A Systems Theory of Religion by Luhmann Niklas Hermann Adrian Kieserling André Brenner David

Author:Luhmann, Niklas, Hermann, Adrian, Kieserling, André, Brenner, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

6

Religious Organizations

I

In all function systems of modern society, organized social systems play an important, indispensable role. It would be surprising if this were different in the case of religion. Yet it is difficult to imagine that organized decision processes operate in the form of religious actions, that decisions constraining an organization are made in the form of a common prayer or are merely accompanied by a request for divine inspiration. Archives are not sacred objects even in church administrations, and majority decisions have to be made and implemented even when individual participants believe those decisions deviate from God’s declared will.1

The Old European tradition, the implications of which reach far into modernity, did not distinguish clearly between society and organization. The organizational conception of the present did not even emerge as something separate from the general semantics of order and organism until the nineteenth century.2 Society itself was understood (in very different conceptual variants) as a natural order of human living together, the result of a social contract motivated by nature. That tradition can be summed up in a term such as “corporation.” In the process, it also becomes clear that this terminology distinguishes what it signifies from families or family households. People are born naturally into these, and they define everyone’s place in the differentiated order of society.

Organization mediates between the production of religious meaning, resulting in myths or dogmas, and the daily practice of specifically religious behavior. It thereby takes the place (even when organizing sects) that sects had occupied in the ancient world—whether ancestors in families were being worshipped or rituals were being institutionalized socially. The direct reference of sects to concepts of faith is mediated today by organization, and up to that point there were neither problems of belonging nor decisions for or against it.

Since the Middle Ages, corporative society as understood legally by the term universitas has developed into a diversity that was confusing at first. Besides the civil society (societas civilis) determined by political rule, there was also a church based on its own law. There were also cities, monasteries, orders, universities, guilds, and similar associations, even corporative entities [Standschaften]. The motivations for differentiation were in part those of internal order and special discipline, in part those of political representation in the town and the surrounding territory. As “church,” but also as holy orders and monasteries, the religion system takes part in this special corporative regulation. Indeed, in defending itself against the theocratic tendencies of imperial rule, the Church elaborates for itself the (much copied) theory of universitas.3 It does so by judicializing its system-internal problems to a great extent, and by having its own jurisdiction, its own textual systematics, and (most of all) a clearly elaborated hierarchical structure guaranteeing its ability to decide on faith and Church policy. Yet at the same time, the religious significance of the Church as a community of faith is preserved, providing indispensable sacred support to what can almost be described as organization.

But there were no regulations here for joining or withdrawing that could function as a motivational basis for selective membership.

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