Authentic Christianity
Fifth and finally: in my judgment, there should be an edginess to authentic Christianity. The use of the adjective “authentic” is, perhaps, questionable there—what makes Christianity authentic?—but I’m simply referring to the Christianity of our founding figures and texts: early Christianity, Jesus, Paul, and so forth. To say the obvious, for those of us who are Christian, we have a crucified Lord—think about it! We all know this, but what does it mean to follow a crucified Lord? To follow a person who was executed by the authorities, who was executed by the ruling powers of his time, the domination system of his time, the powers of this world, and maybe the best empire of the ancient world. The powers of this world killed Jesus and God vindicated him, which is one of the central meanings of Easter. Good Friday and Easter: executed by empire, vindicated by God. In the language of the book of Acts, Peter said to the authorities: “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (2:36).
To say the obvious, Christianity over the centuries has often become too comfortable with culture, pretty much from the time when it became the dominant religion of Europe, too embedded in convention, too wedded to this world, so it’s been difficult to distinguish conventional morality from what it means to be Christian. But I’m convinced there are times when it needs to become edgy, critical of the dominant culture, and affirmative of an alternate vision grounded in God’s passion for the well-being of the world. The message of authentic Christianity is that there is a better world and that better world, for the New Testament, is not primarily about heaven. There’s no denial of an afterlife in what I’m saying, but the better world we’re talking about is to occur on earth. “Your kingdom come on earth,” we pray. It’s especially important for us in our time to take seriously the edginess of Christianity, especially for those of us who are American Christians. What does it mean to be a Christian and a citizen of empire? Or, in Dorothee Soelle’s provocative phrase of fifteen years ago or so, “What does it mean to be a member of Pharaoh’s household and a Christian?”
Summary
I leave you with two very brief definitions of how I would characterize what a Christian is. First, at the center of the Christian life is a transforming relationship with God as known decisively in Jesus. If I were defining Jewish life, I would say that at its center is a transforming relationship with God as known decisively in Torah. The same applies to other religions. Finally, a Christian is somebody who lives the way within the framework of the Christian tradition, just as living within the Jewish tradition makes one Jewish and doing so within the Islamic tradition makes one Muslim, and so forth. There’s no claim that one of these is intrinsically better than the others, but there’s nothing terribly complex about defining what a Christian is. Christians are those who live out their relationship with God within the framework of this tradition.
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Lecture with Huston Smith given at the First Congregational Church, Berkeley, California, November 10, 2006.
Chapter 15
Encountering the Wisdom of Other Faiths
THE TITLE OF MY LECTURE TONIGHT IS “Seeing Religions Again: Religious Pluralism” or “Religious Pluralism: Seeing Religions Again.” And to give you a brief road map up front, there will be four main parts. In part one, I’m going to speak briefly about the fact of religious pluralism. In part two, I’m going to suggest a way of seeing religions. In part three, some comments about the similarities and differences among the religions. And then in part four, Christians and the issue of pluralism or, alternately, being Christian in an age of pluralism.
The Fact of Pluralism
I begin with part one, the fact of pluralism. To say the obvious, we live in an age of religious pluralism. Awareness of other religions and other cultural traditions is one of the central features of our time. To make this point, I want to refer to an important recent book—also highly readable—by Diana Eck, a professor at Harvard University and director of the Pluralism Project. The title of the book is A New Religious America. Let me briefly report to you some of the data she includes in that book about religious pluralism.
The central argument of the book is that religious pluralism, or religious diversity, is a fact of American life. The United States has recently and rapidly become the world’s most religiously diverse nation. The 1965 Immigration Act opened up immigration to people from nations outside of Europe, and the twofold result over the last thirty-five years has been, first, a dramatic increase in immigration from Asia, the Middle East, and to a lesser extent Africa and, second, a dramatic growth in the number of people in the States practicing religions other than Christianity and Judaism. Some of these folks are new immigrants, but many of them have been born in the United States as children of the first wave of immigrants that began in 1965. Thus, religious diversity or pluralism is not simply an intellectual issue within the academic study of religion; it is a cultural reality that Americans, as citizens of a historically Christian, Jewish, and secular nation, need to become aware of.
Among the evidence that Diana Eck cites: there are six million Muslim Americans. There are thus more Muslim Americans than the combined total of Episcopalians and Presbyterians—Episcopalians somewhat over two million, Presbyterians somewhat over three million. There are about the same number of Muslim Americans as Jewish Americans. There are four million American Buddhists; the majority of these are recent immigrants and American-born children of Buddhist immigrants, but there are also a fair number of North American—“European,” as it were—converts to Buddhism. Thus, there are more Buddhists in the United States than either Episcopalians or Presbyterians.
