Christianity and Buddhism don’t belong together

Christianity and Buddhism don’t belong together. Just over fifty years ago, the Catholic monk, Thomas Merton, made a pilgrimage to India to meet the Tibetan Buddhist, Chongyam Trungpa, in the hope of fostering an interfaith dialog between Christianity and Buddhism. The dialog has flourished. Buddhist-Christian Studies is an established journal, and interfaith conferences abound. Curiously, a number of believers have chosen to combine their faiths. Paul Knitter’s Without the Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian explains why this combination works for him; evidently it does for many.

This makes no sense to me. Christianity and Buddhism are so fundamentally different that even the question of dialog makes me wonder. Not about the desirability of people of different faiths talking with each other; that’s always a good thing. But about attempts to show similarities: Jesus was like a bodhisattva (a Buddhist holy man), or that the experience of prajna, or enlightenment, corresponds to the Christian experience of God. The only work I know of that even questions their commensurability is in an essay of that title, “Are Buddhism and Christianity Commensurable?” Remember that commensurable means not similar, but alike enough even to be fruitfully compared. The essay in Wikipedia, “Buddhism and Christianity,” is as good as anything I have read on this subject, primarily because it displays their vast differences.

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Parables of Jesus

Parables of Jesus. Parables are stories. Lots of effort has gone into defining parables. Some argue that they are like analogies, in which one thing stands for another. But that definition would assume that every parable can be taken apart, so that this means that. Better to see the parable as a short story whose meaning is set by the context.

Parables are the main way Jesus Christ explains the kingdom of God, to show the character of God, and the expectations that God has for humans (Snodgrass, p 1). Parables make up over 35% of Jesus’ teaching in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke).* Most scholars believe that the parables are the bedrock of Christ’s teachings, the closest we can get to what he actually said. Trouble is, the meaning of many parables is ambiguous. Another trouble is that we have only the evangelists’ interpretation of the parables, and they had a theological agenda, set by the resurrection. Generally, this is not a problem, for it is this we want to know. However, there are other ways of trying to get behind Jesus’ intent, and I will share one of them with you.

Parables remind me of the questions Socrates posed as he went about his day, such as “what is justice?” or “what is excellence?” Simple questions with big answers. But the real similarity resides in the way in which Jesus’ parables and Socrates’ questions call for answers. Not just to the question posed, but an answer that requires turning one’s life around. The Hebrew term for riddle, mashal, also means parable. It is up to us to find the answer. My favorite definition is that the parable is intended to “deceive the hearer into the truth.”

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The good atheist: Melvin Konner and Belief

The good atheist: Melvin Konner and Belief. Atheists generally don’t write good books. Not because they are atheists, but because their goal is to convince others that belief in God is bad. Most well-known among them are the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” as they have been called: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. The title of Hitchens’ book is not subtle: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

The thing about atheists like this is not that they don’t believe in God; it’s that their disbelief becomes a crusade against religion as the source of most bad things. I don’t like team sports, and classical music doesn’t do much for me. But it would never occur to me that those who like, or even love these things shouldn’t do it, even if I think a lot of money is wasted on big sports. Atheism today has become synonymous with aggressive atheism: belief is bad.

Awe

This is why Melvin Konner’s recent book, Believers: Faith in Human Nature, is so welcome. Raised an orthodox Jew, Konner became an atheist at 17, the result of several factors, including a college course in philosophy. But Konner’s book is not an argument for atheism. It’s an argument for understanding what belief is, where it comes from, and what it does for the believer.

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Bultmann forgets about Christ

Bultmann forgets about Christ. Rudolf Bultmann is probably the twentieth-century’s leading Protestant theologian, though some would give that title to Karl Barth. It hardly matters. The point is that Bultmann has been remarkably influential.

Perhaps his greatest influence has been on how to think about the kerygma (κήρυγμα), the message of the gospels. Bultmann is not subtle.

We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modem medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament. (New Testament and Myth, loc 107)

Miracle healings, walking on water, lots of bread and fish, heaven as up there—all that is part of the myth. How to distinguish the myth from the message without adopting Thomas Jefferson’s Deism, in which God becomes a distant watchmaker, someone who created the world, and has since stepped away? * How can kerygma still live?

Kerygma: the experience and the message

What remains is faith, and faith begins in wonder. Not in miracles, but in the experience of the sublime, “the beginning of terror that we are still just able to bear.” (Rilke) Kerygma is not just, or even primarily, about the message of the gospels. It is an encounter with God. Not with Christ, for Christ is a historical reality (Ladd, p 96). Kerygma is a pre-verbal encounter with the wholly other (Congdon, pp 23-24, 74). It can happen in an encounter with beauty, or in the experience of being alive after a close encounter with death. Boundary or limit experiences they are often called.

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The Resurrection

The Resurrection. Many liberal Protestants seem slightly embarrassed about the resurrection, as if it were part of the magical mystery world of the New Testament. Or at least this is what Wikipedia says. For most Christians, however, resurrection remains the central doctrine of Christianity (Evans, p 29). Believing in the resurrection is tantamount to being a Christian. I suppose I come closer to being a liberal Protestant, but the resurrection is more complicated than reflected by these two categories.

