Is God indeed dead, as a number of people, including many theologians, have been telling us? Is religion now obsolete? Emphatically not, says the author of A RUMOR OF ANGELS: “I think that religion is of very great im¬portance at any time and of particular importance in our own time.” Only, he maintains, through a belief in the existence of the supernatural—that is, a reality that transcends the reality of the natural world of everyday life— can man grasp the true proportions of his experience.
Peter L. Berger, a sociologist by profession, argues that the remarkable agreement today about the alleged demise of the supernatural says a good deal about modern man but very little about the supernatural. Beginning with an analysis of the social forces that have led to the present religious crisis, he shows how the sociological perspective can be used to question the assumptions of modern thought with the same force that modern thought has used to question the assumptions of various religions.
He further suggests that, if theologi¬cal thought is to recover from the in¬tellectual shocks that such modern disciplines as history, sociology, and psychology have administered to it, it might do well to look for a new start¬ing point, and that this might be found in the study of man. By looking at the natural conditions of human life theol¬ogy might discover or rediscover those “signals of transcendence” that indicate the background of the supernatural. Such an investigation is unlikely to lead to a restoration of religious tradi¬tions as we have known them, but rather to a re-evaluation of them in terms of our present condition and state of knowledge.
Angels, Berger reminds us, are God’s messengers or “signals.” Today transcendence has been “reduced to a rumor ... but we can set out to explore these rumors—and perhaps to follow them to their source.”