is what i do

Continuing with Faith Commons…. Bill asks the question, “Can the Message of Jesus be Multi-Religious?”

I’d like to tackle Bill’s question from a perspective that’s almost certainly different from that shared by most members of the Commons. From that perspective—rationalist, scientific, historical, anti-monotheist, heavily influenced by the Buddha’s teaching and by Taoism—I see several problems with presenting Bill’s “Good News” to other cultures as a message that they can accept without significant alteration in their cultural world view.

• First, the message of Jesus, as it is presented in the New Testament, is inconsistent. Jesus sometimes appears as a shaman, as when he comes striding across the water to chide the apostles in their rocking boat; sometimes he appears as a revolutionary, denying the authority of the priests, making a shambles of the temple grounds, offering a radical message of humility, individual responsibility, comradeship and love; sometimes he appears as a stern rabbi, with all the arrogance and intolerance that I came to associate with the rabbis I knew in my half-heartedly Jewish youth; again he appears as the hierophant, making veiled allusions to secret mysteries, speaking in parables; and sometimes he comes off as a simple shill for Yahweh, God the Father. Books have been written about Jesus in all of those guises.

  The inconsistencies in the presentation of Jesus’s message is not surprising, considering that the message comes to us filtered through four (at least) distinct observers, none of whom were contemporaries of Jesus or even of those who might have seen him and heard his teachings. And the gospels have clearly been edited and amended by those whose agendas were probably closer to the Church-builder Paul than the temple-wasting revolutionary Jesus.

  Understandable though they might be, such inconsistencies must appear puzzling to those brought up in a tradition whose scriptural sources were much closer in time and authority to the founders of the tradition. I’m thinking particularly of Buddhist sutras preserved in the Pali canon, the Taoist Tao Te Ching and the Inner Teachings of Chuang Tzu, and the Analects of Kung Fu Tzu (Confucius). Textual difficulties exist with all of those writings, and a direct path between the historical teacher and the canonical teachings is impossible to map precisely and certainly. But in every one of those traditions, the authority of the text, its accuracy as a reflection of the person whose teachings it reveals, is stronger and better attested from textual and historical evidence than is the connection between the teachings of the historical Jesus and the words of Jesus as they are presented in the Gospels.

  And all of those teachings have more internal consistency and a more coherent focus than the Gospels.

• Second, except for the most radical re-interpretations of Jesus as revolutionary humanist or pagan shaman, every interpretation of his teachings is bound up inextricably with soteriological and theological considerations: almost every version of Jesus is founded on the idea of a single all-powerful God, Creator of the world and authority for moral behavior, and of an afterlife in which people, having been judged by God, are consigned to heaven or to hell. Although Christians like Stephen Mitchell and Huston Smith have tried, perhaps unconsciously, to insert the notion of God into their translations and commentary on various Eastern traditions, monotheism is essentially incompatible with those traditions as I understand them, and most of the focus in those traditions is on this life and not on whatever comes after.

  Even Buddhism, with its concept of the karmic round, rejects speculation on the precise mechanisms involved. At least, the Buddha himself rejected such speculation. When he was confronted by a monk with the demand that he explain exactly what happened to us after we’ve left our physical bodies, the Buddha came very close to being annoyed, and he refused to answer the monk’s question. “I never promised you,” he told the questioning monk, “that I would answer the question, what becomes of our selves after our bodies die.” And he said that such speculation was useless and time-wasting. his message, he said, involved just the nature of human suffering, the cause of that suffering, and the way to end the suffering, through an eightfold path—right point of view, right purpose, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right diligence, right mindfulness, and right concentration—that involves no theological concepts, nor, indeed, anything that Bill might characterise as “spiritual”.

  And the rewards for practicing that path were immediate and accessible to experience. The Buddha’s advice to a wealthy family man, in what I’ve translated as The Longshanks Sutta, is entirely practical, having more in common with the advice one might get from a particularly perceptive psychologist than with the advice one would typically get from a church pastor. And the Buddha’s five rules for lay people, essentially the Buddhist equivalent of the Ten Commandments, contain nothing that would correlate with the first five commandments. here’s the Buddha’s full list:

  1. Don’t kill
  2. Don’t take what’s not given
  3. Don’t speak so as to deceive or cause discord
  4. Don’t misbehave sexually: observe your vows and treat your sexual partners with respect
  5. Don’t use alcohol or any other substance that makes you careless and stupid

  Pretty simple and unambiguous, and while there’s nothing there that would flummox a good Christian, there’s a lot that the Christian would add and that the Buddha would likely dismiss, politely, as not particularly “skillful”.

