Newsletter 009: An Introduction to Jacques Ellul
Hey,
Welcome to The Musings of Tyler Hurst where I look at issues surrounding church, culture, and technology through Christian theology, Christian philosophy, and Christian ethics. As a pastor and doctoral candidate in ethics and public theology these are important issues to me and their intersection often is missed.
Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy the thoughts,
tdh
In this post I am reposting the first of a set of essays on Jacques Ellul. The reason for this is that is I recently walked into a little Christian bookstore wondering what they carried. I was not shocked to find that most of the square footage of the storefront was taken by merchandise that was not books. Lots of Christian kitsch. Among the books there was plenty of the expected mediocrity that I wish did not exist (looking at you Steven Furtick) and there was the interesting theology that I hope they sell a bunch of. But there was also, much to my surprise, a copy of Jacques Ellul’s The Presence of the Kingdom. A book that is interesting and thought provoking, and which is likely one of two copies in the entire state of Arizona. The other being in my library. So I thought I would draw up some of these posts from a previous iteration of my newsletter. But before we do that…
here are five things that caught my eye…
An analysis of homeschoolers views on religion and politics - I was initially pretty surprised by this analysis that homeschooling and private schooling have little effect on church attendance. Then, I thought about it for a bit and realized, that it likely corresponds with my experience. Even still, what to do with school is a bit part of the culture war and there is some feeling superiority and inferiority about it among Christian parents.
The problem of positive thinking - There is a bourgeoning movement in Christian circles that talks as if they are channelling the ghost of Norman Vincent Peale—who just so happens to have been the pastor of the church most closely associated with Donald J. Trump. This article over at the Dispatch does a great job of detailing the theology of the positive thinking movement.
Ted Cruz on Tik Tok - In my last post I mentioned in this “five things” section Joe Biden’s last minute family pardons which are ridiculous and gross. So now, let me be an equal opportunity offender. Donald Trump is trying to weasel out a duly passed, and Supreme Court upheld, law banning the app Tik Tok. This app has been described as Chinese Spy-wear and “a strip club full of fifteen year old girls.” So for the sake of national security and national future Trump should be hands off. But also for the sake of Constitutional order. Donald Trump does not have the authority, as President of the United States, to intervene in this process. Doing so would be an executive overreach which should not be tolerated.
Aaron Renn has interesting thoughts on Elder Board make up - Currently, my church is discussing adding one or two elders. As we think about who to add I came across this podcast by Renn and thought it was a helpful reflection.
A short read on AI Therapy - Samuel James, Digital Liturgies, has an interesting piece on the rise of AI based therapy. Part of me thinks “this will never work.” Then again, there are people falling in love with AI boyfriends and girlfriends, who those falling in love with KNOW are AI. So maybe there is a market…? Any way, James’ reflections are a helpful starting point if you haven’t given much thought to the place and limits of AI.
As we consider what it means to live in our present cultural moment on thinker it is imperative to consider is Jacques Ellul.[1] Admittedly his academic background is one that would make most conservative Christians flinch. Counting the work of Karl Barth and Karl Marx as critical influences does not endear the average American Evangelical who is likely unaware of the former Karl and deeply suspicious of the latter. At the same time his courage during the Vichy government is cinenmagraphic and his understanding of the force and near-autonomy of technology was prophetic.
