Learning from Radical Orthodoxy:
Challenging Sociological Assumptions
Ian Markham
Dean of Hartford Seminary
A presentation delivered at the Association for Sociology of Religion in Atlanta,
August 2003.
A convention accepted by most academics is that you don’t talk about topics outside your subject area. Indeed most of us are nervous about commenting on matters outside our immediate area of specialism within our subject. The reason for this convention is our respect for expertise. The journalist or the popularizer is the person who is willing to offer views about everything: the academic recognizes an educational obligation to make sure that one is sufficiently informed before offering a judgment.
So when a book is written by a theologian explaining that a different discipline is an anti-Christian activity and should be strongly resisted by the Church, the temptation is to ‘shake one’s head’ about the impertinent violation of this important convention and assume that it is so ill-informed that it doesn’t deserve attention. John Milbank is that theologian. And, on the whole, the vast majority of sociologists of religion have succumbed to this temptation. John Milbank’s work has attracted considerably attention elsewhere,1 but sociologists – with a small number of notable exceptions - have ignored it.2
My task in this paper is to attempt to rectify this state of affairs. It will start with a brief survey of Milbank’s main arguments as found in Theology and Social Theory. It will follow with an analysis of these arguments which suggests that it is true that sociologists do tend to relegate religious explanations for the activities they are studying. However, I shall conclude by showing that this is not a result of sociologists accepting the secular ‘ontology of power’, but simply sharing a post-Enlightenment propensity to find it difficult to weave together the religious (providential) narratives with the secular ones.
Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory
To understand this rather dense and difficult tome, one needs to disentangle two major assumptions underpinning his work. The first is his postmodern sympathy with the tradition-constituted nature of rationality (to use Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous phrase).3 And his second is his sympathy with the concept of ‘Christian sociology’, which was developed by the Christendom group in England in the 1930s.
Dealing with his epistemology first. Milbank takes a distinctive position in the ‘truth’ debate. We are all familiar with the great divide between the ‘non-realists’ and the ‘critical realists’. Non-realists (sometimes called ‘cultural relativists’, ‘Wittgensteinian fideists’, ‘Rortyian pragmatists, historicists or postmodernists)4 stress the ‘tradition-constituted’ framework that is imposed on our ‘sense experience’ and the impossibility of determining whether a particular tradition has the correct description of the world. Critical Realists (variously called ‘advocates of a correspondence theory of truth’, pre-moderns, or in the scientific form ‘moderns’)5 concede that interpretation of data is an important part of the knowing process, but insist it is still possible to ‘describe the world in better or worse ways’. The issue that divides these two groups is the significance of the tradition of interpretation in the knowing process. For the former, it is decisive: all knowledge claims are filtered through the language and rationality of the community; for the latter, it is a factor that needs to be taken seriously, but by using the imagination and learning the languages of other communities, it can be transcended. The problem for the non-realists is if the ‘truth’ is inaccessible, then surely this makes the quest for the truth redundant and implies we should surrender to the Nietzschian assertion of power. The problem for the realists is that it isn’t easy to circumvent our locatedness in knowing, which seems to be a condition for any universal ‘truth claim’.
Milbank suggests the following alternative: it is true that all we have is a range of different traditions, and decisions between traditions cannot be made on some 'tradition-transcendent grounds'. Yet it is possible that one of these traditions is the truth. This is what the Christian narrative claims to be: it is a meta-discourse which can and should embrace all human life and activity. Milbank describes this position as 'a true Christian metanarrative realism'.6 The confident assertion of the Christian narrative can save us from nihilism and violence. 'Such a Christian logic is not deconstructible by modern secular reason; rather, it is Christianity which exposes the non-necessity of supposing, like the Nietzscheans, that difference, non-totalization and indeterminacy of meaning necessarily imply arbitrariness and violence'.7 So because Milbank's position is post-modern and historicist, he has protected the Christian narrative from secular objections. But because the narrative is true, he has protected himself against the criticism of nihilism.
The second assumption is Milbank’s respect for the Christendom Group. For some nine years, John Milbank served as the Reckitt Fellow at the University of Lancaster. It is to his credit that he decided to respect the conditions of the endowment and engage with the Christendom approach. The Christendom group was a movement that started in 1922 (after The Return of Christendom8 was published) and collapsed in the late 1950s (at least the journal ceased to publish). Its most significant member was T. S. Eliot and its most significant theologian was V. A. Demant (wrongly identified in Milbank’s introduction as V. C. Demant). Milbank takes from Demant the idea of ‘Christian sociology’.
