To better understand what it means for the church to be present in a world dominated by technology and technique, we’re going to learn from Jacques Ellul.
Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) was a French scholar whose works on technology, society, and theology were influenced by his Protestant Christian faith and by Marxism. In his most famous work, The Technological Society, he asserts that the most important phenomenon in today’s world is what he calls technique. It is important to distinguish what Ellul refers to as ‘technique’ and what we refer to when we use the similar word ‘technology.’ He isn’t referring to our physical artifacts or inventions; instead,
“Ellul defines technique not as machinery or any device or procedure, but as ‘nothing more than means and the ensemble of means.’”
According to Ellul, technique is a force whose end is efficiency and rationality and it does not serve any agenda besides its own self-augmentation. Technique promotes a quantifiable “one right way” to do any given task, which means it diminishes human choice because we must choose the most efficient option. But technique drives people to be so focused on the efficiency of the means they are using that the end, the actual goal or purpose, disappears. The most important thing to remember about technique is that it separates the means and ends. No part of humanity and no part of the globe is immune to technique.
Humanity was not always dominated by technique. Ellul says that for much of human history, technique was held in check by other forces: “Among all these factors, which mingled with one another, technique was only one. It was inexorably linked with them and depended on them, as they depended on it. It was part of a whole, part of the determinate society, and it developed as a function of the whole and shared its fate.” This is the “proper framework” for technique — one that involves checks and balances.
However, in the nineteenth century “society began to elaborate an exclusively rational technique which acknowledged only considerations of efficiency,” and that snowballed into the domination of technique that exists today. While Ellul does admit that there are restraining forces that could hypothetically act on technique, he firmly maintains that it’s far too late to dream about retaking human societies from the grasp of technique. This is how Ellul perceived the state of the world during his lifetime:
“The first great fact that emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become ‘means.’ There is no longer an ‘end;’ we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere.”
Earlier we learned from McLuhan about the tendencies of people to adapt technologies without understanding them. Ellul agrees when he says the “principle law of our age” is that “everything which is technique is necessarily used as soon as available, without distinction of good or evil.” Technique itself refuses to “tolerate moral judgments” because “the technological phenomenon cannot be broken down in such a way as to retain the good and reject the bad.” Technique cannot be judged as good or evil, but “the power and autonomy of technique are so well secured that it, in its turn, has become the judge of what is moral, the creator of a new morality.”
According to Ellul, “man can never foresee the totality of consequences of a given technical action.” He agrees with McLuhan that technique produces problems that are exponentially greater than the ones it sets out to solve, leaving society in a worse position than if a particular technique had never been applied. Ellul insists that the result of technique doesn’t just change societies as a whole, but it also conditions individuals irreversibly, and since technique conditions humans with comfort, people will always choose the path of least resistance, which is itself technique.
It is important to note that Ellul did not believe technology or technique is evil. He believed “technical progress is ‘neither exclusively positive nor totally negative,” and he “would certainly never wish to maintain that technology was to be deplored.” He believed “the real problem is not to judge but to understand.” However, he was clearly comfortable in pointing out the problems he saw in technological society:
“The problem arises, though, when means and ends are separated, so that technical means no longer have any end except absolute, rational efficiency (‘the one best way’) and are no longer subject to outside value judgments. The “one best way” of efficiency is always the self-selecting and self-justifying end. At this point people no longer have a choice, because technique chooses for them, and all proposed ends become superfluous. Thus technical means have become totalitarian and landed us in an apocalyptic situation.”
The true problem with technique is when means are separated from ends. This might sound familiar because it’s really just another facet of “the medium is the message.” Ellul doesn’t leave us to speculate about how this affects our perception of God; he approaches from a different perspective McLuhan’s claim that in Jesus the medium and message are one:
“…for the Christian there is no dissociation between the end and the means. It is a Greek ethical idea which has caused this division. The point from which we ought to start is that in the work of God the end and the means are identical. Thus when Jesus Christ is present the Kingdom has “come upon” us. This formula expresses very precisely the relation between the end and the means. Jesus Christ in his incarnation appears as God’s means, for the salvation of man and the establishment of the Kingdom of God, but where Jesus Christ is, there also is this salvation and this Kingdom.”
Ellul says that “for the Christian also the end and the means are united in the same way; thus he is irrevocably committed to fight with all his might against our previous enslavement to means.” He spoke of this enslavement so strongly because he truly believed that the triumph of means in the lives of people actually obstructed people from living out their Christian faith. As to what kind of obstruction he meant we may only speculate. We know of the tendency to view humans as means to our own ends, which is antithetical to the gospel. We also know that technique’s effect on us is distraction. We’re unaware of not just the state of the world around us but unaware of ourselves and our neighbors. We see this in direct opposition to scripture’s call for us to be sober minded and alert.
Perhaps we also see a separation of ends and means in our soteriology. Jesus is both the means and the end of human salvation — we are saved through Christ and into Christ. However, many of our theories of salvation focus on a transaction in which Jesus gives us a thing called “salvation.” When Jesus gives us salvation, he gives us nothing other than himself. He is the way, the truth, and the life. We see this also affecting our view of sanctification. We think of Jesus as giving us “holiness” when Jesus cannot give us holiness apart from giving us his very self. 1 Corinthians 1:30 says, “And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption… “ (ESV). When we separate the person and work of Jesus, we separate the ends and means of our salvation so that Jesus becomes neither.
How are we to fight this enslavement to means, this unawareness Ellul speaks of? We must pursue “the rediscovery in every sphere of life of the reality which all the world is seeking… to achieve this awareness as a whole is only possible under the illumination of the Holy Spirit.” How do we achieve this? The wrong answer is that we must take up action and work to realize the Kingdom of God. Ellul says,
“In this situation it is not our instruments and our institutions which count, but ourselves, for it is ourselves who are God’s instruments; so far as the church and all its members are God’s “means” they ought to constitute that presence of the “end” which is characteristic of the Kingdom… They have to represent before the world this unity between end and means, authorized by Jesus Christ.”
To raise a battle cry and take up arms in action against the domination of technique by more instruments and institutions is only making the problem worse. “That men should be alive, instead of being obsessed with action–it is at this point that means can be put in their right place.” Daniel B. Clendenin summarized it well when he wrote that while action cannot be ignored, what is first required of the Christian is not action but presence. This does not mean that the church should remain idle and stagnant until Jesus returns. Instead, Ellul says “we must search the scriptures for the way in which we ought to live, in order that the end, willed by God, should be present among men.” He elaborates here:
“Thus it is the fact of living, with all its consequence, with all that it involves, which is the revolutionary act par excellance; at the same time this is the solution of the problem of the end and the means. In a civilization which has lost the meaning of life, the most useful thing a Christian can do is to live–and life, understood from the point of view of faith, has an extraordinary explosive force.”
The most revolutionary thing Christians can do to pursue God in wholeness, presence, and reality is simply to live. What does Ellul mean by “life?” He means “the expression of the Holy Spirit, working within us, expressing himself in our actual life, through our words, our habits, and our decisions. Thus what we need is to rediscover all that the fullness of personal life means for a man standing on his own feet in the midst of the world, who rediscovers his neighbor because he himself has been found by God.”
To live a life characterized by wholeness, presence, and reality,
“…the most important thing that we can do socially is to rediscover our neighbor.”
We must determine if the techniques and technologies surrounding us cause us to be more fully present with our neighbors or more isolated from them. If the medium truly is the message, if the means should not be separated from the ends, if our calling is truly to rest in the presence of Christ and be present in the world, then our technologies must either be a part of that calling or have no place in our lives and our churches.