128 - The Heretical Imperative

The Heretical Imperative
By Peter L. Berger
New York, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979. 220 pp. $9.95.

This latest volume from the lively typewriter of Peter Berger is concerned with "contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation." As in previous writings he employed the sociology of knowledge to relativize the relativizers, in this book Berger wants to show that secular pluralism is not inimical, but actually advantageous to honest Christian believing. As an empirical social scientist, he finds that "the most obvious fact about the contemporary world is not so much its secularity, but rather its great hunger for redemption and for transcendence" (p. 184). The multitude of options now available for satisfying this hunger should surprise or threaten nobody. Instead they make religious choice both possible and necessary-hence, "the heretical imperative."

Admittedly, Berger uses the word "heretical" in the sense of "optional" rather than "deviant," which is his linguistic privilege, although it can be misleading, unhistorical, and perhaps even just a bit anti-theological. He sidesteps the vexing question of authority by subsuming it under what he calls tradition and prefers to speak of "plausibility structures" rather than to face the hard issue of "something that may be called truth" (p. 94). Getting into the spirit of his book, the reader is almost persuaded that denying, departing from, or distorting a commonly accepted norm is only the name of the modern pluralizing game-almost, but not quite. If we are all in some sense heretics, then why not drop the word altogether?

Like many of his social-science colleagues, Berger has a fondness, not to say a weakness, for typologies. In the pluralistic situation of the present he suggests three basic options for religious thought. These are the deductive or kerygmatic, which simply reasserts traditional authority in what Berger calls a priori fashion; the reductive or de-mythologizing, which takes modern consciousness as its "given" and tries to translate as much of the tradition into a language with no "cognitive dissonance"; and the inductive or experiential, which assesses possible beliefs in "the determination to remain faithful to one's own experience" (p. 93). Logicians may be slow to recognize the meanings of these terms as employed here, but they do have some value in discriminating kinds of responses to belief-alternatives. The third option represents the

129 - The Heretical Imperative

author's own proposal, offered as a viable method in the vein of classical Protestant liberalism for discerning religious possibilities.

However, Berger wants us to go farther by engaging in "an openminded encounter with other religious possibilities on the level of their truth-claims" (p. 167). This involves being ready to change one's own view of reality, though what is one's own becomes clear in confrontation with an "other" (p. 185). The stance that Berger recommends is attractively supple yet also non-compromising. Yet it is difficult to see just how truth-claims can be met and settled on this basis. Still, mutual respect in sharing experiences is certainly a prerequisite, as every Christian theologian should know.

Nevertheless, theologians probably ought to read this book, despite its failure to address the standing, open problems of their discipline. I, for one, am grateful to the author for his sturdy effort "to discover the universal hidden beneath the exceptional," in the words of Teilhard de Chardin. This is always part and parcel of what theologians are about. The juxtaposition of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist faiths is welcome and bracing. So is Peter Berger's insistence that "religious experience is indeed a human experience, but by its very nature it intends the metahuman" (p. 142). This conviction may be pre-theological, as Berger suggests, but it is shared by many theologians across a wide spectrum of views and commitments. It may sound obvious, and yet that may be the best reason for adopting it, as Schleiermacher once did, for the purposes of theological reflection today.

Roger Hazelton
Berea College
Berea, Kentucky