Gift and Duty

Where Grace and Merit Meet

De Neui

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532638718
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Is the Christian concept of grace anathema to the social structure of merit-making found in Buddhist karmic communities? Are all Buddhist forms of merit-making purely for religious purposes to assuage cosmic consequences or are there other reasons? Are there not Christian churches who operate under a legalistic view of God's divine wrath and are in essence living as karmic communities of the Christian type? The result of discussions about these and other questions is the volume you now hold in your hand. SEANET proudly presents what is number 14 in its series of missiological reference texts, Gift and Duty: Where Grace and Merit Meet. Each of the ten authors presented here represent a particular perspective, both Christian and Buddhist, that can inform the other. The goal of this volume is to lead to a deeper understanding of the significance of diverse religious and cultural perspectives.

Part I

Religious Foundations

‘Therefore everyone who hears

these words of mine

and puts them into practice

is like a wise man

who built his house on the rock.’

Matthew 7:24

1

Can Christians Use Karma Theory?

Russell H. Bowers, Jr.

Observing two occasions where the Bible employs outside imagery to articulate its own ideas, this chapter concludes that non-Jewish and non-Christian thought can provide legitimate tools for evangelism. For many adherents of other religions, Christianity appears arcane and abstruse. What may help them understand are analogies to ideas they already accept. Using non-biblical thought to illustrate the Bible’s message does not imply the former to be either authoritative or entirely true. It is therefore not syncretism. The chapter then outlines one learned Buddhist exposition of karma. It proceeds to identify parallels and differences between karma and grace, and to suggest why the latter provides a hope for humanity that is more satisfying both logically and existentially.

Citing Outside Sources

Were the Buddha to stand before us today and declare, “Friends, two plus two equals four,” what would you say? I hope you would agree he is right. Acknowledging that he is would not make you a Buddhist, because two plus two does in fact make four. “Four” is the answer not because Buddha says so; it just is. Were we to argue that the answer is four because Buddha says so, that would be considering him an authority figure. We would then be Buddhists. But this is not the case in simply acknowledging when Buddha gets something right. As lovers of truth, we should be glad when anyone gets anything right. It does no good to allege that his accurate math is a demonic ploy to lure Christians into lowering their defenses and accepting his whole system. He simply happens to be right in his addition; we can gladly agree that he is, and remain neither syncretists nor compromisers.

The Bible is not embarrassed to acknowledge when non-Christians in the New Testament or non-Jews in the Old are right. Sometimes these unexpected truth-speakers speak or act better than do their more orthodox contemporaries. Josiah, for example, was one of Judah’s most godly kings. One day his southern neighbor, Egypt’s Pharaoh Neco, set out for war against the Babylonians, to the north and east. Judah lay between, and Josiah marched to confront Neco. Pharaoh queried, “What quarrel is there, king of Judah, between you and me? It is not you I am attacking at this time, but the house with which I am at war. God has told me to hurry; so stop opposing God, who is with me, or he will destroy you.” The Old Testament pharaohs are not generally presented as paragons of truth and piety. So whom should we believe is right in this case—a godly Judean king, or a pagan Egyptian pharaoh? Granted, Neco said that God told him to hurry, but why should we imagine he was talking about the one and true God? Was it not more likely to have been a deity from his own pantheon? The answer emerges from what follows: “Josiah, however, would not listen to what Neco had said at God’s command but went to fight him on the plain of Megiddo. Archers shot King Josiah, so they put him in his other chariot and brought him to Jerusalem, where he died” (2 Chr 35:20–24). Neco of Egypt was right; godly Josiah of Judah wrong. Josiah “would not listen to what Neco had said at God’s command.” So he died, and Judah declined into apostasy and captivity. God had indeed spoken to Pharaoh Neco, not to King Josiah. What matters is truth, not the one who happens to speak it. The sons of this age at times do prove more shrewd than the sons of light (Luke 16:8).

Sometimes the Bible employs imagery—including philosophical and religious imagery—from outside Jewish and Christian circles to articulate its own ideas. Genesis 1 is the Bible’s most straightforward account of earth’s origin. God speaks, logically and sequentially, and formless vacuity acquires shape and inhabitants. Although the earth was “formless and empty” (tōhû wāḇōhû) before God’s speech, Genesis 1 envisions no sentient opposition to his work of creation. No one or no thing (other than inanimate watery chaos) stood in God’s way and needed to be defeated.

Not so with neighboring mythology. The Sumerians and their neighbors invoke Tiamat. She is the roiling, primordial sea, often personified as a dragon. After giving birth to various Mesopotamian gods, Tiamat is killed by Marduk. Marduk then uses Tiamat’s corpse as raw material to create the earth—half to form a dome to separate waters above from waters below, and half to form terra firma itself. Certain themes in this myth parallel Genesis, such as the primordial chaotic waters, and a dome created to separate upper waters from lower.

Though Genesis envisions no such sentient serpent whom Yahweh must first conquer in order to create, other biblical passages do. A dozen times in Job, the Psalms, and Isaiah, biblical writers refer to Leviathan or Rahab. Leviathan—“the twisted one,” perhaps derived from the Arabic root lwy “to twist”—is found in Job 3:8; 41:1; Ps 74:14, 104:26; Isa 27:1 bis; Rahab—“the proud one,” from rāhav “behave proudly”—occurs in Job 9:13, 26:12; Ps 87:4; 89:10; Isa 30:7, 51:9. These are “different names for the same monster.”1 “Rahab” is “an alternative for ‘Tiamat,’ the Babylonian name of the dragon of darkness and chaos.”2 “Though this is not mentioned in Genesis, fragments of a creation story known from Ugarit, where God subdues the sea, are found throughout the Bible and in rabbinic literature.”3 The above biblical passages mirror three themes common to various non-Jewish creation myths: a repressive monster who restrains creation, a heroic god who defeats the monster and releases the forces necessary for life, and the god’s ultimate control of these forces.4

Does, then, the Bible teach that this monster, Tiamat, actually existed, and that God had to defeat and dismember her to provide raw material for what he created? Or is this rather “a shared conceptual world which serves as a medium of communication,”5 “a helpful metaphor to describe Yahweh’s creative activity”?6 Surely it must be the latter. Mythopoeic allusions in Job, for example, “are merely borrowed imagery from the ancient Near Eastern cultural milieu,”7 not borrowed theology. “It is inconceivable that these strict monotheists intended to support their view from pagan mythology, which they undoubtedly detested and abominated, unless they were sure that their hearers would understand that their allusions were used in a purely figurative sense.”8 Stories such as these were used simply because “Canaanite mythic imagery was the most impressive means in that ancient cultural milieu whereby to display” the point that the author was trying to make.9 This is simply “[a]n old myth concerning the triumph of good over evil” that “was taken over from ancient Canaan and transformed by the Hebrews.”10

So thoug...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Religious Foundations
• Part II: Cultural Perspectives