False presence of the kingdom

by Jacques Ellul

Text: English, French (translation)

Genres: Theology, Religion, Nonfiction

211 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1963

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

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ellul is timeless. This volume is his major critique of the French Reformed Church in the early 1960s, and he emphasizes the specificity of that time and locale to his critique, setting up a distinction between the way the Church has been critiqued and specific responses to the cultural moment he was in. As such, any contemporary reading of the book has to take this into account and can't take his words as necessarily prescient or prophetic; it could be easy to read almost any political perspective or social perspective into the critiques that he offers, which would be a gross misuse of his work and a complete misunderstanding of the wisdom of his approach and perspective. Nonetheless, the advice that he offers and words of gentle critique that he offers with regard to the way that Christians acquiesce to culture are far-reaching and thought-provoking no matter the time or situation. His words on worldly culture and the appeals that Christians make to try and fit into that culture or even baptize it with a veneer of Christianity are accurate to this day and applicable. Even the solutions that he offers, while maybe limited in scope and application, are worth pondering and examining with a closer lens. The more things change, sometimes, the more they stay the same, and Ellul's work here persists as a fascinating and engaging read of the ways that Christians struggle and at times fail to live in but not of the world.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceedingly helpful book. I gleaned much from its pages.