Questions of Faith

A Skeptical Affirmation of Christianity

Peter Berger

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781405108485
  9781405108478
• eBook ISBN:
  9781405143554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

Leading religious and cultural commentator, Peter Berger, explores how and what we can believe in modern times.

• 
  
• Deals clearly with questions such as 'Does God exist? What was so special about Jesus? How can one be Christian in a pluralistic society?
  
• Structured around key phrases from the Apostles' Creed.
  
• Draws on the Christian theological tradition and the work of other relevant thinkers, such as Freud and Simone Weil.
  
• The author takes the position of an open-minded sceptic, exploring his own beliefs.

Chapter One
“I believe …”

This is a book on questions of religious faith. If one has no faith, is there any reason why one should be interested?

Leave aside for the moment the question of why one may have faith: There are good reasons why many people go through life, often very successfully, without faith. It is more difficult to see how one could fail to be interested in the matter. Religious faith, in whatever form, always involves one fundamental assumption – namely, that there is a reality beyond the reality of ordinary, everyday life, and that this deeper reality is benign. Put differently, religious faith implies that there is a destiny beyond the death and destruction which, as we know, awaits not only ourselves but everyone and everything we care about in this world, the human race and the planet on which its history is played out, and (if modern physics is correct) the entire universe. One can reasonably say that one does not believe in such a transcendent destiny; it is less reasonable to say that one is not interested in it. Religion implies that reality ultimately makes sense in human terms. It is the most audacious thought that human beings have ever had. It may be an illusion; even so, it is a very interesting one.

Most of the time, in the course of ordinary living, we assume that reality is what it appears to be – the physical, psychological, and social structures that provide the parameters of our actions. The philosopher Alfred Schutz called this “the world-taken-for-granted.” There are exceptional individuals who question this taken-for-grantedness by way of intellectual reflection, individuals like Socrates or Einstein; they are quite rare. For most people ordinary reality is put in question by something that happens to interrupt the flow of ordinary living. Often what happens is something bad – illness, bereavement, loss of social status, or some other individual or collective calamity. But the taken-for-grantedness of everyday reality can also be put in question by some very good things: an intense aesthetic experience, or falling in love, or being awed by the birth of one’s first child. Either way, suddenly, it becomes clear that there is more to reality than one had previously assumed. Minimally, this is what is meant by experiences of transcendence. Such experiences are not yet religious – atheists and agnostics too become ill, get to be parents, become intoxicated by music or by love. But one could call these experiences “pre-religious”: By relativizing ordinary reality they open up the possibility of a reality – or, perhaps, of many realities – that are usually hidden. One takes the step from a pre-religious to a religious perception of transcendence when one believes that the reality that lies beyond ordinary experience means well by us. Again, one need not believe this. But it is certainly interesting to consider the possibility.

I used to know a psychoanalyst who was a very orthodox Freudian. We had a number of conversations about religion. He found it hard to understand that an intelligent person (he generously allowed that I was such a person) could be religious. He, so he said, had been a convinced atheist as far back as he could remember, and he was sure that religion was nothing but a comforting illusion. I asked him once whether he ever had any doubts about this conviction of his. He said no, he never had any doubts. Then he hesitated and said, actually yes: He had moments of doubt about his atheism every time he listened to the choral portion of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the chorale based on Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” Thornton Wilder, in his novel The Ides of March, puts a similar thought into the mouth of Julius Caesar. Wilder’s Caesar says that he never believed in the gods (he only performed the religious rituals demanded of a public official in Rome because he thought them to be politically useful). But Caesar too admitted to occasional doubts about his atheism. This happened in some moments in the midst of battle or of some important political actions when he had the feeling that a greater power was guiding him. It also happened during the so-called epileptic aura, the acute sense of ecstasy which typically occurs just before a grandmal attack.

On the other hand, if one has faith, why should one ask questions about it?

