The Worm In Berger's Heretical Apple

Sometime in the late 1990's--probably around 1998--I re-read (after two decades) Peter L. Berger's A Rumor of Angels, and found it as stimulating as when I had first read it as a college freshman. I was moved to write Professor Berger a brief note of appreciation. To my surprise, he wrote back: thanking me for my interest in the book and its subject (succinctly expressed by its subtitle: "Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural"). He confessed that he had always felt a personal affection for the book--despite its relative lack of success with the reading public. He added, significantly (I think), that the only book of his (on that topic) for which he had an even greater regard was The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (1979)--the book he had published in the year I first read Angels. This remark sent me out to the library in order to read and compare the two books. I found myself in agreement with the author and, of the two, it is THI to which I repeatedly return.

That said, THI is not without its problems. The deepest and most troubling from my perspective is a persistent inconsistency with Berger's earlier work with Thomas Luckmann on the sociology of knowledge. Their co-authored book, The Social Construction of Reality (1966), presents a compelling case for the proposition contained in its title: that what we take to be the true state of things is not an unmediated given but, rather, the product of tacit (and rarely conscious) agreements with the socio-cultural context in which we are embedded. In other words, "reality" is, in fact, a social construction.

Berger does not exactly abandon this position in THI, but throughout the later book he makes statements such as the following: "...truth is always its own warrant...consequently, that which has imposed itself as truth by its own force will not be voided by subsequent discoveries of truth" (Berger, 170, emphasis added). By endowing "truth" with agency in this manner, Berger implies that human beings are the passive recipients of "truth" and not its active co-authors. Given his Eliadean assertions throughout THI that sui generis religious experience is a coherent category, one can understand why Berger might have wished to distance himself from his earlier social constructivism; but if he did wish to do so, he should have come clean and admitted as much. The implication that we can genuinely experience "the sacred" as a sui generis phenomenon may lend Berger's argument greater persuasive force with some readers, but it is an argument that has very little purchase with anyone today in the academic study of religion. It is the worm in Berger's heretical apple and is probably the most compelling reason that THI is not accorded the prominence that I (for one) think it deserves within the field. I will elaborate on why I think that Berger's book deserves to be regarded as a religious studies classic with "legs" (i.e., with continuing relevance to the academic study of religion) in future posts.