THEOLOGY & SOCIOLOGY
James Sweeney
Introduction
At the meeting of an association dedicated to the scientific study of religion which I attended not so long ago the president in her welcome address announced the different disciplines represented, all in their various stripes of sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, etc , and she ended by asking ‘have I left anyone out?’. ‘Yes’, I spoke up, ‘theology!’ Thus is the erstwhile ‘Queen of the Sciences’ overlooked – even by a religiously sympathetic president, who seemed quite surprised that she had not thought to include theology.
It is easy to be wrong-footed in these circumstances when ‘scientific’is allowed to define the scope of academic legitimacy. What is meant by science here is, in fact, empirical methodology, not broader scientific enquiry. But sociology just as much as theology is affected by this narrowed definition; its claimto be scientific, while rightful in itself, cannot compete with that of the naturalsciences – ‘real’ science. Sociology’s scientific claims lie closer to those of theology. Theology is the considered, theoretical elaboration,or science, of religion and faith - just as sociology is of society; both are fundamentally interpretative sciences.
There are many possible ways of tackling the relationship of sociology and theology: as an instance of the working of reason and faith in human affairs, and their (perhaps) mutually corrective roles; or from the point of view of an interdisciplinary link-up between them, and the epistemological factors implied; or their different ways of framing religion itself; or by examining the actual use that theology makes of sociology and vice versa; or even to see them as mutually exclusive, as in fact many do.[1]
I will proceed by examining first of all the underlying assumptions of theology and sociology, and put forward a view of how the two disciplines stand in relation to each other. In the second section I will discuss the actual forms of engagement between them. But I need to say something about the perspective from which I approach the task. One could try to be an objective arbiter between the two disciplines, but thatis an awkward position. The alternative is to take one’s stance in one or otherdiscipline. My approach will be in terms of theology evaluating its engagement with sociology. The other way round is also valid, of course, and isappropriate if personal theological commitment is not involved. As will become clear, there are implications for how the issue is handled whichever stance is taken.
It would not be realistic to attempt to cover the whole range of theological traditions and sociological schools and the multiple possibilities of their interconnection. The internal diversifications within sociology and theology - the several different sociological paradigms; the different theological schools and theologies springing from different religions and faith traditions – mean that generalizations about them and their relationship have to be handled with care. In what follows I am thinking of the mainline theological tradition of Western Christianity on the one hand and general sociology on the other, in particular the sociology of religion.
Part 1Foundations
Status questionis
Where theology and sociology rub against each other is above all in the field of practice. Both, in the end, are practical disciplines in the sense that, however theoretical their formulation, they are ultimately in service of ‘real life’ issues and identifiable constituencies. Social scientists engage with the various trades of the politician and civil servant, business leaders and financiers, trade unionists and social workers. Theologians engage with bishops and priests and ministers, chaplains and catechists and pastoral workers and the person in the pew. But all is not neat and tidy. These fields overlap; theologians (and bishops) will want to say something to the politician and the industrialist, while the sociologist casts a cold eye on the religious education teacher in the faith school or how the bishop exercises authority.
The distinctions should be kept between religion and theology and society and sociology - the second in both cases being reflection on the first. Sociology is in (critical and constructive) service of socio-economic-political-cultural life while theology serves the life of faith and the institutions of the religious traditions – again, hopefully, critically and constructively. The sociology of religion takes up an external-outsider stance on religious faith whereas theology is an insider perspective, and practical or pastoral theology relies on the social sciences to analyseissues of religious practice.
The ways that religion and society, and therefore theology and sociology, are implicated in each other are historically and contextually determinate. Care must be taken about the particularity of religious life and practice. Religion has distinctive characteristics in the United States different from those in Europe; and more strikingly different again is religion in Latin America, Africa and Asia. How Judeo-Christian religion relates to society differs from Islam, and their approaches are markedly different from the philosophies of the Eastern religions. The implications of the ‘secular society’ in Britain are different from French laïcité; Islamic Turkey’s secularism is not the same as Hindu India’s.
Theology and sociology both have concern for what occurs in the diverse societal spheres of politics, economics, family and kinship, work, education, etc; but this is not simply common ground. They both have their own fundamental ways of perceiving human-social realitywhich derive from their originating assumptions. The City of God grasped in religious faith and the earthly city open to sociological inspection are overlapping perceptions of reality. The basic categories of faith and reason, the sacred and the profane, religion and the secular are conceptualized within sociology and theology according to their own frames of reference; the ideas may overlap but they are not identical.
