Introduction

The introductory chapter argues that medieval Christianity provided the framework for sociology’s genesis. This theistic foundation was first laid by the Scholastics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and later refined by the Christian Humanists of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The claim is made that Christianity first offered “the promise of sociology” as an empirical and moral/religious endeavor. Contemporary sociologists, by ignoring the role Christianity played in the origins of sociology, have relegated the discipline to offering an epistemologically limited view of the very human behavior it seeks to understand. Contemporary sociology, with few exceptions, by emphasizing a naturalistic/secular worldview that almost exclusively privileges a narrow empirical science, has produced an exceedingly narrow sociology. The contention is made that the incorporation of Christianity into contemporary sociological theory can provide the means to enable sociology to reclaim its initial promise as a moral endeavor while providing a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior than is now the case.