Berger and Luckmann's Model of Legitimation and the Institutional Setting of the Corinthian Community
The Social Setting of the Ministry cance of the social processes which led to Clement's efforts to legitimate certain institutions and that this has led to an inaccurate understanding of institutionalization in this community. Instead, we have examined sect development in the Corinthian church by the use of a more precise model of institutionalization.
We have attempted to show that the seeds of later institutional development in the Corinthian church may be found in what we have interpreted as evidence of house-church leadership in the Pauline epistles. The role of house-church management became a primary focus of institutional development both because of its usefulness in the functioning and growth of the group and its connection with the apostle Paul. The desire to preserve the benefits of the order established or recognized by the apostle probably resulted in a continuation ofthat arrangement after his death and encouraged the increasing emergence of the apostle's staff as important leaders within the local community. In the following section we will show more precisely how Clement attempted to legitimate institutionalized leadership in the Corinthian community.
Legitimation In our discussion of evidence of institutionalization in the Corinthian community we argued that Clement was engaged primarily in an effort to legitimate leadership structures in the Corinthian church. In this section we shall discuss evidence of the process of legitimation in ί Clement more fully. By focusing on themes of legitimation it can be shown that 1 Clement is a relatively unified document, pace Wrede and Knopf, and that its writer was engaged in an explication of the group's symbolic universe in order to justify and validate the institutional order to his readers and to demonstrate its normative character.
Berger and Luckmann's Model of Legitimation and the Institutional Setting of the Corinthian Community As in the case of institutionalization, Berger and Luckmann provide a useful model of legitimation which brings into focus social processes at work in Clement's letter. It was noted in the preceding section that institutions take on a significantly new character when handed on to a third party or second generation.
This is an important observation because the conflict in 1 Clement describes a situation in which conflict has arisen in the Corinthian church in the second or third generation. According to the description of the conflict presented in 44:2-3, after the death of the first leaders appointed by the apostles, conflict arose around those leaders' successors (cf. v. 5). If Clement was writing c. A.D.
96 it is likely that several of the original leaders of the community were either dead or very old and that new leaders had already begun to take their place.205
As we have already noted, Berger and Luckmann argue that because recipients of an institutional order which has been handed down are not involved in its inception, that order needs to be explained and justified to them. The reality of the social world confronts the recipient as an historical one and comes to the new generation not as a memory but as a tradition.206 Because of this the institutions formed by the initial actors lose their self-evident character and can no
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longer be maintained by reference to memory.207 In the context of the Corinthian situation, the leaders who succeeded the actors involved in the development of institutional patterns while Paul was still alive did not have the benefit of memory of a relationship with the apostle which served to legitimate their predecessors' roles of leadership, nor did the later generation of the community enjoy recollection of days past when Paul worked hand in hand with local leaders. What the new generation of leaders and followers alike did possess, however, was a series of institutional arrangements passed on to them, In Berger and Luckmann's terms, this was an objectivated order, i.e., an external socially produced reality which confronted members as normative.
These sociologists also note that as time passes and institutions become more permanent, conflicts may arise which call the transmitted order into question.
Not all recipients of the institutional order receive its objectivated meaning in the same way, nor are all socialized into it equally. This fact can result in conflict within the institutional order. Berger and Luckmann note that in the Christian tradition it was heresy which provided an impetus for theoretical development of the symbolic universe.208
We have argued that depictions of ί Clement as an answer to an heretical challenge are not convincing. We may still see in Clement's letter, however, a response to a form of deviant behaviour. In fact much of his letter is devoted to showing that the leaders of the dissenting groups have departed from the group's beliefs. By identifying these beliefs and locating the institutional order inthe context they provide, Clement made explicit the social meanings contained within the institutional order, and by showing how the group's beliefs relate to the institutions passed on to the community he strengthened the normative character of the group's structures of leadership. This may be described as a theoretical development of the group's symbolic universe.
If, then, the so-called schismatics were not heretics, nevertheless the discord in the Corinthian community functioned in a way analogous to heretical challenges in other situations in the history of the church: to strengthen already existing institutions and to provide an impetus for a theoretical conceptualization of the group's symbolic universe. Any social meaning passed on to individuals who do not have access to a memory which makes that phenomenon meaningful requires some explanation if its normative force is to be preserved.
Further, the act of transmission does not guarantee that the meaning will be communicated perfectly or even convincingly. This model of legitimation provides us with a useful heuristic framework in which to place the patterns of institutionalized authority discovered in the last section, and Clement's role in the cumulative institutionalization of the Corinthian church. We may notice from the general nature of the Corinthian dispute that the meanings which were passed on by members associated with Paul evidently were not enough to prevent a denial of the authority of certain presbyters appointed as leaders of the community (cf. 44:3). As a writer attempting to legitimate the authority of those whose positions had been undermined, Clement's task included the necessity of making the institutional order subjectively plausible to members of the Corinthian community.
