ABSTRACT
Ernst Troeltsch introduces his influential study, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, by insisting that Christianity cannot be reduced to just one other ‘sociological factor’ or ‘force of association’.1 The unity and history of Christianity is, he insists, an essentially religious phenomenon. The foundation of Christianity cannot be understood, therefore, as ‘in any sense due to the impulse of a social movement’.2 In a strikingly bold statement he goes on to claim that:
Troeltsch, from the outset of his work, sweeps aside all reductive sociological accounts of Christianity. This is, for him, a methodological principle. To capture the distinctive character of Christianity it would be foolish to describe it as a disguised version of something other than itself.