A Brief Biography
Ellul was born January 6, 1912 in Bordeaux, France.[2] His upbringing was not particularly Christian, though his mother did profess a protestant Christian faith, his father is described as “a Voltairean agnostic.”[3] So, he was neither predisposed for or against it. Ellul grew up in relative poverty due, according to Ellul, his father’s inability to maintain consistent work.[4] This, Ellul came to believe, was not due to any failure of his father’s, but explained by the alienation of man to his labor by the capitalist system. Ellul was led to this understanding when he encountered Marx’s Das Kapitol early in his days as a law student.[5]
Around the same time Ellul experienced conversion to Christianity, though it took him some time to come to terms with his conversion. He only settled into his new found Protestant faith when the works of John Calvin and Søren Kierkegaard. Eventually Ellul encountered the work of Barth who shaped his Christological understanding of theology and his deontological understanding of ethics, though he could never fully embrace a moral theory that limited human freedom. Looking at the whole of Ellul’s canon it is clear that “Ellul’s Christian thinking was shaped in his early years by encountering the Bible as the living word of God, under the influence of John Calvin, then Søren Kierkegaard and finally, Karl Barth.”[6] However these influences wax and wane throughout his career. Calvin and Barth seem to come and go at times.
In 1937 Ellul married Yvette Lensvelt. The next year he took a position at the University of Strasbourg.[7]
Ellul came of age in war torn Europe. Ellul was two and a half when Germany’s declaration of war (August 1914) brough France officially into the growing military conflict that would become known as World War I. He was in his late twenties when World War II began. In a footnote to Presence in the Modern World: A New Translation, it notes that “Ellul was never an ivory-tower intellectual. He worked on a farm while participating in the Resistance against the Nazi occupation of France.”[8] His refusal to cooperate with Vichy government in France got him fired from his teaching position at Strasbourg, which led to the move to the farm outside of Bordeaux.[9] In addition to his general unwillingness to cooperate, after moving to the farm he participated in the forging of papers for Jews.[10] During this time (1943), he stumbled into the pastorate. He began leading a congregation whose pastor had fled the war.[11] It was ill-fitting as he was not much of an institutionalist.
Yvette died in 1991 and Ellul followed a few years later in 1994.
Ellul’s most notable contribution to Christian thought has been his reflection on technology and technological systems. Given that it is interesting to consider what Ellul would have thought of the internet. As Greenman, Schuchardt, and Toly note:
“The Technological Society was published in a decade of considerable social and technological change: Playboy magazine was launched in December 1953, the McDonald’s restaurant chain was opened in April 1955, followed by the opening of a California theme park called Disneyland in July 1955. Television was becoming a mass medium by which these brands would eventually capture the imagination of billions of households around the world…It was in this context that Ellul made the audacious claim, ‘No social, human, or spiritual fact is so important as the fact of technique in the modern world.’”[12]
[1] Gordon T. Smith, Wisdom from Babylon: Leadership for the Church in a Secular Age (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Academic, 2020), 81.
[2] Jeffery P. Greenman, Read Mercer Schuchardt, and Noah J. Toly, Understanding Jacques Ellul (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), 1.
[3] David W. Gill, “Introduction to Jacques Ellul’s Life and Thought,” Presence in the Modern World: A New Translation (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), 107.
[4] Greenman, Schuchardt, and Toly, Understanding Jacques Ellul, 4.
[5] Greenman, Schuchardt, and Toly, Understanding Jacques Ellul, 3.
[6] Prior, Confronting Technology, 13.
[7] Gill, “Introduction to Jacques Ellul’s Life and Thought,” 108.
[8] Jacques Ellul, Presence in the Modern World: A New Translation, trans. Lisa Richmond (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), 90fn125.
[9] Gill, “Introduction to Jacques Ellul’s Life and Thought,” 108.
[10] Gill, 108.
[11] Greenman, Schuchardt, and Toly, Understanding Jacques Ellul, 9.
[12] Greenman, Schuchardt, and Toly, Understanding Jacques Ellul, 21.
Three pretty random thoughts:
It is very interesting to me how much ministry and theology is affected by when a pastor was in seminary.
It seems to me that the negative world concept is also tied to a critique of Neo-calvinism and winsomeness. If the negative world is short lived does that mean Neo-calvinism is back on the rise?
Now that the church is disintegrated (i.e. there is no universal church in any generation, and even disagreement within mostly unified denominations) how do binding documents like creeds get written?
Thanks for reading,
tdh