Abstract
In of most recent of his many jeremiads, French theologian Jacques Ellul unleashes his considerable wrath on what he claims is perhaps major failing of our time: humiliation of word (1985). The culprit, as might be expected, is privileging of vision, which Ellul traces as far back as fourteenth-century Church's desperate resort to idolatry to maintain faithful in a period of extreme crisis. Through subsequent advances in technological means for reproducing and disseminating images-Ellul's animus against technology is well-known-the over-turning of traditional primacy of word has been solidified to point of virtual irreversibility. The result, he concludes, is that we now live in an era of debauchery of (Ibid.: 119) in which a virulent hostility toward word prevents us from accepting truth of divine annunciation. Ellul's contrast between idolatrous images and God's word is, of course, a time-honored in history of Western religion. Ellul himself traces it to such texts as First Epistle of John with its condemnation of lust of eyes (Ibid.: 81). And he explicitly affirms what he calls the contradiction between word and image in Bible, contrary to present-day tendency to meld them into one (Ibid.: 48). Whereas some commentators contrast Jewish taboo on graven images or seeing face of God with Christian toleration for word made flesh in incarnation, a toleration that
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