News Letter 003: An Introduction to Jacques Ellul...
Plus a review of Wisdom from Babylon by Gordon T. Smith
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
Before we get into it,
here are five things that caught my eye…
Research shows smartphones are bad for kids - Jonathan Haidt, who so far has written one mediocre book (The Happiness Hypothesis) and two much better books (The Coddling of the American Mind and The Righteous Mind) and probably a bunch of other stuff, is out with his third book and it has started a bit of debate. On one side of the debate are people who own smartphones and have kids of pretty much any age. On the other side of the debate are, I assume, people who don’t have kids. The content of the debate is that the year the smartphone was introduced and social media became accessible to adolescence and young adults the world seemed to become a worse place—diminishing of trust, rise in stupidity, and a leap into a mental health abyss. (Here is a review of Haidt’s work)
The Disunited Methodists? - Over at The Dispatch, Mark Tooley explains what is going on with the schism within the United Methodist Church. It is a great article and here is why it stood out to me. If you pay attention to religion news you likely thought (as I did) that the major division was over homosexuality, but what I didn’t realize is that the goal posts have moved further back than that. Tooley writes, “legislative committee has even removed adultery as a chargeable offense for clergy.” Interestingly enough there is also a undertone of racism in the interplay between American Bishops and African Bishops (some of whom could not obtain visas to be present at the meeting to register their dissent).
Artemis and Biblical Interpretation - Here is a review from the Gospel Coalition on a new book dealing with egalitarianism and Artemis worship in the ancient world. Several books have been coming out on this subject drawing a variety of conclusions. This is the one I have heard get the most airplay and I am grateful for this review as (1) for reasons I do not entirely understand TGC has been taking shots for being woke and (2) it makes the crucial biblical interpretation point that we need to trust the text. Paul does not mention the pagan worship practices of the Ephesus when he writes about submission and teaching! Why are we allowing things not ever referenced in the Bible to augment our reading of the Bible?
Pastor Mark is at it again - Between 1996 and 2010 it was borderline impossible to think about Christianity and culture without thinking about the name Mark Driscoll. I have no idea what to make of the latest fracas around him, but I thought this article was a good reminder that Driscoll is still wandering around somewhere in Phoenix, AZ making bank on the preaching of a kind of Christianity. Ted Kluck explains, “[Driscoll] is kind of charismatic (the theological kind this time), and is still really good at marketing his stuff and making money (which he was always good at). He seems to have found a church tradition that is completely at ease with both unabashedly making money, and overlooking his shortcomings. People still dislike this version of Driscoll, but nobody is really taking him seriously anymore as a real Christian writer, because of all the above stuff. We sort of regard him the way we regard Vince McMahon from the WWE. Like, he’s a really good promoter, and is capable of being entertaining, but he’s not the guy you want running your church.”
Religious nonattendance - My definition of importance is relative, it basically means “the things I make time for.” I’m busy, so if something is important I carve out the time it should take in my schedule. There are things I value but not so much that I put spiritual disciplines, time with wife and kids, ministering at my church, or progress on my dissertation on the back burner to make sure they happen. In some sense they are important, but in another sense there importance is relatively low. I write that because of a recent article at Graphs About Religion titled “Religion’s Important, but I Still Don’t Attend.” That makes no sense to me. And in our present era, if something makes no sense to me I generally assume one of two things: either social media or politics. Ryan Burge writes, “But among Republicans, there’s no mistaking what is happening here. The share who are culturally religious has risen quickly. It was about 5% of all Republicans in 2008 who said that religion was very important but they attended services less than once a year. The trend line in 2022 was just about 11%. So, today, a Republican is twice as likely to be culturally religious compared to a Democrat.” Politics strikes again.
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.
I recently finished the book Wisdom From Babylon: Leadership for the Church in a Secular Age. In it Gordon T. Smith argues that in a secular age (defined via Charles Taylor’s concept) we need to rethink our cultural engagement and leadership strategies. He argues that we should look to the concept of exile and Christian thinkers whose thought developed during times of cultural exile. In particular he looks to three: Leslie Newbegin, Jacques Ellul, and Soren Kierkegaard (are you noticing a theme to my reading of late?).
In the main I really enjoyed Wisdom From Babylon, but on criticism is the assumption that “the greatest threat to the church is not external but internal” (48). While I agree that there is much we need to learn from Newbegin, Ellul, and Kierkegaard, I find statements like this to be odd. I am not sure how I would assess and weigh “threats” to the church. Additionally, it seems that many of the internal threats to the church are manifestations of worldliness within the church. In other words, we neglect the external threat of some kind of cultural assimilation, it gets into the church, then it threatens the church.
Thanks for reading,
tdh