[Buddha-l] Questions

[Richard Hayes]

On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 13:39 -0400, Curt Steinmetz wrote:

> Since when are UU's and Quakers Christians!?

By far the largest segment of today's Quaker population are the
evangelical Quakers. They are firmly Bible-based, conservative to the
point of being nearly fundamentalist. You may have heard of Richard M.
Nixon. He was this brand of Quaker.

The Unitarians were considered fundamentalists until fairly recently.
Indeed, the whole idea of unitarianism was the rejection of the doctrine
of the trinity on the grounds that the doctrine is not found in the
Bible. Emerson was a Unitarian minister and left the fold because he
found the Unitarians hopelessly dogmatic and bibliocentric. The
Universalists were even more so.

It has only been fairly recently that a minority of Quakers (and
probably a majority of Unitarian-Universalists) have turned pluralistic.
And of those who are pluralistic only a minority consider themselves
non-Christian.

> I'm pretty sure that the last thing one will ever see in East Asia is 
> any kind of mixture (healthy or otherwise) of Christianity and Buddhism.

Such a mixture has already happened in North America. Father Thomas
Hand, a Jesuit, practiced Zen for thirty years in Japan and brought Zen
practice back to Catholics in the United States. He was spiritual
director of the Mercy Center for many years and taught the Sisters of
Mercy practices supported by a Buddhist-influenced interpretation of
Christianity. Ruben Habito has done much the same thing. Last summer in
Albuquerque several hundred people attended a several-day retreat
entitled The Christ and the Buddha, an event organized by a Franciscan
monk. Similar events have been held under the auspices of Benedictine
monasteries. Many of the people involved in these enterprises have spent
decades in Asia, influencing people there. I would not be too sure that
East Asians will be as closed-minded and resistant to change as you
would wish them to be. The largest single demographic segment in the
Christian world right now are the Chinese. If the Chinese see no
contradiction in being Communists and Christians, or in being Daoists
and Buddhists and Confucians, they are unlikely to find a contradiction
in being Buddhists and Christians.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico