Pastor Dan Solberg on August 6, 2023 preached on the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000
in Matthew 14:13-21 in Saint Paulus, San Francisco, CA
A Four Part Response by Peter D. S. Krey
I
Pastor Dan Solberg began his sermon by asking us in the congregation if anyone had recently seen any miracles like those in the Bible. When someone counted the biblical miracles, they found that the Gospels in the New Testament record 37; there are 29 in the book of Acts, and including the Old Testament, there are almost 100, give or take a few, in the whole Bible. Miracles are where God intervenes; God produces, and God delivers. Like Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead: that miracle upends the notion of death or like Jesus walking on water. A miracle is a point in which God makes an intervention and the laws of nature are abandoned. It’s when God puts a stick into the middle of our world and disrupts the order of nature. Why don’t we see miracles today like in the biblical world?
“Did anyone see a miracle last week? Pastor Dan asked.
I piped up and said, “They are inventing a flying car and that’s a miracle.” People laughed. “They would be good when we’re stuck in traffic.” I said quietly.
“Is that the Holy Spirit making a flying car?” Pastor Dan asked. “Is God done with us? Are there no more miracles; do they still happen? Or is our worldview too scientific for us to see them?”
I spoke again, “I was not joking about flying cars. Science today is producing miracles like cars, airplanes, rockets, computers, etc.; they make people believe in science. I think our humanity is lagging. (Yesteryear we used to speak about how culture lagged behind technology.) Look at the way wars continue. If our humanity did not lag behind science and technology then we would see God doing miracles again.”[1]
Pastor Dan said, “I appreciate that, because most often we merely debate if miracles really happen or explain them away. Like at the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand [in today’s lesson], (is explain away by saying) they all were inspired to share their lunch. That spells a distraction from the real issue.”
Then Pastor put miracles into a good theological perspective. Miracles are not supposed to prove Jesus’ divinity. They are not an exercise of power and drama. They show God’s incredible love and compassion for us. Jesus makes present God’s compassion in the most sensitive circumstances of our wants and needs in this world.
And because this miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 with five loaves and two fish is recorded in all four gospels, it is very important and those recording the event want us to take it seriously.
Pastor Dan then turned to the story: Jesus is trying to find a place alone for himself, grieving over the death of his cousin John the Baptist, but the crowds follow him and he has no time for himself. He feels a gut wrenching compassion for the people who have no shepherd and cares for them, setting about healing and curing the sick among them.
But it has gotten late and the crowds are hungry and the disciples say to Jesus, “Send them home, send them away so they can get something to eat. They are hungry.”
And Jesus says, “You feed them. What do you have?”
The disciples respond, “We have five loaves and two fish, but what is that for so many?”
Pastor noted that they felt weak, powerless, and helpless. They were merely five-loaves-two-fish people. And looking at the homeless problem around us in San Francisco, all the people living in the streets, and the drug culture, we don’t have the resources or the substance either. We shrug our shoulders and feel like those five-loaves-two-fish people who do not have what it takes. But being taken up into the compassion of Jesus, the disciples become transformed and they become blessings.
We too are overwhelmed. It is not so much that we have not caught up with science, Peter, but we are fearful and feel powerless. We are completely oriented to a sense of scarcity and brokenness. We cannot get a grip on what we could do. We feel so weak. Yes, we do not have the resources nor the substance and our compassion is very thin, flimsy and weak.[2]
The miracle is that the disciples become transformed. They are drawn into the compassion of Jesus. Jesus’ miracles are not flashy,[3] they show the measure of God’s compassion. And the miracle is that we are transformed by God’s calling us out of our five-loaves-two-fish sensibility into becoming the hands of our loving and compassionate God. “God’s work our hands.”
II
All the while when Pastor was preaching, I wanted to put in my new insights from reading Emile Durkheim’s Sociology and Philosophy.[4]I felt that Pastor was talking about individual transformation, and not the possibilities of the higher collective and social nature of the church. I derive this new understanding of the church from Durkheim’s “high sociology,” if I might so call it. Pastor Dan criticizes the corporate nature of the church. But with science and technology the corporations can make a car that an individual alone could never make; and roll one every few minutes off an assembly line. Pastor did bring up our collective nature by saying that we are gathered here to be the hands of God. But how could the church as a collectivity come into its own and be analogous to the very high conception of society that Durkheim describes? With a more theological concept of transcendence [to be discussed later] that also entails the work of the Holy Spirit, the church could even surpass the wonderful vision that Durkheim has of society. The following will explain what that vision of Durkheim is.
From Durkheim’s sociology I suddenly understood what the church, a beloved community, a congregation could be, when it transcended its corporate nature. Not, however, if it remains in a low corporate ecclessiology, completely conformed to the world,which Pastor Dan reviles and rightly criticizes. Let me begin with Durkheim’s conclusion of his book, Sociology and Philosophy. As usual, his conclusion is a tour de force!
“Not only do all the forces of the universe converge in society, but they also form a new synthesis which surpasses in richness, complexity, and power of action[5] all that went to form it. In a word, society is nature arrived at a higher point in its development, concentrating all it energies to surpass, as it were, itself.”[6]
Durkheim has a “high sociology,” one might say, the way in theology we might speak of a high Christology. He even claims that society is the kingdom of God at those times when ideals tend to become one with reality.[7] (The times he lists are the beginning of Scholasticism, the Reformation, the Renaissance and the beginnings of 19th century Socialism; times, he asserts, when ideals are born.[8]
The power of action that he speaks of in his conclusion, could well include the miracles done by God, when I plug in the “church,” where he has “society.”[9] [The Church in which Christ is present.]
