Historical Sociology and Comparative Religions:
Life-World Approach
Abstract
This paper explores Ernst Troeltsch’s contribution to a public theory of religion in terms of religious diversity and social institutions in conceptual framework of historical sociology of religion. Investigating his sociological method, I seek to renew and improve on the limitations of Troeltsch through a critical hermeneutical lens as provided by Hans G. Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Jürgen Habermas’ sociology of life-world. In this social hermeneutic mediation, I shall appraise his contribution, while revising some of his insight in a hermeneutically refined and socially responsible manner for the reality of multiple modernities along with solidarity ethic.
Introduction
In Ernst Troeltsch’s (1865-1923) study of the social teachings of Christian religion, we observe that there is a mutually reciprocal relationship between the types of Christian religion and its social context. Exploring the influence of the social context upon its religious constellation, social location becomes the arbiter in characterizing a public attitude and religious ethos. Here we perceive that a sociological-realistic-ethical outlook is critically juxtaposed with Troeltsch’s understanding of comparative Christianities in the historical context.
If we look at the history of a religion, we necessarily update the ethical understanding to reflect our current situation in engagement with public issues. Any ethical compromise in a religious historical context take place in the conditions of the contemporary world for a new synthesis and construction; it should be valid to the present life and situation. Nowhere does an absolute religious ethic exist, which only waits to be discovered, or an absolute ethical transformation of material life or human nature. What matters in Troeltsch’s sociology of religion is a constant wrestling and struggling with the historical and social problems by reinterpreting religious ideas and practical conduct. A religious ethic of the present day and the future will only be an adjustment to the world-situation, desiring to achieve what is practically possible.[1]
Appraising Troeltsch’s insight into religious diversity and social institutions, this paper consists of three parts. The first is to examine Troeltsch’s typology of social teachings in contribution to religious diversity and social institutions and his historical method. A comparison is undertaken in regard to Weber and Troeltsch in dealing with their method of typology and sociological study of Calvinism.
The second part is to take issue with the limitation of Troeltsch’s project and conceptual clarity. I find it substantial to incorporate hermeneutic inquiry (Gadamer) and a critical, emancipatory sociology of lifeworld (Habermas) in order to construct a public theory of religion, along with Troeltsch’s position. In this reorientation, I seek to make Troeltsch’s historical-critical inquiry more amenable to our project of correlating public theory of religion with the comparative historical inquiry and solidarity ethic.
The third part is a critical appraisal with Troeltsch’s insight in order to advance a public theory of religion for solidarity ethic in an eschatological-anamnestic manner. Troeltsch’s looking backward face is to be corrected by his future oriented face.
I. Typology of Comparative Social Teachings
Ernst Troeltsch can be regarded as a historical sociologist of religion, who was involved in his own social and political context by seeking to make a religious ethical contribution to the future course of history. His task was to bring the sociological significance of Christian religion to contemporary relevancy, while refusing to relegate its meaning only to the private, personal sphere.[2] Concerning the relation of the Christian ethos to the social environment, Troeltsch regards ethics as the apex of Christian religion, which entails a comprehensive horizon to shape the future afresh.[3]
Troeltsch undertakes his project of sociological theory of religion within the universal history of the whole religious, cultural situation. Grounded in the school of history-of-religion, his concern is with furthering Christian thought and social life in frank interaction with the forces of the modern world.[4]
Troeltsch contends that the Enlightenment breaks through European culture dominated by the Christian religion, employing “a complete reorientation of culture in all spheres of life.”[5] However, the Enlightenment is in part a religiously inspired process of liberation, which discovers the autonomous self-legislating individual as the most important feature of the modern world.[6]
In dealing with the typology of church-sect-mysticism, there is a parallel between Troeltsch and Weber. Weber, a lifelong friend of Troeltsch, elaborates a sociological method in terms of an ideal-typical meaning, and investigates the meaning of an individual’s social action in regard to a religious ethos. Weber’s method becomes foundational and substantial in shaping Troeltsch’s historical-critical inquiry to the types of social teachings of Christian religion by way of the church-sect-mystic types.
The basic distinction of the three types of Christian religion runs parallel with Weber’s reflection of the relation between hierocratic, official religion as institution (church), the status carriers of a virtuoso’s religion (sect), and mass or popular religion.
