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This article was originally published in the February 15, 1985 issue of Christianity Today.

Money and Power
Jacques Ellul; foreword by David W. Gill, translated by LaVonne Neff
InterVarsity Press, 1984, 173 pp.

Law student Jacques Ellul was 17 and indigent when he discovered Karl Marx and suddenly thought he understood everything: Why his aristocratic father was perpetually out of work, turned away by every company and factory he called on; why his family was impoverished; why the dock workers in Bordeaux lived in degraded conditions; why injustice thrived.

But when young Ellul contacted other followers of Marx—members of socialist and communistic organizations—he was deeply disappointed. No one seemed devoted to Marx's ideas or the improvement of society. The socialists wanted only to improve their own political position, and the Communists put the party line above the thoughts of Marx. Later, during World War II, Ellul saw Communists involved in the Resistance kill other Resistance groups simply because they were not Communists. "The Communists," Ellul wrote, "no longer had the right to be heard, received, or believed" (Perspectives On Our Age: Jacques Ellul Speaks on His Life and Work ed. by William H. Vanderburg, trans. by, Joachim Neugroschel; Seabury Press, 1981, p. 10).

Ellul hasn't had much use for any party, ideology, or system since.

Since his early brush with communism, Ellul has become a Christian, earned a doctorate, cared for a small Protestant congregation, served on the National Council of the French Reformed Church, participated in politics, taught in the university, agitated for ecological reforms, and become an influential thinker.

He has also written a few books; over 30 have been published in 13 languages. But this is no Louis L'Amour or P. G. Wodehouse supplying his public with an embarrassment of predictable entertainment. In fact, Ellul's writing is rarely entertaining, and his ideas, never predictable.

Recently his 30-year-old essay on Christians and the problems of money has appeared in English as Money and Power. Remarkably, its age is of no consequence. As Ellul writes in his 1979 afterword: "Much has changed in appearance, very little in reality" (p. 165).

The book's reception has not always been overwhelmingly positive, due primarily to two factors. The first is the centrality of money to the way we live. Very few of us spend our days producing the things we need for everyday life or for providing much-needed help to the people we care about. Instead, we make money. Perhaps not much of it. But the goal of our labors is a paycheck, and the trips to the bank and the shopping mall—the climate-controlled temples of Mammon—it makes possible. You can say anything you want about the money and morals of oil tycoons, movie moguls, and the captains of industry without raising my hackles. But watch what you say about my daily dollars or you'll make me bristle.

A second factor that may have inhibited the book's reception is Ellul's ruthless, dialectical manner. New College (Berkeley) professor David W. Gill described it this way: "Ellul 'takes everything away' from us. He removes our commonplaces and securities, destroys our idols, crutches, and supports, ruthlessly strips away our justifications, and attacks our conformity to the world and lack of faith in Christ. Both through sociological criticism and through biblical exposition, he leaves us no way out, with the exits sealed off, with no hope" (CT, Sept. 10, 1976, p. 24).

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