Dialogue between sociology and theology is undertaken quite regularly, but it tends to get bogged down. There is a historical legacy here. Sociology came into being to explain the changes in society that flowed from the Enlightenment and the rise of science and the industrial revolution, changes which were seen precisely as ending the dominance of the religious world view. As religion came to be considered passé, theology was no longer seen as valid knowledge; its subject matters could be subsumed within philosophy and anthropology and it would give way to a sociological take on reality. Religion’s social and world-sustaining forces would in time transfer to a proper scientific base; Comte and Marx had different views of what that involved.
Theology today, however, has taken new heart from the re-emergence of religion in the public square, even to the point of some theologians such as John Milbank mounting a counter-attack on sociological ambitions. The expectation of a wholesale and inevitable secularization is now widely recognized as naïve and religion seems set fair to continue in a multiplicity of expressions. In this context Radical Orthodoxy’s critical appraisal of sociology has been of intense, if often skeptical interest to other theologians. [2] Not many sociologists have taken notice, however, except those who specialize in religion, and only those among them, such as David Martin, who are sympathetic to theology; and they, in fact, mostly react against Milbank’s full frontal attack.
These are the latest skirmishes in a long running battle. What is interesting is that the dividing line here is not between sociologists and theologians but between believers across the two academic camps. Previously the forces of modernity and religion were pitted against each other with the heavy artillery of philosophy and theology deployed in passionate debate. While today’s science versus religion debate, stoked by the ‘new atheists’, can be just as passionate the intellectual standard often disappoints. Although one should not underestimate continuing public skepticism and aversion to religion, the critical questions about religion and society today, and the locus of dispute between theology and sociology, no longer concern belief versus non-belief, but how the perspectives of faith and the secular manage to co-exist. [3] The main battleground now is cultural rather than epistemological or institutional.
There are, nevertheless, deep tensions between sociology and theology. They both have their own inherent fragilities and they face battles about their public credibility. The root and branch critique both of them face arises from the privileging of ‘science’ as the only real knowledge. For those who portray religion as simple superstition allied to a magical world view, theology as its committed intellectual investigation can be nothing more than gobbledygook; clever and even interesting gobbledygook may be, but gobbledygook nonetheless. It is now common to use ‘theological’ to denote the obscure and arcane. Sociology too is often dismissed as no more than common sense dressed up in obfuscating language; or as thinly disguised political ideology, usually left leaning; or as unable to meet scientific standards of generalization and falsifiability. These critiques leave both disciplines vulnerable, so that bringing them together is a fraught exercise.
Assumptions
One assumption we can leave aside is that religious faith and theology are totally lacking in validity. This is pervasive in the culture today and the default position of many if not most people, and has serious consequences for theology’s ability to operate as public knowledge. It is, of course, an assumption, for it is impossible to prove the negative that God does not exist; but once it is made, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do for which reasonable arguments can be adduced, there is nothing more to be said about the relation of sociology and theology other than determining how to cope with the persistence of an illusion.
Theology, however, proceeds on the assumption that God does indeed exist. This assumption, while it is argued for reasonably in apologetics, is more than an element of theory or a preliminary at the basis of a theoretical scheme. The assumption of the existence of God and what follows from it arises from the living traditions of religious faith in which it is embedded; it is a matter of socio-religious praxis rather than just abstract theory.
Sociology too, as structured human enquiry, operates on fundamental assumptions of its own; for example, that human social conduct is ordered in some fashion that can be demonstrated rather than being simply random and chance occurrence. This too derives from social praxis for it is how people usually perceive their lives; and it is fundamentally the same assumption that the natural sciences make about the intelligibility of the universe, that the universe has regularities, or laws, that can be understood and that it is not simply absurd.
The usual stance in sociology about religion’s assumptions and the truth claims that flow from them is agnostic. Of course some social science traditions such as Marxism are openly atheistic and proceed on that basis and treat religion as ‘the opium of the people’. In general, however, sociology quite properly disavows any competency to pronounce on whether there is a God or not or whether religious doctrines have any basis in the truth about things; it is committed to methodological agnosticism. [4] Thereafter sociology treats religion and theology as social data to be inspected in the same way as any other data. Whether ‘agnostic’ is truly agnostic is, of course, debatable since human perception is never neutral nor social science value free. It can even be that atheistic assumptions, deriving from the life praxis of individual sociologists or sociological schools, are smuggled into sociological analysis. The historic theory of secularization has been open to criticism on that basis.
