A Gospel Better Than Christian Buddhism

A number of home grown features of today's American evangelicalism echo Buddhist themes

This is a guest post by Dr. John Seel. It is a followup to the Social Pathologist’s essay on Christian Buddhism and my followup on the “Buddhist mood” in American evangelicalism. Views expressed are those of the author.

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The rising interest in “Christian Buddhism” is a telling corrective to the weakness in the church and is a potential onramp to further heresy. As such it requires both theological and cultural discernment. The “Buddhist mood” in the church is from my perspective the consequence of a truncated gospel and the gnostic pietism that stems from it. Buddhism has a cool cultural approachability in pop culture that Gnosticism does not. In its western Americanized forms, it is a religious practice that is esoteric and exotic, loosely scientific, while making few moral demands on one's lifestyle. Few contemporary proponents get as serious about it as Richard Gere and Leonard Cohen. For most it is a ready spiritual hip spice to add to the DIY spiritual brew of your own making. We live in a mix and match world. In Strange Rites, Social commentator Tara Isabella Burton describes contemporary religious seekers as “Remixed,” a fluid bricolage of religious self-creation. Christian Buddhism as a concept fits neatly into such a spiritual ecology.

But there are Buddhist-like tendency that are cropping up in conservative orthodox evangelical Christian circles. On one hand this may be because there is such a low grade of biblical literacy in the church and faithfulness to the basic outlines of a biblical worldview. Most evangelical Christians would fit this description. However, on the other hand, these Buddhist tendencies may be more of a feature of evangelical spirituality than an errant bug. The widespread adherence to a truncated gospel coupled with a Gnostic otherworldly spirituality that minimizes things like creation, embodiment, sexuality, and material culture leads to an impotent faith that has little relevance in the real world of day-to-day existence. Let me explore the problems of these features of a widely accepted truncated gospel. The problem here is not liberalism or neo-orthodoxy but mainstream conservative theology and faith expressions. There is a fatal flaw built into contemporary evangelical faith. Its consequences may look like Buddhism lite, but its sources are far closer to home.

In many conservative evangelical circles, the point of the gospel is narrowly judicial and Gnostic. Its focus is on Jesus meeting the just payment for sin by a righteous God. In this understanding justification takes on a forensic purpose: a divine verdict of acquittal pronounced on the believing sinner. God declares the sinner to be “not guilty” because Christ has taken his place, living a perfect life according to God's law and suffering for his sins. This view is not wrong but woefully incomplete to the point of being a distortion of the gospel. This understanding of justification makes the cross the telos of Jesus' redemptive purpose.

This view has been variously called the “two-chapter gospel” (fall + redemption) or the “gospel of sin management.” The sources of these views can be historically traced to the Second Great Awakening in the late 18th century and to the rise of dispensationalism in the late 19th century. Notable critiques of this view have been made by Dallas Willard and N.T. Wright in favor of a kingdom-oriented gospel or a “four-chapter gospel” (creation + fall + redemption + restoration).

It is fundamentally a gospel narrative that tells a different story. In his The Divine Conspiracy, Willard writes, “We get a totally different picture of salvation, faith, and forgiveness if we regard having life from the kingdom of the heavens now—the eternal kind of life—as the target.” N.T. Wright in After You Believe adds, “The final hope of Christian is not simply ‘going to heaven,’ but resurrection into God's new creation, the ‘new heaven and new earth.’” Namely, the purpose of the gospel is not to get you into heaven, but to get heaven into you via the indwelling presence of Christ through his Holy Spirit. “Heaven, in the Bible,” writes Wright in Surprised by Hope, “is not a future destiny but the other, hidden dimension of our ordinary life—God's dimension, if you like.”

The telos of the gospel is not merely dealing with the forensic guilt of sin but inaugurating a new kind of resurrection life within every believer. This failure to appreciate a holistic understanding of the gospel is the “foundational flaw” of Christians today.

The alternative presents a completely different spiritual story in three ways.