Note well that the way he sees biology as a substratum of sociology, making sociology a sui generis field with its own specificity, relatively autonomous from biology, I go to a higher level of description and see his sociology as a substratum of the theology of the church with its own sui generis specificity, also relatively autonomous from sociology. Thus, (to repeat by adding the two disciplines), let me use Durkheim’s sentence structure to plug in “theology” and the “church” for his words “sociology” and “society”:
Not only do all the spiritual forces of God’s creation (the universe) converge in the church, (the substratum of which is society), and form a new communion (synthesis), which surpasses in richness, complexity, and divine miracles (power of action), all that went to form it. In a word, the church is a society that has arrived at a higher point of its development, concentrating all its energies, to surpass, as it were, itself.
This definition of the church, the congregation, the beloved community, will, of course, have nothing in common with corporations whose only purpose is profit. The high sociology of Durkheim, by contrast, throws light onto the collective reality of the church, a collective reality, sui generis having its own specificity for the compassionate miracles produced and delivered by God for the humanity of our world today.
Let me get back to the question Pastor Dan posed to the congregation: why do we not see the miracles today that are recorded in such a numerous way as having taken place in the biblical world? “Is God done with us? Do we have a worldview that is too scientific?”
No, I would answer Pastor Dan, in the word of the prophets: judgment must start in the house of the Lord, i.e., the church.
I had this theurgic feeling of wanting to pipe up in the sermon again and again, to say (and let me repeat the paragraph above:)
that derived from Durkheim’s understanding of society, there is a high sociological conception of the church, in which the spiritual forces of the universe converge, forming a communion which surpasses in richness, complexity, and power of action all that went to form it. In short, the church in this high sociological perspective is society [now] arrived at a higher point in its development, concentrating all its energies to surpass, as it were, itself.
So the church in the real presence of Christ should be a fertile ground for God to intervene, produce and deliver miracles once more. Missing this richness, complexity, and actions of love and compassion, (at great cost to the church), brings about the critique of the corporate character of the church. The incredible universal dynamic that Durkheim discovered via working out sociology is missing from the church today. Its low ecclessiology adjusts and conforms too closely to an inhumane status quo.
That individuals become transformed as working in the middle of the miracles and feel that their doing is the work of God, as important as that also is, misses the social dynamic of the church as a whole. Through it, however, God does not do flashy miracles. The miracles of Christ are performed to meet the desperate needs of humanity and are humanly characterized by the feeding the hungry, healing the sick, bringing a sound mind to the mentally distressed, also sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, movement to the paralyzed, (making them leap like deer) as well as casting out evil spirits, and filling hearts with love and compassion. They also include those of the collective: peacemaking, overcoming the global climate crisis and racism, bringing shelter to the homeless and resettling and caring for refugees.[10] Those miracles are not a flashy flying car, a Pro 14 iPhone, or a supersonic jet, to be sure. But “Jesus also,” to cite Pastor Dan, “makes present God’s compassionate miracles in the most sensitive circumstances of our wants and needs in this world.”
Durkheim, however, insists on society as a whole and therefore, I argue, the church has to take account of its new collective reality above and beyond its individual members. The whole is greater than its parts. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen gasses as individual elements combine, they become something else,[11] water. The synthesis [communion] transforms the elements [individual members].
Durkheim:
“Since the synthesis is the work of the whole, its sphere is the whole. The resultant surpasses the individual as the whole the part. It is in the whole as it is by the whole.”[12]
A whole organization has far more impact than a lone individual.
and
“[Society] is that which thinks, feels, wishes, even though it can neither think, feel nor act except through individual minds.”[13]
God’s work, our hands: and
“While society transcends us it is immanent in us and we feel it as such.”[14]
The beloved community transcends us it is immanent in us, etc.,
and
[Durkheim does not agree with the] “revolt of the individual against the collective, of personal sentiments against collective sentiments. However, [he writes] what I am opposing, to the collective is the collective itself, but more and better aware of itself.”[15]
So from Durkheim’s sociology, it is possible to derive a high and dynamic conception of the church, which operates in a sui generis field of divine specificity which can anticipate God’s miracles in the world once again.
But let me add that Durkheim came from a long line of Rabbi’s, which he discontinued by becoming a sociologist. Talcott Parsons said something to the effect that he did not reduce religion to sociology so much as lift his sociology up into religion.
In his book, Sociology and Philosophy, Durkheim works out the basis for intellectual, moral, and religious facts. He did not subscribe to naturalism or materialism. Illustrating Talcott Parson’s description of his sociology, he defined individual intellectual representational life to be spiritual and social life to be hyper-spiritual![16] The latter should describe a high and dynamic conception of the church as a fertile ground in which we could fervently pray that the Holy Spirit once again work miracles for the desperate apocalyptic times our world seems to be entering.