In Demant’s case, natural law was the basis of Christian Sociology. According to Demant, ‘The Christian religion provides such a criterion for placing the different activities of man (sic) in their instrumental order, for it has a doctrine of the essential nature of man.’9 Sociology is an attempt to examine and describe society. Christians with their natural-law insights can offer certain facts about human life which will assist any description of society. Therefore a Christian sociology will apply Christian natural-law insights together with the sociological methodology. No longer, argued Demant, should we attempt to recommend what ‘ought to be’, but rather we should be analyzing ‘what is’. The church can provide an accurate analysis of the human predicament, not simply platitudes or exhortations for moral improvement.10
In an exchange with the English social ethicist, Ronald Preston, John Milbank explicitly invokes Demant and explains: ‘he [i.e. Preston] is right to think that I admire the ability of Demant et al to call into question certain assumptions of secular power and knowledge (e.g. absolute state sovereignty), however historically well-entrenched they may be, and to ask whether they are really compatible with Christianity.’11 John Milbank thinks that the category ‘Christian Sociology’ is a useful one. He explains:
‘Talk of ‘a Christian sociology’ or a ‘theology as a social science’ is not, therefore, as silly as talk of ‘Christian mathematics’ (I suspend judgment here) precisely because there can be no sociology in the sense of a universal ‘rational’ account of the ‘social’ character of all societies, and Christian sociology is distinctive simply because it explicates, and adopts the vantage point of, a distinct society, the Church. But the claim here is not that theology, conceived in a broadly traditional fashion, can now add to its competence certain new, “social” pronouncements. On the contrary, the claim is that all theology has to reconceive itself as a kind of “Christian Sociology”: that is to say, as the explication of a socio-linguistic practice or as the constant re-narration of this practice as it has historically developed. The task of such a theology is not apologetics, nor even argument. Rather it is tell again the Christian mythos, pronounce again the Christian logos, and call again for Christian praxis in a manner that restores their freshness and originality. It must articulate Christian difference in such a fashion to make it strange’12
So for Milbank, in a marked development of Demant, the concept Christian sociology has two features: first, it emerges from the Church; it reflects Christian thinking: and second, it is all embracing; it is the telling and living of the Christian drama.
With these two assumptions in mind, we can now turn to Theology and Social Theory. Milbank’s task in this book is to deconstruct modernity. It is a history, which exposes the hidden assumptions of modernity. Fegus Kerr summarizes Milbank’s historical argument thus:
‘Historically, according to Milbank, in seventeenth-century thinkers such as Grotius and Hobbes, the concepts of sovereignty, autonomy, property, power, and so on, which were to generate the new “secular” disciplines of political theory, economics and sociology, emerged from the late medieval theological matrix of an effectively non-Trinitarian theism which celebrated a notion of the absolute will of the divine monarch. The “anthropology” which celebrates human beings as atomistic individuals, with their individuality defined essentially as will, would thus be the spin-off of a (distinctly non-Thomist!) voluntarist monotheism. The modern liberal-individualist conception of the human person would thus be a product of a heretical (because barely if at all Trinitarian) conception of God.’13
Categories, such as ‘individual’, ‘social’, ‘secular’, have a particular history which is a ‘theological’ history. We have a metaphysics of society here: individuals became the fundamental unit (a construct separated out from any family or community obligations); this created space for the ‘social’ (which is an entity that transcends individuals); and running parallel with the ‘social’ is the secular (which is a space made up of non-religious activities), thereby pushing religion entirely to the margins. The whole discourse is a politics that seeks to exclude the religious, thereby making space for secularism to occupy the vacuum.
