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35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Signals of Transcendence, March 20, 2003
This review is from: A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Paperback)
Perhaps one of the reasons that this little book is only a minor classic is its title: "A Rumor of Angels." The book is not about angels or the disembodiment of humans. Neither is it a study of rumor networks or gossip. Nor should the book be taken whimsically or trivially as if it had something to do with fairy tales, ghost stories, or apparitions. Concerned that his earlier book - The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion - "could be read as a treatise on atheism," in 1969 Berger wrote a Rumor of Angels as a sequel and antidote. Berger explains how worldviews are built up and maintained by conversation and what he calls "plausibility structures." Without such social support structures one's knowledge of the world can be seen as deviant or even pathological. Berger tells us that there is an allegation in modern secular society that conversation about religion has shifted from a dialogue to a monologue. The process of secularization is alleged to have reduced the transcendent dimension of life to the status of an unconfirmed "rumor." Berger traces these rumors to their source and calls our attention to five "signals of transcendence" embedded into the fabric of society that indicate a transcendent dimension: order, hope, play, humor and damnation. These five signals aren't like the mystical symbol systems of the Christian Trinity (God, son, spirit), or of Marxism (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), or psychoanalysis (id, ego, superego), or of democracy (executive, judicial, legislative). Without a social order life becomes meaningless, homeless, and loveless, even malevolent. The propensity to hope in the face of suffering and death is another example of the transcendent. Play is a signal of transcendence from the grimness of life's realities and the "iron cage" of large impersonal bureaucratic organizations. Humor laughs at the discrepancy between what "is" and "ought" to be, and the comic discrepancy between tiny men living in a massive cosmos. A sense that some acts are damnable even though we can't escape the relativities of the world implies a transcendent moral order. These five signals are not logical or philosophical proofs for God or angels or religious belief, but Berger tells us they are signposts of transcendence that can only be seen and accepted on the basis of faith. As Berger puts it in one of his later writings, "God plays a game of hide and seek with mankind and leaves more than a few hints where he may be hiding" (A Far Glory, 1992). I have found these five arguments for the persistence of the transcendent to be more intriguing and credible than any theological or philosophical arguments for God. The nonbeliever will find the numerous references in the Christian bible to angels and demons as a considerable stumbling block to religious faith. But Berger points out a sociological truism: belief and non-belief is socially located. Intellectuals often regard beliefs in such things as miracles or divine messengers as figurative and literary devices and look down on people who believe them; while the masses often believe in them or at least talk about such things. Honest belief in a supernatural dimension isn't a matter of intelligence or social class. What accounts for the difference is one's worldview.
By definition a rumor is considered to be a message that lost its original meaning; that ended up distorted as it was passed along the rumor grapevine. Berger, the sociologist par excellence, removes the distortions and traces the rumors to their source and believes they reveal the true human condition. Berger often writes very "heady" topics in a wry, witty, and almost comic manner. He is such a believer in the comic dimension as a signal of transcendence that he later wrote a whole book on the subject of humor ("Redeeming Laughter, 1997). So it is fitting to end this book review with one of Berger's inimitable jokes that may best describe his book A Rumor of Angels: "when a joke-teller tells you that he is no longer joking - don't believe him." Also recommended:
Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, 1967.
Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience, 1997.
Peter S. Williams, The Case for Angels, 2002.