The Social Setting of the Ministry The Four Levels of Legitimation Institutions are made plausible to those to whom they are passed on in several ways. Berger and Luckmann distinguish four levels of legitimation.209 "Incipient legitimation" belongs to the first level — the simple transmission of language to describe institutions. By the act of transmitting kinship language, for example, kinship structures are legitimated. On the next level are contained rudimentary theoretical propositions, such as apophthegms, proverbs, legends and folk tales, which relate sets of objective meanings by means of explanatory schemes. On the third level an institutional segment is legitimated by means of explicit theories which integrate varying sectors of institutionalized conduct through relatively comprehensive frames of reference. It is on this level that we may place Clement's theory of the apostolic establishment of leadership structures (chapters 42; 44) and his paralleling of proper worship arrangements with the Levitical organization of sacrifices (40:5-41:2).
The final and most encompassing and integrating level of legitimation is that of symbolic universes. "These are bodies of theoretical tradition that integrate different provinces of meaning and encompass the institutional order in a symbolic totality. . . ."21° Here legitimation takes place through symbolic totalities which integrate all segments of the institutional order in an all-encompassing schema. It is called a universe because all human activity and experience is conceived of as taking placc within it. We shall focus on this level of legitimation as we discuss the efforts of Clement to promote particular institutional structures in Corinth.
1 Clement as a Unified Document It may strike the reader as odd that so far we have concentrated so heavily on only a handful of passages in the preceding discussion. Indeed, ί Clement is composed of some sixty-five chapters, and to focus our attention on only isolated portions of the text would be methodologically unsound. Our purpose so far has been to attempt to reconstruct the historical and institutional setting of the Corinthian dispute and this has necessitated that we place the weight of our discussion on passages where Clement is less indirect in his description of the Corinthian dispute, namely select verses in chapters 40-44 and a few passages outside this section. But this is not where the discussion can end without fundamental distortion of Clement's aims and method. Failure to understand how the rest of the letter is integrated with these central chapters has led scholars to misrepresent Clement's purposes throughout the document. Thus Bauer, for example, agrees with Knopf that most of 1 Clement has "little or nothing to do with its clearly defined purpose." "Indeed," he adds, "it is easy to get the impression that by far the greater part of the letter serves only to increase its size, in order thereby to enhance its importance and forcefulness,"211 Bauer is following Knopf here and this viewpoint has been repeatedly asserted in past scholarship of ί Clement.212
The view that the majority of I Clement is a form of "epistolary stuffing" arises perhaps from a misunderstanding of the role and nature of moral teaching in the letter, for a great portion of Clement's epistle is concerned with appropri-
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ate moral behaviour. Harnack, commenting upon the amount of moral teaching in ί Clement, writes Der stärkste Eindruck, den man aus dem Brief erhält, ist der, dass die neue
Religion in der erster Linie keine kultische, auch keine enthusiastische, noch weniger eine gnostische oder spekulative-mysteriöse, sondern eine sittliche
Bewegung gewesen ist, eine sittliche Bewegung auf dem Grunde des mit höchstem Ernst und höchster Lebendigkeit empfundenen Monotheismus, oder besser: auf dem Grunde der Wirklichkeit Gottes.213
And later in the same work he concludes that I Clement represents "eine geschlossene und feste sittliche Bewegung in dem sicheren Bewusstsein, den lebendigen Gott zu kennen und als die Erlösten in Christus zu leben."214 But how the morality of this "firm moral movement," on which Clement focuses his attention, relates to the issues he addresses is not satisfactorily answered by Harnack. In the preceding discussion we argued that passages formulated with a view to a more general case have been misinterpreted by scholars as relatively precise descriptions of the Corinthian disputants. In our view such misinterpretations have arisen because scholars have not correctly connected Clement's moral teaching with the broader religious ideas of the letter, i.e., the symbolic universe which Clement shared with his audience. Jaubert gives a valuable warning to those setting out to interpret 1 Clement when she writes, "La diversité des themes est frappante et pourrait déconcerter, surtout lorsque l'on quitte l'optique d'ensemble pour s'attacher aux morceaux particuliers pris en euxmemes."215 Clement's writing becomes especially confusing if his overall purpose is not accurately assessed.
In order to assess more accurately the role of Clement's moral exhortations it is necessary to understand how moral teaching, especially when it is religious, is connected with more encompassing phenomena. Berger and Luckmann argue,
"Legitimation not only tells the individual why he should perform one action and not another; it also tells him why things are what they are."216
On the all-encompassing level of the symbolic universe, roles and certain forms of behaviour are not only presented as normative; the reason why they are normative is also explained. If we apply this observation to 1 Clement, we may state that Clement not only tells the Corinthians that they should submit to the normative institutional order, but more importantly, why they should.
Berger and Luckmann's observation is similar to Geertz's anthropological observation, noted in our discussion of the Shepherd, that moral precepts, i.e., an ethos, are not fully understood until they are seen in the context of the transcendent beliefs which encompass them, that is, a world-view. Harnack's observation above, therefore, that 1 Clement represents a moral movement which exists in the conviction that one knows the living God and lives as a redeemed member in Christ, tells only half the story of the role Clement ascribes to this knowledge in the legitimation of the institutional order. It is necessary to inquire further how the institutional order relates to the morals and beliefs which are presented in the letter. In other words, we want to know, again using
Geertz's terms, how ethos and world-view are related in 1 Clement and how the institutional order fits into them.