Ellul Excitement

Great excitement in my household today with the arrival of a package in the post from the USA from ABE Books. In 1988 I toured Australia with my family, traveling the entire continent for the bicentennial year as part of a funded Bicentennial project. Performing to almost a half million people during the year, our troupe moved through 42 major country towns as well as several smaller ones along the way. On tour I took several books with me as I knew some of the places we were going wouldn't have a library and I needed books to entertain, provoke and educate me on the journey.

In Armidale NSW, I met a foreign student studying sociology at UNE and his research seemed to slot in very nicely with a Jacques Ellul book I was reading at the time : The New Demons. I felt his need was greater than mine so I gave him my copy, later to discover the book was out of print and had a limited print run. I've searched for it on the internet since, but the price was always prohibitive with second-hand booksellers wanting $40US plus postage. So it was with great joy I recently discovered a copy for $3.50 on ABE - $11.50 all up with postage for a hardback copy. (Currently Amazon has a copy 2nd hand for $73 plus postage!)


Ellul was a French philosopher, professor of law and sociology, theologian and Christian anarchist who died in 1994 at the age of 83. He wrote over 50 books and Time magazine once labelled him one of the most important theologians of the twentieth century.


"The decline of the Western Church seems fortunate to me, for those who drift away from the church never really belonged to it. By God's grace, it is no longer useful to be a Christian or to make reference to the church and the Bible." 

Ellul believed that the decline of the Church in the West and secularisation forces Christians to live in risk, insecurity and contradiction. He believed Christians should act with subversive freedom that challenges the premises of the world around them. Christians, according to Ellul, should be subversive iconoclasts, setting out to destroy the new sacralized idols of modern society. The New Demons is Ellul's examination of the secularisation of Western society and the new religions and idols. Somewhere, over the next month or two I'll be re-reading Ellul and see how he stands up after 20 years.


Burn brightly, Pete