Weber and Troeltsch: Typology and Historical Connection
In Weber’s account, the church type as the holder of institutionalized grace, is organized by officials into an institution, and it attempts to organize the religiosity of the masses. It also put its own officially monopolized sacred values by replacing the autonomous and religious status qualifications of religious virtuosos. However, the status carriers of a virtuoso’s religion (sect) come into conflict with every hierocratic and official authority of a church. The religion of the virtuoso has been the genuinely exemplary and practical religion, which is important for the economic ethic. There have been various possibilities of establishing a rational ethic of everyday life, and the religion between virtuoso’s religion to workday life has varied in the area of the economy, according to sacred values and religious ideas.[7]
What is crucial in Weber’s account is to see the extent to which religious virtuosos would be combined into an active ascetic sect toward the progress of modernization and secularization. Here Weber regards two aims to keep attained: “the disenchantment of the world and the blockage of the path to salvation by a flight from the world.”[8]
Weber’s concept of the ideal type formulates a general theory by which to incorporate subjective factors into understanding. The conception of ideal type is linked with the comparative method, relating ideas and interests in terms of the concept of the elective affinity. By an elective process of elements, Weber finds the relevance in an affinity between the autonomous role of ideas and the origin of modern capitalism. His interpretive strategy reads: “it is not necessary to be Caesar in order to understand Caesar.”[9]
Weber notices a connection between Protestantism and capitalism, that is, a certain, particular affinity between the Puritan sect of Calvinism and the spirit of capitalism, since the Puritan ascetic, rationalized work ethic considerably influences the historical development of capitalism.
We read Weber’s own sociological method in his statement: “the way in which the development and the special characteristics of Protestant asceticism have in their turn been influenced by the totality of socio-cultural conditions, especially economic conditions, must then be made clear. …[I]t nevertheless cannot be the intention to substitute for an one-sidedly ‘materialist’ interpretation of cultural and historical causes an equally one-sidedly ‘spiritualist’ interpretation. Both are equally possible, but both are of equally little service to the interests of historical truth if they claim to be, not preliminaries to enquiry, but its conclusion.”[10]
In his notion of elective affinity, he takes into account the relation between general religious orientations and social agency or carriers in which he seeks to transcend materialist as well as idealist interpretations. Two types of social agency are distinguished, class and status group, within the stratification system of the society. The disenchantment is progressed in a massive and evolutionary scale when religious virtuosos are combined with an active ascetic work in the world. And as an instrument of God, it cut off from all magical means of salvation in his/her worldly calling.
In the church-sect-mystic typology Weber’s major concern is to explicate the relation of virtuoso’s religion to economic rationality in the affirmation of the world. In other words, an analysis focuses on “methodical and rationalized routine activities of workday life in the service of the Lord.”[11] The decisive hallmark of that inner-worldly type of asceticism is directed toward the control of this world. That is “an integrated relationship to the world from the point of view of the individual’s proof of salvation (certitudo salutis), which proof in conduct nurtures all else.”[12]
Weber considers the Calvinist doctrine of predestination in the Westminster Confession of 1647 (Chapter III of God’s Eternal Decree), in which “By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life, others foreordained to everlasting death.”[13] Only the elect has the fides efficax by virtue of regeneration and the resulting sanctification, which are indispensable as a sign of election.[14] The Calvinist doctrine of double predestination led to the ascetic action of Puritan morality in the sense of methodically rationalized economic-ethical conduct. It is stamped by a spiritual aristocracy with its character indelebilis based on the double dimension of election.[15]
What is crucial in Weber’s inquiry is that economic ethic is not determined entirely by religion, but including other inner factors. The religious determined way of life is also profoundly influenced and determined by economic, political, and cultural factors. This position is directed against a materialist interpretation of the connection between religious ethics and interest-situations in which “the former appear as mere function of the latter.”[16] Weber’s insight is to penetrate that no ideas, but material and ideal interests directly govern and guide human conduct. The world’s images have been created by ideas, “like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.”[17]
Weber’s religious typology of hierocracy, virtuosos, mass, and the study of Puritan ethic find its echo and further development in Troeltsch’s sociological inquiry of religious diversity, institutions, and ethical teachings of Christian religion in terms of the typology of church-sect-mysticism. For Troeltsch, the church is a popular institution endowed with grace and salvation and is forced to compromise; its principle is universal, open, and in accommodation to the world through the communication of grace and salvation. The Christ of the Church is classified as the Redeemer. The sect is a voluntary society entitled with the experience of the new birth and based on love; “all this is done in preparation for and expectation of the coming Kingdom of God.”[18] Here the Christ of the sect is classified as the Lord.
