The Experience of the Sacred: A Critique of a Purely Academic Study of Religion

Undoubtedly, the problem of relativism stands at the heart of The Heretical Imperative. Berger welcomes the pluralism of perspectives resulting from secularization and "relativizes the relativizers" who would set limits to this pluralism. Since all thought, including modernity itself, is shaped by plausibility structures, no thought has a cognitive privilege with reference to any other thought. Therefore modernity cannot be used to intimidate religious believers into abandoning their faith.

Yet, by emphasizing the superiority of the inductive possibility over the other two options, Berger is unwittingly putting forth his own skewed vision of the religious enterprise. In fact, Berger's stress on individual experience is reflective of modern consciousness, which turns religion more and more into a private act. Thus, Berger cannot escape from resorting to his own special kind of reductionism: viable religion is essentially individualistic and experiential. Now there is no problem in posing such an argument, but to call this position "inductive" (denoting a type of "value-free" openness) betrays the fact that it is derived from an already held religious purview which heavily tends toward the mystical (Gnostic Christianity, Advaita Vedanta, Esoteric Buddhism) and not the revelatory (Biblical Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, Shi'ite Islam). Hence, Berger's inductive methodology calls into question the exclusive claims of any one religious tradition. As such, only certain forms of religious endeavor can remain intact in the modern age; these forms, according to Berger, are almost always mystical in origin and point to knowledge which is not mythic or rational in basis, but trans-empirical or other-worldly.

However, does the "inductive" option really do justice to the
various expressions of religions?