A Global History of Christianity 2: 500 -1000 Authority v Power
1. Missions to the China Sea and the Indian Ocean
The 6th to the 11th centuries saw the expansion of Christianity through missionary enterprises beyond the Roman Byzantine Empire. Africa and India were already Christianized but China remained uncharted territory. Three influences contended with the Christian message — the ancient philosophy of Buddhism in the Far East, Hinduism in the South and Islam in the Near East. In Europe, the alliance between the sacred and the secular culminated in the coronation of King Charlemagne of the Franks as the first Holy Roman Emperor (Imperator Romanorum) by Pope Leo the Great.
2. Asia Minor: Byzantine Christendom
The Greek-speaking Byzantine Church of Eastern Europe took a separate pathway from its Latin-speaking, barbarian-ridden brothers in the west. Seeking mystical union with God, theosis, it shunned mere doctrines for a life of ritualistic worship.
3. South East: Encountering Hinduism in India
The discovery of Thomas Christians who trace their history back to the first century of Christianity astounded the Western church. Today, the Malabar coast is home to the vibrant faith of Syriac rite traditions.
4. Far East: Encountering Buddhism in China
There has been Christian presence in China since the 6th century. But in 635, the amazing intercontinental missionary journey of a Persian monk who traversed the Silk Route some 600 years before Marco Polo, established a faith tradition that ushered in the first Christian age of China.
5. Near East: Encountering Islam in Persia
Islam possesses special links to Christian history, for it sees itself as a corrective to the faulty Christian doctrines of the Judaic faith. Its doctrines and practice mimic those of Christianity and many of its weaknesses can be traced to the weaknesses of the Christian church. The Muslims call the Islamic ‘voice of God’, the Ayat Allah, or Ayatollah. The rapid expansion of Islam brought most of Central Asia and Asia Minor to its knees. Baghdad became the center of Muslim thought and culture as well as Islamic law.
6. Europe: Emperor and Pope
Charlemagne’s coronation by Leo III transformed the papacy and ushered in an age of unprecedented secular power for the bishopric of Rome and sacred authority for the new Holy Roman Emperor. The bishop became an emperor-maker and the emperor became the bishop-maker. The Roman bishops became landowners and territorial kings, mimicking the cry of the Israelites to have a king, [to be] ‘just like the other nations’. The bishop now enjoyed a status that approximated Augustus Caesar’s, ‘Son of a God’. In time, the bishop of Rome would become ‘Pope’.
Conclusion: Authority versus Power
This second 500-year period of Christianity was dominated by the struggle between proclamations of divine religious authority versus exertions of human political power. In China and Europe, Church and State grew in tandem until the fall of the Tang Dynasty and the start of the Crusades. Meanwhile, the State Religion of Islam swept through Europe and the Near East with an integrated mission, to bring the kingdom of God to Earth. Locked in battle for land in Europe, Christianity and Islam eventually clashed in Palestine over the Christian War Pilgrimage that was known to Muslims as the Great Christian Invasion — the Latin Crusades. Finally, the Christianization of Europe and the militarization of the Papacy initiated the rise of Christendom.
1. MISSIONS TO THE CHINA SEA AND INDIAN OCEAN
1.1 TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
From AD 500–1000, Christianity spread throughout much of the ‘known’ world. In South Asia, Christianity confronted Hinduism, in the Near East, it confronted Islam, and in the Far East, missionaries came up against Buddhism. It was in Asia that the four great world religions met and influenced the future of each other. Meanwhile, in Africa, the cradle of Christian theology thrived but as rival theologians found political sponsors for mutual advantages, the split that began at Chalcedon matured into large-scale fractures. Finally, Europe saw the most impressive nexus between State and Church with the coronation of King Charles the Great of the Franks (Charlemagne) by Pope Leo the Great of Rome. The relationship between authority and power can be traced to humanity’s universal quest for control. Both the priest and the prince offer protection and good tidings for those who sign up as followers. One succeeds by assuming the promises of spiritual authority while the other, by the punishing might of power. It is therefore, no surprise that from the earliest days of the Christian faith, political entities have tried to purchase the authority of the Church to feed the power of the State. Conversely, the trappings of sacred authority began to take on the trappings of stately secular power. The rise of papal power followed the rise of the Holy Emperor. Each side understood the fictional boundaries that demarcated the temporal and the spiritual realms, even if more broke the rules than kept them. Popes became increasingly politically powerful and princes recognized the benefits of alliances with the clergy. Time and again, leaders in combat appealed to divine help for favor. When they believed a certain deity assisted them, they responded by adopting that religion. In a sense, religion took on the form of a combat amulet. To possess a god was akin to having a supernatural mascot in times of warfare.[1]
1.2 THE MISSIONS MANDATE
In Europe, while the great missionary Ulfilas preached Arian Christianity to other Germanic tribes, the Franks became the first Gothic tribe to convert to the Nicene or Orthodox Christianity. The Frankish expansion into Gaul brought Christendom to modern day France. It started with the conversion of Clovis (481–511) who was baptized along with 3,000 warriors on the Christmas Day of 496 in the city of Rheims. Clovis was married to a Burgundian princess named Clotilda (475–545), who spoke of the one God who created the heaven and earth and fashioned mankind. He reluctantly permitted his children to be baptized upon the insistence of his wife. In a raging battle with the Alamanni tribe, Clovis cried out “Jesus Christ, Clotilda says thou art the Son of the living God, and thou canst give victory to those who hope in thee. Give me victory and I will be baptized. I have tried other gods and they have deserted me. I call on thee. Only save me.”[2] After he defeated the Alamanni, he renounced his gods in favor of Christ. But he was afraid that his people would not consent to a national conversion. To his surprise, they were won over by his account.
