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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Well informed intellectual religious thought,
By
This review is from: Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Paperback)
The first edition of The Heretical Imperative by Peter L. Berger appeared in 1979 and I do not have a more recent version. Chapter 1, Modernity as the Universalization of Heresy, attempts to define the modern situation. Fate used to determine lives. Now so many people respond to questionnaires that every nervous Prometheus is not only sure to be outvoted, but any question could become the Copernican revolution about which the future is made to revolve for as long as no one dares to agree about anything else. Copernicus is the individual each of us is due to be compared with. "As an analogy, even if one could demonstrate that Copernicus was an absolute fool with regard to the social realities of his day, this demonstration would not strengthen the theory that the earth is flat and that the sun moves around it." (p. 144).
People are subject to dynamic cycles, and students of humor are likely to think that the major difference between people is that they know different jokes. This book was written in years in which war and religion were considered different kinds of experience, and war, in particular, was even subject to multiple interpretations from a religious point of view. "Thus the alleged moral teachings of Christianity may be abstinence from extramarital sex or universal tolerance for all expressions of sexuality, total pacifism or self-sacrifice in just wars, racial . . . and so on almost ad infinitum." (p. 115). Surely there are polls to establish how well the people who claim religious views of one kind or another also adhere to a variety of ethical positions. The present is a time when participants in war might even be quizzed on how well the Crusades are going right down to the day, hour, and minute in which journalists who have been hit turn to the camera and proclaim, "I'm dying." It turns out this book approaches that experience. "Life has never been the same for me since the death of my mother." (p. 40). Societies have similar experiences, and it is not uncommon for intellectuals to mix up one experience with something quite different. For example, Germany was winning territory in Russia and France in World War I, while enduring some starvation, before the American troops attacked the German lines at a few places in France. Asking for an armistice then was hardly like being conquered by the Allied armies in 1945, but this book reports: "This safe world collapsed once and for all in that war, which may well be described as the collective suicide of European civilization. What is more, the fact of this collapse did not take long to sink in. It was visible right away, starkly and frighteningly, as were its moral and intellectual consequences. Not surprisingly, this was especially so in central Europe, dominated by that German culture that was now linked to a nation that had been catastrophically defeated." (p. 71). Many other defeats in the twentieth century were as mild: the United States in Cuba in 1961, and soon thereafter in Laos, Nam, and Cambodia; The Soviet Union in Afghanistan; Argentina in the Falkland Islands. Letting down defenses before September 11, 2001, was part of a strategy of pretending that everyone was equally vulnerable to anything catastrophic. This book was just taking a bleak view of Europe after World War I, noting the decline of bourgeois triumphalism to provide a need for religious revival. "In any case, there is no dispute that its central, indeed overpowering figure was the Swiss theologian Karl Barth." (p. 71). In contrast to the "Manifesto of the Intellectuals" (p. 72) which German theologians signed in 1914 "endorsing the German war effort" (p. 72), Barth supported a "Theological Declaration of Barmen" in 1934, which repudiated political moves in that direction and "remained decisive in showing the capacity of Barthian theology to stand up to the pretensions of the modern age." (p. 72). This book is not afraid to mention Freud, humor, jokes, Nietzsche, sex, and many of them on the same page, as the index indicates: Humor (the comic), and reality, 39ff Jokes, and reality, 39 Sex and sexuality, . . . orgasm and reality, 39 Such experiences are used to identify who an individual is as much as any other, and religion for an individual can be as great a reason to carry on in an intellectual fashion, though modern communication methods may differ in determining which topic is likely to bring more fame in the popularity contest that a society based mainly on entertainment values is rapidly becoming. While the number of people capable of engaging in intellectual activity on the level of this book might not be any less than when the book was written, for those who have aged, the opportunities to engage in rethinking the religiously elevating experiences of Schleiermacher are likely to be few and far between. But for this book, "Everything that followed Schleiermacher was either a development or a refutation of this position, which amounted to a Copernican revolution in theological thinking. . . . The turning inward of religious reflection must be seen in the context of the social and ipso facto psychological weakening of outward authority. Put differently, the quest for certainty on the basis of subjective insights is the result of the frustration of this quest by what is socially available as objective reality-definition." (p. 69). It has been a long time since the instance recounted in this book in which people who were "within a tradition to which they were personally committed turned upon it the full arsenal of critical scholarship and let the theological chips fly where they might." (p. 70). That is what makes us so modern, not to mention heretical.
2 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heretical Imperative,
By
This review is from: Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Paperback)
I have not yet begun to read the book but it was the fastest delivery I have ever seen.
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