Peter Berger's rumors of transcendence
Berger seemed to want a liberal Protestantism with theological substance. But defining that substance was not his vocation.
Peter Berger would have been amused by the headline over his obituary in the New York Times: “Theologian who fought ‘God is dead’ movement dies at 88.” Berger never claimed to be a theologian, and was never the robust defender of faith against atheistic philosophy that the headline suggests. He relished (especially among the devout) being the cool, skeptical social scientist whose own theological commitments were tightly bracketed.
Berger did argue that secularization—the focus of much of his early work—was not as inexorable as he and other sociologists once believed, and that religious belief had proved itself surprisingly resilient in the modern world. Berger saw that for many people, a religiously pluralistic world is not necessarily a secular world.
Berger’s main attempt at theological assertion was his slim but marvelous book A Rumor of Angels, but even there the argument is chiefly anthropological. The book highlights five aspects of human existence which are inexplicable apart from the positing of a transcendent reality. The human propensity to believe that the word is ordered in a trustworthy way, the capacity to play, the capacity to hope in the face of death, the conviction that some things are just wrong and must be condemned, and the capacity to laugh—all these, he said, are “signals of transcendence.” These “prototypical human gestures” aren’t supported by evidence, and they can’t be justified intellectually, yet they seem deeply characteristic of human life.