The net result is that the social sciences are exposed as manipulators of power. The secular, on which the social sciences are parasitic, ‘had to be invented as the space of “pure power”’.14 Therefore disciplines such as ‘sociology of religion’ ought to disappear because ‘secular reason claims that there is a “social” vantage point from which it can locate and survey various “religious” phenomena. But it has turned out that the assumptions about the nature of religion themselves help to define the perspective of this social vantage.’15 Sociology has no privilege over theology: insofar as sociology can continue, writes Milbank, ‘it would have to redefine itself as a “faith”’.16
Having deconstructed secularism, Milbank then constructs an account of Christianity as ‘a true Christian metanarrative realism.’17 This, he believes, is the only response to Nietzschian nihilism. Following Augustine’s two cities, we now have a cosmic contrast. Christianity is located in a community – the Church – and, unlike the secular, which is built on an ontology of violence, the Church is committed to an ontology of peace. He concludes the book: [T]he absolute Christian vision of ontological peace now provides the only alternative to a nihilistic outlook.’18
His treatment of sociology of religion occurs in chapter five. He makes it clear that his target here is the entire discipline – in all its forms – as it has developed in the west. So he writes, ‘I am going to show how all twentieth-century sociology of religion can be exposed as a secular policing of the sublime. Deconstructed in his fashion, the entire subject evaporates into the pure ether of the secular will-to-power.’19 When he discusses ‘American sociology’, he outlines the broad picture of religion that emerges in the literature. First, there is the level of private experience; here religion is universal and ‘a permanent dimension of human being’.20 The second level is the particular religious community, where religion is lived and described. Here the ‘cultural sub-systems’ are seen as ‘plural and diverse, reflecting various arbitrary symbolic conventions.’21 The third level is society. Here, thanks to ‘civil religion’, it is ‘once again universal, because at this level only, symbolic arbitrariness is a cipher for something real, namely, an organic whole, a self-contained system able to conserve its energies in a self-adjusting equilibrium.’22 Religion is located at the margins and excluded from the middle. So Milbank concludes: ‘American sociology therefore reveals that, as a secular policing, its secret purpose is to ensure that religion is kept, conceptually, at the margins – both denied influence, and yet acclaimed for its transcendent purity. . . . What is refused here is the idea that religion might enter into the most basic level of the symbolic organization of society, and the most basic level of its operations of discipline and persuasion, such that one would be unable to abstract a “society” behind and beneath “religion”.’23
So what is the substance of the Milbank criticism? It seems to be this: academic sociologists of religion are a community that denies its community nature. They are working in a post-Enlightenment framework, which assumes the ‘secular’ as a neutral vantage point to construct narratives about religion. The historical narrative of the secular is grounded in a heretical theology. The theoretical frameworks, which sociologists use, are opposed to the religious frameworks of the traditions that they are analyzing. And these theoretical frameworks assume that the issues are ‘control’, ‘organization’, and ‘social influence’, instead of ‘God’, ‘the Holy Spirit’, and the ‘power of prayer’. The former is assuming ‘power’ as the key to understanding, while the church assumes ‘peace’ is the key to understanding. So sociologists of religion are not only dishonest (or perhaps to be kinder ignorant), but also working in a framework that is fundamentally unchristian.
Critique of Milbank
One problem with Milbank is that his project operates on so many different levels that it is difficult to know where one starts. Elsewhere, I have raised questions about his epistemology;24 Kieran Flanagan has raised difficulties with some of the details of his narrative, for example his treatment of Weber and Berger. Others have complained about the ‘idealized’ church operating in his theology;25 and his propensity to lapse into vast generalizations about ‘all sociology of religion’ is problematic.
Turning now to the achievements of his book, many modern sociologists would concede that Milbank is right to attack the positivist assumptions that pervaded some of the pioneering attempts to formulate a ‘sociology of religion’. And the same sociologists are working hard to arrive at narratives that are free from such positivism. Robert Bellah made the point back in 1976, when he distinguished between ‘symbolic reductionism’ and ‘symbolic realism’. Symbolic reductionism seeks to explain religion away, and shaped the work of Marx, Freud, and Durkheim, while ‘symbolic realism’ does not do this. Symbolic realism is the world of non-objective symbols, which ‘express reality and are not reducible to empirical propositions.’26 (Milbank would note the location of these non-objective symbols and insist that this is still making religion marginal). My focus, however, is on the relationship of the sociological and theological ‘discourses’: I want to examine Milbank’s intuition that sociologists are talking about Christian organizations in a fundamentally anti-Christian way.
To do this, I shall take two ecclesiological illustrations: the first is the Roman Catholic view of Church; the second is a sectarian small church. There is, I want to suggest, some force in the objection that sociologists tend to treat as basically irrelevant the theological narrative that religious communities would provide to justify their actions and intentions. Now at this point, I invoke the convention outlined at the start of my paper: my knowledge of the literature in Sociology of Religion is limited. My expertise is in theology with an interest in the sociological approach. So I do welcome counter-illustrations to my argument.
