Dr. Koyzis has responded to my post concering his essay on Jacques Ellul’s Technique and the Opening Chapters of Genesis. He wonders why the sort of personal action that Ellul espouses is any better than institutional action, given the pervasiveness of sin in the world. Ellul, despite his protestations to the contrary, was Calvinist in many ways, including his views of humanity. We are sinful creatures, and every bit of our lives is caught up in sin. Inter-personal, face-to-face action is not less sinful that institutional action, but it solves particular problems that institutions carry with them. But let us look to Ellul’s perspective on this.

In his Presence of the Kingdom, Ellul examines very specifically at the Christian’s role in the world, and what Christian action should resemble. I’ve written previously regarding Ellul’s advice to the layman, so let’s examine what he has to say to the Christian intellectual. He perceives several problems with intellectual activity during the 20th century, but these can be distilled to two primary issues: the imposition of Technique upon intellectual endeavors, and communication that only speaks about humanity rather than to it.

The first problem was alluded to in the discussion of Koyzis’ initial essay–if the Cultural Mandate includes unlocking hidden potentialities in Creation (therefore viewing progress and Technique as part of the created world before Fall), what do we make of “backward” cultures? Are they less Godly because they are less advanced? Additionally, the imposition of Technique on the intellect (the “enslavement of the intelligence to technical methods” as Ellul puts it) becomes problematic for communication because communication now must occur along these technical lines. If we do not employ the proper intellectual technics, we are necessarily excluded from communication because of it. These narrow technical lines ultimately hinder the very intellectual endeavor they seek to empower.

More problematic for Ellul is the effect of Technique on communication. Communication, especially from and between intellectuals, has ceased to be personal. Ellul writes:

There has never been a time when people have talked so much about Man: there never was a time when so little was said to Man.

Worse, intellectual communication has ceased to have any anchor in the world–it is not based on concrete experiences and interactions. Ellul writes with an eye toward political intellectuals, those who formulate theory and policy, and it is here that the problem of non-personal communication manifests itself the most. Ellul’s remedy is focus intellectual activity and communication on what we know and what we experience–our neighbors, our family, our community. Only by knowing these can anyone expect to understand anything about the larger world. Hence Ellul’s distaste of political policies and programs, as they are often anchored in the abstract. Ellul begins with the little way (to borrow Dorothy Day’s phrase) and works outward.

So what of institutions, specifically the State? For Ellul, they will doomed to fail because they must work in the abstract, disconnected from the very people they seek to help (a result of his political work). Ellul would admit, I believe, that the State could do the work of God, but only because of God–it is He who orders those ends. But a focus on political policy and program would likely be fruitless for the Christian, as its work in the abstract necessarily removes us from the concrete work we are called to do–to be neighbors and live out our faith in a real way.

Posted on 6 September 2006