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The Reenchantment of a Modern Man
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10095 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1993 |
4,499 Words |
| Author
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Richard Rubenstein
Richard Rubenstein is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor
of religion at Florida State University and the author of
After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism,
The religious imagination, and other works. |
A FAR GLORY
Peter Berger
New York: Free Press, 1992
218 pp., $22.95
In his most recent book, A Far Glory, sociologist and would be theologian Peter Berger offers both personal testimony and sociological analysis concerning the possibility of religious faith in a pluralistic age. He defines pluralism as the coexistence within society of distinct groups that are involved in some degree of social interaction and that dwell together with a measure of civic peace.
Berger begins by citing one of the oldest and most influential of all defenses of Christian faith, that of Saint Paul in I Corinthians:
For the Jews demand signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but for those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of god and the wisdom of god. FOR THE FOOLISHNESS OF GOD IS WISER THAN MEN AND THE WEAKNESS OF GOD IS STRONGER THAN MEN.(Berger's emphasis)
According to Berger, in a Hellenistic age with many similarities to our own, Paul taught the "scandalous proposition" that "the weakness of God reveals his true power, including the power to triumph over sin and death." Save for a small band of Christians, Paul's Greek and Jewish contemporaries rejected his teaching. As a result, the early Christians suffered from cognitive dissonance, "the painful disagreement between what we believe and what others maintain with assurance," and they attempted to reduce the dissonance between their beliefs and the conventional Hellenistic "wisdom" of their neighbors. By contrast, Paul admonished the Corinthians that their faith had overturned the "wisdom of the world" and constituted a radically novel and unprecedented worldview. Nevertheless, the early Christians could not ignore or altogether disparage the "wisdom of the world" because of the pluralism of their Greco-Roman world.
Two-edged pluralism
According to Berger, pluralism works in contradictory ways. It fosters a measure of tolerance and civility; it also can foster fanaticism and intolerance when we are confronted by people with beliefs and values that challenge or negate our own. As Berger points out, every society has corpus of beliefs and values that are experienced by its
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