Religious Doctrines

February 14, 2008

Last week I was asked by a student about the Islamic view of the origin of evil. This is the sort of religious question I never quite know how to answer. My mind runs to the works that might touch on this issue, but this instinct hardly counts as knowledge of an official Islamic position. And that's just it: I don't care much about theological positions.. especially over the long haul. My attention is drawn to how that position worked in this specific historical context. Religious traditions are very good at maintaining a uniform theological discourse across time, but that discourse often means something different at different times. So why get caught trying to put together an "Islamic" view of anything?

Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism can be read as a case study in how to handle religious doctrines. His thesis is that religious concerns about the afterlife led to the development of a way of life conducive to Capitalist practices. He points to a number of Protestant religious sects that carried within them a constellation of ideas that led to a worldly asceticism. He examines Calvinism, Pietism, Methodism, Baptist sects, and Quakerism.. each of which lead, in Weber's view, to a similar way of life. Now, these religious groups hold some very different doctrinal positions, so how can they each be engines for the same way of life?

Weber addresses this question as follows:

We shall see that similar ethical maxims may be correlated with very different dogmatic foundations. Also the important literary tools for the saving of souls, above all the casuistic compendia of the various denominations, influenced each other in the course of time; one finds great similarities in them, in spite of very great differences in actual conduct. [55]

That first sentence is all important: doctrinal formulations that seem far apart on paper may actually converge on a similar way of life. Thus Calvinists and Methodists may be marked by a shared way of life. This is not to say that a belief in human free will or predestination will not manifest itself in life differently.. but there may be even greater similarities. In short, Weber is completing a complicated move in this passage. He is affirming the importance of studying the doctrines of a sect, but then denying that those doctrines are actually important as intellectual positions. The importance of these doctrines lies in how they lead to a way of living in this world. Doctrines are thus important to analyze in detail (as Weber does), but they are not important for their actual content.

I take this for a model of how to work with religious beliefs. It affirms the importance of beliefs in a way that a Marxist would find uncomfortable, but it also refuses to buy into the intellectual scaffolding of religious doctrinal formulations.. and act as if such formulations were actually important.