Word: berger
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...FROM HOPE. "A 'no' to death," says Berger, "is profoundly rooted in the very being of man." Even in the face of immediate death, he argues, men persist in believing in the future and find in that hope a source of courage for the most self-sacrificing acts. "Empirical reason indicates that this hope is an illusion," Berger admits, and he stands in respectful awe of the stoic who can accept this fact without flinching. Yet most men are not stoics and still continue to hope, so unabashed in their rejection of death that there must be some...
...FROM DAMNATION. Certain human deeds, says Berger, in the common experience of mankind seem "not only evil, but monstrously evil." The archetypal example is the Nazi mass execution of the Jews. Man is "constrained to condemn, and condemn absolutely," the villainy of an Eichmann, and that condemnation derives from a belief that when a person commits such crimes, "he separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community, and thus invokes a retribution that is more than human...
...FROM HUMOR. Man's sense of the comic, says Berger, is fundamentally a sense of discrepancy, and the most basic is the discrepancy between man and the universe. Man's laughter, Berger believes, "reflects the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world"-and his audacious conviction, when that world seems awry, that the imprisonment is not final. "Religion," concludes Berger, "vindicates laughter...
...Berger allows that any of these phenomena can be explained away in Marxian or Freudian terms, but he argues simply that a transcendent reality-in a word, God-is a much better, and sociologically more sensible, explanation. From these starting points of inductive faith, theologians can then examine anew the fabric of traditional belief...
...winnowing the wheat from the chaff without worrying about the chaff. All a priori assumptions must thus be avoided, even so basic an assumption as one that places Christ at the starting point of its theology before examining Christian tradition in the light of other intellectual disciplines. "Theology," insists Berger, "must begin and end with the question of truth...