356 - Knowing the Truth: A Sociological Approach to New Testament Interpretation

Knowing the Truth: A Sociological Approach to New Testament Interpretation
By Howard Clark Kee
Minneapolis, Fortress, 1989. 120 pp. $8.95.

In what Neusner may be quite right in calling "the best" available work on the sociological study of the New Testament, Kee emphasizes in this latest work the role of language in shaping and re-producing social life. Now, language is a very slippery phenomenon, as Jameson once argued, but Kee would more likely have agreed with Berger's notion that language is a basic institution. Of course, Kee is quite right in noting that language-use is crucial for understanding Scripture, and that language-use itself depends on the social context. But the relation of language to social context is itself highly problematical. For all his careful study of sociolinguistics, for instance, Kee does not use the work of Goffman, who insisted on describing the very complex and shifty relation of language to any social context. Even in applying the insights of Mary Douglas to the study of Scripture, Kee does not note that her own analysis derived from the socio-linguistic studies of Basil Bernstein. It was Bernstein, however, who first made the distinction between condensed and elaborated speechcodes, a distinction that requires the researcher to examine the degrees of freedom between language and its social context.

Kee's questions range from matters of personal identity to the identity of groups and communities, from the more expressive aspects of social relationships to the more formal, from the degrees of freedom allotted individual members to the structure of authority, from relations between insiders and outsiders to the relationships between the past and the present. None of these questions is trivial, but what remains uncertain is what to do with the answers. His questions represent the heuristic use of sociological concepts as starting-points for social inquiry. They do not come with any rubrics for forming the answers into a single account, into alternative paradigms, or into competing theories.

Significantly, in his epilogue, Kee mixes terms like "social function" with other terms, like "social reason," as if the two were interchangeable. They are not, since the reasons for a social practice may be quite different from its social functions. On this distinction rests a long literature on the unintended consequences of social action. Kee also uses two other phrases in such short succession to each other that they seem virtually interchangeable: "what is perceived to be the truth" with "perceptions of social reality." Again, there is an important distinction between truth and reality that is being blurred here; on that distinction rest important bases for the explanation and criticism of social life. What is missing, of course, is a methodology that would outline what to do with the answers to his very good sociological questions.

Richard K. Fenn
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N.J.