When I was a kid in northern Ontario, I put up posters of hockey players on my bedroom wall. Now that I am a man, I have put away childish things. But if I were to put up posters today (that is, if my wife would let me, and she would not), I would put up a poster of David Martin, the Wayne Gretzky of contemporary Christian sociology of religion.

The partnership of sociology and theology has long been associated with the liberal tradition in Christian thought. The giants in the previous century were Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, not known for their evangelical convictions. Then in mid-century, on this side of the Atlantic, the Niebuhr brothers deployed the most influential array of social analysis, theology, and ethics.

North American evangelicals have been wary of this combination of disciplines, as we have been wary of social science more generally. To be sure, we have made our own selective uses of pollsters such as George Barna, scholars such as Reginald Bibby and Robert Wuthnow, and popular theorists such as the gurus of the Church Growth Movement. Indeed, even the Willow Creek model relies on a sort of pop sociology: Find out why people don't go to church by surveying them, and then design a church in response. Still, the linkage of formal sociology and formal theology is worrisome. It smacks too much of founding Christian thought upon human perceptions and concerns, rather than upon divine revelation.

It isn't just evangelicals who worry thus. Barthians—since Barth himself—have cast asperions on this enterprise. And so-called Radical Orthodoxy has repudiated any fruitful linkage between sociology and theology—ever since John Milbank's pioneering Theology and Social Theory.1

This resistance has nonplussed David Martin, former Methodist preacher and later Anglican cleric, better known as professor emeritus of sociology at the London School of Economics: "By direct implication [of Milbank's sort of theorizing] the type of analysis I and others pursue … is illegitimate, though no detailed analysis has been forthcoming to supplement and flesh out our philosophical elimination. … I feel I need to be shown why my life's work is out of bounds. I believe a fruitful dialogue to be possible between modes which are simultaneously autonomous and linked."

In two recent collections of essays, (Reflections on Sociology and Theology and Christian Language and Its Mutations), this dialogue is plainly in view and sometimes explicitly defended. It is well worth focusing on some basic definitions—of sociology, history, theology, and their nexus—and then tracing the implications of the interplay of social science and the life of the church in Martin's recent thought. For David Martin is rivaled only by Robert Wuthnow, Peter Berger, and perhaps Robert Bellah in the contemporary enterprise of reflecting on the ecclesiastical implications of the sociology of religion.

Martin is a determinedly humanistic sociologist. He is wary of the number-crunchers, those social scientists who try to reduce (and reduce is the key word here) human motivation and behavior to a few observable and predictable variables that can be expressed in mathematical models. But he also maintains that there is a genuinely scientific angle to take on human life: "Sociology seeks to give an account of the patterns and sequences of social action. Human activity is not random. It gives rise to observable regularities which are susceptible to systematic statement and so allow modest anticipations concerning what is likely to happen next."

Note the characteristically careful qualifications here. Martin is expressing in more academic language the popular observation that things happen "normally" in some ways and not others, that they happen, in his term, "as a rule." Yet, he warns the hyper-quantifiers:

our rule-governed activity as humans is not part of a closed system within which clearly identifiable elements are constantly re-arranged in different combinations. Instead it belongs to an open-ended semi-system moving forward in time and so constituting history. … In short, sociology is a human science which seeks regularities within the specific densities and local character of culture as that unfolds over time in an understandable narrative.

History and sociology thus overlap and even blur. Perhaps one can say that it is the drive to generalize, to discern patterns and express them as simply and as universally as possible, that marks Martin's sort of sociologist over against the typical historian who focuses upon the particularities of his subject and then perhaps adduces a more general observation or two in his conclusion. Yet good historians always do look up from their particulars to consider broader significances and implications, and thus they both provide material for Martin and draw upon his sort of observations and theories to discern broader contours in the landscapes they delineate.2

So what of theology? Theology also reflects upon human history and generalizes about human behavior. At its best, it reflects upon the largest and most fundamental questions of human life: what is real, what is good, what is lasting, what is to be done. As Martin himself notes, sociology and theology actually overlap in their dual concern to delineate worldviews and patterns of behavior in the light of those worldviews. But theology is a normative discipline. It assumes that the images and myths of at least some people do correspond to something that is not "merely a subjective construct evoking the energies of men, or an emergent property of the [cultural] process, but is there, objectively present." Theology describes what is, as sociology does, but it does so on the basis of particular metaphysical convictions about, for example, the existence and character of a Supreme Being. And it goes beyond description to declare what ought to be done—as sociologists often like to do, but as social scientists, strictly speaking, cannot.

Martin recognizes that the two disciplines are not, in fact, as neatly divisible as this model suggests. For the sociologist views the world according to her own convictions about reality, including theological convictions, and the theologian views the world according to his own convictions about reality, including sociological convictions. So the relationship here again, as in the relationship of sociology and history, is dialectical. But the theologian moves determinedly and properly from is to ought.

Martin invokes Reinhold Niebuhr from time to time as an inspiration for his outlook on human affairs. But references to Niebuhr raise the methodological question here that dogged Niebuhr's own career: Which discipline sets the general terms? Does theology start with divine revelation and divine priorities, or does it start with human observations and human concerns? The former is the claim of certain orthodox sorts, as well as Barthians, Radical Orthodox, and others who look at sociology askance. The latter is the stance of liberal Christians, among whom are the greatest admirers of Niebuhr (such as Langdon Gilkey and Robin Lovin), despite his own assaults on various forms of liberalism.

