The man on the middle cross was the Christ I grew up with. Intellectually I may have understood that Love was present at Golgotha, but the painting captures better than any words the tone of my childhood faith: my sin was the direct cause of the horrendous torture and death of the most perfect person to walk on this earth. My ‘chestnuts’ were pulled from the fire only at the last minute with His resurrection, but I still was liable until I repented, “believed”, and gave my life to Him.
For Christians, of course, there is truth in this familiar narrative. But it truly was a religion about Jesus rather than the religion of Jesus. “Believing in Him” had less to do with his Sermon on the Mount than with his death on the cross. (No one saw a connection between the two.) We made little effort to understand how Jesus lived, how he saw the world, or how he came of age. We never asked ourselves from whence had come his extraordinary consciousness, what role the Shema of Judaism played in his spiritual formation, or from what wells he had drawn his Wisdom. Did his words really mean what our elders told us they meant? I needed to ask these questions.
When I first became seriously involved in interfaith work, I admit that I felt some trepidation. My faith had been forged in settings where the Christian Bible (usually the King James Version) was considered the inspired and literal Word of God. Christ was the answer to every question; Jesus was the only begotten Son of God and the Savior of the world. “Believing in Him” was the key to Eternal Life. There was no other way - not Jewish, not Buddhist, not Native American, not even most other Christian denominations. Even science was suspect.
If this is one’s worldview, then the most compassionate stance toward others is evangelical – to help them to see how their faith is incomplete until it is fulfilled in Christian belief and practice.
As I sat down with my Islamic or Hindu colleagues, I feared two things. Either I would come across as dogmatic and arrogant, or I would lose my faith altogether. It took many respectful encounters with loving practitioners from other traditions before I became comfortable in these settings. It took many years before I realized the profound paradox at the heart of genuine interreligious encounter: the more deeply I enter into the dialogue of mind and heart with others, the more real my own faith becomes. The more I appreciate the truth of other traditions, the more I cherish my own. The more I put myself in a position to learn from other faiths, the more expansive my own faith becomes, and the more spacious is my spiritual home.This class is for people like me. It is for those who are eager, as one theologian famously said, “to meet Jesus again for the first time”. It is for those who are willing to put aside old wine skins to taste new wine, who are adventurous enough to step out from the comfort of received tradition and step into an intense global conversation. It is for those who can live courageously without final answers, and engage in a conversation with no end in sight.
This class is primarily for Christians. Adherents from other traditions (or no tradition) are welcomed - and, indeed, their participation would improve the quality of our dialogue - but this course is not designed for them. I want contemporary Christians to become more aware of the rich and varied reflections from others about the central figure of our faith. They can help us to see that, in a spiritual sense, Jesus is larger than we dare imagine. He is more complex than we can comprehend. He is too big for any religion to contain, including ours.
The Jesus we will see through the eyes of others may seem like a stranger to us. Or he may seem strangely familiar. In either case, the comfortable “me and Jesus” attitude so common in our churches will be severely challenged. Yet as our appreciation grows for the essential mystery to which he points, a deeper, wider and living relationship with him also becomes possible.
Thus far I have only hinted at one troubling aspect of traditional Christian thinking: Christian “Triumphalism”. Now I wish to address it directly. In a narrow sense, Triumphalism is the belief that Judaism is fulfilled in Christianity, the so-called “Old Testament” in the New, the Old Covenant in a new one given in Christ Jesus.
More broadly, Triumphalism is the belief that while the classical philosophers and religions offered access to a partial truth, in actuality they were merely God’s way to prepare the world for the fullness of the revelation to come in Jesus. Not only Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, or even John the Baptist, but also Plato, Aristotle and others (or Lao Tzu, Confucius or even the Buddha himself) were necessary but subordinate forerunners of the Christian Gospel.
This is not my view. In fact, the opposite premise will govern this course. I believe that all religions are incomplete, including our own, and that we all must learn from each other. Our understanding of Jesus – the man, the teacher, the healer, the rabbi, the guru, the embodiment of Wisdom or the Incarnation of the Holy One – will become more vital precisely to the degree that we abandon this Triumphalist tendency and quiet our compulsion for orthodox (“right”) interpretations.
A second danger encountered in the early stages of interfaith dialogue is the naive belief that “all religions are really the same.” This often is meant as a generous and non-judgmental embrace of others, but there can be a pernicious if unnoticed side effect. Some Christian theologians go so far as to say that truly spiritual people in other faith traditions really are Christians but they don’t know it. Their Christian faith is hidden even to themselves. This reduces the potential for conflict with them, but it also devalues them and disrespects the genuine differences between religions. It fails to take seriously the core affirmations and worldviews that other traditions embody. In its own way it represents a subtle and patronizing form of Triumphalism.
I want to be clear about this: all religions are not the same. In this class we will consider what Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and Muslims, as well as various Christians, say about Jesus. But even if they honor him with their highest praise, I will not therefore assert that they are Crypto-Christian. It will be more respectful to allow each to speak with his or her own voice. It will be more productive to allow Buddhists to be Buddhists, Hindus to be Hindus, Jews to be Jews, Muslims to be Muslims, Christians to be Christians and agnostics to be agnostics.
I want to thank you for taking the time to participate with me in this exploration, for investing yourself in this journey of discovery, for doing the hard work of seeking Jesus for yourself. I look forward to our conversations.
By Budd Friend-Jones
September, 2012
Picture: Christ et Buddha, by Paul Ranson, 1889
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