What I believe

by Jacques Ellul

Book by Euul, Jacques

Genres: Theology, Sociology, Religion, Anarchism, Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1989

About the author

Baptised Catholic, Ellul became an atheist and Marxist at 19, and a Christian of the Reformed Church at 22. During his Marxist days, he was a member of the French Communist Party. During World War II, he fought with the French Underground against the Nazi occupation of France.

Educated at the Universities of Bordeaux and Paris, he taught Sociology and the History of Law at the Universities of Strausbourg and Montpellier. In 1946 he returned to Bordeaux where he lived, wrote, served as Mayor, and taught until his death in 1994.

In the 40 books and hundreds of articles Ellul wrote in his lifetime, his dominant theme was always the threat to human freedom posed by modern technology. His tenor and methodology is objective and scholarly, and the perspective is a sociological one. Few of his books are overtly political -- even though they deal directly with political phenomena -- and several of his books, including "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" and "The Technological Society" are required reading in many graduate communication curricula.

Ellul was also a respected and serious Christian theologian whose 1948 work, "The Presence of the Kingdom," makes explicit a dual theme inherent, though subtly stated, in all of his writing, a sort of yin and yang of modern technological society: sin and sacramentality.

Reviews

[Otávio Mayrink · Rating 4 out of 5]

A modest, but quite insightful exposition of Jacques Ellul’s views on many of the topics he explored in his life as a sociologist, philosopher, and disciple of Christ. For those looking after an overview of Ellul’s thoughts on life, reality, history, God, technology, and eschatology (although not politics), that’s what you’ll find on this book. He was a prolific writer, and this is rather a personal text, than a theoretical exposition (although many of the subjects are philosophical). It’s not at all an exhaustive text.

His views on history (Part II – The Human Adventure) were formative for me. More importantly, however, is his theory of the three environments (natural, social and technological) which I believe is the best theoretical framework to understand the role of technology in our society today (and also in the future).

His definition of “technique” should be taught in every sociology class about technology. Ellul’s propositions are almost prophetic. It’s crazy how what he wrote in the 60’s remains so up to date. Even the chapter about “Everlasting love” contains a quite relevant message for this generation.

The last chapter (about the doctrine of recapitulation) is groundbreaking. It’s the best perspective I’ve read so far on the meaning of the “reward” (“galardão” in Portuguese) for Christians. It convinced me to read his book about the apocalypse.

Many of the ideas brought about in the book reflect on the discussions in the academia back then (such as the dialogue with Marx). You can also see Karl Barth’s influences on how he understood God and salvation.

[Albert Moritz · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book Ellul gives the fullest exposition of his concept of the three basic milieux, historically, of humankind, first defined, succinctly, in his "Persectives on Our Age" (1980; often reprinted), the book of four swift-flowing, often conversational essays summarizing some of his main ideas, which was based on a week-long Canadian Broadcasting Corporation "Ideas" series of radio programs on him (1979). It's good to have a fuller discussion here--one of many merits of this outstanding and outstandingly stimulated book. One wishes, though, that he'd devoted an entire essay or short book to this concept, whose simplicity and comprehensive depth and accuracy, like those of all of Ellul's fundamental ideas, reveals itself more and more clearly, with the intensification of our various crises, as the essential insights, which needed to be listened to when he formulated them. Unfortunately they still need to be listened to today by many deniers of our constructed reality, although the situation forces recognition on more and more people, who usually express the insights without reference to their originator. Like his master Kierkegaard, Ellul was a thinker of such rapidly evolving fecundity that he threw off many ideas that he himself could not stop to develop fully. On the other hand, he was a usually clearer and less tricksy writer the SK, so even his briefly expressed great ideas, presented almost as asides, are full and strong enough.

[Raleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jacques Ellul impresses me every time. This book is a collection of his thoughts and beliefs on various issues including love, the nature of belief, the destructive power of technology, universal salvation and more. Ellul is very precise and articulate in how he presents his arguments. He is not reluctant to claim (he does again and again actually) that what he believes is something that he cannot explain. He's not teaching us what to believe, he's more showing us what he believes is true in a holistic way. The book is solid throughout and starts off with a brilliant quote:

"For me the difference between what I do not believe and what I do believe has a very different origin. What I do not believe is very clear and precise. What I do believe is is complex, diffuse-I might almost say unconscious-and theoretical. It involves myself, whereas what I do not believe can be at a distance. I can regard it as exterior and therefore relatively well defined. It can be the object of a taxonomy. What I believe finds me totally implicated personally. I can speak about it only as I do about myself. I do not believe in an object but in a network of relations which I cannot really expound because exposition demands a didactic procedure, the dividing up of realities that belong to one another."