Ellul’s Increasing Relevance
People have never spoken so much about human beings while at the same time giving up speaking to them . . . conditions are such that the human person has disappeared. What remains is the consumer, the worker, the citizen, the reader, the partisan, the producer, the bourgeois . . . and yet, it is only to the human person that we can speak authentically. It is only with the human person that we can communicate.223
In this book, we have tried to sketch the main ideas—the “big picture”—in some of the diverse and multifaceted writings of Jacques Ellul. Our goal was not to replace the readers’ engagement with Ellul, but to facilitate it. But why engage with Ellul at all? Is his work still relevant today?
As for the first of these two questions, the citation above is a good starting place to find the answer. Ellul was ultimately after communication; his writings are an address, a personal call to readers. He encourages us to be present, to share time and space with one another, and yet to be different. He calls us to retreat from the easy illusions which our age offers us, to pass through a serious and realistic look at ourselves and the world around us. He exhorts us to serious intellectual labor, to understand where we are, how we got here, and where we are headed. He calls us to respond; he challenges us to disagree; but above all, he counsels us to become aware of what is driving our action so that we can then become free. We suggest that it would be difficult to find a more stringent critic and a more hopeful ally to walk with us in our critical questioning of our society and ourselves.
Ellul urges us to give up our false hopes; his theology calls us to hope in the God who is love, in Jesus Christ. Ellul’s belief is that such an address in the medium of a human word spoken between two persons is the most fragile, humble, and yet authentic way to find true freedom. For all these reasons and many more, Ellul is worth reading. If one honestly responds to Ellul’s challenges, one cannot walk away unchanged.
But is he still relevant today? While we certainly think so (otherwise we would not have written this book), we cannot answer for you, dear readers. We think that Ellul’s address will be relevant as long as we find ourselves alienated and isolated, yearning for true communication and community. If we have not lost this yearning, this desire which is the opposite of a utopian dream, but which measures the distance from where we are and a future which we do not know because it has yet to be discovered—then perhaps Ellul’s call will not fall on deaf ears. But only you can really say.
223. Ellul, Presence in the Modern World, 75–76.