The Threshing Floor

Max Weber devotes a major section of his seminal work on social theory, Economy and Society (see below for full bibliographic information). I was first introduced to Weber by my ex-wife, who was one of my professors when I went back to college in 1979 at the age of 31 to finish what I had started 13 years earlier. No, we were not married at the time. That did not happen until two years later. Then, in my first year in graduate school at the University of Chicago, where I started in the Anthropology Department before switching to Theology after my first year there, we were required to read a lot of Weber. And I am still reading him 25 years later. That’s how influential he has been on my own thinking, not only in social theory, but the philosopht of science as well.

His studies of Protestantism, Ancient Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism make him one of the greatest sociologists of religion. This site gives a very good introduction to Weber’s sociology of religion. I strongly encourage you to spend some time there. And, here’s s very good general introduction to Weber.

Weber developed a typology of legimate authority which uses three basic categories of authority: charismatic, patriarchal and bureaucratic. He defines charisma as

a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader [...] How the quality in question would be ultimately judged from an ethical, aesthetic, or other such point of view is naturally indifferent for the purpose of definition.

Economy and Society Chapter III § 10

Jesus was considered by Weber to be a charismatic religious leader.

Charismatic authority is ‘power legitimized on the basis of a leader’s exceptional personal qualities or the demonstration of extraordinary insight and accomplishment, which inspire loyalty and obedience from followers’. As such, it rests almost entirely on the leader; the absence of that leader for any reason can lead to the authority’s power dissolving. However, due to its idiosyncratic nature and lack of formal organization, charismatic authority depends much more strongly on the perceived legitimacy of the authority than Weber’s other forms of authority.

From Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia

According to the canon, Jesus based his authority on the claim that he was the Son of God. That is about as potent a claim for charismatic authority as you can make, and, if accepted, it would make whatever authority Jesus chose to exercise absolute. According to the canon. the followers of Jesus did accept that authority and, what is even more important for our discussion, once Jesus was no longer around, transferred that authority to the Apostles and eventually to the canon. The charismatic authority, now in the hands of the canon, became the foundation stone for the first patriarchal authority in the hands of the early bishops and then the developing bureaucracy that evolved as a result of the early ecumenical councils who developed the doctrines of the early Church, the rules that form the basis of its bureaucratic authority. This struggle between charismatic authority and charismatic authority is a central theme in the development of Christiam orthodxy and will be a recurring motif in our discussions here.

According to Christian orthodoxy, Jesus’s charismatic authority is rooted in his unique divinity as the “only begotten Son of God.” But did Jesus actually claim divine status? Amd, if he did, did he see himself as unique in that divinity? Answering these two questions will be the theme of the next several posts

Bibliography:

Weber, Max Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (2 volume set) University of California Press (December 19, 1978)

When we talk about who and what someone is or was in everday speech, we are actually imprecisely using the sociological concept of social role. A person can have many social roles in their lives. Our social roles change over time as we mature, cain more education or training, become involved in formal social relationships, or change professions. For example, we all start life as babies. Besides the physical defintion, a baby is also a social role, with social rules and rights that are defined by the society/culture in which we live. In Western society, babies, s they grow, take on the social role of child, granchild, neice or nephew, student, classmate, and friend, to list the most common social roles of modern children.

As the child matures into an adult, they replace some of these social roles for new ones as well as adding others. We cahnge from students to someone who practices a profession - factory worker, secretary, banker, teacher, doctor, etc. We become spouses, parents, even grandparents. We become citizens.

So far the social roles I have listed are socially acceptable ones, but some individuals, either voluntarily or inoluntarily take on social roles that are not socially acceptable. Soem examples of socially unacceptable roles in Western society are criminals, rebels, heretics, and politicans. The key thing to remember is that each society has its own set of social roles, both acceptable and unacceptable, and each society defines the rules and rights of each social role. To understand who and what someone is or was, we need to look at the social roles that person held and how those social roles were understood by the society/culture in which that person lived. And, perhaps even more importantly, we need to analyze how the individual in question understood their social roles. This is especially important when talking about a figure like Jesus who played such a major role in the history and development of Western society and culture.

