A New Starting Point

In a world where everything must be measured and analyzed, how can man grasp the supernatural? Historical criticism and Freudian psychology answer that a sense of transcendence is a product of man's own times and his psychological needs. Even theologians have gloomily conceded the death of God.

In a new book called A Rumor of Angels (Doubleday; $4.50), Peter L. Berger, perhaps the leading U.S. sociologist of religion, suggests that the very scientific methods that have helped to challenge traditional belief in the world of the spirit can be the starting point for a new and better faith.

A Lutheran layman and professor of sociology at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, Berger has already used the tools of his discipline to challenge the bureaucratic pretensions of institutional religion in two books, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies and The Precarious Vision. He readily admits that sociology has helped to undermine the traditional faiths of the past, but he also argues that it can just as easily undermine the certainty of today's aggressive disbelief. Disbelief, he insists, is largely the product of man's present environment, and the skepticism of the professional atheist is just as subject to questioning as the peasant's blind faith in God and miracles. "Sociology," says Berger, "frees us from the tyranny of the present."

Looking to Man. Thus freed, men can look to their own experience for the "signals of transcendence" that Berger believes form the best foundation for an "inductive faith" in the supernatural. Without touching on individual experiences of the esoteric -- such phenomena as mysticism and private revelation -- Berger finds these signals (the "angels" of his title) in experiences that are "generally accessible to all men." In a modern parallel to Thomas Aquinas' classic proofs for God's existence, Berger proposes five common experiences that seem to argue for the transcendent. The arguments:

sbFROM ORDERING. When a child cries in the unfamiliar night, a mother's first impulse is to reassure the child that "everything is all right." Unless the statement is a lie, says Berger, at its root it expresses humanity's basic confidence in a reality that transcends the natural, often cruel world -- "a universe that is ultimately in order and ultimately trust worthy."

sbFROM PLAY. Both children and adults, says Berger, find "liberation and peace" in play. Why? Because "in playing, one steps out of one time into another," temporarily halting, in a way that suggests eternity, a world in which death occurs. Thus, the Vienna Philharmonic could give a concert as Soviet troops be sieged the city in 1945: "an affirmation of the ultimate triumph of all human gestures of creative beauty over the gestures of destruction."

sbFROM HOPE. "A 'no' to death," says Berger, "is profoundly rooted in the very being of man." Even in the face of immediate death, he argues, men persist in believing in the future and find in that hope a source of courage for the most self-sacrificing acts. "Empirical reason indicates that this hope is an illusion," Berger admits, and he stands in respectful awe of the stoic who can accept this fact without flinching. Yet most men are not stoics and still continue to hope, so unabashed in their rejection of death that there must be some final justification of their confidence in a transcendent reality.

sbFROM DAMNATION. Certain human deeds, says Berger, in the common experience of mankind seem "not only evil, but monstrously evil." The archetypal example is the Nazi mass execution of the Jews. Man is "constrained to condemn, and condemn absolutely," the villainy of an Eichmann, and that condemnation derives from a belief that when a person commits such crimes, "he separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community, and thus invokes a retribution that is more than human."

sbFROM HUMOR. Man's sense of the comic, says Berger, is fundamentally a sense of discrepancy, and the most basic is the discrepancy between man and the universe. Man's laughter, Berger believes, "reflects the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world"--and his audacious conviction, when that world seems awry, that the imprisonment is not final. "Religion," concludes Berger, "vindicates laughter."

Berger allows that any of these phenomena can be explained away in Marxian or Freudian terms, but he argues simply that a transcendent reality--in a word, God--is a much better, and sociologically more sensible, explanation. From these starting points of inductive faith, theologians can then examine anew the fabric of traditional belief.

Testing the Traditions. Such a confrontation with traditional belief would require heroic generosity from theologians, he admits. Not only must they be ecumenical, willing to examine and learn from other traditions, but they should also be thoroughly objective with regard to their own faith, winnowing the wheat from the chaff without worrying about the chaff. All a priori assumptions must thus be avoided, even so basic an assumption as one that places Christ at the starting point of its theology before examining Christian tradition in the light of other intellectual disciplines. "Theology," insists Berger, "must begin and end with the question of truth."

He does not suggest that such a search will find its final expression as a universal religion, and disassociates himself from any attempt to create a "theological Esperanto." He sees, in fact, a continuing pluralism, but a more confident one, in which all religions more fully appreciate the commonality of human experience that unites them and the diversity of approach that mutually enriches them.

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