There are people who have faith without feeling the need to reflect about it. Sometimes one refers to this kind of faith as “child-like,” but it is not necessarily something that one should look down upon. These are often people who have grown up in a social environment in which their particular faith is taken for granted, or they have had a powerful experience which confirmed their faith and which retains its power in their memory. Or perhaps the capacity for unquestioning faith is simply a part of a certain personality type; in religious terms one could then say that such faith is a gift. The value one ascribes to reflection will determine whether one envies such people or thinks that they are missing something important. Be this as it may, most human beings (and by no means only intellectuals) feel constrained to reflect about their experiences and beliefs, if only to relate different experiences and beliefs to each other in such a way that they make overall sense. If reflection becomes systematic, one can describe this activity as theorizing. Obviously any aspect of human experience and belief can become an object of reflection. Religion is no exception. The simplest definition of theology is to say that it is systematic reflection about faith.

The word “theology” comes out of Christian usage and people in other traditions (such as Judaism or the religions of India) do not like to use it (often because they associate it with an overly cerebral approach to religion or because they want to distance themselves from the repressive dogmatism which, unfortunately, has been a recurring habit among Christians). However, in the simple sense in which theology has just been defined it will necessarily occur in every religious tradition, from the most sophisticated to the most primitive. A Jew might not want to attach the label “theology” to the highly sophisticated theorizing permeating the Talmudic literature, but in the aforementioned sense it is a specific sort of theologizing that goes on there (even though, with its rootage in practical considerations of religious law, it is different in character from the evolution of Christian doctrine). The same goes for the monumental theoretical edifices constructed in the course of Hindu and Buddhist history. But even in so-called primal religions – that is, traditions without sacred texts or bodies of learned religious functionaries – some sort of theorizing goes on. Thus mythology – the stories about gods and other supernatural beings – is also a very distinctive type of theoretical reflection. In other words, theology occurs whenever there is a systematic attempt to reflect about faith. For anyone who identifies with a particular tradition this reflection will be some sort of dialogue between this tradition and the individual’s experience of faith. Needless to say, the present book is just such an exercise.

Scholars will differ as to the date at which full-blown theological systems first appeared in the development of Christianity – certainly no later than the time when the early Church Fathers felt it necessary to spell out their beliefs in the confrontation with Hellenistic philosophy. But there is theology – or, more precisely, a number of theologies – already in the New Testament, and not only in the letters of the Apostle Paul and the Johannine texts. Even in the Synoptic Gospels, which tell the story of the life of Jesus, there are theological considerations that shape the telling of the story (for example, in relating events to prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures). Thus theology has been a very important feature of Christian history from the beginning. Over the centuries this process of reflection had to take account of different theoretical interlocutors: rabbinical authorities, Greek philosophers, teachers of Gnosticism and other esoteric doctrines, the powerful rival of Islamic thought, more recently the manifold theoretical expressions of modernity.

In a general way, therefore, doing theology today is not fundamentally different from what it was at any time since the early Christians had to make sense of the events around the life of Jesus. Nevertheless, there is something distinctive about the modern situation, and it is useful to recognize this: Modernity progressively undermines the social environments which support taken-for-grantedness, in religion as in everything else that people believe. This is not the place to elaborate on this important phenomenon, but the basic reason for it can be stated quite simply: People take their beliefs for granted to the extent that everyone around them does the same. Put differently, beliefs appear to be self-evident if there is a more or less unified social consensus about them. Modernity, through some of its most basic processes (such as mass migration, mass communication, urbanization), undermines this sort of consensus. The individual is increasingly confronted with many different beliefs, values, and lifestyles, and is therefore forced to choose between them. Choice requires at least rudimentary reflection. Religious choice, then, requires at least rudimentary theologizing.

To use a philosophical term, modernity problematizes. There is an old American joke (admittedly not a very good one) that nicely illustrates what is meant by this term. A soldier returns from the war. He used to be a great talker, but now he just sits and does not speak. His family is worried about him, and everything is done to make him comfortable. At the dinner table his mother gives him the food he likes best and, because she knows that he likes to put a lot of salt on his food, she places a large salt shaker next to his seat. One day she forgets, and the salt shaker is at the other end of the table. The soldier looks around, then says: “Will someone please pass the goddam salt shaker.” Everyone is very happy – the returned warrior seems to have overcome the trauma that must have caused his long silence. The mother passes the salt shaker to him and says: “Son, I’m so happy that you are speaking to us again. Why didn’t you speak before?” He answers: “There was no problem before.”

