Since the seminal writings of Max Weber, the sociology of religion has pictured the Hebraic prophecy as the very matrix of the occidental rationalism, while attributing to it the promise of a future in which Israel would prevail over all other nations. After the experience of the Babylonic exile, such promise has transformed the Jews in a "pariah-peoples," self-segregated, ritualistic, legalist, oriented by some dual ethics and, as a result, unable to confer a universalistic dynamics to the ethical monotheism peculiar to its own sacred Book. The Hebraic prophecy would have, in this perspective, begun the evolutive process that only the New Covenant, with its universal salvation doctrine via the sacrifice of The Redeemer, would have been able to carry out. It is argued that such reasoning, found in the basis of all the effort of Weber to explain the evolution of the occidental ethics, has developed within some theological framing. It can be seen more precisely in the markings of the "Christian theology of overcoming," which postulates that the New Covenant has superseded Judaism by making universal the access to the divine grace the latter had restricted to a pretense "chosen peoples."
Sociology of religion; Occidental rationalism; Hebraic prophecy; Christian theology