Paul Knitter- Buddhist Christian

The Catholic theologian Paul Knitter writes about what he calls the adventure of passing over to another religious tradition in as open, as careful, and as personal a way as possible, and then passing back to one’s own religion to see how what one has experienced or learnt can help one understand and fit into one’s own tradition.

He explains that if we received – say Christianity – as a child and through school assemblies or classes or perhaps even attending church, then that level of awareness has to change and develop as we move into adulthood.

‘As I’ve grown older, my faith in God has, I trust, grown deeper, but that’s because it has been prodded by confusion. No confusion, no deepening. … Being a grown-up means taking responsibility and thinking for oneself, finding reasons in one’s own experience for affirming, or rejecting … blind faith.’

One of the issues of belief and faith that Knitter explores is how Christianity has been plagued by dualism – the God as ‘the Other’. Where the reality of the world and God have been exaggeratedly stressed by the dominant Christian tradition as so different that Christianity cannot really show how the two form a unity. As regular readers to these posts will appreciate, Knitter writes that to overcome this there needs to be the experience of the God within, and a drawing on the Christian mystical tradition. ‘God’ must be a personal experience.

For him Buddhism helped. In Buddhism experience and enlightenment are more important than talk. Picking up the Karl Rahner quote in an earlier post that: ‘In the future Christians will be mystics, or they will not be anything.’ Knitter writes:

‘Buddha has enabled me not only to understand and feel but to be kicked in the stomach by the truth of Rahner’s words. Yes, it is a question of survival! Unless I retrieve my Christian mystical tradition, I’m not going to be able to hang in there with my imperfect, often frustrating church.’

He goes on to say that it’s not a question of merely retrieving the Christian mystical tradition, but also adding to it. Through Buddhism, Knitter felt a deeper sense of God as ‘an activity that is going on everywhere rather than Being that exists somewhere.’ This can be imaged as an energy field:

‘.. which pervades and influences us all, calling us to relationships of knowing and loving each other … not so much of “doing God’s will” but rather of “living God’s life”. That’s why Rahner used to tell us that there are a lot of people who live God’s life in their actions even though they may deny God’s existence in their words. (And vice versa, a lot of people who say they believe in God but who cancel out that belief in the way they live.)

If God can be thought about or imaged as Interbeing and a connecting Spirit, then this can be antidote to the dualism that has infected Christianity. Spirit no longer has to ‘come down’ it is all already here – just has to emerge or take shape and become active. A better image for creation might be then a pouring forth of God, an extension of God, in which the Divine carries on the divine activity of interrelating in and with and through creation; and that includes us.