French Theology for the Philosopher of Technology

Jacob E. Van Vleet has written an accessible and thoroughly researched text outlining the manner in which an informed appreciation of Jacques Ellul’s dialectical theology is of pivotal significance in understanding his work. In this reviewer’s opinion, Van Vleet’s book is a very fine example of a clear and careful synthetic introductory exposition. Most of what I will say in this review is not so much a comment on Van Vleet’s book itself as a reflection on why the book Van Vleet wrote needed to be written and what type of readers of Ellul and thinkers influenced by Ellul will find the text useful.

Ellul is a seminal figure in twentieth-century philosophy of technology scholarship. Two of Ellul’s books—The Technological Society (1954) and Propaganda (1962)—are recognized classics in the field. Even so, Ellul was not a scholar who could be readily assimilated into any established school of thought. Further, the dialectical subtlety, the interdisciplinary scope, and the integrative dynamism of his thought taken as a whole disturbs the demarcations that often define academic normality. For these reasons Ellul’s work tends to be treated in a rather piecemeal manner and not considered as a whole. To Van Vleet this tendency to cherry-pick a few key ideas from Ellul’s work, and only from his recognized philosophy of technology classics, profoundly distorts a fair appreciation of Ellul’s work. Most noticeably, those who only read Ellul’s above classics readily tend toward the entirely erroneous view that Ellul was a technological determinist.

There is no excuse for failing to notice the centrality of dialectical theology to Ellul’s understanding of technique and propagandes. In his preface to Propaganda (1973), Ellul notes that while he sees propaganda as a necessary feature of modern technological society, he does not “worship facts and power” (xv). Indeed, he maintains that because a “phenomenon is necessary means, for me, that it denies man: its necessity is proof of its power, not proof of its excellence” (xv). Here the unstated dialectical partner to determinist necessity is spiritual freedom. Both, so Ellul maintains, are paradoxically integral to the mystery that is human reality. So while Ellul focuses on necessity in his careful study of propaganda, he does so from a stance not limited to necessity, from a stance that refuses to have its conceptual horizons falsely reduced to the statistical iron wall of mechanistic inevitability.

Because he studies necessity from a place “above” necessity, key features of Ellul’s conceptual outlook are simply invisible to those who do “worship facts and power,” to those who approach the study of society without any theological appreciation of freedom. Yet it is here, in his dialectical theology, that Ellul is most keenly differentiated from Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. Because of his theology, Ellul’s careful analysis of the necessities of modern technological society transcends what it is possible to think of in classical sociology.

Thanks to some very fine work by contemporary theologians—John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (2005) being a game changer in the emergence of postsecular political theology—it is now possible to see that Ellul’s theologically framed sociology is not defective social science but is perhaps a fresh pathway out of what might be the determinist, reductive, and philosophically self-defeating malaise of modern social theory. Even so, most thinkers working in the philosophy of technology today have been profoundly formed by the functional determinism that is a key feature of knowledge production in the technological society. For this reason, nontheologically literate philosophers of technology who come into contact with the theological dimension of Ellul’s work can easily find this contact bewildering. A good reading of Ellul coming from a nontheological and determinist stance will wonder what kind of mystifying brave new world of bizarre ideas and incomprehensible intellectual commitments Ellul inhabits.

Van Vleet has given us...