In lesser numbers, there are about a million Hindus, about as many as there are members of the United Church of Christ, and there are about three hundred thousand Sikhs. The phenomenon of religious pluralism, religious diversity, is not confined to major metropolitan areas; it is found in regional and even small cities. Eck writes about a huge white mosque in Toledo, Ohio; a great Hindu temple in Nashville, Tennessee; a Cambodian Buddhist monastery in the farmlands of Minnesota; a Sikh gurdwara in Fremont, California; Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist temples in Salt Lake City and Dallas; Cambodian Buddhist communities in Iowa and Oklahoma; Tibetan Buddhist retreat centers in Vermont and Colorado; and many more. Her conclusion is that the American religious landscape is changing very dramatically in our time. To quote her directly, “This is an astonishing new reality. We have never been here before.”
Now, this is very different from the world that I grew up in and that anybody in my generation grew up in. I grew up in a small town in North Dakota—probably not a representative sample of the United States, to be sure, but I think everybody in that town of fourteen hundred people would have identified themselves as Christian, and we certainly had no Buddhists or Jews or Muslims. Or, to use an example that goes beyond small-town North Dakota, in the middle 1950s, a scholar named Bill Herberg wrote a very well known book for the time about religious diversity in America. What’s interesting is the title of the book, Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. Fifty years ago, that’s what religious diversity in the United States meant. The change is dramatic, and thus there is a need, an imperative to understand other religions—an imperative that has been made more forced and urgent by the events of September 11.
The issue of religious pluralism is not simply a theoretical one about religions that we’ve heard of but might never encounter, but an immensely practical one. For those of us in this society who are Christians, being aware of religious pluralism and other religions can, it seems to me, enrich our understanding of Christianity and what it means to be Christian. I am persuaded that we see Christianity—its nature and purpose—more clearly when we see it within the framework of religious pluralism. Religious pluralism can help us understand our own tradition better. To refer again to Diana Eck, this time paraphrasing her, Eck says whoever knows only one religion is unlikely to understand what religion is about.
Seein
g Religions Again
I turn to part two: seeing religions again. Here I’m going to provide a compact introduction to the nature and function of religions—and note I’m using the plural—the essence and purpose of religions. I’m going to suggest how we might see the major religions of the world and thus also how to see Christianity. I will describe a general understanding of religions with six statements, all six statements commonly affirmed within the academic study of religion—that is, there’d be widespread agreement among religious scholars about these statements.
First statement about religions: Religions are cultural-linguistic traditions. Pretty abstract, but it’s actually a helpful definition. I owe this language to George Lindbeck, of Yale Divinity School. I’m not sure it’s original with him, but in his work is where I encountered it. What it means is that each religion originates within a particular culture and thus uses the language and symbols of that culture. Moreover, if a religion survives for any length of time, and all of the major religions have, it becomes a cultural-linguistic tradition in its own right. That is, it becomes a way of construing the world, of structuring the world, and with its own particular language and symbols.
Thus being Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim is a little bit like being French or Italian. To be French means not only knowing French; it means knowing something about the ethos of being French, it means to have lived within a French world and to have had that world structure your vision of life. Of course, there’s a sense in which being religious is different from this, because it’s a much more universal identity, one that transcends national, racial, and ethnic boundaries. But, nevertheless, it’s very helpful to think of religions as cultural-linguistic traditions, each with its own language, symbols, and so on.
Second statement about religions: Religions are human constructions. Religions are human constructions, or human products. This is a corollary of the first statement. As cultural-linguistic traditions, religions are human creations. Within that I’m including their scriptures (thus for Christians the Bible is a human product), their teachings, their doctrines, their rituals, their practices—all of these are human creations, human constructions. This time I use a phrase from a Harvard religious scholar, Gordon Kaufman. Kaufman speaks of religions as “imaginative human constructions.” He doesn’t use “imaginative” in a negative sense, as when we say something sounds really far-fetched. He means imaginative as both creative and using the language of the imagination, the language of images, symbols, story, and so forth.
Now, not all religious people would agree with the statement that religions are human products or human constructions. Within the three major Western religions, the Abrahamic traditions, as they are commonly called, there are many who would say that their religion comes from God, that it’s a divine and not a human product. I think you are all aware that official Muslim teaching is that the Qur’an was dictated by Allah to Muhammad. Within Judaism, Orthodox Jews typically affirm that the Torah—both the laws given to Moses on Mt. Sinai that are included in the Pentateuch and the oral Torah—was given directly by God to Moses. And fundamentalist Christians typically claim that the Bible is a divine product and thus infallible and inerrant. But within the framework of the academic study of religion, these claims look like a common human tendency to ground a sacred tradition in God. That is, lots of religious traditions say, “Our tradition comes from God.” In fact, this is one of the things that is characteristic of religions—they tend to ground their traditions in divine origin.