Consider this description of the Church taken from the Roman Catholic Catechism:
752. "In Christian usage, the word 'church' designates the liturgical assembly,[Cf. 1 Cor 11:18 ; 1 Cor 14:19, 28, 34, 35 .] but also the local community[Cf. 1 Cor 1:2 ; 1 Cor 16:1 .] or the whole universal community of believers.[Cf. 1 Cor 15:9 ; Gal 1:13 ; Phil 3:6 .] These three meanings are inseparable. 'The Church' is the People that God gathers in the whole world. She exists in local communities and is made real as a liturgical, above all a Eucharistic, assembly. She draws her life from the word and the body of Christ and so herself becomes Christ's Body."
Sociologists might recognize the liturgical, local and universal aspects of Church; but the metaphysical description that follows would be more problematic, especially the assertion that ‘she draws her life from the word and the body of Christ and so herself becomes Christ’s Body’. This description of the Church is grounded in Scripture and shaped by the Tradition. Underpinning this description is a theology that believes in the God who is creating a community through Christ to participate in God’s action in the world.
Compare this with the way that sociologists use the term ‘church’ or ‘congregation’. Sociological debate has been dominated by Max Weber’s distinction between the Church as inclusive and the sect as exclusive.27 For Weber, the division is one of type of membership. H. R. Niebuhr identifies four processes that shift ‘sect’ type organizations to ‘church’ type organizations.28 Wallis then challenged this dichotomy by distinguishing between the external conception (whether an institution is respectable or deviant) and internal conception (whether it is uniquely legitimate or pluralistically legitimate).29 The details and merits of these debates need not concern us here, it is the location of those debates that matter. The church, in these discussions, is being treated primarily as an organization with a certain set of social implications. This is a picture of church that is far removed from the language of the Catechism.
Now it might be objected surely these are just different aspects of the same phenomena? The sociologist is dealing with the social phenomena in the world, while the catechism is capturing the metaphysical reality. The problem with this picture is that the descriptions are making different assumptions about the world. The language of ‘human organization’ when applied to the Church can so often deny the reality of God and the significance of prayer. It assumes a space where God is not present. It concedes the possibility of descriptions that are not theological. It is like saying an altar at a front of a church is a type of table. It is true that there is an ostensible similarity between the shape of an altar and a table in your house, but the dissimilarities are much greater. You eat a meal off the table at home; you can play games around it; you can climb on top of it. It is multi-functional. However, the altar demands respect; and it has one primarily purpose, namely the celebration of the Eucharist. The sacred is necessarily part of the description; to treat the altar as part of a wider ‘set’ called ‘tables’ is to impose on the altar a discourse that is fundamentally alien to its character. So in the same way to see the Church as just another organization is to deny the truth of the metaphysics, which are the terms in which the Church understands itself.
Some sociologists come close to admitting this.30 But before developing this discussion, let us turn to my second illustration. Here I compare my reasons for belonging to a small church with the reasons that Carl Dudley, the congregational studies specialist at Hartford Seminary, sets out in his remarkable and delightful classic Effective Small Churches in the Twenty-first century. (I am using the revised edition of his 1978 text). Allow me to stress that Dudley’s text is intended to be illustrative of a problem; of its type, I think the Dudley book is excellent and in so far as I find fault with it, it is a fault that is almost ‘universal’ in the discipline of sociology of religion. With these preliminary remarks out of the way, I shall now develop the comparison.
When I was a teenager I belong to a small fundamentalist church in the westcountry of England (Bodmin, Cornwall to be precise). It was ostensibly ‘Open Brethren’, albeit not very open, and called itself ‘Bodmin New Testament Church’ (BNTC). The total membership was probably no more than 30 adults and on a Sunday evening at the ‘Gospel Service’ the congregation rarely exceeded 50 people.
Now we knew we were small; and we had a whole host of explanations for our size. First, we took comfort from the Biblical theme of a ‘faithful remnant’. Our Church was small; however we knew that this was God’s way of working. Second, we knew these were the end times and one of the signs of the End was that the majority of Churches would be in a state of apostasy. We were sure that the larger and more successful churches in the region had ‘compromised’ the Gospel. We suspected that other churches were full of ‘nominal Christians’, who were in desperate need of salvation. Other ‘more successful’ churches were not models of ‘worldly success’ and not models that we sought to emulate. Third, we believed in Satan, who was especially active in Bodmin. The ground was barren because ‘devil worship’ was popular and, more widely, hostility to the Gospel was widespread.