Mysticism weakens the significance of public worship and transforms doctrine into a purely personal and inward experience. Troeltsch classifies the Christ of mysticism as an inward spiritual principle. The Protestant Church-type has persisted with the help of sectarian ideas related to relativism and mysticism.[19]
The church-sect-mysticism typology comprehends the social teachings of Christian religion, underlying a conceptual framework in explicating the early church, the Middle Ages, and the post-Reformation confessions in relation to the formation of the new situation in the modern world.[20]
Unlike Weber’s preference of virtuoso’s religion, however, Troeltsch maintains that the Church-type is explicitly superior to the sect-type and to mysticism, as it comes to the form of religious organization. The Church-type has had a very changeful history since it entails the element of tension between pure Christianity and adjustment to the world and today it is becoming transformed. “The Christian ethic of the present day and of future will also only be an adjustment to the world-situation.”[21]
In this comparative study of religious diversity of social teaching and religious organizations, Troeltsch develops his inquiry in elaboration of religious world of thought and dogma from the standpoint of the fundamental sociological conditions. His sociological and realistic typology takes issue with the Marxist method regarding unilaterally the whole of Christian religion and its history “as an ideological reflection of economic development,” in other words, “as the product of class struggles and of economic factors.”[22]
Troeltsch’s sociological inquiry is concerned to explicate the causal connection “out of which [the] peculiar form of religious thought gains concrete stimulus, force, movement, and aim, social and even, finally, economic influences are at work.”[23] Certainly, in the sphere of the history of religion, the spectrum of the casual connection is considerably widened, horizontally broadened and altered by giving fresh attention to the co-operating element or interaction between religious idea and social, cultural, and economic factors.
The religious diversity and social institutions within the Protestant tradition are considerably caused and conditioned by political and social location and circumstances. Troeltsch’s theory of causal connection combines the social typology into a wider historical connection and spectrum than Weber. Religious ethic can be pursued in terms of correlation between social conditions and the establishment of an ideal corresponding to this social situation. This perspective places the religious history and life within the general current of historical evolution or the universal current of religious history in wider spectrum.[24]
Historical Critical Method
In an article on “Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology” (1898), Troeltsch presents historical criticism, the importance of analogy, and the mutual interrelation of all historical developments (correlation).[25]
Historical critique is applied to any religious tradition. In the realm of history only judgments of probability varies from the highest to the lowest degree, such that an estimate must be done to the degree of probability. Any religion, Christianity included is credited no privileged status by a historical-critical method.
The criticism of history is possible on the basis of the principle of analogy, which provides us with the key to historical criticism. Assuming a basic consistency of the human spirit in its historical manifestations, a principle of analogy, which presupposes a common core of similarity, finds its importance in comprehending cultural, historical, and religious differences and similarities. This analogical, critical approach makes difference comprehensible, while also rendering empathy possible. Historical criticism recognizes the significance of the analogical approach in the study of the history of religion.
Furthermore, historians acknowledge and recognize the interaction and interplay of all events in a historical life setting in terms of the principle of correlation. The method of correlation concerns “the interaction of all phenomena in the history of civilization,” because there is no point within the history of civilization that reaches “beyond correlative involvement and mutual influence.”[26] Correlation, which stands in favor of historical relativity, places limitations on all absolute claims of human knowledge. All is made relative as it is embedded within interconnection, tightened together in a relationship of correlation.
However, it does not necessarily mean a rampant and aimless relativism resulting in a nihilistic skepticism, but cultural relativity. All historical phenomena are unique and individual configurations and every historical structure and moment can be comprehended only in relation to the historical totality and context.
Troeltsch evaluates Christian religion with the general context of universal history, grounding his historical sociology on the historical method in orientation toward universal history. His method is that of the history-of-religion, subjecting all tradition to critique and starting from the total historical reality.[27] Exclusive claims to revelation, seen in the method of the history-of-religions, contradicts the totality of human religions, and collide in the practical competition and struggle of religions with each other.[28]
A particular significance of historical relativity and diversity for religious social ethics is expressed in terms of compromise, which describes the historically inevitable relationship and accommodation of Christian religion to its historical and social context in different epochs. Compromise also refers to “the phenomenology of involvement.”[29] Its task is to think through and formulate the Christian world of ideas and life, in terms of unreserved and practical involvement in the modern world. Christian religious ethos is a constantly renewed search for compromise, while providing a fresh opposition to the spirit of compromise and engagement.
A public theory of religion in the sense of Troeltsch is in the making, and it is always searchable in each new case, driven in a creative act through faith, as expressed in ethical decisions. It is to be made anew as a creative act in every changing reality of human life.
All religious thought and dogma depends on fundamental sociological conditions, because they are conditioned and constructed in historical effectiveness and social location.