A sociologist can say that modernity problematizes beliefs because of the high degree of pluralism it creates in the social environment of modern people: Where there is a plurality of beliefs, and where the individual is therefore compelled to make choices between them, a higher degree of reflectiveness becomes unavoidable. This fact has far-reaching consequences in every area of human life. Among other things, it means that religious certainty is harder to come by. In a sense then, every reflective person, if concerned with religion at all, must become a sort of theologian. And this has yet another consequence: More than ever before, theology today should not be left to the professional theologians (even leaving aside the regrettable fact that very frequently the latter talk only to each other). Minimally, there should be a dialogue between professional theologians and others who lack such credentials. Obviously again, this book is an expression of this view.

But why should one have faith in the first place?

The verb “should” is often understood in a moral sense, as when one says, for example, that one should help people who are in trouble or that one should respect the dignity of every person. The same implication is often found in religious language: Thus one is told, in sermons or other religious pronouncements, that one should have faith, conversely that lack of faith (or unbelief) is a moral failure, a sin against God. This is not a very plausible proposition. If God exists, He has not made it very easy to believe in Him – the world is full of terrible things that, on the contrary, make it easy not to believe in Him (or at least not to believe that He is benign). What is more, assuming that God is as omniscient as He is supposed to be, He knows this, and therefore will not hold it against us if we do not manage to have faith. The verb “should” in the above question, then, is to be understood, not as a moral injunction, but simply as a request for an explanation: Are there good reasons to have faith?

There is a venerable tradition in Christian thought proposing proofs for the existence of God. The high point of this tradition can be found in medieval scholasticism, when Thomas Aquinas and other Christian philosophers put forth elegant, closely argued proofs of this kind. One can still learn from these arguments, but, at least since their critique by Immanuel Kant, it has become very difficult to accept them as the proofs they purport to be. But one does not have to be a student of Kant, or for that matter a philosopher of any persuasion, to realize that faith cannot be demonstrated like a mathematical theorem or even supported in probabilistic terms like a scientific hypothesis. If it could, it would not be faith: One believes that which one does not know. Unbelief is the unwillingness to step beyond what one knows with certainty or even with a reasonable degree of probability. This is not a moral failing; on the contrary, it may be a morally admirable attitude of intellectual integrity. By no means is it implied here that faith is a moral failing or a lack of intellectual integrity (as has been said by many critics of religion, who have seen it as a cowardly flight from the harsh realities of life, as in Marx’s characterization of religion as an “opiate”). Still, one should be able to explain why one is willing to make that step into the unknown which constitutes the act of faith.

Of course, as has been suggested before, the question does not appear in its sharpest form as long as faith is taken for granted in the individual’s social environment (although in all periods of history there have been breakdowns of taken-for-grantedness as a result of either individual or collective events). The question has become very sharp in modern times. Thus it makes sense that, close to the beginning of modern history, Pascal made his famous statement about faith as a wager. We cannot know whether faith is true or not, but it is reasonable to bet that it is: If it turns out to be true, we will be gloriously vindicated; if it turns out to be untrue, we will have lost nothing (indeed, we will not be around to draw a conclusion). This probably suggests an overly intellectual understanding of faith, as if it involved the verification of a hypothesis (actually, Pascal held a much more nuanced view). But the term “wager” is helpful. Faith is indeed a sort of wager. Put simply, when one decides to have faith, one bets on the ultimate goodness of the world; conversely, one bets that annihilation is not the ultimate fate of everything one holds dear in the world.

Luther used a play of words, in Latin, when he described faith (fides) as trust (fiducia). Luther, unlike Pascal, only stood on the threshold of a modern sense of reality, and the trust he had in mind was not so much in the existence of God (which, it seems, he never doubted) but in God’s grace. But we can take on his wordplay in a sharper, more modern sense: Faith is trust in the goodness of the world. In our experience there are many indications that the world is a meaningless chamber of horrors and that all human aspirations will end in an abyss of nothingness. But there are also signals of another destiny, a destiny in which one could invest hope – in the wonders of the universe and in the magnificent possibilities of the human condition. I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Chapter One: “I believe …”
• Chapter Two: “… in God”
• Chapter Three: “… the Father Almighty”
• Chapter Four: “… Creator of heaven and earth”
• Chapter Five: “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord”
• Chapter Six: “He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary”
• Excursus: On Prayer in Christ’s Name
• Excursus: On the Empty Tomb and Other Miracles
• Excursus: On Christian Morality
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement