Understanding Jacques Ellul

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Author: Jeffrey P. Greenman, Read Mercer Schuchardt, and Noah J. Toly
Full Title: Understanding Jacques Ellul
Category: #books

Highlights

Someone who is living by the power of Christ is “a true revolutionary” who “makes the coming of the Kingdom actual” in everyday life.74 How? Not naively pretending to “bring in” the kingdom or establishing a paradise, but working to make the world “tolerable,” reducing the opposition between the disorder of the world and God’s will for it, and supremely by proclaiming the good news of salvation.75 This is what Ellul calls a Christian “style of life,” which is a distinctive way of being in the world on behalf of Christ as salt, light, and a sheep among wolves.
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“no one knows where we are going, the aim of life has been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Man has set out at tremendous speed—to go nowhere.”78 The quest for “greater, quicker, more precise” takes over; “success” and “progress” are defined in purely technical ways and extended to all spheres of life.
Ellul sees modern society as stubbornly unwilling to reckon with the reality of its condition. He detects a “refusal, unconscious but widespread, to become aware of reality. Man does not want to see himself in the real situation which the world constitutes for him. He refuses to see what it is that really constitutes our world.”85 He deals with the reductionist results that stem from embracing the notion that “all spheres of intelligence are, in fact, exploited by the technicians.” What others have called “instrumental rationality” supplants contemplation.86
“The first duty of a Christian intellectual today is the duty of awareness: that is to say, the duty of understanding the world and oneself, inseparably connected and inseparably condemned, in their reality.”87
intentionally restore personal contact with their neighbors, and to think of a specific person rather than an abstracted humanity.
According to Ellul, this coupling of Christian belief, on the one hand, and behavior consonant with the demands of technological society, on the other hand, “makes the propagation of Christianity increasingly difficult. The psychological structures built by propaganda are not propitious to Christian beliefs.”29 Propaganda becomes one means that militates against the presence of the kingdom, or Christian “presence in the modern world.”
For it seems that people manipulated by propaganda become increasingly impervious to spiritual realities, less and less suited for the autonomy of the Christian life. We are seeing a considerable religious transformation, by which the religious element, through the means of the myth, is being absorbed little by little by propaganda and becoming one of its categories.
“from the moment the church uses propaganda and uses it successfully, it becomes, unremittingly, a purely sociological institution.”32
For Ellul, a church that uses propaganda—a constellation of psychological and material techniques for manipulating behavior—preaches the power of propaganda, the effectiveness of the medium, rather than the supremacy of God in Christ.
this de-Christianization through the effects of one instrument—propaganda—is much greater than through all the anti-Christian doctrines.34
Ellul’s theologically based contention is that the human pursuit of truth is a matter of words and hearing, not images and seeing. Sight cannot be the avenue to genuine truth about the world, let alone to Divine Truth.
It is the human refusal to be satisfied with revealed words, and its subsequent quest for visible images to represent the divine, that leads humanity into idolatry.
He believes that the word has been “humiliated”—degraded, disrespected, and dethroned. On every front, he recognizes that visual images rather than words dominate the Western technological society.
“All techniques are based on visualization and involve visualization. If a phenomenon cannot be transformed into something visual, it cannot be the object of a technique.”
Ellul bemoans the widespread use of charts, graphs, and statistics in public life, which are presented as “facts” and “proofs” without discussion, yet which depend critically upon interpretation and explanation.
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What bothers Ellul most is the dominance of an unreasonable form of reasoning: “the image that creates this thinking gives rise to a feeling of evidence and a conviction that is not based on reason” since “obviously you cannot dispute with an image … What produces immediate assent cannot bear the discussion process.”
All oral propaganda rests on the fact that language loses its meaning and retains only the power of inciting and triggering.
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Although he does not say so explicitly, it seems clear that Ellul believes that only Christians—because of “the company of him who consummates this reconciliation”80—are capable of offering the right sort of resistance to the idolatry of visual images and restoring the word to its rightful place of primacy in Western culture.
images can be used, but should never be loved.
- Note: Tell it to the institutional church!
Christians have a special duty to puncture inflated rhetoric and to restore moderation to public debate—is
“speaking clearly and reasonably expresses love of neighbor.”
For Ellul, Christians are called to faithfulness rather than to success. The task of the church is not to bring in the kingdom of God. As Ellul notes elsewhere, the kingdom of God marches toward us; we do not march toward it.30