There is a story I heard recently about a prominent biblical scholar. Though he was not himself into social scientific criticism, he was invited to speak at a panel discussion of a book applying social theory to the Bible. This scholar was surprised to be invited. When he sat on the panel, he shared his honest opinion that there was nothing in this book that he had not thought of himself. He communicated to the audience that social scientific research was useless.
Similarly, I once overheard a scholar who emphasized theological approaches bemoaning his task as an outside reader to a New Testament dissertation. This dissertation spent a chapter discussing a particular social theory that she was using to frame her methodology. This scholar/outside-reader saw this sort of discussion as unimportant to what he considered the real work of biblical studies.
From what I gather, there is a significant population of biblical scholars who are entirely disinterested in social theories as applied to biblical texts. As far as I can tell, this stems from a belief that social theories merely dress up what biblical scholars already know in fancy jargon. On the one hand, point taken. If sociology and social psychology is being pillaged by biblicists merely to “sound new” while not really pushing the field any further, then shame shame.
On the other hand, social theory truly has the potential to raise new questions, frame stale discussions in helpful ways, provide new windows for insights, offer an alternative lens for viewing the social world of texts, etc. Social theory cannot be applied lock, stock, and barrel to ancient texts, of course, but rather serve as heuristic tools — incidentally, when I first learned the word “heuristic” as an undergrad, it took me years to understand what it really meant. Further, though, there are deeper issues here related to interdisciplinary fatigue (a nicer word than “laziness”) and ideology.
I’ll give you the difficulty of dealing with social theory on top of everything else that’s out there. Listen, it has taken me a long time even to begin to understand just one little piece of social theory (i.e., social identity theory). When I started reading literature on the topic, it all seemed like a big confusing cloud of jargon. It’s easy to just toss it aside and not to try to wrestle with it. Heck, New Testament studies may own the widest gap in all of academe between the minute puddle of primary literature and its vast ocean of secondary literature. We have enough to read already.
But to say that there is nothing social theory can tell us feels a bit like the old-fashioned view that “Hey, what’s a shrink going to tell me that I don’t already know?” For years many people wondered (and still do wonder) why talk to a mental health professional [who has spent years studying the intricacies of the human mind and the behaviors associated with it] when my own common sense serves me just fine, thank you very much. Haven’t we figured out yet that these professionals have scientifically-tested ways in which to weed out the crap that we are unable to see and help us through uncharted territory in useful ways? Sociologists and social psychologists are applying scientific techniques to the collective behaviors of groups, communities, ethnicities, societies, etc. These people have years of research and experience to guide them in their conclusions. If there is a way to apply what people are seeing in our own times to the ancient world, making some sense of our texts, then why not give it a chance?
On the one hand, it’s possible (probable?) that a particular author has done a botched up job trying to use social theory with biblical research. On the other hand, it is also possible (probable?) that–speaking of social identity–many outsiders to social scientific methods don’t really make an effort to understand the complexities of the methods. And therefore, they do not really understand how these methods push the field in new directions.
I’ll take on ideology in my next post. Then, on to mistakes made by biblicists using social scientific techniques — even if the mistakes don’t disqualify the techniques themselves.
Patrick,
I’m a sceptic. Please give an example (without jargon) of how social theory has shed light on the NT.
It’s a fair question, Richard. I used to be a skeptic myself. I will save it for a future post in this projected social science series. The interesting thing is that historians have been applying social scientific methods in other fields of history, but then when it comes to the Bible people start freaking out.
I do think that if one weds herself or himself to a particular method and all its jargonese, much gets lost in the translation from modern sociological analysis to the exegesis of ancient texts. I think we have to be a bit loose in our use of social theory. But I’ll get into that later . . .
It might be a question of payoff (cost-benefit). I think the insights from SIT can be very helpful as you say, “social theory truly has the potential to raise new questions, frame stale discussions in helpful ways, provide new windows for insights, offer an alternative lens for viewing the social world of texts, etc.” But there are days I think we have to spend way too much time learning the jargon of a new subculture [as you have aptly described]. At the end of the day, while we do have some progress, we can wind up not that far from where we might have arrived by just by paying extra attention to the kinds of questions SIT addresses. Some of its insights are great (things you would have missed otherwise), but the models also can limit you from finding other aspects that you might see clearer from a broader “common sense” intuition–the missing the forest for the trees issue.
Even though we might have better tools for studying sociological phenomena, at the end of the day, we still can’t conduct scientific or even ethnographic studies on the societies of history. Imagine what our understanding of Christian society today would look like if all we had to study were a few material remains of society and about the same amount of selective religious pamphlets (including letters.) The models themselves might look significantly different if those societies could be studied live.
I value social-scientific insights into the New Testament, but I do think some of the extra buzz around using social models in biblical studies is generated by social pressure (on students and scholars) to produce “something new.”
Thanks, Ben. Great thoughts and very well put. For years I dreaded the thought of having to say something new in the field of New Testament studies. But after dipping my feet into the water of social identity theory, I realize that, hey, maybe something new can actually be said here. Or, at least, newish.