First, it begins now. The message Jesus proclaimed, the “good news of God,” was “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news.” The inauguration of a new kind of life—resurrection kingdom life—begins right here, right now. Theologians make a distinction between the “yet and not yet” of God's kingdom. But in most circles the next sentence is telling in that is amounts to a justification of “not yet,” which means, in their telling, the current implications of the gospel in a person's everyday life is “not much.” Again, Willard writes, “The gospel is the good news of the presence and availability of life in the kingdom, now and forever, through reliance on Jesus the Anointed.” It is now time for every believer to experience God's kingdom in its fullness. Wright says, “transforming the present, as far are as we are able, in the light of the future.” This is why it is uniquely “good news.”

Two, the gospel is about an invisible spiritual relational connection between the believer and God. The character of this “eternal life” of which we speak is not knowledge about God but an intimate interactive relationship with him in daily life. This relationship is variously described as “union with Christ” or an invisible mystic indwelling spiritual relationship with God in and through every believer in all aspects of his or her life. This indwelling presence is the essence of our identity, which is a relational spiritual verb not a psychological personality noun. Our identity is based on an ongoing dynamic relationship with the indwelling Christ. It is through this identity that our various roles are fulfilled and empowered. Paul writes, “With no veil we all become like mirrors who brightly reflect the glory of the Lord Jesus.” “If anyone is enfolded into Christ, he has become an entirely new person. All that is related to the old order has vanished. Behold, everything is fresh and new.” We are now through this connection to this divine relationship embodied with a supernatural presence and power. Paul writes, “I pray that he [Jesus] would unveil within you the unlimited riches of his glory and favor until supernatural strength floods your innermost being with his divine might and explosive power.” The aim of this experience and this relationship is to know God's love and to give off God's love. The Christian hope is not centered on the cross but the resurrection. The cross is the means to a resurrection kingdom end. Early Christians never spoke of going to heaven when they died.

Three, the gospel is about making this invisible spiritual connection visible in our bodies and transformative in our world now. The purpose of the invisible mystic spiritual relationship with Christ is to have a transformative visible impact in our lives through our lives in all of creation. God's kingdom is not from this world, but it for this world. Salvation is not about going away from this world but reentering it for the purpose of kingdom transformation. In this we are co-creative agents of redemption for the purpose of re-creation of the whole world, yea the entire cosmos.

Wright summarizes it as, “In other words, the work of salvation, in its full sense, is 1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; 2) about the present, not simply the future; and 3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.”

The recent spiritual trend to merge Christianity with Eastern religions has its strengths and weaknesses. It is a corrective to the overly judicial view of atonement with otherworldly Gnostic tendencies. This is an explanation for the appeal of Orthodoxy as Orthodoxy has a strong emphasis on theosis or inner transformation through the indwelling Christ, which they controversially describe as "deification."

But the merger of Christian with pantheism and/or paganism fails to clarify the content of the “spiritual” connection thereby conflating the immaterial and impersonal with the immaterial and personal. The impersonal cannot have personal qualities—in particular qualities of agency, morality, and love. Eastern religions, esoteric New Age connection, and psychopharmaceutical spirituality are all about connecting an immaterial impersonal aspect of your consciousness with the same in the universe. It is an impersonal connection rooted in materialism. The only difference is in the techniques you use to get there. As such, this is a form of spirituality for an atheist—though one that believes in an unseen reality, say in the scientific spirit of Dark Energy.

The suggestion that we are dependent on a connection with a reality that is invisible, spiritual, and other than yourself is a key and correct insight. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin famously stated, “We are not humans beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human one.” The dynamics of our material physical existence are not denied or minimized, rather they find their proper relationship to the cosmos through a dependent spiritual connection. All living things are dependent on a world that is other than and larger than themselves. We are uniquely designed to flourish when we abide in Christ. It is not a giving up of yourself but aligning and connecting yourself to our internal spiritual life source, i.e., “rivers of living water.”

In practice coming at spiritual connection from an Eastern religious perspective is problematic for three reasons. First, the aim is to connect with the divine spark within which is intrinsic to your being. This means that what starts as a spiritual exercise becomes in the end a means of self-worship. In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton warned of this dynamic. He writes, “Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within…. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.” Historic spirituality observes that the first move spiritually is up and out, not down and in. Plants make this same move toward the rays of the sun. What this down and in orientation leads to is spiritual narcissism or self-worship. While this is in keeping with the spirit of the age where the final arbiter of reality and the ultimate authority is thought to be the subjective individual self. This is the core ubiquitous tenant of expressive individualism. What this view does not challenge is a sacralized autonomy or a spiritualized self-centeredness. By its very nature this is the opposite of what love requires and Christianity stands for, which is the abandonment of self—not the eradication or erasure of self—for the good of another. This points to the second problem.