In the British Isles, Christian Roman soldiers first introduced the faith. In 563, about a hundred years after the death of St. Patrick, an Irish monk called St. Columba went to Iona, a remote island off the Scottish coastline, to evangelize the Scots. Other Irish monks went to preach the gospel to the Germanic tribes east of the Rhine. After Angles and Saxons invaded Roman Britain (today’s England, not Great Britain) in the 5th century, it was renamed Angleland, or England, and its people were known as Anglo-Saxons. In 597, a year before St. Columba died, Pope Gregory the Great sent the Italian monk, Augustine (not the North African bishop) to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons of England and baptize King Ethelbert of Kent. It was the first instance of a pope’s interest in missions beyond the empire. This completed the arrival of Christianity to the British Isles, from Romans to the Irish, the Scots and then the English. A hundred years later, the English became great missionaries to continental Europe.
In the Near East (Persia and Arabia), the Lakhmid (Yemeni) King al-Mundir III (505–554) was a pagan, his mother Mariyah and his queen Hind (from the Byzantine Christian Arab kingdom of Ghassan) were Christians. Queen Hind built a convent, became a nun and described herself as ‘the maid of Christ’. Although there were several Byzantine Arab kingdoms, the first and only Nestorian Christian king of Hirta (Persian Arabia) was al-Numan III (580–602). Thus Christian kingdoms thrived in Arabia for some 250 years before the birth of the prophet Muhammad and many Arabian kings of this period were converts to Judaism.
In Africa, there were at least four traditions of Christianity by the year 600, the Ethiopian, North African or the Maghreb, Egyptian, and Nubian.
The Ethiopian Church from the Axumite[3] King Kaleb of Abyssinia claimed sovereignty over Arabia and attacked it in 528 under the pretext of liberating Arab Christians from Masruq, the Jewish King of Arabia. But they were expelled by the Sassanids (225–651) in 574, ending Christian influence in Arabia just four years after the birth of Muhammad. Roman Africa (North Africa) became a Vandal kingdom and later, also known as Byzantine Africa. By the 7th century, invasions by the Muslim armies turned all of Byzantine Africa from the cross to the crescent.
The North African Church of the Maghreb never recovered from the invasions of ‘barbarians’ in 426. Three years later, the Vandals under Gaiseric attacked and settled in the Carthaginian heartland of Tunisia. The Byzantine Emperor Justinian in turn overthrew the Vandals in 533.
The Egyptian Church, partly as a result of the monastic movement of the 4th century that rejected the urbanizing force of Hellenism, was the catalyst that incorporated Christianity into the native Egyptian culture. The Bible and liturgy had been translated into Coptic languages.[4] The Egyptian Church survived the Islamic invasion, the Crusades, and even the change to adopting Arabic as the national language of the nation. This was accomplished by a distinct tradition that learned to thrive as a minority religion in an overwhelmingly Islamic nation. The Patriarch was chosen by lot from a list of monks, minimizing state interference. He is usually young to encourage long patriarchates, reducing the disruption that threatens any change in leadership. The language of liturgy and the Bible remained Coptic, shielding them from linguistic complications.
The Nubian Church never came under the control of the Roman Empire but was the target of Byzantine missions during the 6thcentury. Nubia is located south of Egypt, beyond the first cataract of the Aswan River. The successful mission of Julian and Longinus, sent by the Empress Theodora to preach to King Silko of Nobatia, planted the first Nubian church. However, the empress leaned towards monophysitism while Emperor Justinian[5] was a Chalcedonian dyophysite. The Nubians favored monophysitism, the tradition of the first missionaries. They began to look to Egyptian Copts for theological and liturgical leadership.[6] Hence, the Nubian Church became part of the Coptic communion even though it was founded by the Byzantines. By around 1500, the Nubian Church died out, exhausted after lingering on as a minority religion under pressure in Islamic Sudan.[7]
In Asia, the Gupta Empire of India suffered a damaging war of succession in 467. Its authority never recovered. The Thomas Christians in Malabar and along the Indus grew in numbers. Although the Indian Church was established since the 3rd century, by the 6th century, it was organized and dependent on, but was not a part of the Nestorian church of Persia. Both the Syrians and the Persians recognized the apostolic independence and authority of the Indian Church. China was the center of the Confucianized high cultures which include Japan, Vietnam, and Korea. From India, Buddhism and Hinduism had already taken root in China. Whether Syriac Christians were present in this early period remains a matter of conjecture at this stage. Although physical evidence suggesting the existence of Christian worshippers has been found, our scientific tools of investigation are not sufficiently powerful to supply responsible conclusions at this time. What we have are stories of travelers from the Persian Empire who may have reached western China before 635, the earliest documented date we possess for the earliest Christianity in China.
1.3 SUMMARY
Christian missions, with the help of the State, advanced north to Europe, south into Africa, east to Asia and west to the Iberian Peninsula. The globalization of the church had begun. The mission mandate to bring the Gospel to all nations, baptizing them and making disciples of every nation, was often carried out under arms.
The transformation from authority to power took place very early on when conversions by kings and princes led the way to the nationalization of religious faith.
[1] Although historians cite the conversions of political leaders, we must not assume that they were the primary reasons why people turned to God. We do not have surviving records of how ordinary working folks responded to religious claims, but we may safely assume that in an age of great uncertainty, most people readily believed in a supernatural being who may offer them protection and providence.
[2] Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language, 2nd edition, (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1995), 157.
[3] Sometimes spelled Aksumite.
