A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity.

A FAR GLORY

The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity 

Peter L. Berger 

Free Press, $22.95, 218 pp.

Take heed, theologians, social scientists, fellow travelers: Berger is back. The prose, sagacity, and insight of this new work are glorious to behold. Those who have luxuriated in Bergerian reflections over the years will not be disappointed.

It has been a while. Directing the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University has absorbed much of Berger's attention during the past decade. His Capitalist Revolution (1986)--a fulfilled prophecy, it appears--is his most recent previous book (not counting several edited collections). And his last booklength foray into theology--a recurring affliction, he opines in the preface--was The Heretical Imperative, published in 1979. Reading A Far Glory is thus like paying a visit to an old friend who has been away on a journey.

This is a book for seekers and nomads, of whom there are still more than a few on college campuses, in the seminaries, and in churches and synagogues. Its essential question is not so much why we continue to seek, but whether it is possible to do so seriously. The intense secularity of modern society scarcely destroys our interest in the sacred (everything from Tarot cards to televangelism tells us that). But it does foster superficiality--or at least the proverbial fear of inauthenticity. We wonder if our convictions are real, And we worry about the fact that we wonder. We want desperately to feel that our relationship to the sacred is weighty enough to hold us in place.

Reading Berger has always been a way to add gravity to the theological enterprise. With ample sprinklings of Latin and German, more than occasional references to Kierkegaard, and no hesitation in coining sociological abstractions, Bergenan prose is no feast for the fast-food addict. But there is also plenty of good humor (in both senses of the word). And if some readers come away mildly depressed with Berger's diagnosis of modern society, most will surely feel hopeful that life has meaning and that this meaning is enriched by the possibility of an embracing transcendence.

The core of the book is an extended reflection (based on Berger's William Belden Noble Lectures at Harvard University in 1991/92) on the meaning of the lapidary affirmation that comes at the start of the Nicene Creed, "I believe in one God." Taking issue with recent liturgical reforms in which "we believe" is asserted (a phrase that "belongs to the language of consumer behavior, not to the language of martyrdom"), Berger argues that only the "solitary believer' can truly assert her convictions in a meaningful way. The reason is that modernity has robbed us of our communities of birth, forcing us out of the cave, so to speak, into a dizzying world of choice. To assert one's belief, therefore, is to abandon fate, affirm individual freedom, and acknowledge that the social world ultimately fades to insignificance when the meaning of life is confronted.

Belief is still a fundamental requirement of living in the modern world, despite the vast growth in scientific and technological knowledge, Berger argues, because little of this knowledge actually replaces 'belief. Indeed, more important than the growth of knowledge has been the "pluralization of the modern social environment," a development that has undermined all taken-for-granted certitudes. The consequence for religion has often been "secularization" (as Berger has emphasized in previous works), for the truth of religious claims can no longer be grounded in taken-for-granted assumptions either. Yet there is a bright side for religion as well: faith is deepened, believers are able to shuck off tradition, making a fresh start, becoming (as Kierkegaard said)"contemporaneous" with Jesus.

The "one God" in whom the believer affirms belief, Berger says, is the mysterious other who plays hide-and-seek with humanity but who also leaves ample clues "as to where he is hiding." These are the "signals of transcendence" that Berger has discussed elsewhere. To believe in the one God is thus to affirm that the universe is open rather than closed, or perhaps better, more than the reality we can claim to know. But to suggest this of course raises the awkward fact that religious conviction also involves assumptions about the capacity to know something of this God. Here again the traces or signals of God's presence provide a convenient answer to the question of how this knowledge is possible. The world is for Berger a "sacramental universe" in which visible signs point to the reality of the invisible. And it is more consistent, in his view, to take an inclusivist orientation toward these signs than to insist on the exclusive interpretation of any single religious tradition.

So where does that leave community? Does the solitary believer have any need to "go to church" at all? Berger says yes (although I doubt his argument will truly comfort the custodians of these institutions). We should go to church, he argues, because most of us never experience signals of transcendence in a very profound way. Instead of the blinding light on the Damascus road, we experience fleeting moments of wonder, a warm smile, a beautiful sunset. We are left with a vague sense of awe. We need an amplifier to make the signal come in stronger. So we turn to religious communities for help. They supply us with better language than we could come up with ourselves. Of course reading self-help books, attending AA meetings, or joining the Sierra Club might do the same.

But Berger also rightly recognizes that most people make their choices from the menu closest at hand. Churches survive because they are well institutionalized (we know they talk about God; we may be less sure what the Sierra Club does). And the biggest choice is no longer among denominations, but between churches in the evangelical tradition, broadly speaking, and ones in the liberal tradition. Neither, Berger admits, is likely to be very palatable to the thoughtful individual. Evangelicalism makes one feel good because of numeric growth, simple answers, and a triumphalist orientation toward the world, but offers up "a long list of hard-to-swallow propositions." Liberalism is a wasteland of debility in which "everything and anything" is discussed to the point of triviality.

Readers may of course disagree with this assessment, regarding it as overly pessimistic, if not patronizing. Berger has in fact come in for a good deal of criticism recently from fellow sociologists who argue that his orientation is "European," "old school," and out of touch with the realities of religion in America. After all, isn't the quest for spirituality as strong as ever? Don't most Americans still claim an affiliation with some religious community? Don't many attend religious services faithfully? Aren't new communities of pentecostalists, Muslims, gays, women's groups, men's groups, prayer fellowships, and Bible studies springing up everywhere? And isn't there evidence of new vitality even in mainline Protestant and Catholic churches?

Yet the Bergerian vision remains enormously valuable. Its critical perspective on American religion is less European than it is a deliberate distancing from the taken for granted. Its emphasis on modernity is not meant to be a commentary on the past decade, but on the past millennium. Confronted with the new pluralism in American religion, Berger would surely be quick to point out that he has always been interested in both the positive and negative implications of this diversity. If it encourages a shallow "marketplace" mentality, it also allows us the freedom to choose, and to revise our beliefs when they become stagnant.

Comparing the present volume with his earlier work reveals a remarkable stead-fastness in Berger's vision. Early in his career he forged a synthesis of Weberian sociology and Heideggerian phenomenology (a la Alfred Schutz) that has provided continuing inspiration for his own work and that of an entire generation of younger social scientists. Indeed, this framework has become so familiar that the difficulty sometimes is to question its assertions rather than simply seeing how well they apply. In this sense, A Far Glory does not break new ground. But it is a mature work, subtle in nuance, redolent with insight. It shines with wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of reading in literature, philosophy, theology, and the social sciences.

ROBERT WUTHNOW is Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Social Sciences and director of the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University. His most recent book is Rediscovering the Sacred: Perspectives on Religion in Contemporary Society (Eerdmans).