How to Read Jacques Ellul

Anyone who has tried to read Jacques Ellul will have had a few moments of despair.  Just when you think you’ve got him figured out, he goes and makes a statement that completely contradicts something he said earlier.  This is not an uncommon experience, and probably one of the main reasons that people have trouble reading Ellul.  Almost every Ellul scholar out there recognizes the huge interpretive problems that exist and attempts to find some interpretive key or “golden thread” in his work to make sense of the whole.  While all of these are helpful, none of them can do justice to Ellul’s body of work.

In an attempt to overcome some of these problems I have compiled a list of things to keep in mind when reading Ellul.  These are not necessarily in any order of importance, but there is a logical flow to each point.  Ideally, all of these would be remembered every time one approaches Ellul.

1. Ellul refuses to systematize his work.  Marva Dawn notes that Ellul “believed…that systematic formulations cannot deal with the dialectical nature of reality, that apparent ‘contradictions’ in actuality demonstrate that a message is too large for our categories.”  As Ellul himself notes, his project was intended “to provide Christians with the means of thinking out for themselves the meaning of their involvement in the modern world,” not “to construct a system of thought, or to offer up some Christian or prefabricated socio-political solutions.”

2. Ellul is a dialectician.  If Ellul has a system (a la Barth), it is similar to Kierkegaard’s “infinite qualitative distinction.”  The only “system” one can find in Ellul’s thought is a massively constructed dialectic between his sociological writings and his theological writings.

The sum of my books constitutes a whole consciously conceived as such.  At root – to the extent that I became convinced on one side that it was impossible to make a unity of the study of modern society, and on the other that it was equally impossible to do a theological study without reference to the world in which one is – it became indispensible for me to find the link, and this could only be the dialectical process.

The way this works itself out in Ellul’s work is through what Ellul calls “dialectical counterpoints.”  Ellul’s theology of the city, The Meaning of the City, is a dialectical counterpoint to his massive sociological study, The Technological Society. Likewise, Ellul’s book on II Kings, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man, was written as a dialectical counterpoint to Ellul’s study of contemporary politics, The Political Illusion.  This means that to understand fully what Ellul is saying in The Technological Society, one needs to read The Meaning of the City.  Reading only one of them will leave the reader with a one-sided view of the world we live in.

3. Ellul writes in two fields: sociology and theology.  As mentioned above, Ellul constructed a dialectic between his two fields of work and these two fields were meant to be read together.  But each of them also needs to be understood in its proper context.  As a serious sociologist, Roman legal scholar, and historian of Institutions (Ellul’s 4-volume History of Institutions is still required reading in many French universities) Ellul wrote in each of these fields without reference to his Christian faith.  This was not done to hide his committment to Christianity, but rather to take his sociological analysis to its logical conclusions as if there was no hope of intervention.  In his sociological work, Ellul is writing to give a realisitic picture of the way the world really is.  His theological work, on the other hand, is meant to give a theological interpretation of his sociological analysis.  In his boks on Technique, Ellul’s main conern is that man is completely determined and has no hope of freedom.  This often sounds like pessimism or fatalism.  But Ellul is simply giving a picture of the way the world is, not as it must be.  If there is no theological response to his realistic analysis, “then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinants will be transformed into inevitabilities.”  Likewise, his theological work is often hard to understand if you are not familiar with the sociological framework and analysis Ellul is working with.

4. While Ellul is probably one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century, he is nonetheless indebted to certain thinkers before him who must be acknowledged in his work. Mostly, I’m thinking here of Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth.  If you want to understand Ellul, you must begin to work through these thinkers.

• The importance of Marx’s sociological analysis of capitalism (Das Capital) on Ellul’s thinking should not be underestimated.  While Ellul clearly rejects Marxism, he is incredibly sympathetic to Marx’s attempt to get at the heart of the modern world and see the whole picture.
• Similarly, Ellul is indebted to Kierkegaard for the formal aspects of his work.  Where Kierkegaard spent half his career writing in pseudonyms with different relationships with Christianity, Ellul wrote his sociological work as if he were not a Christian.  When Kierkegaard’s later writings are explicitly Christian and written under his own name, Ellul’s theological writings represent the true aim of his work.  Overall, both are dialectical thinkers whose aim was to move the individual to action.  Kierkegaard’s writings on the crowd, mass media, and the plight of Christendom can be seen all over Ellul’s writings.
• Barth has a special place in Ellul’s life.  While never an unconditional Barthian (no one should be!), Ellul refers to Barth as the “master,” and often defers theological discussion to Barth’s Dogmatics.  Ellul’s understanding of revelation, the Word of God, and freedom are three hallmarks of his theology that have a distinct Barthian flavor.  However Ellul is critical of Barth’s ethics and his sociological analysis, and his work can be seen as a continuation and correction of Barth’s own work.

5. Ellul is primarly concerned with moral responsibility, and all of his work can be seen as pointing the way forward to a distinct ethic for Christians. It can be argued that Ellul’s primary concern throughout his sociological work is modern man’s loss of moral responsibility.  Technique is the dominant force in society today which seeks to dictate to man how and why he must act.  Ellul calls this “technical morality.”  Propaganda, in the technological society, is not about informaton and public opinion, rather it is about moving the individual to act.  The political system seeks to make men act reflexively to conditioning through mass media.

Contrary to this, Ellul’s theology is primiarly concerned with articulating hope and freedom.  His theology is meant to awaken the reader to live into the freedom that has been given to him by God.  His ethics, as the culmination of his sociological and theological works, are, therefore, the capstone of his work.  In a discussion of the point of his work, Ellul says, “the system and the conclusions to be drawn therefrom [my work] will appear only at the end of my work, if God permits me to arrive at the end.”  The end, for Ellul, was “an ethic stemming from biblical theology.”

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Ultimately, for Ellul,  “The most important thing is to restore to man the maximum of his capacities of independence, invetion, and imagination.  This is what I try to do in stimulating him to think.  In my work I try to give him the cards so he can then play his own hand.  Only the rediscovery of the individual’s initiative is radical in these times.  And this implies that I do not furnish a program.

“At the end of my books, readers are called to take action and make their own decisions, and they surely say to themselves, ‘This is very annoying.  I don’t see which action I can take.’  They would prefer a last chapter in which someone would tell them, ‘Here is what you must think and do.’  This last chapter I will never write.  Even my ethic does not say to the Christian, ‘Here is what is good and here is what is evil.’  It does exactly the opposite.  ‘You are liberated, you are called to be human beings before God.  Now decide for yourselves concretely what is to be done.’”

When reading Ellul, patience is a virtue.  Take the time to read The Technological Society and then work through The Meaning of the City.  Read Hope in Time of Abandonment before working through Propaganda and The Political Illusion, and then go back to The Politics of God and the Politics of Man.  There is no right way to go about it.  Like Kierkegaard, the key to reading Ellul is to read him as he wanted to be read.  You may never “get it,” but that was never the point.  The point, for Ellul, is to move the individual to be a self before God.

“The very fact that man can see, measure, and analyze the determinisms that press on him means that he can face them, and by so doing, act as a free man…By grasping the real nature of the technological phenomenon, and the extent to which it is robbing him of freedom, he confronts the blind mechanisms as a conscious being…The purpose [of my work] is to arouse the reader to an awareness of technological necessity and what it means.  It is a call to the sleeper to awake.”