[4] Adrian Hastings, (ed.) A World History of Christianity, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 195.
[5] Justinian I (Flavius Anicius Justinianus), nephew of Justin I, was born at Tauresium in Illyria, the son of a Slavonic peasant, and was originally called Sabbatius. Educated at Constantinople, in 521 Justinian was named consul and in 527 was proclaimed by Justin his colleague in the empire. Justin died the same year and Justinian, who was then proclaimed sole emperor, was crowned along with his wife, Theodora. See http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/justinian.html.
[6] Hastings, 196.
[7] Giovanni Vantini, Christianity in the Sudan, (Bologna: University of Bologna Press, 1981).
1. SOUTH EAST: ENCOUNTERING HINDUISM IN INDIA
1.1 THE CHRISTIAN DIASPORA: EASTWARD TO ASIA
Christianity is not a western religion introduced to Asia by English-speaking European missionaries. History tells us that Christianity was first brought to China by a Persian-speaking bishop from Persia (modern Iran). Bishop Alopen, as he was known, belonged to the Assyrian Church of the East,[1]which was founded in Mesopotamia (modern eastern Turkey) and subsequently centered at Baghdad (modern Iraq), by Jewish Christians.
“The Church began in Asia, Asia produced the first known church building, the first New Testament translation, perhaps the first Christian king, the first Christian poets, and even arguably the first Christian state. By the 13th century, the Nestorian Church of Asia exercised more ecclesiastical authority over more of the earth than either Rome or Constantinople.” So began Samuel Moffett in his book, A History of Christianity in Asia.
How did Christians end up in oriental Asia with missionaries to India and China? At least four different streams of Christian missions may be traced. They are the Christians of the Odes of Solomon, the Thomas Christians of India, the Syrian Church at Edessa, and the Abgar legends of Osrhoene. A caveat here — the earliest sources of Christianity in Asia are inconclusive. But, caution need not breed skepticism.[2]
According to Acts 11:19, the Jewish-Christian Diaspora left Jerusalem after the execution of Stephen and preached only to the Jews; with Antioch in Syria as one of the principle towns mentioned. Antioch succeeded Jerusalem as the capital of Christianity but its believers were mostly Gentiles. The largest Jewish community outside Jerusalem was not in the West but in the East, in Babylon, a part of the Persian Empire. So it should not come as a surprise that the gospel message inevitably reached the Jews of Asia.
The four great Asian centers of power in the 1st century were Greco-Roman (Asia-Minor, Syria and Palestine) Asia, Iranian (Persia) Asia, Sinic (China) Asia, and Indian Asia. It was at the borders of Roman Asia and Iranian Asia that Christianity moved eastward before the New Testament itself was completed[3]. It was this migration of Christians that created what became known as the Persian Christians of Parthia. But who were they?
At the time of Christ, the Parthians (247 BC-AD 226) or Arcasids, as they called themselves, the third of three imperial dynasties[4]that made Persia the center of the world, ruled what we now call Iran. They were surrounded by Rome to the west, China to the east and India to the south. In 140 BC, King Mithridates I captured the Seleucid emperor in Babylon as it expanded westward. This prompted China to send an ambassador to the Parthians in 100 BC, opening up the Silk Road.
In 53 BC, the Parthians defeated an invading Roman army near Edessa. The Parthians lined their empire with client-states to serve as buffers against other superpowers. When Roman Christians fled to Persia to escape imperial persecution, they planted their first churches at Edessa, the capital of Osrhoene, one of three client states, along with Adiabene and Armenia protecting the northwestern flank of Persia. In time Asian Christianity came to be centered at the Persian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, south of Baghdad. But in the earliest days of Christianity in Asia, Edessa, with its predominance of Jewish Christians, was the eastern equivalent of Antioch. In 116, Emperor Trajan of Rome captured Seleucia-Ctesiphon. Although Rome withdrew its borders, Persian never fully recovered. In 166, when Emperor Marcus Aurelius pushed back another Parthian attack, Edessa became more Roman than Persian. Before the 2nd century was over, Abgar VIII, the king of Osrhoene, became a Christian.
In 226, a 4th dynasty, the Sassanids, began to rule Persia for the next 400 years. Even though the Persian Church continued to use Syriac in its liturgy, the theological center of Syrian Christianity moved from Edessa to Nisibis (southeastern Turkey). Before the end of this dynasty, the Sassanid Christians would send an emissary missionary to the very heart of China.[5]
By the 3rd century, a Jewish Christian bishop had published the oldest manual of church order in Syriac called Didascalia Apostolorum (The Teachings of the Apostles). By the 4th century, the East’s two greatest theologians were Aphrahat the Persian and Ephrem the Syrian. One of the signatories at the Council of Nicaea in 325 signed himself “John of Persia.” Syrian and Persian converts began to plant churches east of the Tigris River, into Zoroastrian[6] territory.
After AD 600, East Syrian monks, priest and merchants traveled the trade routes to East and South Asia, marked by the building of monasteries along the way. These monasteries served as centers of worship, inns for Christian merchants, centers of medical care, and even schools.[7]
The Christian patriarch in Baghdad required the metropolitans in Asia under his supervision, to report back every six years. The liturgies of these Asian churches were in Syriac rather than Greek, Latin, Egyptian or Ge’ez. Mar Timothy I sent more than 100 missionaries into new regions where churches were not yet in existence,[8] including Tibet.
