Yet the principled refusal of dogmatism, Berger insists, need not consign us to nihilism. Pluralism is our condition, but that condition should not be construed as the denial of objective reality. In our everyday lives we have hints and signals, ordinary and extraordinary, of the existence of an order beyond the empirical. They are experiences of reality, and faith is what we make of them. Here we best get the sense, Berger argues, of Luther's conception of faith as ultimate trust in the promise of God that He will not abandon His creation.
Reason is no more denied than it is enthroned.
We are neither fideists nor skeptics. There is something undeniably bracing about Berger's willingness to face up to modernity's intimations of an absurdist abyss and yet give us good reasons to resist its claims. Berger's is in many ways a minimalist Christian proposition, but there is an at least arguable case to be made that it is all that we can with integrity sustain. AT THE SAME time, however, A Far Glory offers inadvertent clues as to the reasons for Protestantism's decline. At one level, Berger neatly ties in the modernist preoccupation with the true and authentic self with counter-modernist transcendence.