From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Oct 25 2004 - 16:28:20 BST
DMB,
> dmb says:
> I'll ask you the same thing I ask everyone, can't you bring me some actual
> quotes from these guys?
After saying I wasn't going to do your homework for you, I will now
slightly retract that, since I just happened to open a book and found a
quotable passage. It's from Peter Berger's The Heretical Imperative, p. 54.
Berger is a sociologist, and a Protestant.
"For reasons discussed in some detail in the preceding chapter, the modern
situation is not conducive to the plausibility of religious authority. The
modern situation, with the closely related aspects of pluralism and
secularization, thus puts what may be called cognitive pressure on the
religious thinker. Insofar as the secular worldview of modernity dominates
his social context, the religious thinker is pressured to soft pedal if not
to abandon altogether the supernatural elements of his tradition."
He goes on to identify three responses to this situation, what he calls the
deductive, reductive, and inductive options. The deductive is to "reassert
the authority of a religious tradition in the face of modern secularity".
This would cover the fundamentalists, which was a movement that started
early in the last century, and also the anti-Modernist reaction of the
Catholic church which lasted until about 1950. The reductive is to
"reinterpret the tradition in terms of modern secularity". This option
could be found in a lot of 19th century Protestant liberalism, or today in
the "historical Jesus" movement, that is, those who try to make out that
Jesus was a social reformer, or whatever. The inductive option, which
Berger prefers, is "to turn to experience as the ground of all religious
affirmation -- one's own experience, to whatever extent this is possible,
and the experience embodied in a particular range of traditions. This range
may be of varying breadth -- limited minimally to one's own tradition, or
expanded maximally to include the fullest available record of human
religious hiistory. In any case, induction means here that religious
traditions are understood as bodies of evidence concerning religious
experience and the insights deriving from experience. Implied in this
option is a deliberately empirical attitude, a weighing and assessing frame
of mind -- not necessarily cool and dispassionate, but unwilling to impose
closure on the quest for religious truth by invoking any authority whatever
-- not the authority of this or that traditional *Deus dixit*, but also not
the authority of modern thought or consciousness."
- Scott
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