Confronting Technology

The Theology of Jacques Ellul

Matthew T. Prior

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532671456, 9781532671463
• eBook ISBN: 9781532671470
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

We are living through a digital revolution which already touches every area of life and will continue to shape the future in as yet unforeseen ways. Digital technologies are an ordinary part of daily life, and yet they also present an unprecedented challenge to Christians to articulate a biblical, theological framework to navigate times of rapid change. The work of the French theologian Jacques Ellul is a theological time-bomb primed for times like these.Accounts of Ellul's career often divide off his sociology and theology, but this book argues that Ellul conceived a single project of bringing technology into confrontation with the Word of God, tackling the phenomenon he named technique, the pursuit of maximal power and efficiency implicit in the technological enterprise, with a profound depth of biblical and ethical insight. Centering himself on the apocalypse or revelation of Jesus Christ in history, Ellul offers a monumental, timely (though far from flawless) contribution to contemporary ethical debates about the uses and abuses of technologies. His work blazes a trail that Christians and all concerned for the future would do well to follow, as we avoid both the naivety of "technological neutrality" and the dread of "technological determinism."

1

Not by Sociology Alone

The Asymmetry of Theology and Sociology in the Work of Jacques Ellul

In my introduction, I explored why I believe Jacques Ellul to be a valuable guide for the mission of the church today. To restate my basic reading of Ellul in negative terms: his work is misunderstood if we think of his theology and sociology as separate categories each with their own integrity. I will argue that Ellul’s life work is an integrated whole born of what he himself would call a biblical dialectic.

I do not claim that approaching Ellul’s thought in this way is entirely new; it has been broached in various forms during the past thirty years of reading Ellul.78 Indeed, Simon Charbonneau, the son of Ellul’s early soul mate Bernard Charbonneau, and an avowed agnostic like his father, states clearly that Ellul’s technology criticism stems from his faith:

This book announces all that his life and work was to be, with its two strands of theology and sociology, each inseparable from the other, despite what people often say. His entire critical stance towards modern society stems from his Christian faith.79

As Charbonneau notes, within the fiercely positivist context of French academic life, separation has been the habitual model, but to the detriment of retrieving Ellul’s legacy today.

To make my case, in this chapter, I will draw on two types of evidence, each in a separate section. In the first section, I will navigate the Ellul’s own statements about the relationship between his theology and his sociology, and their reception by others.

In the second section, I shall explore Frédéric Rognon’s argument for the key influence of Kierkegaard on Ellul and what he calls the asymmetry between theology and sociology in Ellul’s work. In an original reconstruction, I will bring together a number of texts defying easy categorization, which I shall term programmatic, exhibiting an internal dialectic between theology and sociology. They are, in order of publication, Présence au monde moderne (1948); Les nouveaux possédés (1973); La parole humiliée (1981); and Changer de révolution (1982); and the posthumous collection, Théologie et technique: pour une éthique de la non-puissance (2014). Within the standard classification of Ellul’s work, the first is commonly classed as theological, the next three as sociological. Bringing my arguments together in chapter six, I contend that the last and most recently published, Théologie et technique, demonstrates that Ellul’s technology criticism is founded on a dialectical “theology of Technique.”80

Theology as the Key to Jacques Ellul?

Ellul’s reflections upon his work have been a happy hunting ground for his interpreters over the years. American philosopher Jacob Van Vleet has been the latest to offer an outline of what he terms Ellul’s “dialectical Theology.” Based on a careful study of Ellul’s writings, with particular attention to Ellul’s own statements of method, Van Vleet argues that “Theology is the key to Jacques Ellul.”81

Noting that reading Ellul’s sociology alone should perhaps come with a health warning, he begins by attending to the infamous misreading of Ellul identified with the American Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski, who possessed only a number of Ellul’s sociological texts, penned a sentence which should bring a chill to all readers of Ellul: “When I read Technological Society for the first time, I was delighted because I thought: here is someone who is saying what I have already been thinking.”82 Taking this book as his “bible,” Kaczynski’s Ellul was a paranoid “neo-Luddite calling for a complete overthrow of the system,” Van Vleet claims.83 Outlining Ellul’s thought in a clear, integrated and complete way, Van Vleet seeks to dispel the myth of Ellul’s work as “fatalistic” or “deterministic”84 current in popular rejections of his work.

It is of course possible to isolate Ellul’s technology criticism from his theology without such extreme consequences. The 2007 book L’Homme qui avait (presque) tout prévu, by the French journalist Jean-Luc Porquet, re-popularized Ellul’s work in France after years of neglect but essentially dispenses with his faith. Porquet makes a lively case for Ellul as a twentieth-century seer whose work should be required reading today. In encapsulating twenty of Ellul’s “great ideas,” Porquet mines neglected Ellulian analyses from varied works and highlights how they have been validated by events, using an eclectic mix of media clichés, government announcements and purported scientific studies. In closing, he offers a brief chapter on Ellul’s theology, conceding that Ellul’s theology predetermined his iconoclasm, but defending the independence of Ellul’s sociological methods and the prescience of his conclusions.

Porquet’s book is an engaging attempt to apply Ellul’s technology criticism to the present moment, a task Ellul would no doubt have commended. However, its inevitable weakness is...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Notes on Translation
• Introduction
• 1. Not by Sociology Alone
• 2. Rupture
• 3. Apocalypse Then
• 4. Apocalypse Now
• 5. The Apocalypse of Creation
• 6. Hearing the Word
• Conclusion
• Bibliography