In one place, however, Durkheim states, “It is to society that we owe the power over matter which is our glory. It is society which has freed us from nature.”[17]
But nature has become hostile to us on a power and scale that no longer makes this optimistic attitude of his credible. Despite modern scientific medicine, a pandemic has taken away millions of lives. Because of our Anthropocene Age’s effect on the planet, the jet stream and ocean currents are shifting, the ocean’s warming has produced much more powerful storms, floods have inundated whole areas that never experienced them before, and fires have raged all over the planet burning up whole towns and parts of cities. Those affected could understandably have the apocalyptic feeling that their world really did end by fire.
Durkheim’s famous conclusion of his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, which is very much like his in Sociology and Philosophy follows:
“If the synthesis of particular representations that occur within each individual consciousness are already, in and of themselves, productive of novelties, how much more effective must society be – these vast syntheses of entire consciousnesses. A society is the most powerful collection of physical and moral forces that we can observe in nature. Such riches of various materials, so highly concentrated, are to be found nowhere else. It is not surprising, then, that a higher life develops out of them, a life that acts on the elements from which it is made, thereby raising them to a higher form of life and transforming them.”[18]
If “in a word, the church, [by the power of the Holy Spirit] arrives at a higher point of its development, concentrating all its energies, to surpass, as it were, itself, then by that love and compassion of the Holy Spirit our reality can once again become one with our ideals and our culture and humanity will no longer lag behind science and technology. Humanity could advance to a new level.
Yes, that we feel as if we are completely inadequate, anxious, fearful and broken before the apocalyptic issues that we are now facing and that individuals become transformed from five-loaves-two-fish people into those who pray for God’s miracles is important. But Durkheim is pointing to the dynamic reality of the society above the individual. Meanwhile Durkheim does not disparage the individual: it’s “the society,” he writes, “that consecrates the individual and made him [her] pre-eminently worthy of respect.”[19] One has to go up another level of description when translating Durkheim for the church in the real presence of Christ.
For Durkheim’s high sociology, the society is above the individual, the way the conclusions of his two books that I’ve now cited illustrate. And that the society is a system of active forces above and beyond the individual is his step in transcendence. But a further transcendental step with Christ via the Holy Spirit present in the church, is the one we need to pray for. Because his presence would mean communion in community in which the living God calls his people to be Christs to one another and then following Christ, participate in the train of miracles in our sorry modern world today like those in the biblical world of yesterday.
III
Let me cite Durkheim again to point out that in the ideology of individualism, we neglect to proclaim Christ with his kingdom of heaven:
“Since the synthesis is the work of the whole, its sphere is the whole. The resultant surpasses the individual as the whole the part. It is in the whole as it is by the whole.”[20]
We well know that Jesus proclaimed, “Repent! for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” but we mostly rip Jesus out of his kingdom, because of our individualism. But Jesus our Lord comes together with his kingdom. Because of our individualism, we do not take into account that Jesus was also always with his twelve disciples and as any teacher knows, the students also teach the teacher. An intense conversation, not to speak of a continual dialogue, must have been sustained for those three years of Jesus’ ministry, confronting the sorry life under the tyrant Herod and the legions of Roman soldiers by whom the country was “possessed.” Thus the 13 with Jesus as their Lord must have been a powerhouse of a collectivity intelligently confronting the inhumane order of the day.
Thus to cite Durkheim again concerning the individual and the society, the person and the community:
“The human personality is a sacred thing; one dare not violate it nor infringe its bounds, while at the same time the greatest good is communion with others.”[21]
Our Lord Jesus prayed, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” implying that an other-worldly community still transcends its foretaste that we can experience here on earth. (As for Heaven, we can see the previews of the coming attractions, but not the feature presentation.) So those, this-worldly previews are
1) the beloved community, which Martin Luther King, Jr. called the kingdom of heaven; 2) Sobornost, as it is called by the Russians: for example by Khomyakov, Berdyaev, Solovyov; then 3) Shalom, as it is called by the Jews; and 4) Aloha, as the Hawaiians call it.
When relating these this-worldly beloved communities to miracles, it is important to note that Jesus speaks of the Heavenly Father’s will being done on earth, and that points to miracles: “the richness, complexity, and power of action” in that community, deriving from the real presence of Christ through the Holy Spirit in its midst.
Taking up the Hawaiian Aloha first, like Shalom, it does not only mean hello and goodbye, but it specifies love and fellowship as well; literally, alo means presence and hā means breath. Notice how “breath” could also point to the breath of God, i.e., the Holy Spirit, Ruach Elohim. Aloha has many more meanings, however: love, peace, compassion, pity, and grief. So what it describes is very much like the beloved community and shalom.
Along with hello and goodbye, moving backward from 4) to 3), shalom means peace and health, stemming from the root slm meaning complete or perfect. In its meaning of peace, it entails much more than the absence of strife and conflict. It also means peace, harmony, wholeness, completeness, prosperity, welfare and tranquility. Thus like Aloha it also includes a wish for the well-being of the beloved community, to use Martin Luther King’s phrase.
