One of the books I took along to read on my recent trip to India was Peter Berger’s recent Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Affirmation of Christianity
Alas, the book is a disappointment. It was not simply a result of reading Berger’s book in India, where it is clear that Christianity is not simply something that can be taken for granted in the human realm. Berger is at least theoretically aware of this. The book is a disappointment because it is rambling and not altogether coherent in its outlook and argument (p.159). Perhaps I was expecting too much, but this lay theologian does not provide a coherent “sacred canopy” in the way his work in sociology led at least one reader to expect.
This is not to suggest that the book is not full of useful insights and thought-provoking quotes. But they do not form part of a coherent theological vision. Indeed, the only constant throughout the book is that Berger is offering a vision of Christianity that he finds interesting, and what is rejected is rejected on the same basis, namely that Berger finds this or that uninteresting. This scarcely seems to be an adequate basis for even a highly personal and idiosyncratic vision of Christianity (p.114).
The book is outlined according to the Apostle’s Creed, and thus begins with faith. In some respects, his definitions are not unlike my own: “Faith is trust in the goodness of the world…Faith is to bet on the ultimate validity of joy” (p.6). Berger himself cannot claim a personal mystical experience, and thus although he discusses such experiences at length, he finds that they provide a basis for a generic religious outlook rather than a specifically Christian one. For Berger, it is the hunger for God, the fact that the divine silence is offensive, that points to God’s existence.
His own outlook is shaped by Liberal Protestantism, which he helpfully reminds us to have been the result of a remarkable self-critical revolution in which Protestant theologians and scholars themselves took to examining their own beliefs and traditions critically. Berger defines himself as an “inclusivist”, and is capable of showing genuine appreciation for other traditions. A reason he gives for rejecting Buddhism in the end is his conviction that the autonomous self which has rights is one of the key contributions of Western civilization, drawn from its Judeo-Christian heritage, and it is unclear that an illusory self can be argued to have “certain inalienable rights” (pp.26-29).
A particularly thought-provoking statement is that Bultmann was clearly wrong about what “modern man” simply cannot accept. The mythological view of the world is alive and well (p.62). Yet Berger himself rejects superstition (pp.82, 84), and so the point I took away from this is that I am not merely an inhabitant of a worldview in which one cannot be superstitious. I am an advocate not merely of the Christian faith but of rationality and critical thinking. Rationality is not a given, but something I cherish as a value and am committed to promoting. I am not sure whether Berger is even right that the supernatural has lost something of its taken-for-grantedness, since it is woven into the presuppositional fabric of the worldview of many in North America (p.99). Perhaps it is different in Western Europe. Berger himself makes assertions about what it is “impossible” to accept, apparently unaware that historical critical scholarship is no more widely taken for granted in our time than the post-scientific demythologized perspective of Bultmann (p.148). Critical scholarship too is not merely a given but something one must choose, be committed to, and advocate on the basis of its merits.
Berger’s references to theologians and authors show that he is lagging seriously behind in keeping up with Biblical studies and theology. For instance, he shows no awareness even of Stendahl’s famous piece on “Paul and the Introspective Consciousness of the West”, much less more recent work on the “new perspective on Paul” (p.149).
In the end, Berger’s primary conviction whereby everything is evaluated is a refusal to accept death as natural (pp.40, 163). For him, this is the be all and end all of everything, his key unargued and indefensible bedrock presupposition that simply must be accepted. It is the fact that history is a nightmare and the conviction that it ought not to be that drives him (pp.113-114). Yet there is no rationale other than personal preference for what Berger accepts as authoritative (such as Jesus’ attitude towards death) and what he rejects as non-essential (such as the Jewish anthropology on which Jesus’ view was based; see pp.167-168). The book does not live up to its title. It is not a skeptical affirmation of Christianity, but an emotional appeal regarding how one should view the world in response to the death of one’s neighbor’s child (p.174). I certainly agree that a theology that does not take such real-life phenomena seriously is of little use, but I am not persuaded that such phenomena can provide an adequate unifying center and/or foundation for the theological enterprise. Ultimately, Berger’s attempt at a lay theology fails not because he gives the tragedies of life a key importance, but because he fails to provide a coherent vision and outlook on that basis, or on any other.
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