Jacques Ellul: Power

Jacques Ellul was French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist. Explore interesting quotes on power.

Jacques Ellul: 250 quotes7 likes

“Once the church is ready to associate with instituted power it is obliged to associate with all and sundry forms of the state. The scandal is that each time the church seeks to justify both its adaptation and the existing power. It continues to legitimize the state and to be an instrument of its propaganda.”

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 126

“The biblical view is not just apolitical but antipolitical in the sense that it refuses to confer any value on political power, or in the sense that it regards political power as idolatrous.”

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 113

“I can very well say without hesitation that all those who have political power, even if they use it well have acquired it by demonic mediation and even if they are not conscious of it, they are worshippers of diabolos.”

Si tu es le Fils de Dieu (1991), p. 76

“The exousia of political power … is a rebel exousia, an angel in revolt against God.”

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 115

“Perfect freedom, spiritual as well as political or social, … is accomplished in us by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. … But it is strictly intolerable in the fullness of its implications. It is psychologically unbearable. It carries frightening social risks and is politically insulting to every form of power. It was not possible. On every social level and in every culture, people have found it impossible to take up this freedom and accept its implications. This is the basic impossibility, the unanimous refusal of all people, which has resulted in the rejection of Christian freedom.”

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 43

“Throughout the Old Testament we see God choosing what is weak and humble to represent him (the stammering Moses, the infant Samuel, Saul from an insignificant family, David confronting Goliath, etc). Paul tells us that God chooses the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. Here, however, we have a striking contradiction. In Constantine God is supposedly choosing an Augustus, a triumphant military leader. This vision and this miracle are totally impossible. But they are not impossible in the context of Christianity that is already off the rails, that thinks of God as the one who directs history and is the motive power in politics.”

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 123

“We must unmask the ideological falsehoods of the many powers, and especially we must show that the famous theory of the rule of law which lulls the democracies is a lie from beginning to end.”

Jacques Ellul book Anarchy and Christianity

Source: Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 16

“It is because we know that we are going forward to life and resurrection that we must purify ourselves in order that we may be presented holy and faultless. This purification, of course, is not just ritual or moral. It is purification from the stains of the world. It will manifest itself in our freedom with regard to the things of the world. This is why hope and freedom are so often related in the texts. The hope which binds us to the risen Christ by a full and actual bond is precisely that which allows us to reject the validity of the secular powers.”

Source: The Ethics of Freedom (1973 - 1974), p. 17

“Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.”

Jacques Ellul book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1962)

“We can denounce not merely the abuses of power but power itself.”

Jacques Ellul book Anarchy and Christianity

Source: Anarchy and Christianity (1988), p. 23