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

Commonweal, Nov 6, 1992 by Robert Wuthnow

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.