By the 6th century, Christian communities in South India had become established as a separate local caste. The churches reported to the Persian metropolitan of Rewardashir in southern Persia.[9] But by the 8th century, India had their own local metropolitan. Archaeologists have discovered a letter from Timothy I requesting the name of the Indian metropolitan, to be in charge of as least six bishoprics. Several other letters from Timothy I give us clues into the life of the Indian Church in the 8th century. But the first historical evidence of Indian Christianity comes in the form of copper plates with inscriptions that date to AD 850. Although most of the earliest Christians in India were Persian traders who settled down in India, subsequently, many indigenous Indians also joined the congregations. There are unconfirmed indications that as far back as the 9th century, attempts were made for missionary expansions to Sri Lanka, Java, the Malay peninsula, and the southern coast of China.[10]
The presence of Christianity in India dates back to the first century. Although details remain murky and legend, history and collective memories do not always relate a unified account, the missionaries certainly encountered the incredible dominance of philosophical religions that the West have come to know as Hinduism.
1.2 HINDUISM, THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA
Hinduism is the collective name given to the ancient religions of India. Most of them are pantheistic and the faithful regard all of nature as intimately and indistinguishably associated with the divine.
Hindu Belief
Some of the central beliefs common to most forms of Hinduism include:
1. Goal of Hindu devotion: To achieve union with Brahman, the ultimate reality and absolute spirit.[11]
2. Problem: The cycle of life & suffering is a cyclic flow of many existences or rebirths (samsara) influenced by the consequences of one’s actions (karma) from which liberation (moksha) is achieved by enlightenment through the acquisition of knowledge (jnana-marga).
3. The way of knowledge towards liberation involves acknowledging our illusory perception of reality and the proper understanding of reality by the practice of yoga, the meditation with mantras (om) and asceticism.
4. Practice: Philosophical (Vedantic) Hinduism claims that there is one God (Brahman) and we are part of it while popular (Vedic) Hinduism encourages the worship of deities and gods, including the trinity of Vishnu, Shiva and Devi.
Who are we? In the beginning, there was the One (Brahman). Creation is the division of the One into the gender pair. As the male changes into another species, his partner changes into the respective female counterpart. This explains the diversity of life. Since we are at least part of the creator, our souls are eternal and can neither suffer nor die. The effects of joy and suffering are both illusory.
What is our future? The doctrine of Karma states that our lives are subject to the moral consequences of all our actions, so that suffering may be a result of past sins. The doctrine of Samsara teaches that we (our consciousness) are born and we die along with our bodies in an endless series of lives and deaths until we achieve reunion with Brahman — and escape this existence of suffering, or maya. This escape is called moksha and often translated as liberation. The final goal is to achieve nirvana, or an existence of eternal bliss.
The Global Influence of Hinduism
Hindu teachings are found deeply embedded in the world of entertainment, professional sports, the visual arts, peace studies, and in science education and research, especially in the fields of cosmogony and spacetime studies. Christianity must respond to the challenge of Hinduism at our doorstep with responsible engagement. We begin with a deeper appreciation of the complex philosophical foundations, which form their structures of belief and practice.
Hinduism and Christianity
How do the major doctrines of Hinduism and Christian compare? Can one be both a Hindu and a Christian? Is it possible to align oneself to Hinduism as an ethnic Indian while claiming to be a follower of Christ?
The Hinduism of the ancient Vedic texts is different from the Vedantic Hinduism of the Upanishads, and both are different from the Hinduism of the Gita practiced by most modern Hindus in India today. All three differ from the Hindu Renaissance that came to the West, introduced, and shaped since the 19th century. However, we may make a comparison by taking into account the common elements in much of Hinduism.
There are four non-negotiable doctrines that every Christian ought to hold to. The four doctrines of
1. God is our creator (protology)2. We are alienated from God (anthropology)3. We are redeemed by grace (soteriology)4. Jesus is the fullest revelation of God (christology)These describe the doctrines of the trinity, of the canonical scriptures, of eschatology, etc.
1.3 SUMMARY
The encounter between Christianity and Hinduism in India is lost in the mists of legends and unreliable accounts. Concrete historical evidence on the Christian movement in India prior to the 16th century is sparse. But what is evident is the existence of these ancient churches of the Malabar Coast and beyond.
Today, much research is being conducted to recover more reliable accounts of the Persian Christian engagement with Indian Hinduism. What we do know is that there was sufficient tolerance of ideals and ideas about beliefs in an ancient continent of philosophers so that the Syriac liturgical churches survived till this day — the Church of Mar Thoma or the Thomas Christians.
[1] Although they were mistakenly called the Nestorian Church, they never taught Nestorianism. The Church was established in Edessa in the first century and after the schism in AD 431, is variously known as the “Nestorian Church”, “Persian Church”, “East Syrian Church”, “Chaldean Syrian Church” in India only, “Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East”, “Assyrian Church of the East”. As a specific branch of the Church, the ACE was ‘founded’ after the death of John Nestorius in AD 451. http://www.nestorian.org/
[2] Samuel Moffett, History of Christianity in Asia: Beginning to 1500, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992), 56ff. Moffett introduces the legends of Addai, the great missionary to Osrhoene, his disciple called Aggai and King Abgar the Black of Edessa from p47ff. Other important figures of early Asian Christianity include Bardaisan of Edessa, Tatian the Assyrian, and Ephrem the Syrian. Tatian’s translation of the Bible from Greek into Syriac launched the explosion of missions into deeper parts of Asia.
[3] The geographical corridor of Christian missions to the east is the ancient kingdom of Syria.
[4] The first dynasty, which consisted of the Medes and Persians, was the Achaemenids (549–330 BC) founded by Cyrus II, the Great. He liberated his subjects, including the Jews, from Babylonia. The second dynasty was the Greek Dynasty called the Seleucids (312–238 BC). They were the heirs of Alexander the Great of Macedonia, who conquered Persia when he defeated the Achaemenids. See Moffett, 10–11.
