow the suffering, tempted, tired, abandoned Christ into the world.""
--Charles Ringma, author of Resist the Powers with Jacques Ellul

""If You Are the Son of God is Jacques Ellul at his provocative best. By emphasizing the depth of Jesus's suffering and temptation, Ellul demands that we reckon with the humanity of a savior who overcame not weakness, but power, so that by faith 'man might become fully man, a real creature,' free to love both God and neighbor.""
-- Noah Toly, co-author of Understanding Jacques Ellul



Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), a French sociologist and lay theologian, was Professor Emeritus of Law and of the History and Sociology of Institutions at the University of Bordeaux. He wrote more than forty books, including The Technological Society, The Humiliation of the Word, and The Technological Bluff.