toys in the attic:
ideological furnishings for the
homeless mind
action theory & the
human condition
III - SOCOLOGY
OF RELIGION -167
9 - Christianity - 173
The
General Orientation and Setting (universalism of the normative
order)
The
Early Movement - Doctrine and organization
Forms
of Christian Institutionalization
The
Trend to Religious Establishment
Formation
of the Western Church
The
Medieval System and the Renaissance
The
Reformation and Its Aftermath
This ARTICLE WILL deliberately focus on the particular problem of
the importance of Christianity for the modern phase of the development of
societies. This is, of course, only one
combination of aspects of the almost infinitely complex phenomenon that is
Christianity.
What social
scientists call the modern type of society does not have multiple independent
origins but has originated in one specific complex, within the area broadly
called western Europe and has been diffused from there, now even to areas with
altogether non-Western culture, the first notable case being Japan. On the religious side the area of origin of
modern societies has been Christian, with direct involvement in decisive
periods, of numerically small Jewish subcommunities and with largely hostile,
although still culturally significant, interaction with the Islamic world.
The main carrier
of the Christian traditions significant to modern society was its Western
branch, which developed around the Roman papacy in the area inherited from the
western Roman Empire. Apart from the
sense in which Eastern Orthodoxy underlies the recent importance of Russia in
the modern world, the Eastern branch cannot be said to have been a main center
of modernizing innovation, in a sense comparable to the Western.
A somewhat
parallel, although different and in many ways more complex, differentiation
took place in the Reformation period, with the Protestant sector taking the
lead in the relation of religion to modernization. This situation came to a head in the movement of
"ascetic" Protestantism (as Max Weber called it) arid particularly in
its more individualistic and "liberal" branches, especially as they
matured in Holland and England and were extended to the United States and the
English-speaking British dominions.
These processes, however, have been intimately involved in complex
interactions both with Catholic Europe and with the nonascetic, especially
Lutheran, branches of Protestant Europe.
From International Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences, David Sills, ed. Volume 2, pp. 425-447 (New York; the Macmillan
Company and The Free Press, 1968). Copyright © 1968 by Crowell Collier and
Macmillan, Inc. Reprinted with permission of the Publisher.
174
This article will
stress two primary themes. The first
is the basic continuity of the evolutionary trend. This begins with the Israelitic and Greek
cultural backgrounds of Christianity, each of which laid certain decisive
foundations of the movement. It then
continues through the establishment and survival of the early church, the
establishment of the Western church and its differentiation from the Eastern,
the very gradual institutionalization of the Christian society of the High
Middle Ages, the transition into the Renaissance, and then the Reformation and
the developments that led to modern society.
I will place special emphasis on the Protestant branch in what follows,
because I believe the major turning point in the development of modern society
was not, as has so often been held, the industrial revolution of the late
eighteenth century but rather the developments of the seventeenth century,
which centered in Holland and England and, in a special way, in France, which,
although profoundly involved in the Reformation, ended up as a Catholic
power.
The second
primary theme is the analytical complexity of the explanation of what has
occurred and what may be projected.
This article does not assert that Christianity as a religious movement
"produced" modern society; rather it holds that Christianity
contributed a crucial complex of factors, which, because of its own internal
trends of "transformative" development and because of the great
diversity of nonreligious conditions at various stages of the process and in
various areas, operated very differently at
different points in the developmental process. (jjd: not
unlike Dulles’ Dogma p 17)
Incorporating and
synthesizing elements from both of its two main cultural forebears, the
Israelitic and the Greek, and developing a new religious pattern of its own,
the Christian movement crystallized a new pattern of values not only for the
salvation of human souls but also for the nature of the societies in which men
should live on earth. This pattern, the
conception of a "kingdom" or, in Augustine's term, a "city"
of men living according to the divine mandate on earth, became increasingly
institutionalized through a long series of stages, which this article will
attempt to sketch. Later it became the
appropriate framework of societal values for the modern type of society.
Christianity,
through the societal values it has legitimized, has been one principal factor
in the evolutionary process that has led up to modern society. At every stage, however, the religious
systern and its values have stood in complex relations of interdependence with
other factors, notably economic and political organization and interests, the
underlying institutions of kinship and social stratification, and certain
aspects of secular culture. Several
times, as in the rise of monasticism and the Puritan "errand into the
wilderness," the main innovative trend has been associated with the
withdrawal of its carriers from the main societal arena, rather than with
short-run acquisition of control over them.
Indeed, in the larger perspective
the power of religiously grounded values to shape secular life has
depended on the increasing structural differentiation of religion from the
organization of the secular society, as is indicated in the great weakening and
eventual abolition of the long-standing institution of established
churches.
Although the
present article is confined to Christianity, it is written in the perspective
of the comparative status of Christianity among the historic "world"
religions, in their relations to the development of the societies in which they
have originated and to which they have become diffused. (This perspective
derives, more than from any other source, from the work of Max Weber.) Some centuries before the origin of
Christianity, not only in the world of the eastern Mediterranean but eastward
through India to east Asia, there had developed the varied system of
"historic" religions, including Judaism, Hinduism-Buddhism, and
Confucianism-Taoism. All of them in
varying ways and degrees sharply accentuated the differentiation
between the profane and the sacred, temporal existence and
eternity, worldly and otherworldly, natural and supernatural. These great cultural movements redefined the
problems of the meaning of human life both for
the individual as a personality and for human societies. One main axis of the problems concerned the
relative devaluation of the profane, the temporal or the natural.
Should the interests of temporal life be renounced in favor of
some conception of radical salvation?
Was there to be religious legitimation of those temporal interests
or even of human societies with
their necessary natural and secular anchorage?
How were the two basic references to be balanced in relation to each other?
continued ...