Right Answers, Wrong Questions

The questions a man asks not only reveal his character; they also determine what kind and how much of truth he will discover. The questions a religion asks and the answers it gives will do the same. When the Greeks asked, What is man’s relation to God? they got back the answer: Man is finite, God is infinite; man is temporal, God is eternal; man is weak, God is almighty. When the Hebrews asked the same question, they got back the same answers, plus. And it was this plus, this extra, that led them into the heart of their greatest contribution to the world. Their “plus” looked deeper into both the nature of man and the nature of God, and declared that at the deepest level of truth and at the deepest level of communication between God and man, God is holy and man is sinful. Their monotheism was not simply belief in one God; it was ethical monotheism, belief in one God who is the ultimate in ethical personhood, and who has created men in his image as ethical persons.

Now when the Gospel was first preached to the Greeks, and during those first few centuries when the Jewish religion was being adapted to Gentile thought forms, the main source of the controversies that arose was the effort to adapt Jewish answers to Greek questions. Many years ago when I was still a missionary in India, Reinhold Niebuhr opened my eyes to the significance of this for our whole understanding of the history of religions and the relation of Christianity to non-Christian religions. This passage is from his work The Nature and Destiny of Man:

The obsession of the Greek mind with the problem of finiteness and eternity had two consequences, as Greek thought sought to appropriate the “foolishness” of the gospel. One was that it exhausted itself in accepting an un-Greek answer to a Greek problem. It did accept the Christian affirmation that the eternal had made itself known in history. But it regarded the fact, of itself, as the answer to the final problem of life. It did not fully understand that the particular content of the divine disclosure was the knowledge of the mercy and the justice of God in their paradoxical relationship, in other words the Atonement. The specific theological formulation of this error lies in the emphasis upon the Incarnation, to the exclusion of the doctrine of the Atonement or, at least, its relegation to a subordinate position. This error persists in certain types of Catholic and Anglican thought, sometimes more particularly in the latter because of its great dependence upon patristic theology [II, 59].

The Greeks sought after wisdom and the Jews sought after power. Paul and the early apostles preached Christ as both the wisdom of God and the power of God; but they early recognized that the cross, which was both the wisdom and the power of God, was a stumbling block to both. That was right, and that was all right. Christ was continuous with much of Jewish religion and practice from the Old Testament; he came to fulfill. But he was also discontinuous; the shoot that sprang out of the stump of Jesse soon became a new tree itself. Christ also had his points of contact with Greek philosophy and with the Graeco-Roman world. But he was essentially discontinuous with its ideas. Many church fathers made a basic mistake in trying to fit a Judeo-Christian answer to a Greek question. But they made a more basic mistake when they accepted the Greek question as the central question, and then tried to find the Christian answer to this central question. It was more important to convince the Greeks, first of all, that they could not get the right answer until they asked the right question.

The Greek problem was the problem of the finite, the temporal, and the weak creature in relation to the infinite, the eternal, and the Almighty God. They believed that the chasm between the two could not be bridged. What they appropriated from the Gospel, therefore, was the affirmation that this chasm can be bridged and has been bridged. Clement of Alexandria was one of the first Greek philosophers to become a Christian: saturated with the thought that Greek philosophy was a handmaid to lead him to Christ, Clement declared: “The word of God became man in order that thou mayst learn from man how man becomes God.” Origen, greatest of the Alexandrian theologians, thought of Christ primarily as the mediator between the “uncreated One and the created many.” These and the Greek fathers generally were inclined to regard Christ, not so much as an answer to the problem of sin as the Bible defined it, but as an answer to the problem of death, so that incorruptibility and immortality in Greek terms was emphasized more than holiness in Christian terms as the goal of salvation. Sometimes Christ seemed no more than a supplement to the answer that Plato and the philosophers had already given. Sometimes he was regarded as a more adequate bridge between the historical and the eternal than Greek philosophy afforded.

This is not to say that these men were not Christians, as to both inward faith and outward life. Nor is it to say that they were lacking in study of the Scriptures or in emphasis upon the grace of God in the forgiveness of sins. But it is to point out their two mistakes, from which we may learn in our Christian approach to non-Christian religions today. We need to avoid trying to fit a Christian answer to a question it was not meant to answer. And we need to emphasize that the Christian insight into the nature of God and man raises ultimately profound questions not raised by other religions, and then gives answers to those questions that can be found only in Jesus Christ.

Take Mohammedanism, for example, or rather Islam, as it should properly be called. It raises one question out of which all others grow: How can man the creature fulfill the will of Almighty God? The answer is simple: through submission (Islam) to the Will of God, sometimes interpreted as Fate. One’s whole interpretation of the nature of Almighty God (Allah) and the nature of man comes into focus in the answer to this question. We can use the same words as the Mohammedans—for instance, our Bible says, “He that doeth the will of God abideth forever”—but mean entirely different things and come up with different answers. The real difference is in the concept of God and man held by the person asking the question and the person giving the answer. Submission to the will of Allah involves the devotee in at least six practical duties: recital of the confession of faith, recital of daily prayers, thirty days’ fast of Ramadan, almsgiving, pilgrimage to Mecca, and, when necessary, religious war against unbelievers. Islam, from its Judeo-Christian background, sees man as a sinner needing reconciliation with God. But the method proposed is performing religious duties; the God to whom one is to be reconciled provides no atonement, and the heaven he offers is sensual rather than holy. Although Islam is more like Judaism than Christianity, neither in its questions nor in its answers does it come very close to either. Our Gospel would deal radically with both Islam’s questions and its answers.

