Without Buddha I Could Not be a Christian

Paul F. Knitter

• Publisher: Oneworld Academic
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781780742489
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

An honest, unflinching tale of re-finding one's faith, from one of the world's most famous theologians

A new updated edition of Professor Knitter's honest, unflinching account of re-finding one's faith

Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian narrates how esteemed theologian, Paul F. Knitter, overcame a crisis of faith by looking to Buddhism for inspiration. From prayer to how Christianity views life after death, Knitter argues that a Buddhist standpoint can encourage a more person-centred conception of Christianity where individual religious experience comes first, and liturgy and tradition second.

Moving and revolutionary, this edition comes with a new conclusion – ‘Jesus and Buddha Both Come First!’

‘A compelling example of religious inquiry.’ New York Times

‘One of the finest contemporary books on the encounter between religions in the heart and soul of a single thoughtful person.’ Library Journal

1

NIRVANA AND GOD THE TRANSCENDENT OTHER

It’s a universal experience, I suspect, that growing up is not only a wonderful and exciting and rewarding experience; it is also, and often even more so, a painful and bewildering and frustrating ordeal. That’s natural. To leave the familiar, to move into the unknown, and to become something we weren’t can be scary and demanding.

If this is true of life in general, it should also be true of religious faith. More precisely, if figuring out who we really are as we move from childhood to so-called maturity is for most of us a process in which progress takes place through grappling with confusion, we should expect the same process to operate in figuring out who God is. That has certainly been my experience. As I’ve grown older, my faith in God has, I trust, grown deeper, but that’s because it has been prodded by confusion. No confusion, no deepening.

Just why human growth makes for problems in religious growth has to do with the natural process of growing up. Our spiritual intelligence and maturity have to keep pace with our emotional intelligence and maturity. How that syncopated growth takes place, if it does at all, will be different from person to person. But I think there are some general reasons, especially for people in the United States, why this syncopation lags. For many Christians, while their general academic education matures with their bodies and intelligence, their religious education (if they had any) all too often ends with eighth or twelfth grade. They have to face adult life with an eighth-grade, or teenage-level, religious diploma.

That can make for difficulties, mainly because being a grown-up means taking responsibility and thinking for oneself. That requires finding reasons in one’s own experience for affirming, or rejecting, what one took from Mom and Dad with a child’s trusting, but often blind, faith. And making connections between an adult’s experience and a child’s image of a Divine Being up in heaven running the show may be as impossible as fitting into your high-school graduation suit or dress twenty or even ten years later.

Add to such tensions the fact that we live in a world (more vocal in Europe than the U.S.) in which scientists keep answering the questions for which we thought God was the response, or psychologists and political scientists keep pointing out how religion is a more effective tool for manipulation than for maturation, and it becomes even clearer why passing from religious childhood to religious adulthood runs into the kind of problems that either block or terminate the process.

Way back in 1975, the very first graduate theology course I taught (at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago) was titled “The Problem of God.” For me, and for many, the problem remains. As I try to sort out and identify the different faces of my God problem – or, the reasons why I so often find myself wincing when I hear or read how we Christians talk about God – I find three discomforting images: God the transcendent Other, God the personal Other, and God the known Other.

In no way can I provide neatly packaged answers to a lineup of questions that have teased and tormented many a mind much more erudite than my own. But I do want to try to explore and better understand – for myself and for others – how Buddhism has helped me grapple with such questions and even to come up with some working answers.

In what follows in this chapter (and in subsequent chapters) I hope to carry on what John Dunne in his wonderful little book from back in the 1970s, The Way of All the Earth, called the “spiritual adventure of our time:” the adventure of passing over to another religious tradition in as open, as careful, and as personal a way as possible, and then passing back to one’s own religion to see how walking in someone else’s “religious moccasins” can help one to understand and fit into one’s own.

That’s what I’ll be doing in the three segments that make up the structure of each of this book’s chapters. First I’ll try to sketch as clear a picture as possible of the struggles I’m experiencing in a particular area of Christian belief and practice. Then I’ll pass over to how a Buddhist might deal with these struggles and questions. And finally I’ll pass back and try to formulate what I have learned from Buddhism and what I think can make for a retrieval and a deepening of Christian belief.

MY STRUGGLES: THE TRANSCENDENT OTHER

Somewhere, Carl Gustav Jung stated that according to his experience with his clients, when religious people move into the territory of middle-age, they start having problems with a God imaged as a transcendent Other – that is, as a Being who exists “up there” or “out there” in a place called heaven. That certainly describes me and my problems. In fact, though I may have been a late bloomer in many aspects of my life, in this area I was, according to Jung’s forecast, quite precocious. By my mid-twenties I had growing difficulties in wrapping my mind as well as my heart around the picture of God as Other. As I have struggled, it’s become clearer to me that otherness itself is not the real problem. There have to be others, especially certain “significant others,” in our life if it is going to be healthy and fruitful. Wouldn’t God merit a place on the top of my list of significant others?

