I first encountered Jacques Ellul while listening to a Mars Hill Audio interview that commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of both Ellul's Presence of the Kingdom and Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences. That ten minutes of audio was life-changing, as it led me to read two books that changed my understanding of both modern society and Christianity.
Jacques Ellul became a Marxist at age 19, and a Christian at age 22. Heavily influenced by Karl Barth, his theology must be handled gingerly, but just as with other neo-orthodox writers such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the reader's caution is well rewarded as he is guided through important Christian territory that safer writers too often ignore. Ellul is remarkable for being a very thoughtful public Christian who did not trade on that aspect of his life, becoming renowned instead for his legal and sociological studies. He generally wrote about a given subject twice, once using a secular approach and then again in the form of a Bible study.
Jacques Ellul was also remarkable for knowing from the very beginning what the arc of his long career would be. He has written in multiple places that his first book, The Presence of the Kingdom, should be read as a preparatory outline for the work he intended to flesh out over the next fifty years. And it is true; the topics he wrote about, and the things he had to say about them, are mostly found there in embryonic form. So it is possible to read just this book and glean the essence of Ellul's thought—if one reads deeply enough.
But the best reason to read The Presence of the Kingdom is that it gives an unusual answer to the question, How should a Christian conduct himself in today's society? The usual answer is either to separate ourselves from the culture as the pietists do, or to engage with and conquer the culture as the triumphalists do. Ellul proposes a third answer: we are to simply bear witness to the truth by being Christians in a fallen world, neither separating ourselves from nor immersing ourselves in the culture. Taken together with Bonhoeffer's guidelines in Life Together for how Christians should live in community, a powerful alternative emerges to the weak and ineffective approaches to Christian life promoted by the modern church.
(To order all three books, choose The Jacques Ellul Collection.)
The Presence of the Kingdom is Jacques Ellul's most important book for Christians, but he also wrote several landmark books that identified some deep flaws in modern society, and we recommend them as well. Ellul's best-known book is The Technological Society, in which he explains the critical shift in thinking that led to modern industrial society—briefly, we began to value means above ends, and decided that the greatest good was to perform a task efficiently, no matter what the value of the result. (This thesis is explored in a simpler and more accessible manner in Neil Postman's book Technopoly.)
Propaganda is another remarkable book that identifies another critical shift in thinking, namely that technology in the form of mass media can be used to shape men's attitudes. In fact, it is precisely the education and cultural engagement demanded by modern society that leaves men vulnerable to propagandistic efforts that lead them to behave in irrational but politically useful ways.
It is unfortunate that a third book, The Political Illusion, is no longer in print. Not only does it form a trilogy with The Technological Society and Propaganda, but it speaks to a matter about which many Christians seem to be very confused, namely the possibility of influencing society for the good through political means. Ellul explains not only that this is flat-out impossible, but that the political system is deliberately designed to create the illusion of control through participation so as to keep the average person engaged and thereby distracted from doing the simpler and less glamorous things that might actually make a difference. We encourage you to locate a used copy of this book.
A stylistic note: Jacques Ellul's books are not light reading. The writing is not weighed down with jargon or obscure phrasing, but Ellul's arguments are so carefully constructed that it is important to be sure you understand the current point before moving on to the next. Expect that any one of them will require a slow and thorough reading, and that multiple re-readings will continue to yield more insights.