Sobornost
2) Sobornost also seems to describe Durkheim’s highest sociological conception of society in its richness, complexity, and power of action. In the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Ted Henderich defines sobornost as a genuine community having a free and integral unity of human beings in the love of God, entailing the promise to save world civilization from the ruinous effects of western rationalism and individualism, lending itself to a critique of capitalism as well. Solovyov considered sobornost to be a reintegration of humanity into the kingdom of God on earth. By a change of existing social structures, sobornost entails the conception of an ideal commonwealth.[22]
Nicolas Berdyaev argued that sobornost is the organic unity of love and freedom.[23] Following Khomyakov, he writes that sobornost is a Russian sense of consciousness of community, the choric principle, the unity of love and freedom, which has no external guarantees whatever. It is the community spirit that the Slavophiles set against the chivalry of the West, which they accused of unchristian individualism and pride. Sobornost is permeated by a democratic spirit.[24]
Continuing to explicate Khomyakov, Berdyaev writes, the Russian idea of sobornost features the concrete existent.[25] Its love is the source and the guarantee of religious truth. Its corporate experience of love is the criterion of apprehension [i.e., grasp and understanding] as a principle opposed to authority. One does not say, “I think” but “we think” meaning that the corporate experience of love thinks.[26] “Khomyakov had a feeling for spiritual freedom; all his thinking was permeated by it.[27] Sobornost was the image of the Orthodox Church, such as comprehensible to the mind and, in relation to the experienced Church, it is an obligation to be discharged.[28]
Khomyakov’s conception of sobornost, thus, from my point of view, spells a critique of the corporate nature of our Church, here “corporate,” in terms of modern corporations locked into capitalism.
Some salient points: while sobornost is an untranslatable Russian word, a spiritual community comes close, having no external authority, except God and Christ internally, with truth and life as the inner life of the Christian. The Church as sobornost is held together in unity by mutual love. Knowledge of truth is bestowed only upon mutual love.[29] Thus sobornost is opposed by both Catholic authoritarianism and Protestant individualism. The Holy Spirit does not operate where there is an ecumenical council, but an ecumenical council is where the Holy Spirit operates. [This is like Luther: the church is not where the Gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments duly administered, but wherever the Gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments duly administered is the church.] The Holy Spirit does not operate on the level of legalism, as in the life of the state.[30] The spirit of freedom and the spirit of community exist together.
In another place, a biographer cites Berdyaev defining sobornost as an untranslatable word meaning “the idea of all-togetherness, of congregationalism, of catholicism as a spirit in which all work together creatively and to which all contribute.”[31] Sobornost suggests freedom and unity in love, a combination of liberty and order which result from the indwelling of Christ by the Holy Spirit in those who are baptized.[32] Berdyaev writes that sobornost is the victory of harmony over chaos, love over hatred and fear, (citing Nicolas Zernov). It is the complete contrary of collectivism, having more in common with community. “Community and sobornost always recognize freedom and the nature of the person.”[33]
Berdyaev continues that
“society is a blessing to [humanity] when it is conceived as a free union of [human beings] in the spirit of brotherhood [and sisterhood]. Society contributes to spiritual health and promotes freedom when it takes the form of a religious togetherness, a sobornost, and when it is guided by the conviction that the final goal of [human] life is not social but spiritual.”[34]
Continuing: “Fortunately, the earnest, faithful Christian can always transcend the objectified church and can be part of the true Church, the sobornost, which is sustained by the indwelling Spirit of the risen Lord.”[35] In the same place Berdyaev continues that another world beyond this world is disclosed in the church.[36] It is a spiritual society; the realm of freedom is in it.
In his book, The Meaning of the Creative Act, Berdyaev writes: “We live under the sign both of an extreme sociologism (the generally accepted consciousness of today is a sociological consciousness; sociology has replaced theology) and an extreme, individualistic isolation of personality.”[37] (Sociologism is a false sense of community.)
While Emile Durkheim’s sociology almost seems to masquerade as theology, Berdyaev may have a critique of him there, but definitely not about “an extreme, individualistic isolation of personality.” His whole concept of society is conceived in opposition to individualism. Perhaps Durkheim’s thought can be described as a spiritually intoxicated sociology. Note how he states that if individual intellectual representational life is spiritual, then social life can be considered hyper-spiritual.[38] When he describes society with his high sociology, it almost seems to include sobornost.
In his chapter titled, “Creativity and the Structure of Society,”[39] (for a contrast with sobornost) Berdyaev writes that more than any other social theory, materialistic socialism denies communion in love, communion in the Spirit; it recognizes only communion in necessity and in the material. “Only a creative social order, social order in the spirit of love and liberty, is capable of resistance to the social order of the Antichrist.”[40] Returning to the Orthodox faith, Berdyaev was completely disillusioned with Marxism. He even notes that democratism can destroy the inward [person] for the sake of the outward.[41] Again he militates against materialism and external aspirations that neglect the growth and grandeur of the inner person.
As a further aside, when St. Paul tells of the whole creation in the throes of labor pains, for the first fruits of the Spirit, inwardly awaiting our adoption as the children of God,[42] then it is slightly different from Karl Marx’s assertion that “force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” Thinking in terms of Durkheim’s wholes, one could imagine the natural birth of a society. The forced birth of a society is a monstrosity; the rebirth of a society has to be spiritual for the union of love and freedom.
Thus if a person, as Jesus advises Nicodemus, has to be born of the Spirit, then could the church be the result of the natural rebirth of the society, and could its spiritual rebirth be sobornost, shalom, aloha, the beloved community? Berdyaev argues that the new social order comes vertically down from above and not in a revolutionary fashion, horizontally.