[5] Yet, the Persian Christians were not the first ‘western’ religion to reach the ancient kingdom of Cathay. The Manichaens (Mani was a 3rd century prophet who formed a religion that adopted bits and pieces from different religions, and he was crucified for it) reached Chang An, the Tang capital before the Nestorians did. Although Manichaenism has been described as a Christianized Zoroastrianism, it was much more than that. Mani’s attempt to form a world religion that would attract followers from other existing religions began well in India but ended with his own martyrdom. Yet his teachings survived long enough to attract St. Augustine himself for a time.
[6] Zoroaster (Zarathustra) was a Persian prophet from the 18th century BC who preached the worship of Ahura Mazda, the good creator of the universe. Zoroastrianism remained a major influence of the Iranian peoples until the arrival of Islam in the 7th century AD. See A. Shapur Shahbazi, The Traditional Date of Zoroaster Explained,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 40 (London: 1977) and H. W. Bailey, Zoroastrian Problems in the Ninth Century Books, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1943, reprint 1971), xix, and Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, (London: Routledge, 1979).
[7] Irvin and Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, Volume 1, 305.
[8] Irvin and Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, Volume 1, 307.
[9] Dale T. Irvin and Scott W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement. Volume 1, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. 2001), 308.
[10] Irvin and Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, Volume 1, 310.
[11] But the many Hindu religions disagree on whether Brahman is a unity or incorporates pantheist or polytheist aspects. All other gods are merely manifestations of Brahman.
1. FAR EAST: ENCOUNTERING BUDDHISM IN CHINA
1.1 BUDDHISM, THE FIRST GLOBAL RELIGION
Buddhist Belief
Around 450 BC, a young Hindu ascetic claimed to have been ‘awakened’ and discovered the path to liberation from the cycle of suffering that we call our existence. He went on to found the fourth largest religion in the world, which also became the first global religion. His name was Siddharta Gautama and he became known as Shakyamuni Buddha, who left a legacy of teachings called dharma, and a society of monks called the Sangha. Together, they form the Three Jewels of Buddhism.
The central teaching is that “all is impermanent”, including sorrow and joy. Thus we suffer, because we desire the impermanent. The solution is to eliminate unfulfillable desire. Compare this with Jesus, who taught us to seek right desire.
Early Buddhism began as an agnostic philosophy to cope with the anxieties of life. But it was subsequently transformed by some later Buddhist traditions into polytheistic, deistic, and animistic religions. In these later practices, many came to believe that spirits control the lives of the faithful, so prayer and appeasement of spirits became important developments in the evolution of popular Buddhism. Many of these teachings would have been alien to the Buddha himself. Other Buddhists believe in a self-help doctrine, which in some cases, evolved to include ethical altruism. In many countries Buddhism has become nationalistic, and have been inextricably identified with the geopolitics and language of many Asian nations, including Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Kampuchea, Vietnam, Tibet, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka.
Early Theravada Buddhism’s goal of escaping this existence by indifference to materialism coexists with later Buddhist traditions that seek to prolong life in this existence and safeguard material prosperity. In America, Buddhism became a source of inspiration for many to achieve the American Dream or to engage with social policies.
In the ancient East, life for the vast majority consists of a miserable existence. Buddhism offered relief from the turmoil of war and the suffering of the weak by warning the strong that all actions will be repaid, if not in this life, then in the next. There is no escape from moral responsibility (karma). Mistakes in life are not final. There is always another chance in the next life to make right (samsara). The final escape from this existence is by a new way of thinking, in which one’s cognition is awakened (nirvana).
Today, Buddhism has achieved mainstream acceptance both in name and in philosophy throughout the world. Almost every arena of human thought has been influenced by Buddhist dharma.
Buddhism and Christianity
The power of Buddhist thought lies in its soothing claims for peace, gentleness, and relaxation. When The Beetles sing, “Let It Be” and Christians chant the slogan, “Let Go and Let God”, they mimic an instrumental concept behind Buddhism. Buddhism has been imported into Christian practice for many years now.
The term ‘Extrapolated Buddhism’ refers to Buddhist themes taken out of their original contexts and extrapolated to radically different contexts. Some Catholic contemplatives have adopted Zen teachings and techniques to aid them in the search for God. Father Hugo Enomiya-Lasalle (1898–1990) a Jesuit missionary to Japan and Thomas Merton (1915–1968),[1] an American Trappist monk, are prime examples. Lasalle underwent Rinzai training, becoming a master in 1978, and returned to Europe to lead Zen retreats with koans (stories for meditation) from the Bible.[2] Today, many Christian theologians and pastors experiment with aspects of Hindu and Buddhist practice in an attempt to recapture the mystical experiences of earlier Christian history. One such popular practice is yogic meditation. For some, the Buddhist experience of being ‘awakened’ may be just the cure for an indifferent congregation.
Let us set out the basic Christian and Buddhist worldviews concerning what each religion considers its primary message. For the Church, the Good News is that God seeks to redeem us for full fellowship in the afterlife by and through the death and resurrection of Jesus. For Buddhism, cognitive awakening solves the problem of the endless cycle of frustrated lives where desires remain unsatisfied.
The Christian Worldview
While Christianity is expressed through a wide range of orthodoxic and orthopraxic traditions, historic teachings may be summed up by four non-negotiable elements. I call these four elements the C.A.S.E. for Christianity:
1. Creation (Protology): God created all that exists, including the natural order.
2. Alienation (Anthropology): Humans possess the capacity for moral judgment and therefore, to either receive or reject God. Rejection puts us in a state of volitional sin, resulting in a self-imposed alienation from God. Receiving God into our way of life is described as being saved.
