Use of Social Theory In New Testament Studies

James G. Crossley's new book "Why Christianity Happened" (cite below) (also check out his blog at http://earliestchristianhistory.blogspot.com/) has a fascinating chapter that begins his book called, "Toward a Secular Approach to Christian Origins." The chapter interestingly enough engages in a history of the use of sociological methods in New Testament Studies. It argues that there is a historical gap in New Testament Studies from the work of the Chicago School in the 1920's and the beginning of a renaissance of the methodological use of sociology in the 1970's (most specifically, I would think, in the work John Gager though Crossely mentions John Elliot). Still he asks an important question, why the gap? The answer interestingly enough is Marxism. Crossley argues that thanks to some degree to the work of the Annales school (a french school of history that is probably more indebted to Durkheim than to Marx). The Annales school focused on structural institutions as a way of reading history over a long period [the long duree]) but thus had a social/economic focus to there work. Great leaders would come and go, but social structures outlasted them all. Crossley seems to think the Annales school thus broke the chains previously holding historical study and allowed historians to start thinking in terms of long lasting institution.

At the same time, in the 1960's Marxist historians were reaching the height of the influence in England with the full flowering of the Communist Party Historian's Group. Marxism thus dominated the historical landscape. Yet New Testament Scholars would have none of it and were naturally suspicious that an atheist approach could illuminate the New Testament. Thus Crossley uncovers a Marxophobia which persists in the 1970's (undoubtedly fueled by the cold war). Citing Gerd Theissen's defense that he is not a Marxist even if some of his conclusion have some Marxist tendencies, Crossley states, "the fact that Theissen even has to defend Marxist influence and stress that it does not equate to being a Marxist speaks volumes about the interests and fears of NT scholarship."(13) Of course Stalin figures into this fear as well as the fact that Germany, split into west and east, was simultaneous the central theater of cold war drama as well as the dominant locus of New Testament Studies through the sixties.

Crossley argues that the redemption of sociological methods for New Testament Studies comes with the translation of the work of Max Weber into English in the 60's and 70's. Now we have a sociologist who is not Marxist and whose notion of Charisma seems to dovetail nicely with pre-existing assumptions of New Testament scholars. In a sense Weber saves sociology for Christianity.

Crossley's argument is certainly interesting and I think he is certainly right that a Marxophobia did engulf New Testament Studies. Certainly this was true for different reasons in different places. Crossley notes the anti-intellectual impulse of Nazism as a factor in Germany, but one could equally point to the McCarthy period in the United States which undoubtedly influenced the academy here. But there is one factor, and perhaps this is somewhat distinctly American, that Crossley does not address and that is the rise of Parsonian Functionalism.

When Talcott Parson wrote is highly influential three-volume tome The Structure of Social Action it is interesting that he include Weber and Durkheim but not Marx. While there may be theoretically sound reasons for this, the exclusion of Marx had the ancillary effect of making Parsonian functionalism "safe" for New Testament use. Interestingly enough, while Crossley notes that Theissen clearly employs Weber's notion of Charisma, what he does not notice is that Theissen's spin on Charisma is actually Parsonian in nature, and Thiessen's final argument that the Christianity controls "aggression" is based on an article Parson's published on the same topic, though mutated by Theissen's Christian values.

Crossley, James G. 2006. Why Christianity Happened: A Sociohistorical Account of Christian Origins. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.