II. Hermeneutic Inquiry and Historical Critical Method
In regard to Troeltsch’s historical critical method, I find hermeneutical significance in Troeltsch’s triadic principle of criticism, analogy, and correlation, which is embedded with social context and historical effectiveness. His historical method can be placed in the initial stage of the principle of criticism, yet occupying an important component of hermeneutical inquiry. Driven within the framework of the universal development of religion and on the basis of a history-of-religions method,Troeltsch argues that there is no such thing as an unchangeably fixed truth. Due to the changing character of our world, there are increasingly new and vital attempts to construe the essential nature of reality in an ongoing process of evolution. The pluralism of rival analogous truth claims appear in place of a horizon that is dominated by the sole, supernatural truth claim.[30]
Troeltsch is interested in establishing the fundamental and universal supremacy of Christianity, while rejecting Christian religion as the absolute religion in actualization and perfection of other religions.[31] However, this position tends to be self-contradictory, because universal supremacy leads to absolute religion. It needs to be more significant in Troeltsch’s development to affirm particularity of one’s religion, while it runs into its universal significance. Given this critical renewal, he stands on the threshold toward a hermeneutic inquiry, yet falls short of hermeneutical reflection of truth claims in understanding religious and cultural heritage.
I find Gadamer’s hermeneutical reflection to be substantial, since his hermeneutic inquiry helps us to circumvent historical relativism excessively attached to Troeltsch’s historical critical “method.” The usefulness of hermeneutical theory presupposes the lifeworld (horizon) in which each human life is conditioned and moves in its own manner. Although there is the relativity of cultural life in each context, the lifeworld is not relativized by historical critical method, but it is the basis and background for different cultural life. This hermeneutical project helps improve on the limitation of historical relativism related to historical critical consciousness of the inquirer.
For Gadamer, the interpreter belongs to the tradition that he/she is interpreting and understanding, the interpretation itself is a historical event. The interpreter seeks to understand the text, what it says, and what constitutes the text’s meaning and significance. In so doing, the interpreter’s own thought plays a role in re-awakening the text’s meaning in a fusion of horizons between the text and the reader.[32]
Understanding the efficacy of history and the effect of a living tradition may influence and condition a historical-critical study of the inquirer; to such an extent that understanding, which transpires in interpretation, is the participation of the event of a living tradition rather than a subjective critical methodological activity.
Certainly, Troeltsch’s historical, critical method tends to judge the achievements of history through the lens of presentism, by the standards of the European Ideal of Enlightenment and his present time.
However, in hermeneutic inquiry, the truth is self-manifesting like how a play reaches presentation through the players.[33] The truth speaks to the inquirer in engagement with history, from and through history, coming as an event effective in the understanding of the inquirer. The critical consciousness of the inquirer has his/her own horizon, as conditioned and limited within his/her standpoint, background, and lifeworld. Thus, historical critical method must be relocated and developed in a self-critical manner, moving within the dynamic interplay between the history of effect and the fusion of horizons. As the right horizon of inquiry is acquired through an encounter with history and tradition, the inquirer’s understanding of history is expanded and opens up his/her horizon in the progress of a fusion of horizon. This procedure entails a critical force against false consciousness, distorted forms of language, and social institutions.
This revision qualifies the historical-critical method to be more self-critical or immanently critical, since it assesses the critical method to be embedded within the efficacy of history and the social location of the inquirer. Thus, immanent critique is undertaken as a privileged locus of methodical inquiry, contending that historical criticism should not be presumed to be intact from history or to exist outside of it.”
This perspective helps to avoid the pitfall of historical relativism and renews Troeltsch’s historical-critical method, because the latter does not explore the dimension of unity and correlation embedded within the inquirer and the historical object of research. Hermeneutical inquiry helps deepen critical method by renewing it in light of a fusion of horizons in dialogue with the lifeworld of the object of research.
Epistemology of Religion and Religious A Priori
A hermeneutical clarification helps to better locate Troeltsch’s concept of religious a priori in the study of comparative religions. For Troeltsch, God is transcendent, not to be identified with the finite. Yet the divine presence is to be found within the unfolding of finite history. The human spirit gives imposing testimony to the immanence of God within our very being.
Troeltsch calls this the religious a priori within the human spirit. He suggests that mysticism, as the primary phenomenon of all religion, can be regarded as the actualization of the religious a priori. Religious a priori is the innate orientation toward and the experience of the divine built into human nature. This religious rationality refers to empirically independent structures of consciousness which forms a theory of religious a priori. In the epistemology of religion the level of reality proper to religious consciousness must be rationally justified. He appropriates Kant’s understanding of a priori structures of consciousness.
Wilhelm Dilthey, one of Troelsch’s teachers, has attempted to ground the independence between humanities and natural sciences. The procedure of natural sciences dissects natural events into their causal sequence through explanation, while the approach of the humanities aims at ‘understanding’ historical process, which is psychologically articulated.
Against this, however, neo-Kantianism (Heinrich Rickert and his mentor Wilhelm Windelband) sought another solution. According to Windelband, the human sciences, in particular history, aim to describe and explain individual, nonrepeating events, individuals, movements, and cultural formations. It is ideographic character. However, the natural sciences aim to discover in particular instances the operation of laws that apply generally and, ultimately, at all places and times. It is nomothetic character.