3. Salvation (Soteriology): God eternally resolved to redeem us by the sacrifice of Jesus, whose righteousness cloaks us (atonement) so we are deemed holy instead of sinful (justification). In repentance, we receive God’s forgiveness. We are liberated from slavery to sin, even as we struggle to resist temptations. We worship in community and learn to trust God (sanctification) as we await Jesus to usher in a new age of physical existence in a renewed world.
4. Election (Christology): We can freely choose to share this good news of Jesus Christ in gentleness and humility. We take time out to study the Scriptures and develop a comprehensive worldview from which to articulate a responsible apologetic (pre-evangelism), paving the way for the proclamation of the good news (evangelism) as we go forth to the world (missions) to disciple all nations (discipleship).
The Buddhist Worldview
Buddhism teaches meditation to achieve discovery of insights to the truth about reality while Christians are to meditate on the scriptural disclosure of revelation from God to shape an understanding of reality.
Life is suffering and no one can help us: Siddharta Gautama witnessed the physiological and psychological suffering of pain, aging, illness, and death. Dissatisfied with the explanations of Hindu philosophy and theology, he rejected the existence of a supreme creator and resigned himself to self-help.
Christianity also acknowledges the reality of human suffering but accepts the teaching of the scriptures that we can do little about it by ourselves and in any case, “this too shall pass”. Although God is not the direct cause of much of human suffering, God is the ultimate comfort for human brokenness. Instead of self-help, we are invited to surrender to God. Jesus, who is God, is our Savior and only He qualifies to relieve us from the human predicament. It is Buddhism’s self-help vs divine-help of Christianity.
All is impermanent,[3] and knowledge of this helps us escape this existence: the human predicament as an existence caught within the cycle of life, death, rebirth and re-death in which permanent escape is the goal. Such escape is only possible with the knowledge that “all is impermanent” and that our consciousness of reality is illusory. We cannot get beyond our natural senses. This reliance on our natural senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste) traps us to respond to the urgency of life with actions (karma) that continue to hold us in a self-imprisoned mode of existence.
We tend to believe that what we cannot perceive with our natural senses must surely not exist. We are essentially blind to any possible reality that we cannot sense naturally. The solution is to direct our actions to accomplish the goal of escaping this illusorycycle of existence. Improper karma leads to imprisonment in samsara. The Fourth Noble Truth recommends the Eightfold Pathway of behavior, which directs proper action. This will reduce the chances of rebirth. After many cycles of life and death, our consciousness may be weaned out of its dependence on desires that cannot be satisfied. Then true consciousness can be achieved. This is happiness.
Christianity teaches that we were created to have fellowship with our creator, but each of us intuitively rejects the authority of God. We seek independence (autonomy). This leaves us in a state of restlessness so that all our desires cannot be satisfied by anyone or anything except by God. Our state of disobedience to God is called sin. The solution is repentance. This is possible only because there is someone with the authority to forgive. Since sin is an offense against God, only someone with equal status to God has the authority to reinstate the human status. This person is Jesus, an equal partner in the Triune Godhead of the Christian faith. Although repentance is an action of the will, the operational element that satisfies the debt of sin is not our action but the eternal act of Jesus who died a human death.
The achronic (divine) truth that Jesus can reconcile us to God (saves) is independent of when one asks. He can … period, independent of our knowledge. The synchronic truth that “Barack Obama is the president of the United States” is operative only as long as he holds office. Is there a truth that is true all the time? Yes, we call it diachronic truth, but this is still dependent on human knowledge. Thus we used to say that all swans are white, until black swans were discovered in Australia. From this perspective, no human knowledge about anything can be considered absolutely true[4] as they consist of either synchronic or diachronic but never achronic truths. [5]
Escape rather than salvation is the ultimate goal of Buddhism.
There is no good or evil, no god or devil, no heaven or hell: Early Buddhism does not recognize much of what now passes as Buddhism, especially outside of Sri Lanka. Universal impermanence means that concepts of good and evil are masks of true reality. They are not what they seem. Meditation helps us to think thoughts that are not dependent on our senses. We cannot trust our notions of good and bad. With neither God nor the Devil to guide or deceive us, we are responsible for our own predicament. There is no promise of heaven or curse of hell. Nirvana cannot be described adequately since no one who goes across comes back. As such, ethics does not follow from morality but follows from the pragmatic goal of escaping suffering by escaping the only form of existence we know. There is no salvation because no one has sinned and there is no need for evangelism because there is no good news to affirm. The Buddha died confident but had no assurance — there is no one to assure him.
Christianity proclaims the certainty of everlasting life with God since Jesus is the witness to postmortem life. His 40 days before his ascension to heaven was a historical period when he spoke to people who would have asked him about his experiences. There is God from whom we can understand goodness. Evil is the absence of good and hell is the absence of God’s presence.
Buddhist ethics is not based on a moral imperative because there is no known lawgiver. Christianity identifies the lawgiver as God, creator of the heavens and the earth.
Nirvana: The final goal — to extinguish the flame of this mode of existence: Buddhism does not seek self-annihilation as some people believe, but, rather, the annihilation of this form of existence. Relief from samsara is not an attempt to reverse the emergence of life but to escape the ‘gravitational pull’ of this-worldy existence to enter a new ‘orbit’ of existence in which there is no suffering. In this sense, it is likened to entering a heaven-like place. Some forms of Buddhism interpret nirvana as entering a ‘pure land’ where all our desires are finally matched by satisfaction. It is not that desires themselves are undesirable, but that unfulfilled desires will lead to frustration. The Buddhist goal is to enter a state of existence in which we will desire what is desirable and good for us. This transformation of the mind echoes Christianity’s call to be transformed by the renewal of the mind in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 12:2.
