If theology is a conversation between ‘what we are given to believe’ and ‘what is going on in our world’, we have to be more precise about what is happening in today’s world. For me, and for many Christians, the two most pressing questions that clamour for answers from my Christian beliefs are the many religions and the many poor. Yes, there have always been many religions and many poor people. But today, they are knocking on our door (sometimes literally!) and pushing themselves into our awareness as never before.
Why, if Jesus is the only saviour and Christianity the only really true religion, has God allowed so many other religions to continue to prosper? And instead of competing and fighting with each other, can the religions dialogue and co-operate together toward a world of greater peace and well-being?
What can we do about the horrible reality of the millions of people who cannot feed their children or provide a roof and medicine for them? How address the glaring inequality of the distribution of the goods of this world between the few who have so much and the many who have so little? And of course, when we talk of ‘the many poor’, that includes the impoverished earth, for the impoverishment of the earth, we are told, and the impoverishment of peoples are intimately and murderously related.5
Unless ‘what I believe’ helps me, if not answer, at least deal with and struggle with such questions, it will not be a meaningful faith for me. What is true must be meaningful. If it’s not meaningful, who cares if it’s true?
Therefore, the two primary characteristics of the theology which I will try to summarize in what follows – or the two criteria by which I will evaluate whether a Christian theology is both meaningful for our contemporary world and faithful to the message of Jesus– will be these: is it liberative and is it dialogical.6
By liberative I mean, essentially, that it must be a theology that shows how the message of Jesus and his Church enable us to understand the causes of, and the solutions for, the widespread suffering due to poverty and injustice.
By dialogical I mean that it must be an understanding of Christian beliefs that both promotes and is informed by a dialogue with other religions. Any theological interpretation of Christian belief that does not allow for and promote dialogue can’t be a responsible and orthodox interpretation. And once such dialogue with other religions is embraced, it will in turn affect and inform the theological task of interpreting Jesus’ message. In the pages that follow, I will try to make clear how much my dialogue with other religions, especially with Buddhism, has enabled me to understand more deeply and embrace more resolutely my own Christian faith.
These two essential characteristics of a relevant and orthodox Christian theology – that it be both liberative and dialogical – are vitally connected. With Hans Küng, I believe that only through a globally co-operative dialogue of religions can we achieve a world of global peace with justice.7
God/Trinity
Before I begin talking, or writing, about God, I need to post a reminder from my teacher, Karl Rahner: We experience God before we know God. All our ‘talk’ of the Divine is possible only because we have an inbuilt capacity to ‘feel’ the Divine. All the words we use for God are possible and meaningful only because they touch or give voice to what Rahner called the ‘pre-thematic’, or pre-verbal, experiences of the Divine that are as natural to our natures as a bee’s bent to flowers.8
So where did I learn my ‘God language’? From Jesus primarily. His ways of talking about the Mystery that held and guided his life– Abba, Spirit, Reign – confirm or clarify or correct the ways I have sensed this Mystery in my own interactions with people and the world. Certain Christian theologians – Rahner, Paul Tillich and, I should add, Raimon Panikkar9 – have provided the broader philosophical framework for the deeper understanding that my faith in Jesus seeks. And then there is Buddha. As I’ve tried to explain in a recent book, Gautama has helped me understand Jesus – or, the Dharma (Buddha’s teachings) has enabled me to grasp the gospel– in such a profound, enlightening way that I can honestly say that Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian.10 Like a growing number of Christians, I’m a ‘double-belonger’ – in this case, a ‘Buddhist–Christian’.11 Buddhist fingers, together with Rahner’s and Tillich’s and Panikkar’s, have helped point me to the moon that guided Jesus’ life and that he called ‘Abba’ or ‘Dad’. I’ll try to explain what I mean.
God as triune mystery
For Christians, to speak of the one God is not possible without speaking of the more-than-one God. The oneness of the divine Mystery does not exclude – indeed, it includes – the manyness of the divine Mystery. I know that sounds like polytheism (as my Muslim friends gently remind me). But it’s not. Rather, it’s a way of affirming and holding on to the Christian conviction that the unity that makes up the divine nature (and therefore the nature of the world) does not exclude – indeed, it absolutely requires – diversity. No diversity, no unity. No manyness, no oneness.
How do Christians know that? How can they dare to say anything about the inner nature of God? Rahner’s answer is as simple as it is profound: the only way we can venture assertions about God’s inner trinitarian nature (what he called the ‘Trinity ad intra’) is because that’s how we experience God in our own lives and in the world (what he called the ‘Trinity ad extra’).12 In other words: if this is how God seems to act in creation, we can assume that that’s how God acts in the divine nature. The old theological slug makes common sense: ‘agere sequitur esse’ – the way one acts flows from the way one is. We know what a person is like from the way she interacts with us. If that doesn’t apply also to God, we have no way of knowing anything about God. (This is what Catholic theologians call ‘the analogy of being’, and it forms the basis for all Catholic theology: finite being serves as a reflection pond for Infinite Being.)13
And after experiencing God in the way Jesus of Nazareth lived and died, in what he taught, and in the way his Spirit lived on in their communities after his death, the early Jesus-followers, through the course of the first four centuries after Jesus’ death, came to conclude that the one God is also the triune God. Now there are different ways of ‘unpacking’ what it means to assert that ‘three-ness’ is part of God’s oneness. Broadly and basically, we can put it this way: based on the way they encountered God through Jesus, Christians came to realize that God is a creating Mystery (therefore they used the symbol Father or Parent), a communicating Mystery (therefore the symbol of Word or Son/offspring), and an animating Mystery (thus, Spirit). The one divine Mystery acts, and therefore exists, in these three really different but essentially related ways.
The ‘co-inhering’ of God and world
This talk of God as triune may sound very abstract. But it contains very practical consequences for the way Christians understand and act in the finite world. To experience, and therefore to assert, that there is a divine power that creates, communicates and animates all that exists is to assert a mysterious immanence of God in the world– and of the world in God. The world is alive with the splendour and energy of the Divine. Within the very matter of the earth and within the complexities of human knowing and loving – God creates, communicates, and gives shape. As Paul in the Acts of the Apostles