The epistemological approach to cultural values differed from the naturalist and the genealogical, or historicist, because the mechanistically driven natural sciences and the sphere of the ideal could form mutually exclusive.
For Rickert, values could only be considered universally valid if they could be shown to be necessary presuppositions of thought and action. Values in cultural science are connected with demands human beings assent only in free decision. This position reacts against psychologistic theories that considered values to be the product of subjective, psychological events, as seen in Dilthey’s psychological hermeneutics. Such an intrinsic value could not be rationally vindicated here.
In contrast to the approach of the natural sciences, in cultural sciences this is governed by the question of value. Religion must have a ‘rational cause’ and must correlate with the culture functions.
Troeltsch sought to supplement the psychology of religion with an epistemology (of Kantian provenance) of the theory of validity by deepening a yearning for the absolute—the religion. Rickert’s problem can be seen in his forced emphasis on the general rational value system and its significance for ethics. He undermines the multitude of historical manifestations as a basic problem.
Troeltsch does not undermine his position of history-of-religions school, which maintains the recognition that ‘historical’ and ‘relative’ mean the same thing. The individual decision as to value finds support in this regard,
History everywhere shows the struggle of spiritual life appearing in the phenomenon of life which strives against the merely natural. The task of the psychology of religion is to study the religious experience without prejudice (in the sense of value neutrality) for comprehending the religious experience in its characteristic peculiarity. It is also important to establish epistemology as the validity and truth of religion by reducing these to a law of reason, in order to secure them against the psychological appearance. He sought to grasp the validity of religious phenomena by historical investigation, while describing it in psychological terms. He develops a philosophical theory in terms of the religious a priori for an epistemology of religion.
As Troeltsch writes, “The concept of the religious a priori must, therefore, be considered in its twofold meaning: one the one hand, as the expression of the autonomy of reason, and on the other, as the universally necessary which distinguishes reason from what is variable and relative and can only be grasped psychologically,…The unconditioned nature of every a priori, [in the interwovenness of all human events, of the religious and the non-religious, of the Christian and the non-Christian] and the continuity and local nature of the historical forms of reason, appear to point to an active presence of the absolute spirit in the realm of the finite, to an activity of the universe, as Schleiermacher says, in individual souls. This active presence is the real ground of every a priori and of all movement that is to be understood from the standpoint of a philosophy of history.”[34]
The religious life is endlessly intertwined with the life of the spirit in general. The religious a priori can be lived and experienced only in and through a historical process. The religions are the vehicle through which the human feeling about God takes concrete form within history. All religions share something in common: the divine presence or revelation. However, no historical manifestation of the absolute can be absolute. No religion can entirely step outside of history.
Within the universal framework of history of religion, he explicates the general concept of religion in terms of the plurality of real existing religions for comparative religious-historical studies. Troetsch’s synthesis can be seen in incorporation of historical critical method and sociological inquiry into a history-of-religion school; in this historical sociology he articulates a concept of religious a priori at work within the life of correlation (including the religious and the non-religious), which is underscored in the comparative study of religions, especially mystical type of religion. A mystical type of religion becomes a social form of challenging the objectified institutional form of religion.
If the religious a priori is secured as the autonomy of reason and its universal validity, shouldn’t a psychological grasping run across a relativist subjectivism threatening an objective side of validity? Can the religious a priori safeguard its rationality from a life of correlation engaged in the universal stream of history?
At this point, I find it substantial to cut through limitation of Troeltsch through the lens of lifeworld for common validity and mutual recognition.
What is understood in the theory of the lifeworld is expressed in and through language, rather than being grasped psychologically. If the religious a priori is subject to a history of effects and conditioned by social location, it would cease to hold transcendental validity as an a priori. A theory of the lifeworld, as developed by Edmund Husserl, is valuable for addressing the Schleiermacher-Dilthey problem inherent in Troeltsch’s thought.
Sociology of Lifeworld, Religious Discourse, and Politics of Recognition
A notion of lifeworld complements Troeltsch’s historical sociology of religion in which I draw attention to Habermas’ sociology of lifeworld and his critique of ideology regarding history and tradition. Habermas helps us to refine self-reflection on emancipation and undergirds a social-critical deliberation in taking a stance for lifeworld against a mechanism of the system, as steered by money, politics, and mass media. In the framework of systems, language becomes a medium for domination and social power, hence it is ideological. The process of emancipation aims at revealing and overcoming systematically distorted communication by critiquing dominion and power in a given society.[35]
Despite Habermas’ critique of the incompetence of hermeneutic inquiry in the field of ideology, however, critical hermeneutical reflection has a space to accept the critique of ideology in its momentum of critical distance. Placing at a distance adopts a methodological attitude because the history of effects occurs precisely under the condition of historical distance. History as effect becomes valuable and critical at a distance,[36] since critical distance comes from the creative interpretation of the text.