Berdyaev would probably not agree with arguing that as nature is the substratum of society, and society that of the church, because each higher level of description is only relatively autonomous from its substratum, according to Durkheim. For Berdyaev the City of God is completely autonomous from the world, created by God out of nothing; and thus it cannot be derived from the world. “The way of the New Jerusalem is a way of sacrifice.”[43]
It might seem that we have now come far afield of why the miracles recorded in the biblical world are not part of our experience today. But we can argue that in terms of the Divine milieu of sobornost, shalom, aloha, and the beloved community, humanity can overtake science and technology. Even if the other-worldly transcendence is left outstanding by Durkheim, he depicts the higher social level of description as a supernatural society, (because for him nature is the substratum of society). By following Durkheim, however, we depart from Berdyaev’s City of God descending from above.
Can one imagine the “incarnation” of the beloved community? Incarnation refers more precisely to the Word, Christ, becoming flesh, a human being. Perhaps “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” can be interpreted as the other-worldly realm descending down into this one, with the Lord Christ as the Right Hand of God taking up his dominion here on earth as proclaimed by his Ascension. Thus the rebirth of the society becomes the church and the church’s birth from above enfolds the baptized[44] who have become transformed into Christs for the sake of the salvation of the world.[45]
The transformation of the church into the beloved community is a miracle enfolding the transformed, the baptized, from five-loaves-two-fish, resource-less people into Christs, who represent miracles nesting inside the larger community miracle. Such a communion in the beloved community spells a divine culture capable of overtaking science and technology. In that beloved community, no matter if described from the Russian, Jewish, or Hawaiian versions, human beings, having been born from above, have become Christs to one another. Through the Holy Spirit, who provides the real presence of Christ, the Resurrected One will have dominion at God’s Right Hand – at hand, in the midst of the transformed. With that the miracles ensuing from God’s mercy and compassion will take place again:
Lo, the Spirit of the Lord will be upon them, because they will be anointed to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, [hearing to the deaf and voice to the mute, healing to the sick, leaping to the lame], let the oppressed go free, the feeding the masses, the five and then the four million, [the whole train of Jesus miracles] and furthermore, bring peace, make failed states into livable countries once more, quench global warming, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor![46] All the slaves go free in the year of Jubilee!
IV
Only sobornost seems to have included a critique of capitalism. But could a sociology of the this-worldly kingdom of heaven be conceived in order to be of help with that critique? Durkheim said that with his sociology, he left philosophy to return with a profit. In the same way, sociology could do the same for theology. First of all, capitalism and even socialism as well, give economics pride of place.[47] In the beloved community, not economics nor politics, but religion, i.e., trust in God, for the beloved community, has to have pride of place. As already noted, Berdyaev held that “more than any other social theory, materialistic socialism denies communion in love, communion in the Spirit; it recognizes only communion in necessity and in the material.” Thus it takes a creative spiritual social order, “a communion of love and freedom,” as theorized in “sobornost, where the goal is not merely social, but spiritual” for the building of the beloved community, according to Berdyaev.
Durkheim shows that permeating a society are a hierarchy of values, norms, collectivities, [and roles].[48] But overarching the whole society is what he calls the conscience collective,[49] a system of beliefs and sentiments, which are held in common. In the higher level of description of the beloved community, faith in terms of trusting in God would permeate the conscience collective. In keeping with Durkheim’s conception of society, if it were transformed, it would also entail the transformation of its persons within. Durkheim argues that it is by the grace of society that persons have sacredness invested and added to them.[50] And Durkheim discovered that the conscience collective and its values and norms became internalized in the persons of that community, because of the interpenetration of personality and social system.[51]
In this way the transformation of the society into the beloved community entails transformation of the persons within the community as well. Parsons defines Durkheim’s conception of organic solidarity as “the integration of units which, in the last analysis, are individual persons in roles, who are performing qualitatively different functions in the social system.” Perhaps, here organic solidarity is a term to keep in mind for the richness, complexity and power of action of the community. Community can be understood referring merely to an association or fellowship of individual persons while solidarity captures elements beyond them and structures involved in a complex modern society as well.
Parsons shows how Durkheim himself had some confusion about mechanical solidarity. (Ibid., p. 138) Parsons writes, “For organic solidarity, as noted above, the complex of contract, property, and occupation is central; whereas leadership, authority, and what I have elsewhere called “regulation” are central to mechanical solidarity.” (Ibid., p. 133) The organ as the agent of mechanical solidarity is government.
In these pages where Parsons discusses the relation of the conscience collective to organic solidarity and the relation of organic solidarity and mechanical solidarity to each other, (Ibid., p. 138ff.) for me the model of Jürgen Habermas begins to become visible, especially his contrast of the economic realm with that of the political one: “Power is a measure and medium that in those respects which are relevant is parallel with money.”[52] Parsons has very much more to say about roles in collectivities, motivation, rational and irrational psychology, but concluded with “Durkheim established the basic foundations for developing a fruitful theory of social integration.”[53]
The Lifeworld and the Two Systems
With Jürgen Habermas it becomes obvious that activists who glibly champion changing the system have very much over-simplified the complexity of what that could possibly mean. Roughly Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason[54] posits a Weberian ideal-type or model of a lifeworld and two systems, the one political and the other economic. His critique of functionalist reason takes place through his integration of fundamental speech-act communication, learned from the philosophy of language, as opposed to reasoning about sociological functions apart from language. For Habermas, the currency of the economic system is, of course, money; that of the political system, power; and that of the lifeworld, words. In the lifeworld people relate for their own sake, for the pleasure of their fellowship, for their love of one another, as in a family, a church, as described by the German term Gemeinschaft. The relations in the systems are described by the other German term, Gesellschaft, where participants relate for a certain purpose, but not relating together for their own sake.
