Culture as Flight from God: Jacques Ellul on the Fall

Jacques Ellul was a twentieth-century French Protestant, a scientist and social scientist – as well as a highly accomplished lay theologian. His most famous work sociologically analysed trends in modern developed societies, The Technological Society and later The Technological Bluff . In these books he deployed a form of cultural criticism inspired by Marx to emphasise the ways that mutations in material culture shape human self-awareness and so resituates people’s perceptions of what counts as a moral dilemma. As a dialectical theologian he sought to straddle but not to synthesise popular rationality and theological discourse, rooted, as he understood it, in the ‘mythical’ world of the Christian Bible. 1 In this chapter I will focus on a text in which Ellul draws together his cultural analysis and his theology, The Meaning of the City . Taking problems he saw for modern humanity living in a technological world to the text of scripture, he found in the primeval history substantive links with his sociological observations about the power of the forces of the autonomous, intrusive and manipulative postindustrial world. The Fall plays a central role in this culture-critical hermeneutic