Faith Today - September/October 2015

John Stackhouse is the Samuel J. Mikolaski
professor of religious studies at Crandall
University in Moncton, N.B., and the author of

Need to Know: Vocation as the Heart of Christian Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2014). Find more of these columns at www.faithtoday.ca/ ChristAndCulture.

How often have you heard the following saying? “Religion is man reaching up ward to God, while Christianity alone speaks of God reaching down to man.” Perhaps you’ve heard it in a sermon or book?

Or what about this old chestnut? “Other religions offer salvation by works. Only Christianity preaches grace.” You might even have used that one yourself.

Now that the world has come to Canada, in the form of immigrants of every race and religion, we have to re-examine inherited “truths” and beware of perpetuating stereotypes.

These two timeworn clichés among Evangelicals need to be retired and replaced with something both truer and better.

Both are ignorant, for example, of the Hare Krishnas. For a time they were a common sight in our airports and on our street corners, banging their drums, chanting their prayers and offering flowers or books for sale. Some had distinctive haircuts, bald but for a ponytail. What was that about?

It was about Lord Krishna hearing their prayers and reaching down to pull them up by those ponytails into a heaven they could not otherwise merit. Indeed, the most popular forms of Hinduism generally are bhakti – devotion to a god (Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva and the like) who will reach down to give the faithful the help they need to avoid the strict outcomes in reincarnation of their respective karmas.

Another major religion that speaks of God reaching down is Buddhism. Popular forms depict the Buddha as a heavenly being who, moved by compassion, came to Earth to be born as Prince Siddhartha and grow up into the sage who would bring enlightenment to all.

And Judaism, which shares ancestry with Christianity in ancient Israelite religion, thus shares with us Christians belief in a God who came down to speak out of a burning bush, give the Law on the top of a mountain, and dwell with His people in a tent and then a temple.

As for the second cliché, is it true that Christianity is the only religion preaching that the Supreme Being offers us unmerited favour, gifting us with blessing beyond our deserts? We need look no further than Islam for a counterexample.

Yes, Islam’s God is often depicted as using a dread set of scales in which our actions are weighed to see if we merit his approval, and certainly much folk Islam is of this sort.

But so is a lot of popular Christianity equally legalistic and moralistic.

In fact the Qur’an speaks of God
as “the Compassionate, the Merci-
ful.” Every major division (or surah)
begins with this same phrase: “In
the name of God, the Compassion-
ate, the Merciful.” (Actually, all but
one begin that way, and many
scholars therefore conclude the
exceptional surah is merely the
second half of a surah inadvertently
severed early in the tradition.)

The most popular form of Buddhism in Japan is Pure Land Buddhism, which trusts the Amida Buddha to graciously help us arrive after death in his Pure Land, an optimal place in which to meditate to achieve final nirvana.

Indeed, the largest segment of Buddhism globally is Mahayana, the “Greater Vehicle,” which offers the assistance of dozens of buddhas and bodhisattvas – enlightened ones who, out of compassion, voluntarily delay their release into nirvana to attend to the prayers of devotees for aid along the Noble Eightfold Path of deliverance from suffering.

We Christians therefore must stop repeating these oversimplifications. They are wrong and can be offensive to our neighbours.

We must celebrate, instead, that the most popular forms of religion in the world feature the opportunity to call for help from supernatural beings, rather than rely on our own merits. Isn’t that interesting? And isn’t that a lovely opportunity in which to share the gospel?

And we must proclaim that gospel, which has at its heart a God who not only reached down to humankind to offer grace, but actually became human to suffer and die in our place, and unite humanity to Himself in resurrection, so He might call all of us to join the circle of divine love forever.