Those first two statements both stress the human origins of religion, but the third statement brings God back into the picture. Religions are responses to the experience of the sacred—or God or the Spirit, terms I use synonymously and interchangeably. I take the reality of God very seriously; I am utterly convinced that there is a “more”—to use William James’s marvelously generic term for the sacred—a stupendous, wondrous more. I’m convinced that this “more” has been experienced in every human culture and that the origin of the major religious traditions lies in the experiences of the “more.” So I see religions as human products, but human products created in response to the experience of the sacred in the particular culture in which each emerges.
Fourth statement: Religions are wisdom traditions. I owe this statement to a man I’m honored to call my friend, Huston Smith. He speaks about this a lot, that religions are wisdom traditions. Wisdom in both religion and philosophy is concerned with the question, “How shall I live? What is life about?” Well, this is what the religions to a large extent are about: they are disclosures about how to live—and by that I don’t mean just morals, but something more comprehensive. They are disclosures about life and reality. And it’s not just that those disclosures are individual responses to the questions; they are the accumulated wisdom of the past of centuries of thinkers, which range from very practical wisdom to theological and metaphysical wisdom. The religions are a treasure trove of wisdom.
Fifth statement: Religions are means of ultimate transformation. I owe this short statement to Frederick Strang, author of an introduction to religion textbook published some twenty-five years ago or so. Let me unpack that definition. Religions are means in the sense that they have a very practical purpose, and that practical purpose is ultimate transformation. When we speak of ultimate transformation, we mean not just psychological transformation, important as that is, but spiritual transformation, transformation of the self at its deepest level. That is the very practical purpose of religion. That transformation is from an old way of being to a new way of being, from an old identity to a new identity, and the fruit or product of this transformation across religious traditions is compassion, becoming more compassionate beings. This is central to all the major religions, and the saints of the various traditions look very similar in this respect.
And sixth and finally: Religions are sacraments of the sacred. Let me define the word “sacrament” here. Those of us who are Christians are familiar with the two universal sacraments of the Protestant and Catholic traditions and then the five additional sacraments of the Catholic tradition itself. But I’m using the word “sacrament” in a broader sense. A sacrament is a mediator of the sacred, or a sacrament is a mediator of the Spirit. A sacrament is anything finite and visible through which the Spirit becomes present to us. In this broad sense, nature can be a sacrament, music can be a sacrament. Virtually everything in human history has, for somebody, been a means whereby the Spirit has been mediated. To apply this definition to religions: the purpose of religions is to mediate the sacred. The purpose of their scriptures, their rituals, their practices is to become a vehicle or vessel for the sacred to become present to us.
If we take this seriously, it also has an effect upon what we think being religious means. Within the Christian tradition over the last three hundred years, especially for Protestants, but also for Catholics, because of the effect of the Enlightenment on Western Christianity, there’s been an enormous emphasis on believing. Being a Christian means believing in the Bible, in Jesus, in God, or in Christianity. If you see religion as a sacrament, the point is not to believe in the sacrament; the point is to live within the tradition and let the sacrament do its work within you, let the sacrament mediate the reality of the sacred to you. It seems to me that this is the purpose of the Buddhist tradition, the Muslim tradition, the Jewish tradition, and so forth, that they are means whereby the sacred becomes present to and works within people.
Similarities and Differences Among the Religions
I turn now to part three. If you reflect on the similarities and differences between religions, you arrive at the very simple, very elementary conclusion: Religions are both alike and different. I’ve already touched on this somewhat by speaking of the six characteristics the religions have in common. But to say a bit more about their commonality, I want to mention four things here. First, they are grounded in experiences of the sacred. This is most obvious with the mystical strand of each religious tradition—th
e mystical strand is the most experiential of each tradition, and the mystical strands of the various religions are very similar to each other.
Second, they’re very alike in the paths that they teach. Most religions have a path, a “way” at the center of their message. This is perhaps most apparent in Buddhism, which speaks of the Eightfold Path, but teaching about the way or the path is also utterly central to the Christian tradition. The earliest name of the Christian tradition was, according to the book of Acts, “the Way” (2:36). The paths that the religions teach are remarkably similar. Within the Christian tradition, it’s symbolized by the cross as a metaphor for the internal, psychological, spiritual process of transformation—namely, dying to an old way of being and being born to a new way of being, dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity. At the center of the Buddhist way or path is letting go, which means letting go of one’s prior understanding of who one is and what life is about and being born into a new understanding of all of that, not just a cognitive, intellectual understanding, but a new way of being. It’s also central to the Muslim tradition. The word “Islam” itself means “submission,” meaning radical centering in God and therefore not centering in culture or tradition or yourself. In the Muslim tradition, one of the sayings attributed to Muhammad is, “Die before you die.” That’s the same thing as death and resurrection as a metaphor for a process that happens in the midst of this life: “Die before you die.”
Days of Awe and Wonder Page 16