So, to put it all into a nutshell, social roles are how society - other people - defines and understands us and how we understand and define ourselves. The way others see us and the way we see ourselves are not always the same thing, as we shall prove in our discussion of Jesus.

Finally, social roles can be theoretical constructs, typologies used to explain social phenomena that may not necessarily match the way a person or a society/culture defines its social roles. But these typologies serves as tools to help interpret the social behavior of an individual or a group. The true function of any analysis, whether sociological or theological, is not to describe things “as they really are” - which is, in my opinion, an impossible task, but rather to interpret and explain phenomena so that we better understand ourselves and each other.

Interpretation, or to use the more techical term hermeneutics, is not an exact science. Hermeneutical analysis is constrained by the horizon of meaning of the interpreter. The horizon of meaning is determined by the social and historical backgrond of the interpreter. Someone in the 21st century will have a somewhat different interpretation of who and what Jesus was than someone from the 15th century. Someone, like me, who is grounded in Western Christian culture, will have a different interpretation of Jesus than someone ssteeped in traditonal Tibetan Buddhist culture, for example. This may be difficult for some people to understand, but, rest assured, we will be talking about horizon of meaning a great deal and what I mean will become clearer over time.

The father of modern interpretive sociology, and someone who has influenced my own thinking greaty, is Max Weber. I will use many of the typological constructs developed by Weber in his sociology of religion in my posts. In fact, the first social role of Jesus we will discuss in the next post uses one of the most basic constructs of Weberian sociology, charisma, to discuss what I see as the most fundamental social role of Jesus that lays the foundation for explaining who and what Jesus the person was. He was, first and foremost, a charismatic religious leader.

To conclude today’s post, I should probably answer the following question: Why am I doing sociology when the main focus of this blog is theological? The answer is that we cannot understand the development of a theology without irst looking at the sociological and philosophical foundations of that theology. As we shall see, there were some major shifts in the sociological and philosophical framework of Christianity early in its history that led to some profound shifts in Christian doctrine. So, be prepared. We will be constantly shifting gears between sociology, philosophy, and theology proper.

In my previous post, I used a number of terms to characterize the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth. Today, and in the next few posts, I want to clarify what I mean by those terms and explain why I used them to characterize Jesus of Nazareth. But first,I want to explicitly spell out some basic working assumptions.

First of all, although there is very little historica; documentation outisde of Christian scripture to support the fact that Jesus of Nazareth wa a real historical personage, I work from the assumption that he really did exist, although who and what he was, said and did is open for debate. Part of the function of this blog will be to develop a better understanding of who and what Jesus was, said and did using various Christian, in the very broadest sense of the word, texts/ That means using not only the canonical scriptures, but apocryphal and heretical texts as well, which leads us to our second working assumption.

I do not work from the assumption that the canonical scriptures - the Bible - are the literal revealed word of God. I will accept the possibility of divine inspiration, but to accept them as the exact words of God without any human interpretation of those words is poor scholarship and, in my humble opinion, poor theology. One of the purposes of this blog will be to try and separate the wheat from the chaff in the development of the Christian canon. My research in Christian heresiology has shown already that there were political issues at stake in the debate over the canon in the early church.

Thirdly, I do not accept the claim by Christian apologists that Christianity is the sole and exclusive path to salvation. Nor do I accept their claim that Jesus was the one and only “Son of God,begotten, not made…” That claim is open for discussion. In fact, my working hypothesis is that claiming Jesus to be the only Son of God is a major distortion of what Jesus believed and taught.

This means that the rules of engagement on this blog are as follows:

Discussions must be supported by something more than dogmatics. For example. if you believe the Bible to be the exact revealed word of God, that is fine. You are entitled to believe as you wish, but if you intend to argue the point with me, provide evidence to support your argument. Quoting authority figures who merely reiterate your belief is not evidence. The best evidence is, of course, scripture, especilly scripture that quotes th teachings ofJesus, but be prepared to have the authenticity of that quote challenged. It is my contention, and I will be providing arguments and evidence to show that not everything attributed to Jesus in the canonical scriptures is really Jesus. Certain authors, perhaps all of them, for whatever reason, pit words into Jesus’ mouth to support their own agenda. Just because Paul said something about Jesus does not make it true.

