The Experiential Turn

The hero of Peter L. Berger's The Heretical Imperative is the late 18th/early 19th century German philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Berger favors Schleiermacher because of his emphasis upon religious experience (a reflection of his pietistic background) and his insistence that such experience involves a "consciousness of something beyond itself--indeed, so much beyond itself that the human subject feels himself to be utterly dependent on that other reality or being at the center of the experience" (THI, 122). Reading these passages can be frustrating insofar as they often appear to contain Berger's endorsement of what is, in essence, a theological claim, dressed up as scientific "induction." This is not to say, of course, that Schleiermacher ought not to have made this particular claim or that Berger, as a social scientist, is not permitted a theology. But the book is written in such a way that one must be very careful to distinguish Berger the sociologist from Berger the theologian.

On page 128, when Berger admits that inductive reasoning cannot "prove the truth claim of an alleged revelation in the way a natural science proves or validates its hypotheses. In that final sense, religious affirmations always entail faith," the reader breathes a sigh of relief. But the added qualification of "that final sense" suggests that there are other senses, penultimate ones perhaps, in which religious affirmations based upon an "inductive model" somehow escape the criticisms leveled against it by the proponents of what Berger had earlier termed the "reductive possibility" (pp. 87-113). That latter position (represented in THI by Rudolf Bultmann), is resisted in the book because it does not allow religious experience a sui generis ontological validity--a religious sine qua non for Berger. The author's theological pre-commitments in this regard somewhat undermine his credibility--which is a shame--because the reader may become discouraged and neglect to contemplate Berger's most interesting notion: that of a "coming contestation of religions."

I will return to this notion in a future post.