For today's post, I want to go down a very different road than I normally do.
Here is a comment from Len Sweet (with which I wholeheartedly agree).
"Too much of today's pop Christianity sounds like bad Buddhism. Christianity is not a vague, amorphous, ethereal religion... Christianity is and has always been a religion of incarnation... it is inescapably material, physical and cultural" (Viral).
I read a lot in the area of spirituality, spiritual formation and spiritual direction. There is a significant part of contemporary Christian spirituality that is incorporating Buddhist practices in to the spiritual life. I think Sweet is spot on in his assessment.
As a side note, in recent weeks I have found similar comments and concerns in N.T. Wright (New Testament scholar), Robert Roberts (philosopher who specializes in the philosophy of the human person/psychology), and Baron von Hugel (spiritual director, teacher and author).
This is not a post against Buddhism, although I need to make a few statements about what Buddhism actually believes (I find that so many Christians have no idea about Buddhist teaching). I am not critiquing Buddhism simply repeating core tenets.
Neither is this post about personal interactions and relationships with Buddhists. In all things, Christians are to love and respect those who differ from us, while at the same time, have the freedom to assess, critique, dialogue, debate, and witness for Christ and His Way. How we do that is important, but not the concern here.
This post is about Christians who find Buddhist spirituality attractive and useful. This is at least "odd" because the gulf between Buddhism and Christianity is vast. They are not even close in their worldviews. They are fundamentally, essentially and non-negotiably different.
If the central beliefs of Buddhism are true, then Christianity if false. The opposite is also true. If even the essence of Christianity is true, then Buddhism is a deeply flawed and deficient way of life.
In the prevailing climate of pluralism, relativism and tolerance, there is the tendency for Christians to have an uncritical (even naive) borrowing and intermingling of other religious faiths in to the Christian faith. The result is that missiologists/anthropologists refer to as syncretism (or hybrid versions of faith). This is becoming more common in our time.
RESOURCES
By the way . . .
If you want more of an overview of the Buddhist worldview (core belief system) read the chapter in James Sire, The Universe Next Door.
Or the chapter in God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World, by Stephen Prothero.
Both Sire and Prothero are worth reading in their entirety.
If you would like to see a comparison and contrast of the Buddha and Jesus Christ, read Ravi Zacharias - The Lotus and the Cross (very short) and set as an imagined conversation between Jesus and Siddhartha (who became the Buddha).
ABOUT GOD:
There is no comparison between their views of God. Buddhism does not believe in a personal, conscious Being we name as God. Buddha is not God. The Buddha was a person who achieved "enlightenment." The word Buddha means "enlightened one." Christianity is personal, Trinitarian, Christocentric and relational when it comes to how God is understood. The Apostle Paul prays that we would be enlightened about this reality (Ephesians 1:18).
ABOUT THE HUMAN PERSON:
There is no comparison between their understanding of the nature of humanity. In Buddhism - your sense of individuality and personal self-existence is an illusion. You must transcend this illusion through a type of meditative experience designed to pierce the illusion and connect you with the undifferentiated ALL. You are a drop of water in the ocean of All that is. Christianity believes in personal identity, the dignity of being made in the image of God, the glorious love of a personal God for his creation.
ABOUT SPIRITUALITY:
There is no comparison in their understanding of spirituality. How can there be? The two main poles of spirituality are God and the human person. Spirituality is the experience of the person who encounters God. If the fundamental ideas of both God and the human person are so different, then spirituality (the connection of the person with God) will inevitably be different.
So Buddhism is world-denying, world-escaping, excessively interior in its preoccupation, withdrawing from the mundane and rather disembodied. Although, a bit whimsically, why is the Buddha (see the image above) so often pictured with an enormous belly? Apparently food is exempt from being an illusion.
Christianity is wonderfully incarnational, "embodied," earthy, grounded, rooted, world engaging, world transforming and in all this, experiences God and the glory of God incarnate.
The glory of God is the God who loves His creation, who weeps over what sin has done to it, and in great sacrifice becomes incaranate in the world for the sake of its redemption.
The primary spiritual discipline of meditation in Buddhism is for the purpose of emptying the mind of thought, ceasing to think and transcending rationality to the higher reality that everything is an illusion, including your personal sense of self. You move to the experience of being one with everything. And so the core belief. All is god. "(g)od" is all. All is one. To belief otherwise is to believe in an illusion.
Biblical meditation is a filling of the mind with truth that delights and transforms the one who meditates on this truth. Biblical meditation is a deeply personal, relational connectedness with the transcendent God who loves, visits, speaks, engages and recreates us in to the marred image of Christ. To believe otherwise (or not to believe at all) is to be deceived.
The practices of silence and solitude, quiet and rest, meditation and contemplation look quite different in these different ways. These practices are quite biblical, but not so well known. I think, because modern Christianity has not done so well with these practices, Christians look elsewhere and borrow uncritically from Buddhism (and other places), and don't realize that an alternative worldview is smuggled in with the practices.
SYNCRETISM AND REDEFINED FAITH:
What we have in the USA is what Sweet calls "bad" Buddhism. Much like American appetites that cannot stomach real Chinese food and so we greatly reinvent it to make it more palatable for our consumption, the Western mind cannot connect with real Buddhism. So Buddhism has been morphed (reinvented) to be more understandable and attractive (palatable for the western consumer) who would not be at all interested in the real fare.
By the way, when you actually study Buddhism and its expressions around the world, what you discover is that very few who live in countries where Buddhism is the official religion, even believe or practice "philosophical" Buddhism. It is simply an unworkable religion (that really isn't even the right word for Buddhism). Most Buddhists are more animistic in belief and practice.
So when a well known "evangelical" (probably former evangelical is more accurate) author writes a book on Christian spirituality and has generous references and a positive use of a variety of eastern religions and their advocates, along with a similarly generous use of secular psycho-therapeutic perspectives on the human person . . .
And that book has little Scripture in it . . .
Christ is barely mentioned . . .
the cross and resurrection are neglected . . .
sin is a non-existent category . . .
and there is bare mention of interpreters, authors and teachers within the evangelical tradition . . .
This is syncretism and its product is a sadly deficient, distorted (and I guess I should say) deceptive spirituality.
In the long run, it is not bad Buddhism I am really concerned about.
It is bad Christianity.
While I am FOR generous orthodoxy, I am against naive heterodoxy.
And I am always FOR, a robust, relational, biblical, incarnational, sacrificial, missional spirituality. I am for all those things because that is what JESUS CHRIST was for.
Brian K. Rice
Evangelicals on the Ignatian Way
Leadership ConneXtions International
