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A sociologist who turned to God, but never understood faith: Peter Berger

A sociologist who turned to God, but never understood faith: Peter Berger, March 17, 1929-June 27, 2017.

When I was in graduate school many years ago, The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, published in 1966, was my bible, and I was not alone. Berger and Luckmann argued that what we experience as reality is socially constructed by men and women. Over time, this construction is forgotten and the reality taken as given. It’s a good argument, but it doesn’t work very well with God. Berger acknowledged as much in a book written a few years later, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural, published in 1970.

Where Berger was right

Berger seems right that what has failed in modernity is not a belief in God, but belief in “another reality.” Some theologians seem to have gone along with this. Paul Tillich understood the task of theology in terms of the “method of correlation,” by which he meant the interpretation of Christianity in the language of philosophical and psychological thought (p 11).

Rudolf Bultmann exaggerates, but has the right idea when he says that no one who uses electricity and listens to the radio can any longer believe in the miracle world of the New Testament. His response was to translate the Christian tradition into the contemporary language of existentialism (p. 41).

Bultmann’s definition of the disease has proven useful. Today many of us are enthralled with the things humans have made, like smart phones. (Confession: I bought my first smart phone a couple of weeks ago, and something about it is compelling.) So how should religion respond?

Berger’s answer is that we should not capitulate to modernity, but anchor belief in God in human experience. Good diagnosis, poor remedy.

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Emmanuel Levinas says we can’t talk to God, only each other

Emmanuel Levinas says we can’t talk to God, only each other. When we care for others in words and deeds, we come as close as we can to God.

Emmanuel Levinas is popular among philosophers because “he introduces God into the scene without making so much ontological noise,” as Ryan Urbano puts it (p 75). In other words, Levinas lets us talk about God without talking about God. It’s true, but it’s not because he is shy about using the G—word.

For Levinas, God is experienced in the ethical encounter with the other. Religion is Levinas’ term for this ethical relationship. For Levinas, there is no direct relationship with the Divine.

The Divine can only be accessed through the human other to whom the self is infinitely responsible. (Urbano, p 51)

We know God when we act ethically toward another person. We do not keep God alive by trying to prove his existence, a waste of time. Everything I can ever know about God is experienced in caring for others.

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Reinhold Niebuhr, Theodor Adorno, and the Scandal of the Twentieth Century

Around the middle of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was the most prominent Protestant theologian in America. He was on the cover of Time magazine (March 8, 1948). More recently, Barack Obama called Niebuhr his favorite philosopher (Brooks). Niebuhr is author of the well-known serenity prayer.

God give us the grace to accept things that cannot be changed. Courage to change the things that should be changed. And the Wisdom to distinguish one from the other.

His daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, says that this is the real version of the prayer, noting the difference between “should be changed” and “can be changed,” which is the version usually recited. She thinks the usual version represents a dumbing down of the prayer, for in its original version it calls us to do the right thing, not what I can do, but what I should do (Lemert, pp. 195-196).

The world as gift and idolatry

The difference between science and theology, as I understand it, is one over whether you see the world as a gift or not; and you cannot resolve this just by inspecting the thing, any more than you can deduce from examining a porcelain vase that it is a wedding present. (quoted in Crouter, p. 133)

If one sees the world as gift, then humans were created: to savor life surely, but also to be responsible stewards of the gift, not only of one’s own life, but also a world. Everything is gift. Humans are not just creators, but created.

From this perspective, idolatry becomes the gravest and most tempting sin, the worship of our own creations. For Niebuhr, “communal idolatry” is the most common sin of our time, certainly the most damaging in scale and intensity. For Niebuhr, sin, and with it idolatry, are an anxious attempt to hide our finitude, to make ourselves the center of life, and so take the place of God. Each of us can imagine all manner of terrible things that might befall us. And so humans seek by an act of will, what Niebuhr (1944, p. 139) calls the will-to-power, to overreach the limits of human creatureliness. Since most people lack the ability to do this on their own, they join communities of self-justification and self-assertion.

Niebuhr was never very interested in the details of Christian doctrine. For Niebuhr, original sin had little to do with desire. Original sin stems from a person’s fear at being alone and vulnerable in the world, leading him or her to worship the gods of the community, indeed the god that is the community. Nationalism, money, success, fitting in—all this and more become our idols.

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