Jacques Ellul - Life and Influences

Life and Influences

Ellul was born in Bordeaux, France on 6 January 1912 to Marthe Mendes (Protestant; French-Portuguese) and Joseph Ellul (initially Greek Orthodox, but then Voltarian by conviction; born in Malta of an Italo-Maltese father and Serb mother). As a teenager he wanted to be a naval officer but his father made him read law. He was married to Yvette Lensvelt in 1937.

Jacques was educated at the universities of Bordeaux and Paris. In World War II, he was a leader in the French resistance. For his efforts to save Jews he was awarded the title Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2001.

Ellul was best friends with Bernard Charbonneau, who wrote on similar themes. They met through the Protestant Student Federation during the academic school year of 1929–1930.

Jacques Ellul had three primary sources of inspiration by the early 1930s who would influence his works henceforth: Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth. Ellul was first introduced to the ideas of Karl Marx during an economics lecture course taught by Joseph Benzacar in 1929––1930; Ellul studied Marx and became a prolific exegete of his theories. During this same period, he also came across Kierkegaard. And, he considered Karl Barth, who was a leader of the resistance against the German state church in World War II, the greatest theologian of the 20th century. He also said that his father played a great role in his life and considered him his role model.

The influence of these ideologies has alternately earned him devoted followers and vicious enemies. In large measure and especially in those of his books concerned with theological matters, Ellul restates the viewpoints held by Barth, whose polar dialectic of the Word of God, in which the Gospel both judges and renews the world, shaped Ellul's theological perspective. In Jacques Ellul: A Systemic Exposition Darrell J. Fasching claimed Ellul believed "That which desacralizes a given reality, itself in turn becomes the new sacred reality".

In 1932, after what he describes as "a very brutal and very sudden conversion", Ellul professed himself a Christian. Ellul believes he was about 17 (1929–1930) and spending the summer with some friends in Blanquefort, France. While translating Faust alone in the house, Ellul knew (without seeing or hearing anything) he was in the presence of a something so astounding, so overwhelming, which entered the very center of his being. He jumped on a bike and fled, concluding eventually that he had been in the presence of God. This experience started the conversion process which Ellul said then continued over a period of years thereafter.

He was also prominent in the worldwide ecumenical movement, although he later became sharply critical of the movement for what he felt were indiscriminate endorsements of political establishments, primarily of the Left. However, he was no friendlier in his assessment of those of the Right; he fashioned an explicitly anti-political stance as an alternative to both (see below).

Ellul has been credited with coining the phrase, "Think globally, act locally." He often said that he was born in Bordeaux by chance, but that it was by choice that he spent almost all his academic career there.

On 19 May 1994, after a long illness, he died in his house in Pessac, just a mile or two from the University of Bordeaux campus and surrounded by those closest to him. His wife had died a few years prior, on 16 April 1991.