Now when I read Carl Dudley’s Effective Small Churches in the Twenty-First Century none of my reasons I listed for my church being small are considered. Instead Dudley works with a model of a small church that I don’t recognize. The small church for Dudley is one where people are attracted to the order (the same people meet up week after week) and to the family intimacy (everyone knows everyone else).
On order, Dudley explains, ‘The experience of belonging to a small congregation meets a basic human need for social order and metaphysical orderliness. . . . In the small congregation, the rhythm of the week begins and ends with everything and every person to be found in his or her rightful place.’31 Now this is perhaps a factor for some (after all, he does cite the FACT data – a point I shall come to in a moment), however in my case there was no ‘metaphysical orderliness’. Indeed the theological explanation for the size of the congregation was not due to ‘metaphysical order’ but disorder: it was the exact opposite. The size of BNTC was due to the state of human sinfulness and the surrounding antagonism to God. It was a matter of personal sadness that the vast majority of people I passed as I walked to Church on a Sunday morning were on the way to hell and that they are not in their ‘rightful’ place in Church.
On family intimacy, Dudley spends several chapters reflecting on the problem of ‘family intimacy’ and church growth. Dudley assumes that many churches want to grow and therefore the dilemma is how best to grow while preserving the intimacy of the community. He suggests the model of ‘adoption’ – one he notes that is firmly grounded in the Bible: so he writes, ‘Adoption should be a part of church growth . . . The purpose of “adoption” is to help the pride in a congregation’s Christian record become the common property of the congregation, not the private possession of a few.’32 Now Dudley is right that this small church did have a family intimacy; it is also true that anyone joining the church rapidly became part of the family. However, the problem I have here is that social analysis is the organizing paradigm for the understanding the way faith is expressed in small church. BNTC would find the preoccupation with ‘social analysis’ odd (bit like an altar being compared to a table), the Bible is what matters. Furthermore BNTC would not talk about the problem of Church growth simply as one of integration into the community. Our strongly Calvinist sympathies meant that we left God to do the recruiting, and ‘church growth’ for ‘church growth’s sake was a value of the world.33 We on theological grounds disapproved of big churches: they had almost certainly surrendered (or compromised – a much favored word) the Gospel. Our job was to be faithful and if God was going to bless our Church that that is up to God. Although Dudley has captured two aspects of the small church (family intimacy and adoption as the model for new members), he has done so while misunderstanding the underlying dispositions that shape our attitude to those outside and therefore our underlying disposition to growth.
At this point three objections might be raised. The first is that Dudley has data that supports his arguments. The second is that this is not a clash between sociologist and theologian, but between different types of theology. Dudley’s theology is liberal and positive, while BNTC is sectarian and closed. The third objection is that this is no more than a plea for the James Hopewell approach to congregational studies; one that takes the ‘identity’ of a congregation seriously. I shall deal with each of these objections in turn.
It is true that Dudley has considerable data that supports his assertions that the family intimacy of the church is a major attraction for that Church. But Milbank’s response would be to point out that Dudley asks the questions. The sociologists take their non-theological framework in which they pose the questions and then treat this as evidence for their explanations. In BNTC explanations for our internal life is grounded in a Biblical worldview that believes in a cosmic battle between God and Satan, which will culminate in an imminent end to the world.
In respect to the second objection, again it is true that Dudley works hard to develop a theological and biblical rationale to better understand the small church embodiment of their shared faith. It is also true that certain theological narratives offered by certain communities are very ugly, for example the ‘Christian Identity narrative (i.e. those violent white supremacists groups).34 But my point is that the social analysis is given the privileged status, the theology is secondary. The type of theology is irrelevant; it is the status in the discourse.