Finally, ad hominem arguments are unacceptable. Calling me a heretic is fine, becuase I am one and rather proud of it, actually. Calling me a blasphemer, or an apostate or a Satanist is not acceptable by the rules of argumentation. Ad hominem arguments are the last reort o the ignorant, and you do not want people to think you are ignorat, right?

I will respect your beliefs even if I disagree with you. Extend me the same courtesy. I make no claims to knowing the whole truth. Nor am I trying  to convert anyone. Like you, I am trying to grow in understanding and wisdom. We are all seeking enlightenment. Perhaps we can walk that path together.

May the peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your heart and mind in the. knowledge and love of God

To me, deconstructing something means taking it apart to see what makes it tick, to see how it came to be what it is. Deconstruction of Christian  orthodoxy means looing at the socio-historicl development of the Christian church and Christian doctrine. It also means looking at the development of the doctrines, canon and underlying assumptions of orthodox doctrine. Orthodoxy did not spring full blown from the mind of Jesus, Augustine, Thoma Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin or even Pat Robertson. Christian orthodox has a long history.

The history of Christian ortodoxy is actually, for our purposes, two histories - a political,in the Aristolean sense, history; and an  ideological history - a history of ideas  there is a very vclose interaction between the political and ideological history of Christian orthodoxy For better or for worse, as we have already seen in my discussion of early Christian heresy, church politics has had a tremendous influence on church ideology.

Christian orthodocy is the attenpt of a community of believers to come to grips with the teachings of a charismatic, in the Weberiam sense of the word, reformer, mystic, prophet, dvine avatar, and man names Jesus of Nazareth. In the twnety centuries since the hustorical Jesus walked this earth, the social and political nature of that community of nelievers has gove through major, even revolutionary, changes. Those changes, contrary to what some fundamentalists may argue, have had a profound effect on the development of Christian orthodoxy

The changes in the Christian communitiy’s ideological foundation - the philosophical assumptions it uses to understand the kerygma of jesus - have been equally revolutionary. The earliest Christian communities were Jewish - Semitic = and had a monistic world view With the Hellenization of the Christian church and the rise to power of the Roman communities, the world view shifted fron monissm to dualism. as we shall see at a later date, that had an extremely profound effect on Christian doctrine.

Decomstructing Christian orthodoxy may be an impossible task, but as JacquesDerrida, one of the founders of deconstructionism,has often said, deconstruction is about experiencing the impossible. So, come watch me bang my head against a wall, watch me tilt at windmills like Don Quixote. but, in the end, we will all havee a better understanding of God, the Universe and the kerygma of Jesus

The kerygma of Jesus often uses parables about ancient agriculture: the sower, the mustard seed,and separating the wheat from the chaff. The threshing flor is where ancient farmers used sticks to beat the stalks of grain to separate the wheat, the good stuff, from the chaff, which they threw into the fire because it was useless.

In reviewing my posts of the last year and a half, it dawned on me last night that what I have been doing all these months is beating Christian orthodoxy with a the stick of critical analysis to try and separate the wheat, the true kerygma of Jesus, from the chaff of the historical accretions and distortions we know as Christian orthodoxy. In otther words, this blog has served at times as a theological threshing floor.

Given that I am returning, after a nearly ytwnety-five-year haitus, to my doctoral studies in theology, the logical thing for me to do with my blogs is to focus one, this one, on beating the wheat from the chaff, and using the other one for less esoteric topics, like my ramb;omgs on politics.

So, effective today, this b;pg has a new name, The Threshing Floor, and a very tight focus, a critical analysis of Christian orthodoxy. The other one will remain mmore electic.

For now, I will leave the old content on both sites, but, as I saud some weeks ago, I intend to revise much of the oldr content, especially the article series on heresy and fundamentalism, that revised content will remain here and the older versions removed from my other blog.

The new content here will be slow in coming because it will require a great deal more research than the more personal and eclectic posts to the other blog. But the content here is of far greater priority for me than the other blog, so, although the posts will be less frequemt, this blog will receive a great deal more of my time and attention.

I have added the RSS feed for my other blog to the right side panel and the RSS feed for this blog is already on the other site so you can see what is new on the other blog, no matter whch one you decide to follow.