The stumbling stone has to do with the way God is portrayed as different from all the other significant others in my life. He (for the rest of this section it feels appropriate to use the traditional male pronoun for God) is the transcendent Other. Or as I was taught during my years of theological studies in Rome back in the 1960s, God is the totaliter aliter – the totally Other, infinitely beyond all that we are as human and finite beings. In his transcendence, God is, we were taught, infinitely perfect, infinitely complete, happy unto himself, in need of nothing. “Ipsum esse subsistens” was the Latin label we memorized – God is “Self-subsistent Being,” Being who originates from himself, who is dependent solely on himself, and could be happy all by himself.

An Other in need of no other

Admittedly, this image of God as Self-subsistent Being is more a legacy of Greek philosophy than biblical narratives (though some Bible scholars see its roots in the declaration of God as “I am who I am” in Exodus 3:14). When I thought about this, I realized that this means that God is an Other who really doesn’t need others, and so in his self-sufficiency cannot really be affected by others. In fact, that’s pretty standard Christian theology: God does not have any needs that would make him dependent on creatures – needs that would tarnish the perfection and self-sufficiency of God. Theologians through the centuries (conditioned, I might add, by the Greek and very male notion of perfection as self-sufficiency) have acted as bodyguards around God, making sure that no one really touches him. To be touched and changed by something that is not God – that would be, as it were, a weakness that is not permitted by God’s infinite otherness.

But wait a minute. This is only half the picture of God in Christian doctrine. The God of Abraham and Moses and Jesus is also a God of love. Christianity affirms that the God who is infinitely other, infinitely perfect and powerful, is also a God who infinitely loves. Creation is the supreme sign and expression of that love, and it is so, theologians explain, precisely because this God, who in his self-sufficiency and perfection didn’t have to create, did so! To do something that one doesn’t have to do, to give of oneself even when one in no way needs to – that, say the theologians, is love at its finest.

But is it? Here is where I stumbled again. In my thinking as well as in my praying, in my efforts to image and in my efforts to feel the Divine, I could not see how Christian teaching succeeded in holding together God’s infinite otherness with God’s infinite love, or God’s transcendent being beyond this world with God’s immanent action in this world.

To start with, if we believe that God is love and that creation is the expression of this love, but then immediately add that God did not have to create, it sounds like God did not have to express his love. But what kind of a love is that? A love that can just exist, without finding expression? Is there such a love? Can we imagine a person being full of love but never showing it, or putting it into action? Theologians respond by explaining that God’s inherent, infinite love is expressed within himself, between the relations that make up the Trinity. So God’s love could be satisfied with being only an internal, self-love? ... Hmmm. We have words for such love. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I have to be honest. A love that doesn’t need to be expressed just doesn’t make sense – or it’s a bit sick.

Creation from scratch

Further problems in reconciling God’s love in creation with traditional understanding of God’s transcendent otherness arise from the way Christian doctrine has understood creation. I’m supposed to believe in a “creation out of nothing” (creatio ex nihilo). God produced the world from scratch; he had nothing to work with. Theologians have insisted on this (it’s not that clear in the Bible) for two reasons: to make sure that there was nothing around before creation (because it would have come from somewhere else besides God) and to make sure that God didn’t spin out the world from God’s self (because that would have put the world on God’s level and so undermined the divine transcendence). So there’s a clear line of demarcation between God and creation; it’s the line between Producer and produced, between the totally Infinite and the totally finite, between the Transcendent and the immanent. For me, the line of demarcation feels and looks like a chasm.

But that, Christian theology announces, is precisely the marvel and mystery of Christianity. It proclaims a God who has crossed the chasm! A God who, already among the people of Israel, has chosen to enter history. And that choice and that entrance have come to their total and final fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth, for in him God has become history by becoming human. The transcendence of God, for Christians, has become immanent and present within creation, for Christians believe in a God who not only acts in history but becomes incarnate and “takes flesh” in history.

Here we’re touching the very heart of Christianity, and as I will try to explain in Chapter 5, this is why I remain a Christian. But problems still remain in bringing together in a coherent, engaging manner the abiding Christian insistence on the transcendent otherness of God and a convincing affirmation of God’s action and incarnation in the world. To summarize in what I hope is a not too simplistic statement: given the chasm-like dividing line between God and the world, God’s engagement in our history turns out to be one way, preferential, and, in its highest incarnational form, one time.