• Third, there is, in the assumption that Jesus presents a coherent “message”, and that the message is indeed “Good News”, an unqualified acceptance of Jesus as savior. The purpose of life is to reconcile with the Father, and the way to the Father is through the Son.

  While that part of the message might be (and, clearly, has been) appealing to many different people from many different cultures, there is no doubt that when those people, responding to the appeal, accept Jesus as their Savior, they are bound, if not by their culture’s rules and priestly strictures, then by the demands of their new priests and ministers, to abandon the false beliefs in which they were raised, or to re-interpret those beliefs in terms of the Christian story: that we are all born sinners, that God sent his Son to die on the cross and so redeem our sins, and that to participate in that redemption, we must accept rebirth in Jesus.

For all of those reasons, I’d have to answer Bill’s question with a qualified “no”. The reason for the qualification is that there are, of course, elements in the message of Jesus, as it comes to us through the Gospels, that are clearly in accord with the teachings of many other traditions. There are even some, such as the focus on forgiveness, that are radically new and welcome to a quarrelsome world. But.

For someone raised in a non-Christian tradition and pursuing a non-Christian discipline, there is always, reading the gospels, a “but”.

“Blessed are the humble in spirit.” Well, yes. I can buy that.

“The kingdom of heaven is theirs.” Come again? That one has no referent in my experience or in the belief systems I’ve inherited and developed. Not for any value of “blessed”.

I see the first part of the statement that opens the Sermon on the Mount, not so much as a statement of fact that is surprising in itself and requires explanation, but, rather, as a statement that helps us understand why humility is a good thing; those who practice it are blessed, for some reasonable, non-theological value of “blessed”. That is, humble people are more likely to lead lives that are full of friendships and contentment and relatively free of conflict and frustration.

So it goes with a lot of the gospel teachings. I can walk with Jesus when it comes to most of the ethical values that his teachings promulgate, but I don’t see the need for the spiritual connections he makes. And when he tells me that the only way to the Father is through him, I step away a little. For one thing, I don’t want the Father in my life, in any form. And for another, I think it’s a little crazy to claim such a privileged gatekeeper position for one who recommends humility and who points out, insistently, that he is the son of Man.

Bill claims that Christianity, prior to the Eighteenth Century, “mostly moved into culture rather than converting it.” That’s a broad generalization, and, while I believe that it’s mostly true, it has to be interpreted pretty specifically. As a technique, I think, it worked better with polytheistic and animistic cultures than it did with non-theistic cultures. A Hindu, for example, or a follower of Santería, hearing the story of Jesus, has little difficulty folding that story and its miscellaneous persona into a tradition that is rich in similar stories. The story plays much less well, I think, in a Confucian culture, or one based on Taoist or Buddhist traditions.

And even the cultures that were willing to hear the story of Jesus as another story of another set of gods and heroes were not left in peace with such a bemused understanding. If it wasn’t the first round of missionaries, then it was the second or third, but they inevitably meddled, and people who accepted Jesus in any form were forced to make the choice: either Jesus was the Way, the only Way, or they were out of the church and had to abandon the various material benefits conferred by their membership therein. Christianity, although it has proved itself capable, in isolated congregations, of true tolerance and a humility befitting its founder, has never been able to blend such tolerance with missionary zeal.

So, to Bill, I would suggest that the Good News he hears is probably harmonious to my ears, but it would not be harmonious to those who are staffing the missions that are working today in every third world country. If you are truly going to “move into” a foreign culture, it requires a level of acceptance that most of the proselytizers would be offended at the thought of. Some of the early Christian visitors to non-Christian cultures were, indeed, so accepting. The first Jesuits into China, for example, admired the culture they found and recommended to Rome that the Chinese be accepted as communicants without the requirement that they make a specifically Christian confession. And if their recommendations had been accepted, we would be living in a dramatically different world. But they were not.

And the first British rulers of the Raj were, many of them, erudite and tolerant people, holding their newly subject peoples in deep admiration and working hard and productively to come to an understanding of their traditions. Indeed, that is an aspect of colonialism that is severely under-appreciated today. (For an interesting review of how the Europeans absorbed, and, in a sense, created “buddhism”, see Pankaj Mishra’s excellent memoir/history, “An End to Suffering”.)

That’s my (long) take on the matter. I’m interested in your comments. (Note: I’m cross-posting this piece to Faith Commons. I’ve turned comments off here; if you’re interested in making a comment, go the Faith Commons posting.)