Second, the source of this connection is invisible, immaterial, and impersonal. Rather than connecting to a person, we are connecting to a force, cosmic energy, and the like. Love and relational connection are smuggled into this impersonal force field, but this is a rhetorical flourish not a metaphysical consistency. Gravity and electricity or electro-magnetic fields do not love because love is a function of a person with agency and a moral conscience capable of love—willing the best for another. So, proponents of Eastern religious connection import notions of love where they don't belong—meaning that they have no metaphysical basis on the terms of the metaphysics on which they are based.

Third, closely related to the problem of love is the problem of justice. These Eastern views of connection do nothing to challenge autonomy. The aim of eradicating the self with the loss of personhood is a further example of how the possibility of love is erased. Not only is love erased relationally, justice is erased socially. Morally, these approaches toward spiritual connection are nihilistic and amoral. As such they have no ability to promote the good, the just, or discern evil. In practice the longing for amoral subjective immaterial spiritual experience directly opens you to the occult or to “dark enchantment.” Here spiritual experience and reality are sought within the framework of autonomy and amorality. There is maximum spiritual openness without any consideration of good or evil. This is a ready breeding ground for demonic influence and/or possession. This is a spirituality that is intellectually beyond good and evil but is practically an open door to evil through the blindness of spiritual naiveté. Lost here is personhood, love, and justice all in the name of cosmic spirituality. Christian spirituality rightly understood point in the opposite direction enhancing personhood, equipping for love, and encouraging justice.

Collectively these views are all Gnostic in spirit. There are Gnostic tendencies in American religious expressions as highlighted by Harold Bloom in American Religion. Gnosticism is isomorphic with dominant cultural trends and sensibilities. It supports elite thinking, a cyberspace virtual sensibility, and a radical individualism. There are strong Gnostic tendencies in American Protestantism with its emphasis on cognitive doctrine, left-brain rationalism, individual special experience, academically trained clergy (“in the Greek and Hebrew”), and otherworldly salvation that wants to escape earth for heaven. Irenaeus toward the end of the second century identified four gnostic patterns: “promise of salvation by knowledge rather than by faith; stress upon secret or hidden, as against open and available, revelation; disregard and devaluation of nature in favor of the pure, free, and unencumbered spirit; and concentration upon the radical individuality of the spirit.” These are all active here.

There is a strong contemporary desire to connect with the spiritual. If there is a way to do this that is non-dogmatic, celebrates the self, makes no demands on morality, sexual or otherwise, is inclusive and eclectic, aligns with aspects of science and quantum physics, and is esoteric in its metaphysical appeal, then we have a spirituality aligned to the post-Christian zeitgeist. Thus, the interest in “Christian Buddhism.”

Despite decrees to the contrary, historic biblical Christian and Buddhism are not the same. There are superficial similarities with a bastardized version of American Christianity lite. But on closer examination, the promise of the gospel requires repenting of your self-centered life orientation, placing yourself before a personal and moral Creator, acknowledging your sin, and then through accepting the grace of the cross connecting to an indwelling incarnate presence of God within that becomes the presence, purpose, and power of your life. “Christian Buddhism” is a heresy born out of the deficiencies of American evangelical Christianity, a doorway to dark enchantment, and an embrace of therapeutically inspired spiritual narcissism. It should be avoided as a spiritual imposter.

Historic Christianity tells a different and better story. It is a story that affirms our humanity, cherishes creation, empowers our life purpose, and empowers self-sacrificing love that is beyond what we can do on our own. It is a better story because this is good news when applied to the actual messiness of daily embodied life.

John Seel holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland and M.Div from Covenant Theological Seminary. He is an Anglican cultural renewal entrepreneur and social impact consultant.

Cover image by Andrew Moore/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0