Jacques Ellul Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

What seems to be one of the disasters of our time is that we all appear to agree that the nation-state is the norm. … Whether the state be Marxist or capitalist, it makes no difference. The dominant ideology is that of sovereignty.

Jacques Ellul
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.

Jacques Ellul
Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity.

Jacques Ellul
The biblical view is not just apolitical but antipolitical in the sense that it refuses to confer any value on political power, or in the sense that it regards political power as idolatrous.

Jacques Ellul
The gospel and the first church were never hostile to women nor treated them as minors. … When Christianity became a power or authority, this worked against women. A strange perversion, yet fully understandable when we allow that women represent precisely the most innovative elements in Christianity: grace, love, charity, a concern for living creatures, nonviolence, an interest in little things, the hope of new beginnings—the very elements that Christianity was setting aside in favor of glory and success.

Jacques Ellul
I describe a world with no exit, convinced that God accompanies man throughout his history.

Jacques Ellul
Evangelical proclamation was essentially subversive. Put in danger by it, the forces of the social body have replied by integrating this power of negation, of challenge, by absorbing it.

Jacques Ellul
The combination of Christian truth and political power led to the creation of the complex that we know so well. … The emperor endows the church handsomely, helps it in all that it does, aids it in its mission. The church supports the emperor's legitimacy and assures him that he is God's representative on earth.

Jacques Ellul
Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

Jacques Ellul
We have to admit that there is an immeasurable distance between all that we read in the Bible and the practice of the Church and of Christians.

Jacques Ellul
When God picks out a man and speaks to him, it is to engage him in a work, an action. Nowhere in Scripture do we find indeterminate or purely mystical vocation.

Jacques Ellul
Very quickly the church found intolerable and inapplicable features in what Jesus Christ demanded and proclaimed. Let us simply take two themes. First, he tells us to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. But how can anyone take this impossibility seriously? … Again, Jesus says, Go, sell all your goods, give them to the poor, and then come and follow me. How are we to take this? …

Jacques Ellul
Revelation … unavoidably challenges the institution and established power, no matter what form this may take. But the adulteration by political power has changed all this. Christianity has become a religion of conformity, of integration into the social body. It has come to be regarded as useful for social cohesion (the exact opposite of what it is in its source and truth). Alternatively, it has become a flight from political or concrete reality, a flight into the spiritual world, into the cultivation of the inner life, into mysticism, and hence an evasion of the present world.

Jacques Ellul
In point of fact there are a certain number of values and of forces which are of decisive importance in our world civilization: the primacy of production, the continual growth of the power of the State and the formation of the National State, the autonomous development of technics, etc. These, among others — far more than the ownership of the means of production or any totalitarian doctrine — are the constitutive elements of the modern world. So long as these elements continue to be taken for granted, the world is standing still.

Jacques Ellul
Christianity, … welcomed at first among the religions of escape, changes into a religion that gives cohesion to society

Jacques Ellul
The individual who is the servant of technique must be completely unconscious of himself.

Jacques Ellul
Technique shapes an aristocratic society, which in turn implies aristocratic government. Democracy in such a society can only be a mere appearance. Even now, we see in propaganda the premises of such a state of affairs. When it comes to state propaganda, there is no longer any question of democracy.

Jacques Ellul
The church … is always at the service of the political power that is either in place or in course of being installed. It goes on to serve the Holy Roman Empire but also the kings of France who split off from it. It will bless all the monarchs who seize power in ways that are tragic, tempestuous, and often bloody and unjust.. It legitimizes everything. This is logical once it associates itself with the existing power.

Jacques Ellul
The exousia of political power … is a rebel exousia, an angel in revolt against God.

Jacques Ellul
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.

Jacques Ellul
Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it.

Jacques Ellul
Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends.

Jacques Ellul
The social body that had been effectively threatened by the diffusion of a faith that bordered on anarchism, on a total lack of interest in worldly matters (administration, commerce, etc.), … reacted in self-defense and absorbed the foreign body, making it serve its own ends.

Jacques Ellul
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).

Jacques Ellul
Throughout the Old Testament we see God choosing what is weak and humble to represent him (the stammering Moses, the infant Samuel, Saul from an insignificant family, David confronting Goliath, etc). Paul tells us that God chooses the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. Here, however, we have a striking contradiction. In Constantine God is supposedly choosing an Augustus, a triumphant military leader. This vision and this miracle are totally impossible. But they are not impossible in the context of Christianity that is already off the rails, that thinks of God as the one who directs history and is the motive power in politics.

Jacques Ellul
Jesus find the same mistake in both the Saducees and the Pharisees, both those who collaborate with the Romans and those who oppose them. In the eyes of Jesus they are both wrong. He will not play any part in the political drama.

Jacques Ellul
It seems to me that the free man, i. e., the man freed in Christ, ought to take parts in all movements that aim at human freedom. He obviously ought to oppose all dictatorship and oppression and all the fatalities which crush man. The Christian cannot bear it that others should be slaves. His great passion in the world ought to be a passion for the liberation of men.

Jacques Ellul
Every modern state is totalitarian. It recognizes no limit either factual or legal. This is why I maintain that no state in the modern world is legitimate. No present-day authority can claim to be instructed by God, for all authority is set in the framework of a totalitarian state. This is why I decide for anarchy.

Jacques Ellul
But if technique demands the participation of everybody, this means that the individual is reduced to a few essential functions which make him a mass man. He remains 'free', but he can no longer escape being a part of the mass. Technical expansion requires the widest possible domain. In the near future not even the whole earth may be sufficient.

Jacques Ellul
Perfect freedom, spiritual as well as political or social, … is accomplished in us by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. … But it is strictly intolerable in the fullness of its implications. It is psychologically unbearable. It carries frightening social risks and is politically insulting to every form of power. It was not possible. On every social level and in every culture, people have found it impossible to take up this freedom and accept its implications. This is the basic impossibility, the unanimous refusal of all people, which has resulted in the rejection of Christian freedom.

Jacques Ellul