If the systems uncouple and economically colonize the lifeworld, it violates his sociological version of the Kantian principle, that the system exists for the sake of the lifeworld and not vice versa. A person wielding power distorts the lifeworld and can wreak havoc on its groups and friendly relationships. But power is the currency of the political system and is there for the sake of the lifeworld. If the economic system uncouples and colonizes the political system, you have money distorting the political system of democracy, damaging the welfare of the people of the lifeworld.
As in Durkheim’s “high” sociology, one can see values already present in the sociological model of Habermas. One could also ask, what would it take to make the lifeworld the beloved community, sobornost? His model does not seem to be permeated with the sacred and with morality the way that of Durkheim’s is. His communicative action could well be the speech-act proclamation of Jesus’ good news of repentance for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Talcott Parsons, reverting back to him, in The Evolution of Societies,[55] has some helpful insights for a sociology of a this-worldly kingdom of heaven or beloved community. He notes that
“Anchorage in a higher-order subsystem is the basic condition of upgrading effects of a generalized medium of interchange. Therefore cultural development is essential for the evolutionary advance of societies. For example, religious developments underlie major processes of value generalizations and the increase in empirical knowledge underlies the institutionalization of new technologies. Sufficient levels of value generalizations, implemented through the legal system, are prerequisite to major steps of inclusion in the structure of a social community. A consensual base that promotes adequately extensive operation of the influence mechanism is necessary for major developments in the system of political power. Certain degrees of heightened political integration are prerequisite to the expansion of money economies beyond relatively simple levels.”[56]
It is worth struggling with this conclusion of his book, which to begin to understand, would, of course, require reading the whole book. My interpretation will over-simplify his study of primitive, ancient, medieval, and modern societies and how they developed. A question might be whether the beloved community can come about through evolution, revolution, or vertically, as Berdyaev would argue, by God reducing the society to nothing to recreate it into the beloved community. Thus the beloved community comes by the Holy Spirit’s gift of salvation, not by evolution or revolution.
Upgrading the present society by means of anchoring it in a higher-order subsystem could represent the social forces deriving from sobornost, to use the Russian concept. The medium of interchange would not be individual, but social and spiritual, in a way that would be transformative. After all, Parsons notes that “religious developments underlie major processes of value generalizations.” Let’s understand the latter term to mean generating higher values. But Parsons does not discount “underlying knowledge” in terms of science and technology. For example, in the recent pandemic, science and technology saved many lives.
On the religious side one could think of what monasteries attempted to do embedded in their societies. Their higher social values did not change the whole society, because of their detachment and even isolation from the mainstream community. Thus they did not anchor the society in a higher-order subsystem, which could upgrade values in the center of the community.
Luther with his centripetal spirituality, marriage spirituality, opposed the centrifugal celibate Catholic spirituality. The priesthood of all believers sent believers like monks into the midst of society. Seeing the power of his this-worldly asceticism, the Jesuits followed suit, and no longer cloistered themselves away, like traditional monks did. Thus Parsons has an interesting comment to make in regard to the powerful influence of the Reformation. After Luther’s emphasis on the priesthood of all believers and their sacred vocations out in society, the purpose and responsibility of the congregation or community changed.[57] No longer through its priesthood did the church have guardianship over all persons. With its faith mandate, Protestantism defined carrying out God’s calling as ultimately the individual’s own responsibility.[58] Durkheim would suggest a social responsibility! The following lines from Parsons are telling:
Similarly, the form of stratification within the medieval Church, the differentiation between laity and members of the religious orders, lost its legitimation in Protestantism. On the level of a way of life, all callings had the same religious status; the highest religious merits could be attained in secular callings.[59] This attitude included marriage – Luther himself left the monastery[60] and married a former nun, symbolizing the change. This change in relations between the church and the secular society has often been interpreted as a loss of religious rigor in favor of worldly indulgence. I consider this view a misrepresentation, for the Reformation was a movement to upgrade secular society to the highest religious level. Every man was obligated to behave like a monk in his religious devotion, although not in his daily life; that is, he was to be guided by religious considerations. A turn in the process, which dated from early phases of Christianity, was to permeate the things of this world with religious values and to create a City of Man in the image of God.[61]
Thus in a social sense, the church was to change the society into the Church, a this-worldly beloved community, “a City of God,” in the words of Parsons, “in the image of God.” In some ways today, however, the secular society seems to have higher values than some churches; although it would be hard to assert that about the whole Church.
