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Christian Language and Its Mutations
Christian Language and Its Mutations: Essays in Sociological Understanding by David Martin Ashgate, 2002 240 pp. $79.95 
Putting Science in its Place
Reflections on Sociology and Theology by David Martin Clarendon Press/ Oxford Univ. Press, 1997 272 pp. $105 |
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."
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