This leads to the third and most substantive objection. James F. Hopewell’s now classic study Congregation: Stories and Structures is clearly preoccupied with the need to understanding the theological narrative that shapes a faith community. He divides approaches to congregational studies into four: contextual (i.e. the immediate environment), mechanical (the functional aspects), organic (the biographic aspect), and symbolic (the identity). Hopewell argues for the symbolic approach. He writes,
‘The approach considers the congregation less a texture or machine or organism than a discourse, an exchange of symbols that express the views, values, and motivations of the parish. . . .[T]he symbolic outlook . . . focuses upon its identity. Identity mirrors the “we” of a church that persists through whatever changes environment or revised program or interpersonal growth may effect in its midst. Throughout such changes any congregation remains itself, irrepressibly recognizable to its members and other observers. The marks and patterns of that recognition are the symbols this fourth approach seeks to discover.’35
To discover the worldview of a congregation, Hopewell offers a variety of tools, including a participant observation, guided interviews, and ‘A World View’ test instrument. Congregational studies, explains Hopewell, needs to take seriously the beliefs and stories that underpin a congregation. The congregation must be permitted to articulate their own narrative of self-understanding.
The difficulty with Hopewell’s approach is this: the congregational narrative is another piece of the sociological data that Hopewell wants added to the mix for analysis. He is collecting further data for the sociologist to ‘explain’; he is not inviting the congregation to ‘explain’ the data themselves. Naturally, good sociologists are interested in a community’s narrative; but this narrative is this relocated into a sociological framework as apiece that then requires further sociological analysis.
Take almost any debate in Sociology of Religion, we will find similar narrative conflicts. Growing Churches, to crudely oversimplify the complex literature, are largely suburban, middle class, and conservative. Growing Churches, according to the Christians inside them, are ones that are praying and as a result being transformed by the action of the Holy Spirit. European religion explains Grace Davie, (again over-simplifying a complex book)36 is in a process of mutation; partly due to the problem of ‘gathering’ in Europe, religious institutions have fewer congregants, but religious dispositions are continuing in a variety of different ways. European religion, explains many African Christians, is in a state of sin and rebellion against God due to a consumerist attitude and increasing secular unbelief. It seems then that Milbank does have a point: sociological narratives seem to be incompatible with religious ones.
Locating the debate
For sociologists of religion, there are three aspects to the Milbank challenge. The first is an invitation to think rather more about the assumptions being made. The second is that there needs to be a more effective conversation between the internal narratives and the sociological ones. And the third is to reflect rather more on the relationship of sociology and theology.
On the first, Milbank is encouraging the existing debate about assumptions, especially about the collection of, and analysis of, data. Feminist sociologists complain about the propensity of ‘conventional sociology’ to argue ‘that we can only trust our knowledge when we obtain it in ways that are divorced from our selves – our bodies, attitudes, feelings, and “biases” – because the self is a contaminant in social research.’37 This would be step in the right direction, although Milbank wants sociologists to go much further. This flows into the second aspect to the challenge.
It is interesting how Milbank admires anthropologists much more than sociologists. Anthropologists, he implies, are much more self-aware and sensitive to the politics of their research. Now I am not a position to adjudicate on whether this entirely true. However, it is worth looking at an equivalent debate in ethnography, which I suspect Milbank would commend.
James Spickard in an excellent article entitled ‘On the Epistemology of Post-Colonial Ethnography’ calls for the ‘trading’ of interpretations between the observer and the observed. His argument starts from a recognition that the roots of ethnography are political. So the British Foreign Office needed data on the people in the Empire and the American Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted guidance on how ‘to turn tribes into family farmers’38 This culture of ‘observing’ the uncivilized with the purpose of reporting back to ‘civilization’ has been challenged. Kenneth Good’s ‘fieldwork’ with the Yanomama in Venezuela involved a twelve-year stage and marriage to a local woman. Spickard summarizes thus: ‘ethnography is not a matter of looking at others but of allowing us to live with them.’39
The obvious problem with this is that the study still needs to guided by certain expectations. Here Spickard suggests the concept of ‘truth’ has a use. However, not understood in a traditional realist way, but as a ‘regulative ideal’. It is the goal of writing a narrative that portrays ‘more truly the people about whom they write.’40 However, this rich narrative requires the ethnographer to take seriously the internal narratives that justify human behavior and action. Spickard explains:
[E]thnographers can no longer take the role of educated outsiders, come to help natives sort out their conceptual affairs. No more can they speak with the imperial voice: “You think you are testing your faith with snakes, but actually you are displaying your manhood”; “You think you are honoring your ancestors, but actually you are reaffirming your kin ties.” Post-colonial ethnography bans the missionary position and its presumption of native ignorance. More precisely, equality demands that native interpretations of our beliefs be given as much weight as our interpretations of theirs. This changes ethnographic practice. If we are no longer imposing interpretations, but trading them, we begin to converse with our informants. In fact ethnographers have always done so, but they have traditionally seen these conversations as means to an end: Our Capture of Their worldview. Presuming equality means that we can no longer present just one side of the conversation; we must present both. Our dialogues become the subject of ethnography, not its means, and ethnography becomes personal: a matter of cross-cultural encounter rather than a one-way view.’41
The crucial idea here is that the sociologist should ‘trade’ and ‘converse’ with the subjects of their study. We should take more interest in the explanations that the ‘subjects’ in any enquiry would give for their situation. In other words offer the data to the community and listen to their theological explanation for that data. Often, as we have seen, this does appear in the descriptive part of the sociological study; but these religious accounts then disappear as the sociologists provides their own ‘expert’ explanation for ‘what is really going on’.
