Sociology of Knowledge and Christian Faith

It is more than forty years ago now since Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote a very influential work in the field of sociology of knowledge, The Social Construction of Reality. This book is frequently described today as a groundwork for the school of social constructionism. Just a couple of years later, another Berger's field defining work followed, The Sacred Canopy, which applied the general claims of sociology of knowledge to religious claims, doctrines and systems of legitimation of religious claims and practices.

Very briefly, Berger's idea in Sacred Canopy is that every epistemic community has its “plausibility structure” for any conception or belief. This holds also for religious communities which legislate what to believe and what not to believe, give reasons for this (which may be "pragmatic" as well as "cognitive"), and try to correct those who do not obey these rules. In more technical terms: the plausibility structure consists in social definitions of reality, the social relations which take these definitions as true, and the supporting “therapies” & legitimations with which the definitions are supported and members of the community “brought into line” if needed. Berger claims that this holds especially for religious definitions of reality and the corresponding religious knowledge claims because these are not supported by sense experience directly and are therefore even more dependent on social support than scientific claims (although see for ex. the works of Martin Kusch who argues that this also applies to science and its epistemic communities).

Not entering into discussion of the details here, I think it must be admitted - and anyone who has been a part of a religious community in a way knows this, I think - that such "plausibility structures" indeed exist in rel. communities, that they are enforced by the communal talk and taken-for-granted commitments, and that there are various ways of "therapies" for those who do not conform (not to say that these therapies and sanctions are in any way intentionally "evil" or that they are created or enforced consciously or methodically, but they exist and can be experienced).

Belief in the full-fledged doctrine of the Trinity, for example, is taken for granted in the most Christian Churches and, if one does not share this belief (even though one might share many other Christian beliefs, including the messiahship and God's Sonship of Jesus, construed a bit differently), is somehow out of the game, or at least "under pressure" to conform in order to become a full member of the community.

Berger was also a Lutheran and a lay theologian (he penned at least three books where he discusses his theological positions combining them with his sociological views). It was not a coincidence that his theological journey was from a Barth-inspired neo-orthodoxy in the early sixties, to a more Schleiermacher-inspired liberal theology from the late sixties until today. His conviction was that only a liberal theology, aware of a socio-cultural conditioning of doctrine, theology, Church practices and interpretations of Scripture, is capable of surviving the very insightful criticism from the perspective of Sociology of Knowledge. If the religious experience as lived through a certain kind of existential feelings is completely abandoned as a basis of faith or "proper theology", Berger thought, then theology or even Christian religious commitment has lost an important - or the most important - foundation of faith which alone can (at least in some respects and only through "signals" in the world) transcend the temporal and socio-historical determinateness of religion.

While there are several simplistic assumptions which Berger made in late 1960s (for ex. the assumption of inevitability of secularization understood as a process towards a loss of religious commitment in contemporary world), his application of sociology of knowledge to religion does pose an important challenge to theology and philosophy of religion which is ignored only at their own peril. At the same time, some forms of social constructionism present very fruitful opportunities for religious affirmation and theology today because constructionist critique of atheist a-theologies and empiricist criteria for justified belief are equally weighty as its critique of religion and theology.