Parsons makes my assertion above explicit:
The institutionalization of the conception of a religiously based human society implied the possibility of establishing a societal community with a corporate character something like the Church itself, particularly the Protestant conception of a church that dispensed with the stratification in the Roman Catholic conception.[62]
His critique does not mention racism, where churches avoid cross-cultural and cross-racial encounter, even though St. Paul states,
“those baptized into Christ have clothed themselves in Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all are one in Christ Jesus. “(Gal 3:27-28)[63]
It took the army to start integration and African-American soldiers returning to society did not receive acceptance in White churches and were often soundly rejected by society, even lynched. But Parsons does mention the criticism about how state churches developed among Lutherans and only some branches of the Calvinist church stressed the independence of their groups from political authority.[64]
Can doing this kind of sociology return to theology with a profit? How can the church once again accomplish it mission of “establishing a societal community with a corporate character something like that of the church itself”? How can such a “high-order subsystem” anchor our society once again, moor it steadfastly, bringing it to nothing, so God can vertically create, incarnate, a this-worldly beloved community reflecting the kingdom of heaven? That transformation would be as great a miracle as the transformation of a believer into Christ for the neighbor and perhaps, by overtaking the science and technology gap, could once again experience the human miracles that “God produces and delivers.”
Thus when our Lord Jesus proclaims, “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” then for the kingdom of heaven, he could have said, the beloved community, shalom, aloha, (Hello!), sobornost, but there is much more to it when considering the complex nature and the many values and structures involved in modern societies. But the Holy Spirit makes a way where there is no way. What would a new paradigm, now not merely of scientific paradigm, but that of a complex modern society look like? That is yet to be seen.
But, on the other hand, countries all around us have become unlivable and completely vulnerable to catastrophes, because, as Jesus said, “the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence and the violent take it by force.”(Mat 11:12) When the society itself is a catastrophe, then in the terms of Durkheim, (far from surpassing itself), as it were, but destroying itself, it compounds the flood, earthquake, or other natural catastrophe by the catastrophe it is. When the peaceful, harmonious, life-nurturing, healing, beloved community comes, then it will mobilize all manner resources for any and every rescue, from its organic union of love and freedom, and the human miracles recorded in the world of the Bible will be witnessed in the modern world of today, empirically even by scientists. Till then we live by faith and not by sight: For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever! Yes, Lord Jesus, Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.
(This is still a work in progress. I still hope to work with
the sociology of fields by Pierre Bourdieu and the Justice as Fairness model by John Rawls)
peterkrey, August 6-31, and then to September 15, 2023
[1] Note that in the biblical world at times science and technology could have lagged behind culture and humanity.
[2] Meanwhile Pastor Dan Solberg and Saint Paulus organized SF Cares, which supports the San Francisco Night Ministry and the S.O.S., the homeless Singers of the Streets, along with a Vision program providing eyeglasses for the homeless.
[3] It is important to note Durkheim’s incredibly high description of society, as far surpassing an individual mind, sui generis and with a specificity above and beyond what any individual would be capable of. And God’s miracles are not the transformation of things with more and more superiority, but of a transformed society working through individuals, whom God has transformed to feed the starving masses dying in famines, transformed unlivable countries as safe homes for the millions fleeing them and making them become safe and livable places, new communities once again for the millions languishing in refugee camps. When science and technology create a robot, even having artificial intelligence, it is still a thing, an it, and one cannot speak of Martin Buber’s I and Thou.
[4] Emile Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, trans. D.F. Pocock with Introduction by J.G. Persistiany, (Glencoe, Illinois, 1953).
[5] My italics, because I want to relate those words to miracles.
[6] Ibid., p. 97.
[7] Ibid., p. 92. I argue, however, that his concept of transcendence seems to be completely sociological and thus theologically inadequate.
[8] Ibid., p. 92.
[9] In a way I am using his sentence structure to make my move from society to church and because of misusing his sentences, it could be called catachresis.
[10] See footnote 3 above.
[11] Ibid., p. 26.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., p. 55. Durkheim’s conception of transcendence is still this worldly, from nature to society and note that if he considers nature the substratum of society, then for him society becomes supernatural. But for theology, transcendence must also be other-worldly. For example, it is problematic when he states,
I know only one being that possesses a richer and more complex moral reality than our own, and that is the collective being. I am mistaken; there is another being which could play the same part, and that is the Divinity. Between God and society lies the choice[…]. I can only say that I myself am quite indifferent to this choice, since I see in the Divinity only society transfigured and symbolically expressed. Ibid., p. 52.
His transcendence from nature or the individual to the society should not preclude the other-worldly transcendence of the Holy Spirit and the Son at the right hand of God. To be discussed further below.
[15] Ibid., p. 66. When in November 1518 Luther secretly leaves Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg, he writes an appeal from the ill-informed pope to the better informed pope (a papa male informato ad papam melius informandum). The University of Paris had used the same formula to protest the Concordat of Bologna of 1516 very shortly before.
[16] Ibid., p. 34.
[17] Ibid., p. 73.
[18] Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. by Karen E. Fields, (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 447.
[19] Sociology and Philosophy, p. 72.
[20] Ibid. Again see footnote 2, where the society of countries has to transform countries to make them livable again. Warring factions for the sake of the advantages of power and wealth (shepherds who want to fleece their flocks) are one part of the problem, changes in the environment because of the global warming crisis, is another, presenting an even greater challenge.
[21] Sociology and Philosophy, p. 37.
[22] Ted Henderich, ed., Oxford Companion to Philosophy, (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 705.
[23] Nicolas Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1947,1962), p. 51-52.
