The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches by Ernst Troeltsch

First published:Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, 1912 (English translation, 1931)

Edition(s) used:The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, translated by Olive Wyon. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Church history; critical analysis; theology

Core issue(s): Church; ethics; Jesus Christ

Overview

Ernst Troeltsch belonged to a pioneering generation of German social thinkers who studied value conflict in the formation of social and cultural unity. In studies of religion, they emphasized the tension within “universal” religions between world-affirming and world-rejecting impulses. The former impulse finds expression in beliefs that the cosmos is divinely created, sustained, or guided; the latter finds expression in beliefs that the cosmos stands in profound disjunction with divine purposes, triggering responses such as asceticism, expectation of divine judgment, or longing for otherworldly salvation. Focusing primarily on three periods of Christian history—early Christianity, medieval and Reformation Christianity, and early modern Protestantism—Troeltsch shows how Christians, wrestling with the ambiguities of institutional and personal value conflict, attempted to create Christian identities suitable for their times and cultures.

Because they expected the world to be quickly replaced by the Kingdom of God, these social dilemmas were especially acute for the earliest Christians. To follow Jesus meant to live wholly in terms of the coming redemption and in radical disjunction with this world. The expectation of a perpetually delayed salvation, however, could not sustain the nascent community for long, and Christianity had to adjust to life in an enduring world. Troeltsch argues that the social tensions of this dilemma permeated the ethical and theological discourse of early Christian thinkers from Paul to Augustine. Their primary response was to find in Jesus not only the announcer of future redemption but also a cosmic Christ who offers salvation within this world. In turn, redemption came to mean grace that ensures both salvation in the next world and forgiveness, personal transformation, and strength to live a virtuous life in this world, mediated by an authoritative institutional church. However, the nagging question persisted: What is to be rejected and affirmed in the life of this world? Its social ethic attuned to the world to come, Christianity borrowed from preexisting Jewish and Greco-Roman ethical and philosophical perspectives. Troeltsch argues that the expectation of a future Kingdom of God was ultimately recast into a Neoplatonic hierarchy of divinely created goods: those of this world—the state, the economy, the family—were affirmed, but only in their proper place below the higher eternal goods that call forth absolute love of God and neighbor. Combined with a Stoic theory of natural law, this perspective offered a relative Christian affirmation of secular institutions even while demoting them beneath the higher ethical demands that echoed from the Gospel.

The medieval Church broke out of this model for the simple reason that it was situated in a culture it had helped to create. To a large extent, Christianity permeated and affirmed secular medieval institutions. This circumstance found intellectual expression in the Christian-Aristotelian theology of Thomas Aquinas, which held that divine revelation, grace, and the Church perfected and completed the political, social, and economic institutions natural to the created pattern of rational human development. The underlying formal ideal of the unity of religion and culture expressed here was assumed not only by the medieval Church but by the Protestant Reformers as well.

At this point in his analysis, Troeltsch proposes one of his most famous themes: the analytical distinction between three types of religious institutional formation—the church-type, sect-type, and mysticism-type. For many readers, this distinction is the enduring heart of his book.

By the term church-type, Troeltsch means the type of religious institution, first exemplified in Christianity by the medieval Church, that affirms and stabilizes worldly institutions, seeing them as divinely ordained. Such support, in turn, increases the authority with which the Church maintains its own expansive theological and sacramental power. The price for this influence, however, is the compromise of the radical ethical requirements of the Gospel. Redemption is understood in terms of grace offered for the forgiveness of sins, including for these compromises. Those born into a given territory are automatically born into the Church by infant baptism, followed by participation in formalized sacramental observances administered by a priestly hierarchy. The world-rejecting ethic of Jesus is not denied by the church-type, however, but sponsored primarily in monitored forms of asceticism. Even here, though, the emphasis usually falls not on rejection of the world but on rejection of the pride or lust associated with worldly experience. Troeltsch argues that even though Protestant Reformers later significantly adjusted the substance of this type, they left its basic form intact, assuming the unity of culture and religion.

The dominance of the church-type during the medieval and Reformation periods, however, forced the latent world-rejecting impulse—the sect-type—into the open rebellion characteristic of such groups as the Waldensians, the Hussites, and the Anabaptists. The Christ of the sect-type was not the cosmic redeemer but the culturally disjunctive and prophetic Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, the suffering and persecuted Lord who calls his followers to lives of simple discipleship in anticipation of the coming kingdom. In the sect-type, baptism is a voluntary adult act signifying the personal and communal commitment of the faithful few who will take up the cross of Christ. Their world rejection consists not so much in detachment from greed, lust, or pleasure, nor in monasticism, but in steadfast refusal to participate in institutions, religious or secular, that are characteristic of, or have compromised with, a corrupt world, no matter how long that world endures.

In the struggle between and within these two types, a third latent type emerged: the mysticism-type. Always a part of Christianity, mysticism was usually attuned to the internal spiritual meaning of external belief and practice. In the struggles between church and sect, however, mysticism emerged as a separate religious formation, marked by indifference or hostility to institutional religion. Mysticism calls for personal union with God. Its Christ is the inner word experienced in the depths of the soul or in visionary ecstasy. Troeltsch illustrates his mysticism-type with a bewildering array of historical figures, but this variety was precisely what he wanted to highlight. In the deadly confessional strife of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods, the individual’s inward life became an attractive avenue of independent spiritual transcendence. Moreover, as modern Europeans grew increasingly wary of all institutional religious authorities, whether of church or sect, the authority of subjective religious experience only grew stronger.

Christian Themes

Which of the three types canvassed above is the correct form of Christianity? Troeltsch answers: all three. The church-type expresses the universality of Christianity, but the sect-type preserves the early meaning of Jesus’ Gospel, while the mysticism-type conveys the idea of inner communion of the soul with its God. All are scriptural, legitimate, and once-united components driven asunder by the conflicts of historical development. Observing the increasingly secularized and industrialized Europe of the early twentieth century, Troeltsch wonders how Christianity would sustain itself and its culture. The greatest achievement of the early church had been the construction of the Church itself as an enduring institution grafted onto an alien pagan world that it had outlived. In the modern world, however, Christianity finds itself in the same situation, searching for its place in an increasingly alien and religiously fragmented world. The future of each of the three types does not look promising: Neither an increasingly ineffective form of hierarchical authority, nor a sectarian rejection of the world, nor an institutionally indifferent mysticism seemed to offer realistic avenues for enduring cultural engagement. The future is open, Troeltsch argues, and he ends his book wondering whether a new institutional form or a new combination of the three types would emerge soon enough to help resolve the religious and cultural dilemmas of Europe.

Sources for Further Study

Chapman, Mark D. Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology: Religion and Cultural Synthesis in Wilhelmine Germany. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2001. Detailed account of Troeltsch’s program for a culturally engaged and ethically responsible form of Christianity.

Drescher, Hans-Georg. Ernst Troeltsch: His Life and Work. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1993. Troeltsch’s intellectual development; good summaries of his major works.

Harrisville, Roy A., and Walter Sundberg. “Ernst Troeltsch: The Power of Historical Consciousness.” In The Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs. 2d ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002. Troeltsch’s theological and methodological positions related to his interpretation of Christian history.

Liebersohn, Harry. “Ernst Troeltsch: From Community to Society.” In Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870-1923. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institution of Technology Press, 1988. Troeltsch’s sociology of religion and his underlying sense of cultural and religious crisis.

Welch, Claude. “Ernst Troeltsch: Faith, History, and Ethics in Tension.” In Vol. 2 of Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches in the context of an insightful overview of Troeltsch’s theological work and its historical context.