It is my contention that the force of the Milbank challenge can be mitigated by these two strategies. First, identify, explore, and state the assumptions that the discipline is making; second, allow the task of the analysis to be shared with the community being studied. Primarily this is a plea that sociology needs to catch up with our postmodern sensitivity to the difficulties in formulating any account of anything:42 it is all much harder than some sociological narratives seem to admit.
In conclusion, however, I should make clear that there is an aspect of the Milbank agenda that I recommend you should resist. Milbank’s epistemology drives him to a strong insistence on the incommensurability of different narratives. Although I think it is difficult to live in different worlds and enable appropriate comparison and contrast, I do think it is possible. And the difficulty that preoccupies Milbank is no different than the difficulty you find in other subject areas.
For many years, fundamentalist Biblical scholars have complained about the ‘presuppositions’ of the critical study of the Bible. And William Abrahams raised an extremely sophisticated version of this challenge in two excellent books published in the early 1980s. Abrahams raises the question whether the exegetical assumptions made by biblical scholars about this or that miracle are simply the ‘reading into the text’ the assumptions of modernity. If God is really active, then there is no reason at all why the resurrection might not have occurred. One should not assume that these features of the text need to be ‘explained away’ because our modern age has not encountered many resurrected people.
Biblical studies has also had to struggle with the problem of providence and history. The 8th century prophetic interpretation for the fall of Judah in 587BCE is that God was judging the Jewish people for their failure to be faithful to the covenant. The historian’s account tends to assume it is the regular regional problem of small nations and large empires. The explanation is political not religious.
The science and religion debate has had to grapple with a comparable issue. In the Scriptures, God is the agent directly responsible for the weather: in our modern period we tend to treat the weather as a self-generating system, which is in large matter predictable. At one point, if at all does God intervene?
Providing an account of providence that harmonizes with the historical, sociological, and scientific narratives of modernity continues to be a difficult for modern theology. Some opt for levels of explanation: this is the strategy of the physicists John Polkinghorne. If you wanted an explanation for this lecture, then a computer read out of my brain activity during this lecture would be one level. However, few would consider this a total explanation. And another level of explanation would be in terms of human intention and therefore a summary of my argument. So by analogy the sociological, historical, and scientific levels of explanation are opting at the same level as the computer print out. Another strategy is the route taken by Austin Farrer – double agency. The God explanation and the sociological, historical and scientific narrative are really one and the same. In retrospect one can see the theological narrative, which at the time one simply interpreted sociologically. Precisely how these two narratives merge is, explains Farrer, a mystery. But it is precisely the ‘eye of faith’ that sees this merger.
It is not my purpose in this paper to solve this conundrum. In one sense seeing how widespread the problem of reconciling narratives mitigates the Milbank challenge. He is simply stating in a new way an old problem. And perhaps the problem is easier to solve than we often imagine. Allow me in conclusion to introduce you to the worldview of my seven year old. It is his birthday. Mysterious presents from England have been arriving all week. On the morning of his birthday, he marches into the bedroom – where my wife and I are sleeping – passes the big pile of wrapped presents by the door and continues on to the bathroom to relieve himself. As he does so, we distinctly hear him remark: ‘Thank you God and thank you all my relatives in England’. Quite so, Luke Markham, the sociological and theological narratives reconciled through the eyes of faith.43
Footnotes
1. The case could be made that amongst English theologians John Milbank is probably the best known. This is in part due to the interest and support of Stanley Hauerwas.
