Jacques Ellul
Jacques Ellul
Jacques Ellulwas a French philosopher, professor, sociologist, lay theologian, and Christian anarchist. Ellul was a longtime Professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions on the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences at the University of Bordeaux. A prolific writer, he authored 58 books and more than a thousand articles over his lifetime, many of which discussed propaganda, the impact of technology on society, and the interaction between religion and politics. The dominant theme of his work proved to be...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth6 January 1912
CountryFrance
decision challenges groups
This is where each individual must decide for himself. The essential thing is the decision to challenge the modern state, which without this small group of protesters will be checked by neither brake, value, nor reason.
heart thinking expression
People think that they have no right to judge a fact all they have to do is to accept it. Thus from the moment that technics, the State, or production, are facts, we must worship them as facts, and we must try to adapt ourselves to them. This is the very heart of modern religion, the religion of the established fact, the religion on which depend the lesser religions of the dollar, race, or the proletariat , which are only expressions of the great modern divinity , the Moloch of fact.
spiritual downgrading violence
To the ideal of high consumption and the downgrading of spiritual values corresponds a conception of injustice that centers exclusively on the problem of consumption; and equality in consumption cannot be achieved except by violence.
giving-up fate giving
Fate operates when people give up
jesus son should-have
It is inconceivable that the God who gives Himself in His Son to save us, should have created some people ordained to evil and damnation. There can only be one predestination to salvation. In and through Jesus Christ all people are predestined to be saved. Our free choice is ruled out in this regard. God wants free people, except in relation to this last and definitive decision. We are not free to decide and choose to be damned.
propaganda ends dialogue
Propaganda begins when dialogue ends.
justice violence causes
Almost always, it is the conviction that 'I am right' or 'my cause is the cause of justice' that triggers violence. That is, ...the moment propaganda does its work, violence is unleashed. And violence can be reduced by countering this propaganda.
reality choices individuality
True technique will know how to maintain the illusion of liberty, choice, and individuality; but these will have been carefully calculated so that they will be integrated into the mathematical reality merely as appearances!
suicide world accepting
The will of the world is always a will to death, a will to suicide. We must not accept this suicide, and we must so act that it cannot take place.
christian prayer views
For in a civilization which has lost the meaning of life, the most important thing a Christian can do is to live, and life, understood from the point of view of faith, has an extraordinary explosive force.
goal ends humanist
Education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians.
men doe propaganda
Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve .
christian people religion
Christians have always tended to transform the Christian Revelation into a Christian religion. Christianity is said to be a religion like any other or, conversely, some Christians try to show that it is a better religion than the others. People attempt to take possession of God. Theology claims to explain everything, including the being of God. People tend to transform Christianity into a religion because the Christian faith obviously places people in an extremely uncomfortable position that of freedom guided only by love and all in the context of God's radical demand that we be holy.
kings teaching biblical
The biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power . It incites to "counterpower," to "positive" criticism , to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel ), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally, if we may use a modern term, to a kind of " anarchism " (so long as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the nineteenth century).