Martin doesn't deal with this question directly, and I expect he would see it as a question mal posée. One recalls John Calvin asking in the opening of the Institutes whether one should begin one's theology with humanity or with God, since he recognized that we could hardly understand either without the other. He begins with God as a sort of act of worship, more than for any obvious methodological reason, and with a clear recognition that he is engaged in a dialectic from the start.

I expect Martin feels just this way about sociology and theology: surely the relationship is dialectical from the start—unavoidably and unharmfully. The danger for the Christian theologian is not sociology; it is idolatry: of putting this or that human aspiration or appetite or agenda above God and God's Word. Sociology, properly done, can in fact sensitize us precisely to instances in which Christians are subverting God's Word on behalf of human idols, such as nation, race, economic class, or sex. (Martin's work on the history of Christianity and war is an instance of such discernment.) "You see?" the sociologist can say. "Look at the way these people actually behave. They have merely adorned this or that ulterior motive with Christian symbols, and one can discern a basic social pattern that puts the lie to their theological legitimations."

The excitement in reading David Martin, however, comes not so much from these basic, if vital, methodological questions as it does in his particular, and often bracing, observations that bring clarity to what was heretofore only dimly seen. I remember him addressing a conference of Canadian sociologists and historians not long ago in which we simply sat agape as he proceeded to tell us fascinating things about our own country—a country about which British scholars notoriously know virtually nothing.

One of Mark Noll's most profound observations in his lament over The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is that when evangelicals talk about the world, we tend too often to talk about deductions about the world that we have drawn from our Bible reading. Noll pleads with us to look at the world. In regard particularly to the use of sociology by Christians, Martin echoes this crucial point in his deceptively mild way:

There is no discipline more salutary to religious vision, or more helpful to understand the empirical vicissitudes of vision, than being forced to ask the basic question as to what is actually the case and what is most likely to follow from a given course of action. Sociology can, therefore, be part of a moral discipline imposed by reality.

Amen.

A David Martin Sampler

RST = Reflections on Sociology and Theology CLM = Christian Language and Its Mutations: Essays in Sociological Understanding If, for example, sociological analysis shows that the conflict of Catholics and Protestants in Ulster is a particular instance in a class of conflicts, so that given the coordinates A to N … C and P are bound to clash, then ecumenical breastbeating becomes a rather otiose activity. [RST, p. 62] What … is indisputable is the rule-governed character of all such spiritual phenomena [as the Wesleyan revival]. … The lava of the Spirit runs along the lines of social fault; and the wind of the Spirit blows according to a chart of high and low pressures. [RST, p. 67. Note that this observation comes from one of the world's great scholars of Pentecostalism in Latin America.] People who have been converted from Romanian Orthodoxy to a Baptist or Pentecostal faith do not merely change an identity but help forward the severance of religion from ethnic belonging. … In Romania … conversions of this kind are treated as a form of treason. … (But then I have a clear recollection of being told in Norway only 25 years ago that Methodists were not Norwegians.) [CLM, p. 150] A theologian may say: "Lack of unity is the principal obstacle to the work of God in England today."… A sociologist may then proceed to show … that where, as in Scandinavia, the Church has no serious problem of disunity, spiritual life is singularly dormant. He may suggest that it is to such united death that the ecumenical movement seductively invites us. [RST, p. 86] Given that the two affiliated societies of Britain and the USA differ as to their church-state relationship and their expression of a diffuse civil religion, how is it that Canada and Australia, both located in terms of history and of sociological criteria between the two, lack either a state church or a civil religion? [RST, p. 108. Hint: Martin responds by noting the proportion of dissenters, the range of peoples and churches, and the history of national identity in each country.] If there is [in modern society] simultaneously unwillingness to tie up the future and a preference for inner states rather than ritual enactments, then marriage and baptism both go into recession. [CLM, p. 152] Explanations of religion, such as those put forward by Marx, Freud, and Durkheim, are philosophically based attempts to divert the ontology of religion and show that religion is really generated from and directed to other sources than it claims. Nothing in social science can be adduced for or against these ontological diversions. In that respect Max Weber was truly or at any rate exclusively a social scientist in that he had no explanation of religion at all. [RST, p. 115] Most of the expansions, plantations, and migrations of the past cannot be undone. For one thing all claims to be the original native population themselves rest on previous migrations, displacements, and expropriations. … In practical terms this means that nobody dreams of sending the descendants of the Aztecs back to northern Mexico in order to compensate the Toltecs, and nobody expects to repatriate all the inhabitants of North America back to their original countries, or the Irish Celts back to the Russian steppes. [RST, p. 211] Evangelicalism is clear about our equal need of redemption but poor in its provision for artistic and sensitive souls. Catholicism may be less democractic but it is decidedly superior in its provision for the varieties of the human spirit. [CLM, p. 198]

John G. Stackhouse, Jr., is Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology and Culture at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada. Among his recent books are Humble Apologetics (Oxford Univ. Press) and the edited collection Evangelical Ecclesiology: Reality or Illusion? (Baker Academic).

1. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Blackwell, 1990).

2. See Steve Bruce, "In Praise of the History Man," in Restoring the Image: Essays on Religion and Society in Honour of David Martin, ed. Andrew Walker and Martyn Percy (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), pp. 12-21.

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