Now, if something “new” has to be done, we’re going to have to pay some “cost,” as you say, no matter what. In our field, the low-hanging fruit is long gone. If there is something that can help us reframe old questions or maybe even ask new ones, then that seems worth a try to me. That said, social theory can be (and often is) sorely misused. I advocate an eclectic approach, more like a social historian who borrows from various sociological methods to help demonstrate a point. But I’ll get to that later . . .
A worrying thing about such sentiments from biblical scholars is that it is danger of trying to form our own little ghetto of biblical studies that is bracketed off from all the developments in other branches of the Humanities. I think there is much social-scientific research that can illuminate biblical studies, whether it is the study of agrarian societies and how that impacts our understanding of Galilee and the historical Jesus, the use of Weberian ideal types (charismatic prophet, priest, even the category “apocalyptic” which is a modern academic classification for a variety of literature that bears a certain family resemblance), the sect-church dichotomy as Christ followers moved from reformist sects within Second Temple Judaism to increasing institutionalization, studies of “conversion” and the spread of Christianity throughout the Greco-Roman world, identity formation, the role of boundaries & Othering in understanding the Christian adversus Ioudaios literature and the eventual parting of Christianity from Judaism, or the use of a Durkheim functionalist or Marxist conflict theory paradigm in understanding how early Christians participated in or conflicted with Greco-Roman society. I do not want to give too many examples as I am not yet well-read in alot of social-scientific research, but I don’t know how anyone can discard its importance for understanding and interpreting Christian origins.
Thanks, Mike! Well said. One could problematize any of these approaches, of course. Weberian ideal types feels particularly ripe for critique. But what approach can’t be critiqued?
And it is a good thing all these approaches can be problematized and critiqued, or else there would be no new PhD theses or jobs for us upcoming grad students
All things in good measure. There are insights from Social-Scientific work certainly. There is a need though, I think, to be a bit more cautious in taking their insights too far and uncritically, but we also need to pay attention to the field and interact with it.
Thanks, Erland. And I believe you have an article published in that vein, yes?
All disciplines have value, even those which are small, new, old, dying, etc. The value of the payoff for me is not very relevant. If scholars chose disciplines based on payoff, where would the insight of, say, text criticism be? If one’s life only contributes to biblical scholarship in one small way, it is significant. For me, if one has a passion for such a discipline, then pursue that discipline. However, it must be kept in mind that all disciplines are indeed survival-of-the-fittest and will die without institutional funding.
Thanks, Rob. Good points. That is in part what I’m getting at. Why should we take any offense at social theory if it has some potential? Text criticism clearly pushes our understanding of things further (think of Daniel McClellan’s thesis, for instance). But I have found text criticism to be slow and tedious. For me, the benefit is not worth the cost to my own efforts. That said, I still find it very interesting and I’m glad that others have the endurance for it. Others find social theory to be slow and tedious, but I find it exciting. The nature of the beast. I just wish that those who don’t have an interest in the “cost” of social theory in their own work, would at least try to appreciate the “benefit” without being so negative about it.
Yes that’s right I did. Good spot. (I guess that is the advantage of having a uncommon Norse first name)
This is quickly moving and exciting field. Over the past 18 months there have been five studies on the issue of Jewish interaction with patronage and benefaction (and the use of socio-scientific models) alone.
Looking forward to your posts.
This is the way I think about it as someone who has just started looking at the field in terms of the old testament: when one is doing historical work, one is spending a lot of time looking into the past. And sometimes, at the end of the day, one might think they have grasped something of an image of the past, but it has little if no relation to the present. For example, I could spend a great deal of time asking questions like, what did an Israelite prophet look like during the time of the two kingdoms? How would that relate to someone like Elijah or Elisha that we read about in Kings? What did other ancient near eastern “prophets” do or say around that time? What were their prophecies like? How does that parallel or contrast the things Elijah or Elisha are supposed to have said? I may end up with a pretty cool image of some such ancient figure or their literary likeness, but such figures remain ancient, detached, and unfamiliar to my reality. Something like cultural anthropology can then step in and provide a way to make sense of the past in terms of the present. Thomas Overholt can point out amazing similarities and parallels between a character like Elijah or Elisha and modern-day shamans (Cultural Anthropology and the Old Testament). Before, I had an idea of what an ancient Israelite prophet might have looked like in the past. Now I suddenly have an idea of what one might look like in the present. That is one thing social science does. It may seem trivial or peripheral, but it is not. If something from the past can’t be re-interpreted in the context of the present, then it has little more value than mere intellectual curiosity. While many of us reading this blog may have a great deal of mere intellectual curiosity, it is not sufficient. There is a reason why drastically noticeable marks have a habit of appearing over certain words on ancient artifacts like, for instance, the Merneptah stele—because we aren’t content simply to have the intellectual knowledge of a thing. We want to touch the ancient in the present because the present is where we exist. It is the reason we take something written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and turn it into English. Even though English is an anachronism and can’t ever pretend to replace the thing itself, it still enables us to turn the ancient into an image of the present. And that has tremendous value.
I don’t tend to read many books that take a social scientific approach because one has to wade through a lot of fluff with very little exegetical pay-off. An example of this is the summary of a recent book on the RBL web site here. This long paragraph succeeds in saying absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. Breath-taking. I read the book in the same series on Timothy and was unimpressed.
I appreciate that, Richard. But, as with any field of scholarship, one has to separate the most helpful contributions from those that aren’t quite as helpful.