120 - Looking Both Ways: Exploring the Interface Between Christianity and Sociology

Looking Both Ways: Exploring the Interface Between Christianity and Sociology
By Richard Perkins
Grand Rapids, Baker, 1987. 189 pp, $8.95.

This volume represents a reasoned and lucid attempt on the part of a noted Protestant evangelical sociologist to provide a "coherent account … of how Christianity relates to sociology and vice-versa." The author rejects both methodological extremes, that is, the "integrative" approach in which "all truth is God's truth" and the "value-free" position in which truth can be neatly compartmentalized into "Christian" and "sociological" frames of reference. After arguing that "every sociological theory rests on metaphysical distinctions," he asserts that "Christian sociology claims no scientific methodology of its own, but it does claim a special metaphysic. To the degree that this metaphysic can shape sociological thinking, while still retaining the basics of the sociological perspective, is the degree to which Christian sociology is a useful term."

Perkins' overall message is twofold. On the one hand, Christianity and sociology do not naturally get along with each other. On the other hand, when combined-that is, by "looking both ways"-the individual can better transcend the limitations of either perspective. For example, Christianity can help sociology overcome its inability to deal satisfactorily with either the issue of the relativity inherent within a social constructionist perspective or that of free will and determininism. Perkins, at this point, seems to be in a critical dialogue with the work of Lutheran scholar and sociologist, Peter L. Berger. For its part, sociology can, for instance, expose the ideological components that unnecessariliy can contaminate various Christian orientations to the world.

One criticism, offered from one advocating a distinctive Roman Catholic sociology, is that Perkins, perhaps, underplays the possibility of developing a full-blown Christian sociological theory. It is conceivable, for instance, that the rich conceptual heritage of the Catholic natural law tradition could provide the necessary material for one such theoretical scaffold. In any event, Looking Both Ways is a thought-provoking volume that can be profitably read alongside of the excellent analysis of David Lyon, Sociology and the Human Image, in which the

122 - Looking Both Ways: Exploring the Interface Between Christianity and Sociology

latter similarly argues for a "critical integration" between Christianity and social science.

Joseph A. Varacalli
Nassau Community College
Garden City, N.Y.