Ontologies
These theological and sociological assumptions frame social reality in quite different ways and manifest different underlying ontologies. Abasic theological starting point for defining the reality of the human, and therefore how faith relates to society, is the doctrine of nature and grace – the understanding of a created order which is graced or penetrated by the active presence of God. The theology of grace has been transformed in recent decades, especially in Roman Catholic circles, in a marked move away from any deist conception of God as has been prevalent in much philosophy of religion and was reflected also in a theology which made a radical disjunction of the realm of grace from that of nature. That theological understanding has given way to an integrated view whereby all reality, and especially humanity, is understood as shot through with the divine presence or grace. This does not mean that grace is one empirical reality alongside other empirical realities, and therefore open to direct inspection, but rather that the ‘whole’, understood in terms of its ultimate significance, is constituted, and therefore has to be defined, by what lies in a depth or transcendent dimension that is not directly observable. [5]
This notion of grace is at the heart of the ontology or metaphysics which articulates in theological terms what is fundamentally constitutive of the reality of the human and the wider social arena within which human life is carried on. It is an ontology which derives from a religious perception and assumption, not something that can be empirically established. As a view of the world it arises within a historical religious tradition, and it is kept in function by virtue of the regular continued experience of believers who, in a great variety of ways, live out this world view and are thereby enabled to find the existential meaning of their lives.
The sociological view of reality, on the other hand, is determined by the fundamental purposes of the discipline and the historical origins from which these are derived. These purposes are, in a word, to explain societal change, and specifically the profound structural changes that culminate in what we know as modernity; sociology is modernity’s child. Its prior assumptions about the nature of social reality are a philosophical matter; but as there is no one philosophy or philosophical consensus on which to depend, sociology’s reality assumptions are inevitably guided by the historical context in which the discipline emerged and the societal processes and dynamics which it identifies as driving social change. This context was quite specific: the profound cultural and social shift in which the theological portrayal of society as a given was rejected and in its place a vision was enshrined of society as produced in an ongoing and ever more extensive process of rationalization, the goal of which (most strongly expressed in modernity’s early phase) is ‘progress’.
The ontology or metaphysics underlying sociology which derive from this history is clearly of a different order from the religious ontology of grace. Its social constructivist view (which is bolstered by evolutionary thinking) recasts the way all social ontologies, including religious ontology, are framed; for (pace the fundamentalists) it is no longer possible to see the world-as-is coming directly and without intermediate causality from the hand of God. At the same time, being agnostic about any ultimate causality, sociology expounds a resolutely secular vision of the world in which human-social reality is what is observable, what can be described and analysed in the categories of reason. If there is a realm of reality beyond the observable, sociology has no knowledge of it and it cannot enter into the scope and definition of the real as that is framed sociologically.
Sociologists, of course, are real people who may not be at all agnostic or atheist in their personal lives, and who carry out their professional work with care and in tandem with their religious and life commitments. Anyway, most people do not dwell overlong on their ontological assumptions. Nevertheless, the ontologies in the background of sociology and theology have their effect in structuring minds and imaginations. The two ontologies do not simply sit alongside one another. The perceptions of reality as the simply observable and of reality as graced, while not necessarily totally divergent, work differently.
Herein lies the deep tension between a sociological and a theological perspective. The ontology of grace is not simply another step on a continuum beginning with the observable, an optional step, as it were, that the religious believer takes; it is rather a perception that changes everything. And the secular ontology of the observable, since it is constrained to leave the realm of grace as an open possibility, places limits on what sociology can say about the human and social world. If there is more than what the eye can see, then what the eye can see is in some measure deficient.
What the eye cannot see is grace. Divine grace is the touch of God on the human, and God is beyond all human knowing and perceiving; but the touch is humanly real. Karl Rahner describes it as ‘a dark loving contact’ or, following St Bonaventure, a ‘spiritual touch’. Grace, although not directly observable, is understood as a dynamic element in human existence and a reality to be appropriated. It can enter conscious awareness in a certain measure, an event that Rahner calls ‘transcendence becoming thematic’. Within this perspective all human experience, because it touches on transcendence, is understood as having the capacity to be and become religious experience or experience of grace. This happens when the grace that interpenetrates regular human experience rises to – an always opaque – consciousness, a way of knowing ‘as in a glass darkly’ (1Cor. 13: 12).