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".
