2 - The social sciences and New Testament interpretation

Summary

In this investigation, insights from the social sciences will be drawn upon in addition to relying on historical methods with the aim of presenting a more complete description of development in the Pauline/deutero-Pauline circle. The following discussion sets out the social scientific theory that will be employed.

The symbolic universe

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality is of primary significance for this investigation of institutionalization in the Pauline movement. The Social Construction of Reality is a treatise on the sociology of knowledge – a branch of sociology devoted to the study of the relation between human thought and the social context in which it arises. The fundamental thesis of Berger and Luckmann's study is that the relationship between the individual as producer, and the individual's social world, the product, is a dialectical one. Berger and Luckmann consider society in terms of both subjective and objective reality; they explore how externalized products of human activity attain the character of objectivity. They assert that the objectivity of the institutional world is a humanly produced objectivity. However, the institutional world acts back on the producer. Internalization occurs when this world is retrojected into the consciousness of the individual in the course of socialization and becomes subjectively meaningful. In other words, the individual and the individual's social world interact with each other.