Mere Christianity

 Though I must have mentioned enjoying The Screwtape Letters I was still caught by surprise when one of my esteemed colleagues from Texas sent me C.S. Lewis's, "beloved classic on what all Christians believe".  After 10 years of practice, I've only recently started considering myself a Buddhist, so I hardly feel like good conversion material.  But then we are told grace works in mysterious ways ... so you never know. 

Because this book was more of a straightforward exposition of core Christian beliefs than the more imaginative Screwtape scenario, I found it less interesting overall.  Nevertheless, I think it is a wonderful introduction to the best version of Christianity I've heard anyone argue for.  Lewis is cogent, persuasive, and genuine.  He presents of vision of what makes one a Christian -- any kind of Christian -- that focuses less on what dogma one needs to believe than on what qualities one is asked to cultivate.  This goes some way towards answering what I would consider one of the main defects of Christianity relative to something like Buddhism.  Generally, Christianity is presented as mainly a system of belief, and Buddhism mainly as a system of practice.  To be a Christian means to believe that Christ is the unique God and he died for your sins.  To be a Buddhist is to think that the Buddha offered a coherent path for freeing your mind through meditation.  While I think this characterization is largely accurate, Lewis shows us that the lines between these two may not be as bright as they first seem.  On the one hand, I should note that while explicitly more empirical and DIY, Buddhism also clearly involves beliefs on some level.  And on the other, Lewis depicts a Christianity that is much more about the practice of letting go of one's self through the cultivation of ethical virtue and community mindedness.  Many parts of *Mere Christianity*, particularly the later chapters where Lewis begins to unfold a more transformative and mystical view of what it means to be Christian, sketch a practice that doesn't feel far from the cultivation of the Buddhist path.  There is a shared emphasis on going beyond yourself to discover something larger, a shared appreciation that true faith can transform us, and not merely optimize our machine, and a shared joy in surrounding ourselves with a community of like minded practitioners. So I found it exciting to consider this take on Christianity that sounds so different from the ones I remember growing up with; whether this is really, "what all Christians believe," as the back cover would have it, is obviously a question for Christians, not Buddhists, to adjudicate.

While I'm grateful that the book made me better appreciate why some people feel Christianity is a satisfying spiritual path for them, it didn't do anything to change my own personal beliefs or practice.  For me personally, I still find that the Christian worldview simply begs the point of all spirituality.  What we are searching for is something more than ourselves.  We feel drawn past our everyday craving for pleasure and avoidance of pain into an exploration of why we're here at all and what it's all for anyhow. I agree with folks like Ziporyn and Nishitani who identify this as the underlying impulse behind all spirituality.  And I also agree with them that the Abrahamic faiths' notion of a single unified God who creates, controls, and judges all of existence just like a father creates, controls, and judges his family is fundamentally a betrayal of the the spiritual quest.  The problem is not that this God is too transcendent, too woo-woo and 'unscientific'.  The problem is just the opposite.  The problem with this God has always been that he is way too much like us, way too close to a putative individual human self projected into the sky.  And Christianity merely compounds this problem by putting the sky on the ground, drawing God and man closer together.  The only way I could believe in a monotheist God is in the way Spinoza thought of him -- as absolutely nothing like we (think) we are.

In short, I still feel Christianity is a bad answer to a great question.  In fact, for me, the whole point of the question lies in not having an answer at all, much less in providing an answer so clearly modeled on our own most conditioned reflex.