Does nirvana resemble heaven in any way? The Buddhist worldview is essentially agnostic. The Buddha neither affirmed nor denied the existence of God. This does not mean that Buddhism is pessimistic or annihilistic. Rather, it seeks a boundless life not limited by the frustrations of unfulfilled desires and unsustainable attachments. Nirvana ‘blows out the fire’ that draws from us[6] desires that we cannot adequately fulfill, resulting in resentment and frustration, thus blinding us to the real joys of life. This refers to how our insights and understanding is distracted by the metaphorical fire that consumes oxygen and draws attention to itself, preventing us from seeing reality. Nirvana liberates the self from its shackles of finitude and self-centeredness.
How the Awakened Met the Enlightened
The Buddha is known as “The Awakened One”. However, when Buddhism came to the West, early Buddhologists referred to Shakyamuni Buddha’s Awakening as his Enlightenment in response to the cultural crisis of the breach between scientific reason and religious dogma following the Enlightenment.[7] The term stuck, and the Buddha became ‘Enlightened’.
The European Enlightenment in the 18th century sought to liberate Western civilization from the yoke of intellectual and political tyranny largely dominated by Christian clerics. Thinkers such as Voltaire, Hume, Kant,[8] Diderot, Franklin and Montesquieu advanced the view that only the scientific method of rational analyses of empirical data could serve as the source of absolute knowledge. Their intellectual manifesto was an amalgam of empiricism, cultural relativism, pluralism, and eclecticism. Their political manifesto, however, demanded absolutes in order to mandate social reform. Despite much hope in greater learning, they never did manage to reconcile the inherent conflict between their political absolutes and intellectual relativism. One unforeseen effect of the Enlightenment was the introduction of Buddhist philosophy to Western thought.[9] Although the Church claimed the authority of God, it often expressed such authority in terms of raw bullying power. This failure of the Church to cope with the excesses of its political power prompted philosophers to turn to non-western ideals.
Three strands of influence paved the way for the study of the Buddha, or Buddhalogy:
1. The openness to other possible resources of knowledge led to the collection, translation, and study of Buddhist texts, and excavation of Buddhist archaeological sites.
2. The search for solutions to the European cultural crisis included Eastern religions, especially one that claimed ‘Enlightenment’.
3. Westerners exposed to Buddhism now asked for the right to reform religion to fit the emerging field of psychology in the name of human progress.
1.2 CHRISTIANITY IN THE TANG DYNASTY
The earliest records of lay Christian presence in China may be of the families of Persian or Bactrian traders settling in Lintao, Kansu in China in the 6th century. The Sui Dynasty (580–617) founded the city of Changan (Xianfu) in 582. By 628, it became part the Tang Empire (618–907), founded by Li Yuan (Emperor Gaozu) in 618. Peaceful political co-existence with the Turks fostered trade with the West, Turkestan and Persia.
The ‘Old Silk Road’ dated from as far back as the 1st century BC, reaching to Rome. In the mid-7th century, power politics in West Asia favored the Arabs, whose newfound religion, Islam, gave the desert people a history and a power undreamed of. With this newfound confidence, they took on the superpowers of Rome and Persia, who were already battle-fatigued from fighting each other. As the state religion of Zoroastrianism declined under the oppression of Islam, Manichaeism (which may be seen either as a form of Christianized Zoroastrianism or a Zoroastrianized Christianity) began to flourish. Thus, among the Persians, Christianity, Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism were the dominant faith traditions. Islam added a fourth to the list as it grew in numbers. Meanwhile, in East Asia, China emerged as a new superpower under the Tang Dynasty. Its expanding borders soon came into contact with these four religions of Persia.
Well before the arrival of Christianity, Buddhism had arrived in China from India in the 1st century, but it remained a foreign religion because the Buddha’s ethics went against the grain of Confucian teachings on filial piety. For example, the practice of Buddhist monasticism would lead to the ‘destruction of the fabric of society’[10] because a large number of men would leave their homes and parents uncared for in old age.
In 635[11] Yeshuyab II[12] (628–643), patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East[13] sent Alopen, the first documented missionary to China. This missional legacy started from Jewish Christianity in Palestine to Roman Christianity to Syriac Christianity in Persia (Iraq and Iran), to Nestorian Christianity in Tang Dynasty China, to Kerait Christianity in Mongolia. The second emperor of the Tang dynasty embraced the Gospel.
Had Alopen come just a decade earlier, he would have faced the formidable Gaozu, founding emperor of the Tang Dynasty, who in 626 ordered an edict forcing Buddhist monks to disband. This was in accordance with classical Confucian thought, which did not look kindly at the idea of large numbers of monks, folks who did not contribute to the collective wealth of the nation. Buddhism, an Indian import, was considered un-Chinese and foreign to the Chinese way of life. It is likely that Christianity would have faced a similar reception. After the death of Taitsung, his son, Kaotsung (649–683), continued the enthusiasm of his father towards the Christians as well as Buddhists.[14]
From the 7th to the 9th centuries, Nestorian Christianity received favors from successive emperors of the Tang Dynasty. According to the Nestorian Monument, all ten provinces of Tang Dynasty China housed monasteries and churches. China had its own Metropolitan by the time of Catholicos (Patriarch) Timothy I (780–823) and Christian communities existed from among the Turks and Uighurs in western China to Canton in the south as well as to the north, beyond Changan.[15] Then, it collapsed as mysteriously as it blossomed. As the world’s largest city with over a million residents, Changan, the Tang dynasty capital, sat at the terminus of the ‘Silk Road’ and attracted the intelligentsia of East Asia. The scholarly Confucian Emperor, Taitsung,[16] son of Gaozu, established what amounts to a university there. It was home to a great library of perhaps 200,000 volumes. Here, the first Christian writings were translated into Chinese.[17] Nestorianism, along with Judaism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, gained acceptance.