[24] Ibid., p. 52.
[25] Ibid., p. 160.
[26] Teilhard de Chardin would say that it crosses the collective threshold of thought.
[27] Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, p. 162.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid., p. 164.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Fuad Nucho, Berdyaev’s Philosophy: the Existential Paradox of Freedom and Necessity, (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966), p. 23.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid., p. 57. I replaced “men” when it occurred with [human beings], etc.
[35] Ibid., p. 82.
[36] A theological transcendence reaches to the world beyond this world, where Durkheim espouses a this-worldly sociological transcendence.
[37] Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, (New York: Collier Books, Trans. Donald A. Lowrie, 1962), p. 253.
[38] Sociology and Philosophy, p. 34.
[39] The Meaning of the Creative Act, pages 253-272.
[40] Ibid., p. 265.
[41] Ibid., p. 266.
[42] Romans 8:22.
[43] The Meaning of the Creative Act, p. 271.
[44] Baptism symbolizes being “washed” and thus receiving a pure heart and also to have undergone suffering, thus, dying to oneself, and following after Jesus with the cross on one’s shoulders, for the sake of the beloved community.
[45] When Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address stated that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom,” he was thinking of a collective rather than a merely individual rebirth.
[46] Cf. Luke 4:18.
[47] Karl Marx’s concept of class also gives economics and materialism pride of place. Durkheim disassociates himself from an individualism which “reduces society to … a mechanism of production and exchange.” Essays on Sociology and Philosophy, p. 35. And Durkheim argued it an error that “individuals and peoples must no longer pursue anything except economic interests.” Ibid., p. 54. In the words of Durkheim:
In any social organization whatsoever, no matter how skillfully it may be administered, the economic functions can co-operate harmoniously and maintain themselves in equilibrium only if they are submitted to moral forces which go beyond them, which contain and govern them.” Ibid., p. 55.
[48] Talcott Parsons, “Durkheim’s Contribution to the Theory of Integration of Social Systems,” in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., Essays on Sociology and Philosophy by Emile Durkheim et al. with Appraisals of His Life and Thought, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper & Rowe Publishers, 1960), p. 125: Parsons argues that these “are categories that are descriptive of a social system only” and then I believe he relates them to Durkheim’s conception of the mechanical solidarity of a society. Parsons adds roles, which Durkheim did not take account of.
[49] In French “conscience” means both consciousness and conscience, not merely the latter as understood in English.
[50] Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, p. 72.
[51] Parsons, Essays in Sociology and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 143.
[52] Ibid., p. 140.
[53] Ibid., p. 151. In relating Parson’s recapitulation and critique of Durkheim’s sociology to the beloved community, the complexity of a modern society, (with beliefs and values held in common having to differentiate organic and mechanical solidarity and social structures taking account of collectivities and their institutionalization as well as the roles and those having the privileges and responsibilities in them, rational and irrational motivation), becomes difficult indeed. But Durkheim does not give economics pride of place, nor self-interest, nor individualism. In championing morality as transmitted by society to persons within it, he states: “Never do we admit that a moral value can be expressed in terms of economic values – I would go so far as to say temporal values.” Sociology and Philosophy, (p. 57-58) and “I, as an individual cannot be the end of my moral conduct.” (p. 50) Durkheim reminds of Luther, not his own, but everyone his neighbor’s priest.
[54] Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, Vol. Two, trans. by Thomas McCarthy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).
[55] Talcott Parsons, The Evolution of Societies, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1977).
[56] Ibid., p. 240-241.
[57] The German term Gemeinde means both congregation and community. When the faith was still all Lutheran or all Roman Catholic, there was no difference between the congregation and community, but with our pluralism, that is no longer the case.
Another concern: speaking a congregation of today versus the whole society or the whole social system, e.g., capitalism or socialism, means speaking about a subsystem, a societal community. In Luther’s times one religion described the congregation as well as the community, while our communities are pluralistic. But important values of a Lutheran faith can become values held in common by the whole community and even the collective consciousness of the whole social system, as Talcott Parsons noted about Luther’s theology of vocations.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Note that Parsons is citing Max Weber as his reference! Ibid., p. 132 n55.
[60] Luther never left the Black Cloister, but stopped being a monk. Marrying Katie von Bora on June 13,1525, the one-time cloister became an evangelical household of students, relatives, refugees, and visitors, a model for Lutheran clergy households to come. When Luther came downstairs some students recorded everything he said and these were later discovered and became the Table Talks.
[61] Ibid., p. 132-133.
[62] Ibid., p. 133. Talcott Parsons exhibits some cultural Protestantism in this place, but historically, where the Reformation was rejected, the stagnation of those countries took centuries to overcome. The center of Western civilization, (if we don’t question our being civilized), moved from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic Ocean. The society should, of course, not become the Lutheran or Protestant or Catholic “church,” but the important religious values that Parsons mentions should become part of the common consciousness, the beliefs, sentiment, and values of society held in common. Just like for example, where Roman Catholic authoritarianism should be rejected, its long-standing social justice emphasis should be welcomed. Then much needed are Judaism’s wisdom, moral teachings, and pursuit of justice. Perhaps Islam’s emphasis on piety and alms.
[63] I change the direct second person pronoun “you” into the third person “they and them.”
[64] The Evolution of Societies, p. 132-133.