Resurrection in the time of Jesus

Among the elite at the time of Jesus, physical resurrection was abhorrent. The elite, mostly Sadducees, were Hellenistic (Greek) in their attitude toward the body: that it was the prison of the soul. Death meant the liberation of the soul from the body, as Socrates and Plato taught.

Among the less cultured Greeks, as well as the Philistines, belief in the resurrection of the body, today’s official belief among most Christians, was more common (Vermes, loc 612). During the years (forty of them) during which I taught Plato, I thought the Platonists were right. If there is an afterlife, the soul would be free of the burden, demands, and desires of the body. Physical resurrection seemed weird. But the more Christian theology I read, the more sense physical resurrection makes to me. Not as a statement of fact (I don’t know what the facts are), but as a statement about how humans are fundamentally embodied creatures. Life without the body would be less, not more, than it is on earth. Jürgen Moltmann’s argument is particularly persuasive.

Paul states the theological significance of resurrection

It is in Paul that the central theological significance of the resurrection was laid out. Many readers of the New Testament will be familiar with this passage.

If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. . . . If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Corinthians 15:14-19)

Evidence for the resurrection

The search for historical evidence of the resurrection seems misguided. The historical evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ and his crucifixion is sound. However, it puzzles me that such a brilliant scholar as N. T. Wright could conclude that the evidence for the resurrection provided by two far from certain facts, the empty tomb, and the posthumous appearances of the risen Jesus, make the resurrection as historically certain as the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, or the death of Augustus in 14 AD (p 710).

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Is Paul anti-Semitic? Does God play fair?

Paul’s letter to the Roman’s is difficult. One reason is because Paul seems uncomfortable with a couple of his own conclusions. But one thing is clear. It is the most sustained statement of Paul’s theology (Moo, loc 4011-4019). But what is that?

One theme concerns the relationship between Jews for Jesus and Gentiles for Jesus. The Jews came first, they remain God’s chosen people, but they remain stuck on the law. God is not concerned with the law. He is concerned with faith and justification.

Another theme is God’s wrath, as well as his caprice. How could God hate Esau before he was born (Romans 9:13)? (The Greek term used for hate is misei, and should not be rendered by a weaker verb. See Strongs 3404). What sense does that make?

A related theme is that it’s all up to God. We deserve nothing; whatever we get is due to the loving generosity of God.

What strikes me most is how Paul seems to struggle with the answers he comes up with, not always liking their implications, but with the result that his explanation is even more troubling.

Jews and Gentiles

For Paul, two things are striking about the Jews. They were and remain God’s chosen people. Abraham and the other patriarchs of the Hebrew Scriptures remain sacred to God (11:26). At the same time, Jews have taken a wrong turn. They zealously trust in the law, by which Paul means not only the Ten Commandments, but the purity codes spelled out in Leviticus and elsewhere.

Often times Paul is simply read as an argument for faith over works, but that’s too simple. By works Paul meant (as Luther meant) the works of the law. And faith is only revealed by the works of the spirit. Without the works of the law we would not know sin; but we are redeemed by faith. We need both; they are not exclusive.

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The Protestant Reformation was not all great

The Protestant Reformation was not all great. The Reformation (16^thand 17^th centuries), initiated by Martin Luther, is credited with the creation of the individual, and fostering the Enlightenment. This is the usual sketch, and its correct as far as it goes. I’m going to look at the good parts and the not so good parts. First, the good parts.*

The good parts of the Reformation

Many people know about Luther’s 95 theses, stuck on the church door in Wittenberg. In it he attacked the Catholic church’s practice of selling indulgences, which allowed the dead to get out of purgatory faster, a toll road for sinners. The practice was corrupt to the core. While his attack on the corrupt church helps explain Luther’s appeal, it is even more important to understand how Luther’s own religious experience lessened the fear that most people lived under five hundred years ago.

It’s difficult for most of us to grasp Luther’s sense of guilt and dread in the face of an angry God (Marty, loc 105). Of course, it was not just Luther’s dread, but almost all who believed in the Christian God, which means almost everybody. People trembled at the thought that when they died, Jesus would judge them, sending some to heaven and others to the fiery flames of Hell, including many who led exemplary lives, but had less than exemplary thoughts. That includes most of us. Since God knows our every thought, as well as sees our every act, there is no escape.

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Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong: one of the best books on religion I’ve read

Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong: one of the best books on religion I’ve read.

Karen Armstrong was a nun for seven years. She left the convent, partly because its discipline was harsh and inhuman, but primarily because she was unable to pray, and never even came close to the complete self-surrender which was the only path to God (p 9).

She had begun Oxford University in England while still a nun. She did well, but soon realized that she had no ideas of her own. On the contrary, she had been trained not to have them. A clever woman, she could put together the ideas of others, even use one criticize another, but that’s as far as she could go. This reminds me so much of graduate school, where I spent almost ten years of my life (I was a slow learner). At least in the social science and humanities, students are trained to put the ideas of others together in new ways, but rarely encouraged to think on their own.

While at Oxford, she began to experience panic attacks during which she would hallucinate, the world seeming to melt and fragment, faces around her dripping like wax (p 141). Years of psychoanalysis were useless, and eventually she was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. Proper medication stopped the seizures and the hallucinations. But the experience of the hallucinations stayed with her.

It is as though a comforting veil of illusion had been ripped away and you see the world without form, without significance, purposeless, blind, trivial, spiteful, and ugly to the core. (p 55)

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