Take another example, from Hinduism. It raises one central question out of which all others grow: How can the individual Soul (Atman) be reabsorbed into the Universal Soul (Paramatman)? The whole system of thinking associated with karma (retribution), reincarnation, rebirth, and transmigration, so characteristic of both Hinduism and its offshoot, Buddhism, will come into focus in the answer given to this one central question.

God can use and does use all forms of knowledge and investigation, and I am loath to condemn the bands of Christian scholars in India today who seek to find bridges by which one may pass over from Hinduism to Christianity. Christ is the fulfillment of all truth, wherever found, in all religions. But these scholars are dealing essentially with the same problem faced by the early Greek fathers. And if in their effort to find Christian answers to Hindu questions about the relation of the Individual Soul to the Universal Soul they are led to give preeminence to the incarnation of Jesus Christ rather than the atonement, they will be missing the point. Incarnation, atonement, sinlessness, resurrection, love, power, and second coming: all these are important. But the central insight of the Gospel is that man is a sinner who needs above everything else to be reconciled to God, and then to his fellow man, by the death of Jesus Christ on the cross and his resurrection from the dead.

Hinduism wavers between a God who is passible and one who is impassible, between one who is personal and one who is impersonal, between polytheism and monotheism in the form of monism, between ethical responsibility and spiritual mysticism, between dualistic Samkhya and monistic Vedanta, between many incarnations, non-incarnation, and pantheistic all-incarnation. It has a burdensome consciousness of both collective and individual sin, and it offers four ways in which one may escape from rebirth caused by sin and be reabsorbed into the Universal Soul. But it always misses the point of vicarious suffering for another, whereby the Son of God reconciles sinful man to holy God. Some have been tempted to see Christ’s death as a short-cut by which one might escape all future rebirths and immediately be reabsorbed into the Universal Soul. But even this would be a travesty on the nature of God and of man, and the foisting of a Christian answer onto a Hindu question, for which it was not suited.

A PRAYER

Come in, God.

Come in with your fire

And kindle me.

My faith won’t believe.

I have stirred it

With a poker,

And stoked it,

And soaked it

With combustible reasons,

Including fifteen to show

That you actually do exist,

But it won’t burn.

My faith is a clinker, God.

Make it a red-hot coal.

COLIN CAMPBELL

Take one further example. In no sense was Confucius the founder of the religion that bears his name, nor was he even a great religious reformer. He was a pragmatic moralist interested in religion in so far as it would produce courteous gentlemen, just to inferiors and obedient to superiors and parents. To him filial piety was the prime virtue, and, he observed with scrupulous care the ancestral worship that had been handed down to him from previous ages. But he said nothing about the actual existence of the spirits of the dead, which ancestral worship presupposes, and he seldom referred to God in any personal way, speaking instead of heaven, impersonally. He was a true humanist. To see where humanism, even Christian humanism, will lead, look at Confucianism, for humanism reaches its peak here.

Now, with this kind of introduction, we are prepared to have it said that Confucius never asked any of the profound religious questions, nor came up with any of the profound or practical answers, that we have been considering. The one central question he faced was: Is religion for this life or for the next? And he answered, For this life only. But when we as Christians answer that religion is both for this life and for the next, we must not assume that we have found a bridge between the two religions, nor that the Christian means the same thing the Confucian means. To the Confucian, man’s nature is essentially good, has been spoiled by ignorance, and could be corrected by knowledge. And so he never raises the question of reconciliation to a holy God by a sinful man who has disobeyed God and is at enmity with him. The Confucian must learn, therefore, to see deeper and to ask profounder questions before he will even be ready for the deeper answers that the Christian proclamation brings.

The Frankfurt Declaration, a missionary document issued last year by a group of German theologians (see June 19, 1970, issue, page 3), is authentically biblical. From Jesus Christ our Lord we have the authoritative assertion, “No one comes to the Father but by me. I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Peter, true to his Master, declares, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” But Peter did not know what all the other religions of the world had to say. Our situation is different from his. By today, all the world’s religions have been minutely studied. Thousands of people in all lands are well informed about the breadth and depth of the alternatives to Christianity, and they are not willing to assert the superiority of Christianity, except on the basis of the fullest information possible. A detailed study of the questions raised and the answers given by other religions will confirm to us the profound insight involved in the Christian proclamation of its answer to the question that is basic to all others: How can sinful man be reconciled to holy God? A detailed knowledge of the sacred scriptures of other religions will forcefully support the Frankfurt Declaration.

Maurice Blanchard is pastor of Austin-Second Baptist Church in Chicago. He spent twenty-five years in India as an American Baptist missionary and has written twelve books in the Telugu language of South India. He has the Th.D. from Northern Baptist Seminary; his thesis was a comparison of the New Testament with the Bhagavad Gita.

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