For instance, biblical narratives such as the Exodus and the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus are grounded in our memory, encouraging us to participate in the liberative praxis or anamnestic solidarity with the margins and innocent victims. The interest in emancipation, as seen in the historical-hermeneutical sciences, becomes possible on the basis of the creative interpretation of cultural heritage and the subject matter of texts.[37]
This is what I call the source of immanent critique in juxtaposition between critical distance and critique of ideology within the universal horizon of lifeworld. Affected by history and the influence of tradition in our language and interpretation, we critically engage the tradition, cultural heritage, and public issues for a recovery of new meaning. This critical inquiry can be operative in terms of analogical imagination, say similarity-in-difference in approximation to the truth. I characterize this synthesis of hermeneutic inquiry, historical-critical method, sociology of lifeworld in terms of a social-hermeneutical procedure.
Habermas’ sociology of lifeworld is a critical dialogue partner with hermeneutic reflection, and it also entails postmetaphysical thinking of religious discourse and religious tolerance, which provides significant insight to the elaboration of public theory of religion in the context of religious pluralism. Habermas utilizes a postmetaphysical stance in dealing with the boundary between faith and knowledge, without assuming the validity of a particular religion. He is convinced of dialogical approaches (in the sense of Karl Jaspers’ Axial Age) that adopt a critical attitude toward religious tradition, while open to learning from them.[38]
As long as a non-agnostic philosophy of religion is devoted to the self-enlightenment of religion, it will seek to explicate the reasonableness of faith without representing a particular revealed religion.[39] Both religious and secular citizens may stand in complementary learning processes. The secular citizen needs to adopt the epistemic attitude of postmetaphysical thinking if they want to learn something from the contributions of their religious counterparts in public debates. Religious traditions have a special power to articulate moral intuitions, making religious speech into a serious vehicle for possible truth contents. Religious speech in the vocabulary of a particular religious community can be translated for its public validity into a generally accessible public language.[40]
Habermas calls for the arduous work of hermeneutical self-reflection from within the perspective of religious traditions to develop, first, an epistemic stance toward other religions and worldviews, relating their religious beliefs in a self-reflexive manner to the truth claim. Secondly, for secular knowledge not to conflict with articles of faith, the religious community must develop an epistemic stance capable of articulating the relationship between dogmatic beliefs and secular knowledge from the religious viewpoint. Thirdly, the epistemic stance draws attention to the priority that is enjoyed in the political arena, convincingly integrating the egalitarian individualism of modern natural law and universalistic morality within the comprehensive religious doctrine.[41]
True enough, we may argue the extent to which one is capable of doing the three epistemic criteria sufficiently enough. According to Habermas, under the rubric of the politics of recognition, people can articulate their self-understanding and maintain their identities.[42] The equal coexistence of different forms of life calls for the integration of all citizens and mutual recognition within the society rather than leading to segmentation.[43] Pluralism and the struggle for religious tolerance are the driving force behind civil society, such that Habermas addresses religious tolerance as the peacemaker for multiculturalism.[44]
In the face of the international tensions and conflicts between Western major culture and world religions in the context of globalization, people of non-Western cultures are capable of asserting their cultural distinctiveness in finding paths to alternative modernities or multiple modernities which are proposed against a capitalist world culture.[45] .
Habermas provides a conceptual clarity with underlying public theory of religion to adopt the epistemic stance toward the secular public sphere and other religions. The claim and authority of every religion for structuring a form of life in its entirety needs to be translatable in a publicly accessible manner. Habermas’ notion of the politics of recognition and alternative modernities brings us back to dealing with Troletsch’s study of the history of religion and his recognition of religious pluralism in this direction. This perspective helps us to appreciate and deepen Troeltsch’s historical sociology of religion for a public theory of religion.
III. Troeltsch, Religious Diversity, and Comparative Study of Religions
Troeltsch grounds the validity of Christianity within the development of the history of religions in reference to world religions, as involved in similarities and differences.[46] In the interpretation of Christian ideas along the lines of the universal history of religions and in comparison with other religions, Christian religion entails a much greater capacity in qualifying its ideas for self-critique and rejuvenation without abandoning the Christian foundation in the European and American world. Here Troeltsch reinforces his comparative study of religion by broadening historical-critical thinking and the history-of-religions method into the universal history of religions.[47]
Troeltsch comprehends Christianity among the great religions as “the strongest and most concentrated revelation of personalistic religious apprehension.”[48] His notion of Christianity is established as the culmination. Although Christianity is “the focal synthesis of all religious tendencies and the disclosure of what is in principle a new way of life,”[49] we cannot prove that it will always remain the final culmination. Absolute truth belongs to the future appearing in the judgment of God. We place ourselves in the forward-pressing impetus in all approximation to divine ultimate reality and participate in the living power Absolute in our midst.[50] Thus Christian religion is in no way the absolute religion and it is a purely historical phenomenon as conceived in the universal framework of religion. It is nowhere the changeless, exhaustive, and unconditioned realization as the universal principle of religion[51] in face of God’s Future.
