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158 BOOK REVIEWS The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation . By PETER L. BERGER. Garden City: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1979. Pp. xv + Q07. $9.95. Few writers had as much influence on religious and theological thought in the 1960's as did the sociologist Peter L. Berger. His The Sacred Canopy (1967) delineated convincingly the ways in which religions (including Christianity) arise as social constructs and themselves engage in the social construction of reality (both this-worldly and other-worldly). One effect of such a sociology of knowledge has always been to suggest that all these social constructions are, at best, so many subjective approaches to an unknowable realm and that they are perhaps all equally illusory. Berger's A Rumor of Angels (1970) was his effort to show why and how one might engage, formally and informally, in the theological enterprise even after subscribing to the analyses of The Sacred Canopy. Now after ten years, he has returned to the same task in The Heretical Imperative. Berger entitles this new study of the " contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation " The Heretical Imperative because he wishes to stress the necessity of choosing (playing on the Greek verb hairein, to choose) in which the modern situation places human beings. The main feature of this situation, as it bears on religion, is not so much secularization as it is pluralism. Modernity brings with it a multiplication of possibilities and an acute consciousness that the possibilities are available. At other times and in other cultures, people may have been, in principle, able to choose between life-styles and world-views; but in modern societies picking and choosing become an inescapable and often unhappy necessity for nearly everyone. And, once a person has elected to follow one path rather than another, he remains aware that he does so out of choice. This awareness has profound consequences for religious authority and religious community, but what Berger wishes to stress here, as in A Rumor of Angels, is not so much the sociological situation as the strategies for choosing. The basic argument should be a familiar one for readers of the earlier books. The author notes two procedures which he regards as fundamentally inadequate. First of all, there is the deductive strategy in which one reaffirms the tradition. The person confronted with the unsettling dissonance introduced by modernity can put the challenge aside and say once more, "It is so, and it can be no other." Although he sees it worked out in a variety of forms in different cultures, Berger takes Karl Barth and neoorthodoxy as the paradigm. The strength of this response is that it highlights the authoritative element in religious life; its weakness is that it denies the human conditions and connections of Christian faith. The polar extreme of neo-orthodoxy is reductionism, and here Rudolf Bultmann's demythologization project serves as paradigmatic for all those theological BOOK REVIEWS 159 maneuvers which allow the wisdom of the age to control the interpretation of religion. The two fatal weaknesses of such maneuvers are that they tend to liquidate themselves in favor of purely secular readings of the world and that they normally involve too simplistic a view of modernity itself. Berger's own way through the Scylla of deductionism and the Charybdis of reductionism still bears the name inductionism. Lying behind it are the convictions that locating religion as a human project says nothing about the truth-value of religious experience and religious belief and that the import of the project must be determined by calling forth all the resources available to people today. By induction, he means" taking human experience as the starting-point of religious reflection and using the methods of the historian to uncover those human experiences that have become embodied in the various religious traditions." The representative figure here is Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Berger makes it clear (no doubt to the surprise of some who have been reading his writings over the past few years) that he shares the theological liberalism of Schleiermacher and Ernst Troeltsch. It is a liberalism which allows one to stand firm as a Christian while acknowledging his fallibility and while looking for the truth in...

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