Word: faiths
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Manhattan's New School for Social Research, Berger has already used the tools of his discipline to challenge the bureaucratic pretensions of institutional religion in two books, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies and The Precarious Vision. He readily admits that sociology has helped to undermine the traditional faiths of the past, but he also argues that it can just as easily undermine the certainty of today's aggressive disbelief. Disbelief, he insists, is largely the product of man's present environment, and the skepticism of the professional atheist is just as subject to questioning as the peasant...
...book called A Rumor of Angels (Doubleday; $4.50), Peter L. Berger, perhaps the leading U.S. sociologist of religion, suggests that the very scientific methods that have helped to challenge traditional belief in the world of the spirit can be the starting point for a new and better faith...
Looking to Man. Thus freed, men can look to their own experience for the "signals of transcendence" that Berger believes form the best foundation for an "inductive faith" in the supernatural. Without touching on individual experiences of the esoteric - such phenomena as mysticism and private revelation - Berger finds these signals (the "angels" of his title) in experiences that are "generally accessible to all men." In a modern parallel to Thomas Aquinas' classic proofs for God's existence, Berger proposes five common experiences that seem to argue for the transcendent. The arguments...
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...
Testing the Traditions. Such a confrontation with traditional belief would require heroic generosity from theologians, he admits. Not only must they be ecumenical, willing to examine and learn from other traditions, but they should also be thoroughly objective with regard to their own faith, 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...