What Christians Can Learn from Other Religions: by J. Philip Wogaman

Author:J. Philip Wogaman [Wogaman, J. Philip]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Published: 2014-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

Buddhist Atheism

What about the more fundamental faith in the reality of God? Is Buddhism atheistic? If so, what can we possibly learn from that?

Sometimes Buddhism is characterized as the only major world religion that does not believe in God. That is vigorously debated, both within and beyond the Buddhist community; it may partly come down to matters of definition. It is beyond my purpose here to try to resolve the debate. It is certainly true that many, if not most, Buddhists avoid talking about God. In a sense God-talk is considered by Buddhist thinkers as changing the subject from what we should be talking about. To focus our attention on God as center and source of all being is to be distracted from the primary task of life.

Our central purpose is to achieve enlightenment, a process requiring great concentration and progressive freedom from the distractions and illusions that constantly prey on us. What is enlightenment? Central to Buddhism is the belief that enlightenment cannot be conveyed in words. It cannot be described. You, like Buddha himself, will know it when you have it! Its fruits, its effects will then be evident to you and to others. In the most sublime sense of the word, you will have become a truly spiritual being. Even those of us who are not Buddhists can recognize something of that spiritual quality in historical figures like the Buddha himself and contemporary Buddhists like the Tibetan Dalai Lama.

Those of us who can lay no claim on being enlightened in the Buddhist sense may still ask whether this avoidance of talking about God has anything to say to people for whom God is so central. Perhaps it can at least mean this: Talk about God runs the risk of turning the reality of God into an abstraction. When the word “God” or the idea or concept of God replaces the living reality, then not only have we lost something of our own spiritual foundations, but we also have departed from the core meaning of Christian faith itself. That is so easy to do. The historic Christian creeds point to that core meaning, but they necessarily do so with words. When adherence to those words and the theological formulas they convey is taken to be the true test of faith, defining who belongs and who does not, distinguishing between persons who are orthodox and those who are heretics, then the reality of God can be lost. The fact that Buddhists don’t insist on such creedal orthodoxy may be one reason that they haven’t burned people at the stake as heretics! What does that say to Christians whose historical traditions include many instances of cruel repression?

Christians will not abandon belief in God. But perhaps from their Buddhist friends they can learn something about how not to believe in God. It is the reality of the living God that counts, not the abstraction. To be sure, theology matters. It points in certain directions and away from others. Even the concept of heresy has a place.

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