Thus, I find a future-oriented dimension in Troeltsch’s study of religions not to be self-contradictory per se, but rather consistent in his historical critical method in light of God’s Future. The Christian notion of God’s Future is not relativized, but elevated to be the critical transcendence in the relativization of all social, historical realities and limitations. Troeltsch’s construction of the supreme validity of Christianity seeks to provide an adequate synthesis between relativism and absolutism.
But later, his endeavor shifted toward a more relativistic notion of cultural validity in his 1923 lecture at the University of Oxford (“The Place of Christianity among the World Religions”).[52] His notion of relativity as historical individuality and individual configuration[53] is further sharpened and reinforced in the notion of different cultural circles of other religions, which is not so neatly reconcilable with the notion of supreme validity. The superiority of Christian religion is no longer valid as the convergence or culmination point for all other religions. As Christianity is the best religion for Christian followers, so Buddhism or Brahmanism is capable of appealing to their followers in the same manner.[54] Should his position be identified with a pioneer of religious pluralism in a sheer relativistic sense, including the relativism of God’s Future as transcendence which as alterity is present in the universal history of religions?
In his study of non-Christian religions, Troeltsch is more and more convinced that truth can have many cultural expressions in the relativist sense of polymorphous truth, such that an attitude of one better than the other is out of the question. Nonetheless, Troetsch as a historical relativist is not neatly identified as a religious pluralist in the bilingual sense of double belongingness to two different religious traditions. No conversion or transformation of one into the other is feasible in historical limitations and social conditions, shaping culture and religion in a different manner.
Troeltsch’s attitude of agreement and mutual understanding in a creative and open-ended manner is appropriate for me to involve a project of conceptualizing the politics of recognition in the reality of multiple modernities; it can be undertaken in a way that different histories, different cultures, different circumstances, including Western modernity, produce quite different modern cultures and societies. In other words, multiple modernities, drawing upon the politics of recognition of the Other, reinforces public theory of religion to draw human creativity as agency in relation to social structure and institutions; it is in support of an alternative reality of plurality and hybridity in the coalescence of diverse patterns and forms.[55] In so doing, Troeltsch can be regarded as a pioneer in paving the way toward a reality of multiple modernities and public theory of religion in his historical sociological framework.
Public Theory of Religion and Solidarity Ethics
We have dealt with Troeltsch’s historical sociology of religion and public comparative of religion, while critically revising his hermeneutical and sociological setbacks. In a path to grounding public theory of religion, I have adopted a social-hermeneutical reorientation, which incorporates Troeltsch’s triadic principle (critique, analogy, and correlation) into the frame of lifeworld via hermeneutical reflection and postmetaphysical thinking.
Troeltsch remains an inspiration for us to advance a public theory of religion on the path of recognition of religious diversity and multiple modernities. He is also an inspiration for synthesis and transformation through human creativity in interaction with social institutions, as well as change in patterns of behavior and power structure. In this light social structures and institutions may be seen in terms of structuration; thus social structure and organization are continually fabricated by human factors like cultural and human agency, and enhance and condition human action within given institutional frameworks.[56]
Troeltsch has made an important contribution to the sociological study of the correlation between typology and historical interconnection through critique, analogy, and synthesis. Within the universal history of religion, Troeltsch acknowledges that Christian ideas of the infinite worth of God-filled soul provides the sharpest formulation to the concept of eschatology.[57]
Despite the overemphasis on infinite worth of an individual soul and conservatism, Troeltsch argues, religious ethos of the gospel demands the brotherly love uniting souls in a deep spirit of mutual understanding and in the most self-sacrificing love. He recognizes this ethos of socialism in Jesus’ message of the Kingdom. Charity is produced as the fruit of the Christian spirit.[58] Modern democracy, in Troeltsch’s account, received the strongest impulses from Puritanism and the Reformed ideal of popular sovereignty. Protestant groups regard their alliance with democracy as a moral obligation for the sake of the gospel, while social democracy claims the true historical Jesus and his ministry for its own direction.[59]
Suspecting a Marxist bent of all social Utopias, however, Troeltsch finds in the Calvinist type of socialism a pursuit for truth and justice which does not lose heart and fall back into skepticism. His eschatological motto: “the life beyond this world is, in very deed, the inspiration of the life that now is.”[60] This perspective plays as self-correction and immanent critique of Troeltsch’s own synthesis of reconciling democracy and conservatism. It relocates Troeltsch’s insight by qualifying it in the sociological theory of human agency in relation to social change, structuration, and religious institutions.
