The Liberal Imperative

The Heretical Imperative By Peter L. Berger Doubleday, 220 pp., $9.95 For most of the 1970s the Rutgers sociologist Peter Berger has been identified with various defenses of traditional religion, or, perhaps more accurately, with attempts to demythologize the accepted dogmas of modernity. He has pointed out, for example, that traditional religious belief has been rendered “incredible” not so much by being disproved as by finding itself in a situation where it lacks strong social supports. Hence unbelief itself becomes a kind of unexamined assumption. Last year Berger criticized certain influential theologians (Langdon Gilkey and David Tracy) for courting the people Berger called the “religiously tone deaf.” However, Berger has also stated that “the heresy which would describe my beliefs has not even been invented yet.” That was fair warning, and in his newest work he reaffirms his essential commitment to religious liberalism as the only valid approach to belief in the modern world.

Berger divides religion into three categories—the deductive, the inductive, and the reductive, according to the source of authority each accepts. The deductive is neo-orthodoxy, principally represented by Karl Barth, which accepts the truth of religious tradition and the authority of revelation. The inductive is liberalism, represented by its founder, Schleiermacher, which takes human experience as the unavoidable starting point of all belief. The reductive, which Berger gives short shrift, is a corruption of the inductive whereby religious experience is reduced to something else—politics, psychology, art, etc.

JH

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James Hitchcock

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The Heretical Imperative By Peter L. Berger Doubleday, 220 pp., $9.95 For most of the 1970s the Rutgers sociologist Peter Berger has been identified with various defenses of traditional religion, or, perhaps more accurately, with attempts to demythologize the accepted dogmas of modernity. He has pointed out, for example, that traditional religious belief has been rendered “incredible” not so much by being disproved as by finding itself in a situation where it lacks strong social supports. Hence unbelief itself becomes a kind of unexamined assumption. Last year Berger criticized certain influential theologians (Langdon Gilkey and David Tracy) for courting the people Berger called the “religiously tone deaf.” However, Berger has also stated that “the heresy which would describe my beliefs has not even been invented yet.” That was fair warning, and in his newest work he reaffirms his essential commitment to religious liberalism as the only valid approach to belief in the modern world.

Berger divides religion into three categories—the deductive, the inductive, and the reductive, according to the source of authority each accepts. The deductive is neo-orthodoxy, principally represented by Karl Barth, which accepts the truth of religious tradition and the authority of revelation. The inductive is liberalism, represented by its founder, Schleiermacher, which takes human experience as the unavoidable starting point of all belief. The reductive, which Berger gives short shrift, is a corruption of the inductive whereby religious experience is reduced to something else—politics, psychology, art, etc.