Luhmann and Religion
In his last stage, Luhmann was devoted to the phenomenon of religion from his theory of social systems, in which religion is formulated as an autopoietic subsystem of modern society. Human beings, from the system theoretical perspective, live, think, and act in the network of communication. The autonomy of social or communicative systems requires a conceptual revolution by replacing action theory with communication theory; it is characteristic of the elementary operative level of the social system.[1]
Religion as a subsystem organizes itself in influencing the religious individual through communication (preaching, worship, and social statement, or church’s participation in social and cultural service). In fact, the religious does not die out in an iron cage of secularization, but has resurgence as a viable communication community structurally coupled to other systems. There are diverse forms of religious communication.[2]
If communications are the basic elements of “the social”, sociology of religion should study the particularities of religious discourse. For Luhmann, religion is a societal existence as communication, communicative faith community. Individuals or their collective consciousness or experience can never build up a religion—but participating only in communication.[3]
In Die Religion der Gesellschaft Luhmann acknowledges religion as the primary regime of meaning, or meaningful social system.[4] He refers to the religious code transcendence /immanence in the function of religion. Religion creates representative forms of transcendence, thus it reintroduces the appresented through the representation, making the appresented horizon of the meaning relevant to society.[5]
Autopoietic network appears to be closer to the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence and no self (no persistent subject). Its core doctrine of a radical relationality in the phenomena of the world, inside and outside (pratitya samutpada), making our grasping after the essence-ego into the source of continuous frustration and deep anxiety. This Buddhist position can be shared with autopoietic network thinking which rejects “a clinging to an outer ground in the form of the idea of a pregiven and independent world.”[6]
We may say than that communication is always religious, if it considers the immanent under the point of view of transcendence. Thereby the transcendence stands for the negative value, in which something happening can be seen as contingent.[7] There is the reference to God around whom religious discourse and communication center.
For Luhmann’s system theoretical interpretation, he considers the biblical theme of creation and cross in which these two themes are conceptualized as God’s gift out of divine love with no restriction. In the biblical story of creation God appears to be the observer and the human is created in the image of God. The human being relates to God-as-the person—not in an anthropomorphic or theomorphic manner. The characterization of God as person is plausible because it makes God the observer of things.[8]
There is an implicit endeavor for Luhmann to renew the dialogue between sociology and Christian theology for the public sphere. This refers to his sociological enlightenment in clarifying the function of religion as a meaningful cultural system in public spheres. God assigns a religious form of freedom.[9]
A communication is always religious, insofar as it observes immanence from the point of view of transcendence. Only as viewed from transcendence, events in this world would acquire a religious meaning. It is closer to methodological theism in sociological distinction between transcendence and immanence for a paradoxical unity.
Transcendence and Religious Meaning
How does Luhmann adopt the position of transcendence in regard to the world for acquiring religious meaning? Only through observation of God’s attributes? In so doing, he is not in a position to avoid a phenomenological approach to God’s transcendence (totaliter aliter) in its self-revelation. If human experience of God is explicated by human freedom as a gift of God, should it go beyond the autopoietic framework?
In public theological reasoning, God as the source of communication transcends the wall or the system of the church through epistemological rupture through extraordinary ways of lights and worlds; divine action of communication breaks through systems of society and culture in the sense of creatio continua. An aspect of divine communication cuts across functional understanding of religion in the distinction immanence/ transcendence, because divine action of communication comes through the face of those fragile and broken–having ethical form from innocent victim and for them.
A religious code of transcendence and immanence is compared to the distinction between the sacred and the profane, or it refers to a distinction between Nirvana and samsara; it affirms that the transcendental signified is over against the immanent signifier. Luhmann does not want to remove a space of transcendence in comparative study of religion or in evolutionary perspective innovation.
In fact, the concept of the transcendence remains crucial in the sociological comparative study of axial religions, in which the transcendence appears to be a critical attitude toward a prevailing social order. According to Robert Bellah, a religious concept of transcendence is structurally coupled to the social environment, heralding a new vision of society, as seen in Jewish prophetic voice or Confucian critique, or Buddhist emancipation from Hindu dominant caste system. Emergence of narrative forms of religious communication is essential to an understanding of axial age, because “it is the source of our ethics, our politics, and our religion.”[10]
Religious discourse of transcendence is not so much different from creativity of prophetic narrative in the synthesis between analepsis and prolepsis in elevating a flashback to the past and fulfilling it in light of a new heaven and earth, especially in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In so doing, a proleptic creativity emerges in prophetic representation of the future. A sense or meaning comes from the unity between potential and the actual, from the prolepsis of life-world.
However, Luhmann’s position still remains the weak point in its incapability of articulating the sociological aspect of correlation within the universal history-of-religions. Religious communication is open to other religious communication in terms of dialogue, integration, and mutual enrichment in the interreligious context, especial in the differentiated global context. It is an indispensable task for dialogue and collaboration among religious communities to enhance peace, justice and symbiotic civilization of recognition and respect.
[1] Luhmann, “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems”, in N. Luhmann, Essays on Self-Reference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 6. [pp. 1–20]
[2] Luhmann, “Religion als Kommunikation”, in H. Tyrell, V. Krech and H. Knoblauch (eds), Religion als Kommunikation (Würzburg: Ergon, 1998), pp. 135–146.
[3] Ibid., 137.
[4] Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 16.
[5] Ibid., 24.
[6] Capra, The Web of Life, 295.
[7] Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft, 77.
[8] Inid., 153, 157.
[9] Luhmann, “Die Weisung Gottes als Form der Freiheit”, in N. Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 5. Konstruktivistische Perspektiven (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990), pp. 77–94.
[10] Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 280.