A one-way street

It’s one way because given the Christian insistence on the perfection and unchangeability of God, God can certainly make a difference in the world. But the world can never make any difference for God. I remember my guarded perplexity when Father Van Roo, S.J., teaching us the “De Deo Uno” course (“On the One God”) at the Gregorian University in Rome, carefully led us through the distinction that God’s influence on the world is real, but the world’s influence on God is “rationis tantum” – loosely translated, only figments of our mind’s imagination. If the world could affect God, the professor clarified, it would tarnish his perfection and independence.

So God’s action in history is a one-way street. But it also seems to be a street constructed rather preferentially, in some neighborhoods but not in others. What I’m getting at is something I’ve heard frequently from my undergraduate students: God seems to play favorites; he acts here, but not there; in Jewish history but not in Canaanite history. This pushes us back to the transcendent divide between God and the world. Since they’re two totally different realms and since God is in total charge, his actions in history and the world have to cross a divide. God has, as it were, to build bridges.

And bridges, if I may extend the analogy, are built here and there. If they were everywhere, there would be no divide! This makes God’s actions in the world interventions rather than natural or spontaneous happenings. And the interventions are “choices:” God freely chooses to act because, remember, he doesn’t have to act. But then his choices seem to be selective, preferential, as if God loves some of his children more than others.

This last difficulty hangs heavily on what Christianity proclaims as the best of its good news: that this transcendent God has “come down” from his transcendent heaven and has identified, or become one with, his creation. The Divine was “made flesh” (John 1:14). Here the chasm no longer exists. Here we have the marvel of God’s love – to “give up” the privileges of divinity, to cross the divide, and become like us in all things except sin. Miraculous, marvelous, incredible as it is, however, it still bears, for me and for many Christians, all the problems of a preferential intervention. This miracle of God becoming human happens not only at a particular time, within a particular people; it also happens, Christians insist, only once. Only in Jesus, nowhere else. We’ll explore this issue more carefully in Chapter 5. For the moment I’ll just state my struggle: while I’m perplexed by God having to “come down” in order to be part of this world, I’m even more puzzled over why he did so only once.

Dualism is the problem!

Even though many of my teachers at the Gregorian University in the 1960s may have been overly conscientious in their determination to guard God’s transcendent untouchability, even though God’s otherness may weigh more heavily on my generation’s shoulders than on my children’s, still, for many contemporary Christians I know that there is a deep-reaching, fundamental problem in the way Christians image and talk about God-the-Other. I’m going to give the problem a philosophical name, but it points to a personal malaise that many Christians feel at least once a week when listening to Sunday sermons or singing Sunday hymns.

Christianity, throughout most of its history (because of its historical conditioning, not because of its inherent nature), has been plagued with the problem of dualism. My dictionary defines dualism as: “a state in which something has two distinct parts or aspects, which are often opposites.” My own simplistic definition would be: dualism results when we make necessary distinctions, and then take those distinctions too seriously. We turn those distinctions into dividing lines rather than connecting lines; we use them as no-trespassing signs. We not only distinguish, we separate. And the separation usually leads to ranking: one side is superior to and dominant over the other. Thus, we have the dualism of matter and spirit, East and West, nature and history, male and female, God and the world.

Here’s our problem, I think. We Christians (we’re not the only religion to do this) have distinguished God and the world, or the Infinite and the finite. Such distinctions are right and proper; indeed, necessary. But then we’ve made much too much of our neat distinctions. We’ve made these distinctions too clear, too defined. We have so insisted on the infinite distance between God and the world that we’ve ended up not with God and creatures on two ends of the same playing field but in two different stadiums! We have so stressed how different, how beyond, God is from creatures that our attempts to “connect” the two turn out to be contrived or artificial or partial or unequal.

That’s the problem with dualism: it so stresses the difference between two realities, it so separates them, that it cannot then get them back together again and show how the two belong together, complement each other, need each other, form a genuine relationship with each other. That’s it! That’s the crux of the problem: Christian dualism has so exaggerated the difference between God and the world that it cannot really show how the two form a unity.

Of course, what I have summed up in these pages does not represent all of Christian tradition and experience, and even of Christian theology. But it does echo the dominant voices and reflect the prevailing images not only in popular Christian beliefs bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Preface: Am I Still a Christian?
• 1 Nirvana and God the Transcendent Other
• 2 Nirvana and God the Personal Other
• 3 Nirvana and God the Mysterious Other
• 4 Nirvana and Heaven
• 5 Jesus the Christ and Gautama the Buddha
• 6 Prayer and Meditation
• 7 Making Peace and Being Peace
• Conclusion: Promiscuity or Hybridity?
• A New Conclusion: Jesus and Buddha Both Come First!
• Glossary
• Sources and Resources
• Index