Jacques Ellul (; ; 6 January 1912 – 19 May 1994) was a French-born philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, resistance fighter and professor. Noted as a Christian anarchist, Ellul was a longtime professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions on the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences at the University of Bordeaux. A prolific writer, he authored more than 60 books and more than 600 articles over his lifetime,Marva Dawn, Eugene Peterson, The Unnecessary Pastor: Rediscovering the Call, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2000, p. 103 many of which discussed propaganda, the impact of technology on society, and the interaction between religion and politics.
The dominant theme of Ellul's work proved to be the threat to human freedom and religion created by modern technology. He did not seek to eliminate modern technology or technique but sought to change our perception of them to that of a tool rather than regulator of the status quo.Ellul, Jacques. Perspectives On Our Age: Jacques Ellul Speaks On His Life And Work. House of Anansi Press Inc., Toronto, ON. 2004. pp 89. Among his most influential books are The Technological Society and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.
Considered by many to be a philosopher, Ellul was trained as a sociologist, and approached the question of technology and human action from a dialectical viewpoint. His writings are frequently concerned with the emergence of a technological tyranny over humanity. As a philosopher and theologian, he further explored the religiosity of the technological society. In 2000, the International Jacques Ellul Society was founded by a group of former Ellul students. The society, which includes scholars from a variety of disciplines, is devoted to continuing Ellul's legacy and discussing the contemporary relevance and implications of his work.
Life and influences
Jacques Ellul was born in Bordeaux, France, on 6 January 1912, to Marthe Mendes (Protestant; French-Portuguese) and Joseph Ellul (initially an Eastern Orthodox Christian, but later a Voltairian deist by conviction; born in Malta to an Italo-Maltese father and Serbian mother). As a teenager he wanted to be a naval officer but his father made him study law. He married Yvette Lensvelt in 1937.
Ellul was educated at the universities of Bordeaux and Paris. In World War II, he was a leader in the French resistance. For his efforts to save Jews he was awarded the title Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2001.
Ellul was best friends with Bernard Charbonneau, who was also a writer from the Aquitaine region and a protagonist of the French personalism movement. They met through the Protestant Student Federation during the academic school year of 1929–1930. Both men acknowledged the great influence each had on the other.
By the early 1930s, Ellul's three primary sources of inspiration were Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth. Ellul was first introduced to the ideas of Karl Marx during an economics lecture course taught by Joseph Benzacar in 1929–30; Ellul studied Marx and became a prolific exegete of his theories. During this same period, he also came across the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard. According to Ellul, Marx and Kierkegaard were his two greatest influences, and the only two authors whose work he read in its entirety. Also, he considered Karl Barth, who was a leader of the resistance against the German state church in World War II,. the greatest theologian of the 20th century. In addition to these intellectual influences, Ellul also said that his father played a great role in his life and considered him his role model.
In large measure, and especially in those of his books concerned with theological matters, Ellul restated the viewpoints held by Barth, whose polar dialectic of the Word of God, in which the Gospel both judges and renews the world, shaped Ellul's theological perspective.. In Jacques Ellul: A Systemic Exposition Darrell J. Fasching claimed Ellul believed "That which desacralizes a given reality, itself in turn becomes the new sacred reality"..
In 1932, after what he describes as "a very brutal and very sudden conversion", Ellul professed himself a Christian. Ellul believes he was about 17 (1929–30) and spending the summer with some friends in Blanquefort, France. While translating Faust alone in the house, Ellul suddenly believed (without seeing or hearing anything) he was in the presence of a something so overwhelming that it changed his point of view. He fled the house on a bike, concluding that he had been in the presence of God. This experience started the conversion process which Ellul said then continued over a period of years thereafter, eventually becoming a layman in the Reformed Church of France.. Although Ellul identified as a Protestant, he was critical of church authority in general because he believed the church dogmas did not place enough emphasis on the teachings of Jesus or Christian scripture.Ellul, Jacques. Anarchy and Christianity. WIPF & Stock: Eugene, Oregon. 1998. pp 45.
Ellul was also prominent in the worldwide ecumenical movement, although he later became sharply critical of the movement for what he felt were indiscriminate endorsements of political establishments. Ellul came to like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,Ellul, Jacques. Anarchy and Christianity. WIPF & Stock: Eugene, Oregon. 1998. pp 2. who convinced him that the creation of new institutions from the grass roots level was the best way to create an anarchist society. He stated his view is close to that of anarcho-syndicalism,Ellul, Jacques. Anarchy and Christianity. WIPF & Stock: Eugene, Oregon. 1998. pp 21. however the kind of change Ellul wanted was an evolutionary approach by means of a "... Proudhonian socialism ... by transforming the press, the media, and the economic structures ... by means of a federative cooperative approach"Ellul, Jacques. Perspectives On Our Age: Jacques Ellul Speaks On His Life And Work. House of Anansi Press Inc., Toronto, ON. 2004. p. 18 that would lead to an Anarchist society based on federation and the Mutualist economics of Proudhon. In regards to Jesus and Anarchism he believed Jesus was not merely a socialist but anarchist and that "anarchism is the fullest and most serious form of socialism".Ellul, Jacques. Anarchy and Christianity. WIPF & Stock: Eugene, Oregon. 1998. p. 3
Ellul has been credited with coining the phrase, "Think globally, act locally.". He often said that he was born in Bordeaux by chance, but that it was by choice that he spent almost all his academic career there.