2. There is some discussion of Milbank’s arguments by sociologists, of which the best example is Kieran Flanagan ‘Sociology and Milbank’s City of God’, in New Blackfrairs, Vol. 73 No. 861, June 1992, pp. 333-41. Reprinted in Robin Gill (ed) Theology and Sociology. A Reader (London: Cassell 1996). But apart from this, the discussion is limited.
3. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth 1988)
4. For cultural relativism, Denis Nineham’s book The Use and the Abuse of the Bible is a good introduction; for Wittgensteinian fideists, the work of D. Z. Phillips is helpful (see his Faith after Foundationalism), and for Richard Rorty see Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. For ‘historicism’ this is the language of John Milbank himself, when attacking the realist instincts of Alasdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? For postmodernism, see Graham Ward (ed.) The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader (Oxford Blackwell 1997) Non-realism is a term associated with the work of Don Cupitt. See, for example, his Taking Leave of God (London: SCM Press 19??)
5. For a good defence of critical realism, see Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth.
6. J. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 389.
7. Ibid., p. 5.
8. See C. Gore introduced, The Return of Christendom, By a group of Churchmen (London 1922)
9. V. A. Demant, God, Man, and Society (London: SCM Press 1933), p. 42.
10. For a further discussion of Demant’s ‘Christian Sociology’ see my Plurality and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996) pp.32-34.
11. John Milbank, ‘A Socialist Economic Order’ in Theology September 1988 p.413-4.
12. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p.381.
13. Fergus Kerr, ‘Simplicity Itself: Milbank’s thesis’ reprinted in Robin Gill (ed.) Theology and Sociology p.432.
14. Ibid. p.12.
15. Ibid. p.139.
16. Ibid. p. 139.
17. Ibid. p. 389.
18. Ibid. p.434.
19. Ibid. p.106.
20. Ibid. p. 109.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. See Ian Markham Truth and the Reality of God.
25. See Rowan Williams.
26. See Robert Bellah (ed.) The New Religious Consciousness p.351
27. See Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (London: Methuen 1965)
28. H. R. Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Meridian 1957)
29. R. Wallis, The Road to Total Freedom: a Sociologial Analysis of Scientology (London: Heinemann 1976)
30. Mady A. Thung, ‘An Alternative Model for a missionary church: An approach of the Sociology of Religion’, in R. Gill ed. p.340-1
31. Carl Dudley, Effective Small Churches in the Twenty-first century, (Nashville: Abingdon Press 2003) p.43.
32. Ibid. p.66-7.
33. Dudley does recognize that despite some of their leaders, many small churches do not want to grow.
34. See Douglas E. Cowan, ‘Theologizing Race: The Construction of “Christian Identity”, in Craig R. Dnntis (ed.) Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity (New York: New York University Press 2003) pp.112-123.
35. James F. Hopewell, Congregation: Stories and Structures, edited by Barbara Wheeler, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1987) p.28-9.
36. See Grace Davie, Religion in Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000?).
37. Lynn Davidman, ‘Truth, Subjectivity, and Ethnographic Research’, in James V. Spikang, J. Shawn Lundres, and Meredith B. McGuine (eds) Reshaping the Ethnology of Religion (New York: New York University Press 2002) Recognizing ‘where one is coming from’ does not necessarily entail a ‘Feminist research methodology’. For a good discussion on this see Adair T. Lummis and Paula D. Nesbitt ‘Women Clergy Research and the Sociology of Religion’ in Sociology of Religion Vol 6, (Lointen 2000).
38. James V. Spickard, ‘On the Epistemology of Post-Colonial Ethnography’ in James V. Spickard, J. Shawn Landres, and Meredith B. McGuire (eds.) Personal Knowledge and Beyond. Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion (New York: New York University Press 2002) p.237.
39. Ibid. p.243.
40. Ibid. p.246.
41. Ibid. p.247.
42. I enjoyed my colleague David Roozen’s discussion of postmodernity and congregations. It is a good attempt to think through some of the problems of denominational identity in a postmodern world. See ‘Identity and Structure in National Denominations’. Unpublished paper.
43. I am enormously grateful to friends who read this in draft form: Carl Dudley, David Roozen, Scott Thumma, Martyn Percy, Lewis Ayres, J’annine Jobling, and Adair Lummis.
