Van Vleet Jacob E. - Jacques Ellul

O ver the course of his life ( 1912 1994 ), Jacques Ellul penned over fifty books and over one thousand essays. Many of his writings are difficult to traverse and take for granted an in-depth understanding of his complex approach to the world. Additionally, Ellul wrote many different types of books, from history and sociology to biblical studies and poetry. It is quite easy to find oneself lost in the forest of Elluls writings, or to read only one genre of his oeuvre and unknowingly neglect other key works. Ironically, after one reads several of Elluls books, one might have a poorer understanding of Ellul than if one had read only one. The only way to overcome this is to understand the big picture of what Ellul is saying, to see how each book fits (or does not fit) with all his other works. His work is like a jigsaw puzzle: readers need the picture of the puzzle on the box, so to speak, in order to orient each individual piece to that whole. But because his work is so multifaceted, it can take a lot of time and reading to see this big picture. In the following, we hope to make this task easier by sketching the big picture. This book introduces readers to a number of Elluls primary theological and sociological writings, providing a solid foundation for further study.

Ellul described his work as separated into two dialectically related veins: one theological and one sociological. To use an analogy Ellul was fond of, his work is like two rails of a train track: separate but parallel, moving toward the same goal. His sociology and theology obeyed different methods and had different ends, but the whole interest is the confrontation between these two ways of understanding the world. To make this confrontation explicit, Ellul coupled several of his sociological books with theological counterpoints. For example, The Politics of God and the Politics Man (a study of the biblical book of Kings) can be read as a theological counterpoint to The Political Illusion (an analysis and critique of modern political systems). Also, The Meaning of the City (a biblical study of the theme of cities, human works, and political authority) reads as the counterpoint to The Technological Society (a sociological analysis of the technological world and worldview). This list can go on, but the important idea is this: in order to fully understand Ellul, one must read selections from both sides of his work. One must engage both the theological and the sociological dialectically. Many tend to focus on only one track of Elluls writings, thus ending up with an incomplete understanding of Ellul; this leads to a dead end and misses his point. As Andrew Goddard explains: Elluls work as a whole forms a composition in counterpoint. Any attempt to understand his thought that concentrates excessively on one of the two strands or ignores the relation between them is therefore liable to distort his thinking.

In this brief introduction to some of Elluls major writings, we separate his work into two broad categories: theological and sociological. Elluls specifically theological writings can themselves be generally divided into two kinds. The first includes theological ethics, in critical dialogue with what might be described as philosophical systematic theology; the second is a kind of meditative biblical exegesis. Elluls theological-ethical works include books such as Presence in the Modern World , Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, and Hope in Time of Abandonment. These writings are particularly interesting because of Elluls critical engagement with philosophers and theologians such as Sren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and Karl Barth; they are part of a much larger conversation. Also, these books showcase Elluls unique engagement with dialectical thoughtwhich, in the continental tradition, largely comes to him from G. W. F. Hegel via Kierkegaard, Marx, and Barth. From a philosophers perspective, these theological works might thus prove more interesting than Elluls biblical studies, as they explicitly engage this wider conversation. Furthermore, Elluls specific writings of biblical commentary often take part in theological and philosophical conversations detailed in his other theological works, making clear the need to be familiar with them as well. In the following, we will focus more heavily on Elluls ethical-theological writings, though his biblical studies will not be completely neglected.

Elluls nontheological writings are often described as sociological. This can be a misleading designation. These works, such as The Technological Society (which is among his most influential works) hardly stay within what we consider to be sociology today; they address readers with a much broader perspective, encroaching on regions thoroughly philosophical. Like his other sociological books, The Technological Society strays far from the path of purely descriptive sociological analysis; it ends up reading more like the critical theory of the Frankfurt School philosophers. Furthermore, all of Elluls sociological works are laden with serious ethical critiques of technique, modern politics, and propaganda. For these reasons, Elluls sociological studies might more properly be called philosophy; in any case, they represent a kind of scholarly work that pushes against contemporary disciplinary boundaries. While we have adopted the theological/sociological division for convenience in this text, both sides of Elluls work are in fact profoundly informed by a complex mixture of sociological, philosophical, and theological premises and categories of thought. It is helpful to remember this when reading Ellul.