Word & World 9/4 (1989)
Copyright © 1989 by Word & World, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN. All rights reserved.
page 386
An Introduction to the Work of Jacques Ellul MARVA J. DAWN Christians Equipped for Ministry, Vancouver, Washington The writings of French sociologist/lay theologian Jacques Ellul are both desperately needed and vastly misunderstood. The corpus of his works is much too large (with over six hundred articles and forty books to his credit!) to be easily grasped, and yet a comprehension of the entirety is necessary in order to interpret the individual pieces properly. Often readers get frustrated with Ellul because he frequently overstates his case to make a point. Moreover, details of his sketches are sometimes misleading because he paints them hastily with a broad sweep in order to give a comprehensive perspective. However, these problems can be easily overcome if we remember that he is serving as a prophet to awaken us to biblical truth and to stimulate our own thinking on the matters he introduces. On a deeper level, much of the misunderstanding of Ellul’s thought is caused by the fact that his work proceeds in two very distinct tracks that he rarely connects. On the one hand, Ellul writes tough sociology. He first became well-known in the U.S. because of The Technological Society, a wide-scoped critique of the overall phenomenon that he calls “Technique.” This term encompasses for Ellul not just the machines or organization of technology, but the entire technological milieu that shapes present society and is characterized by its self-augmentation, monism, autonomy, universality, and the criterion of efficiency. The book warns of the effects of this milieu on economic and political matters, as well as on human beings.1 Originally this book met with stiff criticism, and Ellul was accused of being unduly pessimistic. However, sociologists began more and more to recognize the truth of his insights, and thirty years later, when he published The Technological System (Continuum, 1980), Ellul himself acknowledged that the control of technicization was even greater than he had at first comprehended. On the other hand, Ellul writes many books of biblical exposition and theology, which are characterized by a Christian hope that is sometimes falsely labelled 1
The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964). The French version of this book was first published in 1954. page 387
naive. Some of the most important of these include Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation (Seabury, 1977), The Meaning of the City (which surveys the biblical concept from Cain to the new Jerusalem; Eerdmans, 1970), Money and Power ( which suggests how the seemingly contradictory attitudes toward wealth in the Old and New Testaments can be correlated; InterVarsity, 1984), and The Politics of God and the Politics of Man (a study of 2 Kings; Eerdmans, 1972). An excellent overview of his perspectives in biblical exegesis is given by “Notes