Ellul fell into a deep grief following the 16 April 1991 death of his wife, Yvette. He died three years later, on 19 May 1994 in Pessac.
Thought Theology While Ellul was primarily a sociologist who focused on discussions of technology, he saw his theological work as an essential aspect of his career. He began publishing theological discussions early, with such books as The Presence of the Kingdom (1948).
Although a son of the minority French Reformed tradition and thus a spiritual heir of thinkers like John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, Ellul departed substantially from Reformed doctrinal traditions, but unlike other European Protestant thinkers, utterly rejected the influence of philosophical idealism or romanticism upon his beliefs about God and human faith. In articulating his theological ideas, he mainly drew upon the corpus of works by Barth and the critiques of European state Christianity made by Kierkegaard. Thus, some have considered him one of the more ardent expositors of dialectical theology,. which was in decline elsewhere in the Western theological scene during Ellul's heyday. Much like Barth, Ellul had no use for either liberal theology (to him dominated by Enlightenment notions about the goodness of humanity and thus rendered puerile by its naïveté) or orthodox Protestantism (e.g., fundamentalism or scholastic Calvinism, both of which to him refuse to acknowledge the radical freedom of God and humanity) and maintained a roughly un-Catholic. view of the Bible, theology, and the churches.
One particular theological movement that aroused his ire was death of God theology. Some within this movement held the conviction that the traditional Christian conceptions of God and humanity arise from a primitive consciousness, one that most civilized people have quite overcome. This line of thought affirmed the ethical teachings of Jesus but rejected the idea that he represented anything more than a highly accomplished human being. Ellul attacked this school, and practitioners of it such as Harvey Cox, as out of accord not with Christian doctrinal traditions, but reality itself, namely what he perceived as the irreducible religiosity of the human race, a devotion that has worshiped idols such as rulers, nations, and in more recent times materialism, scientism, technology and economics. To Ellul, people use such fallen images, or powers, as a substitute for God, and are, in turn, used by them, with no possible appeal to innocence or neutrality, which, although possible theoretically, does not in fact exist. Ellul thus renovates in a non-legalistic manner the traditional Christian understanding of original sin and espouses a thoroughgoing pessimism about human capabilities, a view most sharply evidenced in his The Meaning of the City. Ellul stated that one of the problems with these "new theologies" was:
Ellul espouses views on salvation, the sovereignty of God, and ethical action that appear to take a deliberately contrarian stance toward established, "mainstream" opinion. For instance, in the book What I Believe, he declared himself to be a Christian Universalist, writing "that all people from the beginning of time are saved by God in Jesus Christ, that they have all been recipients of His grace no matter what they have done." Ellul formulated this stance not from any liberal or humanistic sympathies, but in the main from an extremely high view of God's transcendence, that God is totally free to do what God pleases. Any attempts to modify that freedom from merely human standards of righteousness and justice amount to sin, to putting oneself in God's place, which is precisely what Adam and Eve sought to do in the creation myths in Genesis. This highly unusual juxtaposition of original sin and universal salvation has repelled liberal and conservative critics and commentators alike, who charge that such views amount to antinomianism, denying that God's laws are binding upon human beings. In most of his theologically oriented writings, Ellul effectively dismisses those charges as stemming from a radical confusion between religions as human phenomena and the unique claims of the Christian faith, which are not predicated upon human achievement or moral integrity whatsoever.
On technique The Ellulian concept of technique is briefly defined within the "Notes to Reader" section of The Technological Society (1964). It is "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity." He states here as well that the term technique is not solely machines, technology, or a procedure used to attain an end.
What many consider to be Ellul's most important work, The Technological Society (1964), was originally published in French as La Technique: L'enjeu du siècle (literally, "The Stake of the Century").. In it, Ellul set forth seven characteristics of modern technology that make efficiency a necessity: rationality, artificiality, automatism of technical choice, self-augmentation, monism, universalism, and autonomy. The rationality of technique enforces logical and mechanical organization through division of labor, the setting of production standards, etc. And it creates an artificial system which "eliminates or subordinates the natural world."