Peter L. Berger, A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credibility, 1992.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An intellectual, moderate view of religion, January 8, 2004
This review is from: A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Paperback)
A sociological look at religion in the 20th century, the process of secularization and its affects on religion, as well as it's philosophical and theological implications of it. The title of the second chapter sums up this book: "Relativizing the Relativizers." In other words, if Marx and Freuerbach turned Hegel on his head, here's an effort to do the same in turn to them. In other words, it deals with the issue of whether religion is a human projection. "Yes," says Berger, "But that doesn't necessarily invalidate it," he continues. This is not some "God-is-dead" theological exercise, nor is it liberal, secular theology a la Harvey Cox's "The Secular City." It does provide sociology's point of view on religion from a sociologist who is himself a believer. It takes seriously the threat posed to traditional dogma that sociology so forcefully poses, concedes its weaknesses, and yet doesn't conceded the fallacy and futility of religious belief. All this leads up to a pluralistic view of religion: fundamentalists and literalists beware. Surprisingly, the best part of the book is when Berger switches hats and becomes a bit of a philosopher of religion. While he doesn't call them "proofs," he does provide in the second half of the book "signals" that the divine exists. This is one of my favorite books, and it has withstood the test of multiple reads through the years.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intimations of transcendence, November 25, 2006
This review is from: A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Paperback)
Peter Berger's book is an undisputed classic for several reasons: in it Berger gives an acute sociological diagnosis of the contemporary demise of the supernatural, which he defines as the "belief that there is an other reality, and one of ultimate significance for man, which transcends the reality within which our everyday experience unfolds" (p.2), he sketches a brief sociology of religious knowledge, accounting for the waxing and waning of religious thought in terms of 'plausibility structures' and the tension associated with being in a 'cognitive minority' and finally suggests an 'anthropological starting point' for theological method, in which an empirical study may reveal 'rumors of transcendence' within human experience, or "phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our 'natural' reality but that appear to point beyond that reality" (p.66).
Peter Berger makes some particularly insightful comments on the so-called threat of sociological relativization which threatens the integrity of religious belief. The problem, he says, is that too often the relativizers do not apply their own tools of analysis to themselves. The upshot is that "When everything has been subsumed under the relativiziing categories in question...the question of truth reasserts itself in almost pristine simplicity. Once we know that all human affirmations are subject to scientifically graspable socio-historical processes, which affirmations are true and which are false?" (p.50) Sociology may present a challenge to traditional religious understanding, but this has little to do with whether that understanding is accurate. Sociology is descriptive but not prescriptive: "We may agree, say, that contemporary consciousness is incapable of conceiving of either angels or demons. We are still left with the question of whether, possibly, both angels and demons go on existing despite this incapacity of our contemporaries to conceive of them" (p.52).
Berger presents five arguments for quintessentially human experiences which seem to point to the supernatural: the pervasive sense of ordering, play, moral damnation, humor and hope. All of these may be said to reveal a fundamental disanalogy between man's being or humanitas and the universe as a whole, and they suggest that there is more to existence than our everyday experience. Berger is careful to point out that one cannot empirically prove that these experiences do in fact point to this higher reality, but they do offer legitimate support from the standpoint of 'inductive faith'.
The book only purports to sketch an outline of theological method, based on these fundamental human experiences. It is clear that by and large the theological community has not taken up Berger's challenge to do the detailed scholarly work that would validate such a method. He himself has extended it in his book on humor, "The Redemption of Laughter", but it is clear that there is a long way still to go.
Even though there is so much that is so right in Berger's little book, there is one major sticking point where I get off his train: his insistence that orthodoxy must be challenged, and that a particular religious tradition can at least serve as "a catalogue of heresies for possible home-use". It seems that both the anthropological and revelational 'poles' of the divine-human encounter are necessary: one completes the other. Berger criticizes the neo-orthodox approach of stressing the primacy of revelation at the expense of human experience, but methinks he protests too much. Revelation is necessary in order to give complete meaning and sense to the otherwise extraordinarily vague 'intimations of transcedence' which Berger identifies, important though they are to theological method.
Overall, though, this book is indispensable for theology. Peter Berger is a lucid, eloquent, piercing writers whose words are inspiring, illuminating and provocative. One can only hope that the rumors of the supernatural which he indentifies will stay alive in an increasingly secular, materialistic Western culture.
P.S. For a devotional book which has remarkable similarities to Berger's theological method, see Philip Yancey's "Rumors of Another World".
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