An ethic of universal brotherliness or Calvinist socialism may find its echo in Habermas’ universalistic ethic of human rights, which originates from the Enlightenment (especially from Immanuel Kant), in which Habermas seeks to re-anchor the economic and state administrative structures in the lifeworld. An ethic of solidarity, along with normative standards of social justice would take priority over the pure incentives of profit- and power-maximization as steered by economy and politics.[61] Such an ethic comes along with anamnestic rationality, which is highly relevant for a project of rethinking of the Christian Democratic and Social Democratic project, though difficult but not entirely impossible.[62]
Engaging Troeltsch for a public theory of religion, his insight is in the making to be renewed and revised through human creativity and involvement in social structures, institutions, and political ethics. It stands in the expectation of life beyond this world, which is within us, carried on in the remembrance of the suffering of the vanquished, and in solidarity with the margins within us.
[1] Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, II, trans. Olive Wyon (Louisville: Westminster John Knox,1992), 1013.
[2] Mark D. Chapman, Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology: Religion and Cultural Synthesis in Wihelmine Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4-8.
[3] Bryce A. Gayhart, The Ethics of Ernst Troeltsch: a Commitment to Relevancy (N.Y.: Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1990), 182.
[4] Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, I,trans. Olive Wyon, 19.
[5] Chapman, Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology, 152.
[6] Ibid., 155-6.
[7] Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 288-99. For the study of official religion, virtuosos, and mass religion see Stephen Sharot, A Comparative Sociology of World Religions: Virtuosos, Priests, and Popular Religion (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001).
[8] Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 290.
[9] Weber, “The Nature of Social Action,” in Weber Selections in Translation, ed. W.G. Runciman, and trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 8.
[10] Weber, “Protestant Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in Weber Selections in Translation, 172.
[11] Weber, Sociology of Religion, 291.
[12] Ibid., 257.
[13] Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003), 100.
[14] Ibid., 115
[15] Ibid., 121.
[16] Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in From Max Weber, 270.
[17] Ibid., 280.
[18] Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, II, 993.
[19] Ibid.,1009
[20] Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, I, 25.
[21] Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, II, 1013.
[22] Ibid., 1002.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid., 1013.
[25] Troeltsch, “Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology (1898),” in Religion in History: Ernst Troeltsch, trans, James L. Adams and Walter F. Bense (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 13.
[26] Ibid., 14.
[27] Ibid., 19-20.
[28] Troeltsch, “The Dogmatics of the History-of-Religions School (1913),” in Religion in History, 88.
[29] Benjamin A. Reist, Toward a Theology of Involvement: The Thought of Ernst Troeltsch (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), 161.
[30] Troeltsch, “The Dogmatics of the History-of-Religions School (1913),” in Religion in History, 99. 107.
[31] Ibid., 95.
[32] Hans. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd. Rev. ed. Joel Weinscheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004), 324. 388.
[33] Ibid.,103.
[34] “On the Question of the Religious a Priori,” Religion in History, 35-41.
[35] Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functional Reason, II, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1987), 119.
[36] Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 74.
[37] Ibid., 97.
[38] Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press, 2008), 245.
[39] Ibid., 137.
[40] Ibid., 131.
[41] Ibid., 137.
[42] Ibid., 269.
[43] Ibid., 270.
[44] Ibid., 257
[45] Ibid., 311.
[46] Troeltsch, “The Dogmatics of the History-of-Religions School (1913),” in Religion in History, 90, 94
[47] Ibid., 95-6, 98.
[48] Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, trans. David Reid (Richmond, VA: Knox, 1971), 112.
[49] Ibid., 114.
[50] Ibid., 115. Troeltsch, “The Dogmatics of the History-of-Religions School (1913),” in Religion in History, 105.
[51] Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, 71.
[52] Troeltsch, “The Place of Christianity among the World Religions,” in Christianity and Other Religions, eds. John Hick and Brian Hebblethwaite (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980).
[53] Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity, 89.
[54] Troeltsch, “The Place of Christianity among the World Religions,” in Christianity and Other Religions, 23.
[55] Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 223.
[56] Anthony Giddens, Central Problem in Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
[57] Troeltsch, “Eschatology (1910),” in Religion in History, 153, 155.
[58] Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches II, 1005.
[59] Troeltsch, “Political Ethics and Christianity (1904),” in Religion in History, 184.
[60] Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches II, 1006.
[61] Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, II (Boston: Beacon, 1981), 153-97.
[62] Bellah, “Max Weber and World-Denying Love,” in The Robert Bellah Reader, 148.