In AD 781, a large stone was erected to commemorate the arrival of the Illustrious Religion. But by the 10th century, there were reports of the demise of Nestorian Christianity in China. The Jesuits discovered their ancient presence some 700 years later with the discovery of the Nestorian Monument in 1623.[18]
Evidence of Nestorian activity as far inland as Turkestan in Central Asia dates at least to the time of Marco Polo in the 13th century, who reported discovering a church at the Kerait capital of Karakoram.[19] By the 13th century, the Mongolians came to power in China. Genghis Khan married a Christian wife, Sorkakthani, mother of emperor Kublai Khan. Kublai hosted Marco Polo and asked the pope to send 100 teaching monks to evangelize China — they never came and Marco returned to China just after the Great Khan died. What happened after that?
[1] Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O. was arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has sold over one million copies and has been translated into over fifteen languages. The book sent scores of disillusioned World War II veterans, students, and even teen-agers flocking to monasteries across the US. He wrote over sixty other books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence, and the nuclear arms race. Merton was born in Prades, France to two artists, a New Zealand-born father and an American-born mother. After a rambunctious youth and adolescence, Merton converted to Roman Catholicism whilst at Columbia University and on December 10th, 1941 he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani of Kentucky, a community of monks belonging to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists), the most ascetic Roman Catholic monastic order. In 1949, he was ordained to the priesthood and given the name Father Louis. Merton was a keen proponent of interfaith understanding. He pioneered dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama, the Japanese writer D.T. Suzuki, and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Merton has also been the subject of several biographies. http://www.merton.org/
[2] Robinson and Johnson, The Buddhist Religion, 301.
[3] Except the very dharma that ‘all is impermanent’.
[4] Absolute truth requires absolute knowledge.
[5] We reserve achronic truth for God alone. This is the limitation of chronos (creaturely time) when compared to kairos (divine time). Since all of creation exists in chronos, and only God exists in kairos, it was necessary for God to invade chronos as the God-man Jesus the Christ so we may know God. What God resolved in kairos to do he did in chronos. Although Jesus died on the cross around AD 29, his will is eternal and takes place in kairic, not chronic time. The historical events of his death and resurrection are significations of an eternal will ‘preceding’ the act. Thus its operational impact is effective before and after the act in the time vector because its timeline is bidirectional (past and future) and synchronic (independent of circumstantial phenomena).
[6] Smith, The World’s Religions, 113.
[7] Robinson and Johnson, The Buddhist Religion, 302.
[8] Kant’s program has been reconsidered in recent years and John E. Hare of Yale, among others have argued that Kant’s main point was not to undermine faith but rather to demonstrate the limitations of a faith-free science.
[9] Robinson and Johnson, The Buddhist Religion, 299.
[10] Andrew Walls, Lecture Notes : EC 435, Spring 1999, PTS
[11] This was the same year that Aidan (c.600–651) the monk shared the Gospel in Northumbria, in the north of England. See Aubrey R. Vine, The Nestorian Churches (London: Independent Press, 1937) 79.
[12] Also known as Ishoʿyahb II of Gdala.
[13] The Assyrian Church of the East, officially known as the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East, or simply the Church of the East, is an ancient Christian tradition of Persian Christianity — its current headquarters is in Chicago of the United States. The Church of the East. was officially founded in 1552 following the Nestorian Schism of 1551 and claims historical continuity with the Patriarchate of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, near Baghdad. Another denomination, the Ancient Church of the East, broke off in 1968 in opposition to reforms introduced in the Assyrian Church of the East including the adoption of the Roman liturgical calendar in 1964. It is based in Baghdad and led by Catholicos-Patriarch Mar Addai II. Today, this tradition of Persian Christianity is not in communion with any other church, whether Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Oriental Orthodox — these non-Chalcedonian Churches recognize only the first three ecumenical councils and comprise six groups: Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India, Armenian Apostolic, Syriac Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, and Eritrean Orthodox Churches. In 2001, some theologians of the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox Churches declared that they had always shared the same Christology but expressed its formula differently. They jointly issued a statement — the Middle Eastern Oriental Orthodox Common Declaration.
See http://sor.cua.edu/Ecumenism/20010317oomtg4.html. The Assyrian Church of the East was erroneously called Nestorian by the time its missionary efforts took root in China during the 7th century.
[14] Paludan, 96. The alternate spelling based on pinyin for Tai-tsung is Taizong, Kao-tsung, Gaozong
[15] John C. England, The Hidden History of Christianity in Asia, 69. Chang-An is modern day Xi’an.
[16] Ann Paludan, Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998) 89, His real name was Li Shimin, born 599, second son of Gaozu (Li Yuan), founding emperor of the Tang Dynasty. The alternate spelling based on pinyin is Taizong.
[17] England, The Hidden History of Christianity in Asia, 72.
[18] Various sources offered three dates: 1623, 1625, and 1628. A 19th century ink rubbing by the Rev. John Murray (Class of 1875 and missionary to China from 1875–1926) hangs at the Speer Library of Princeton Theological Seminary.
[19] Vine, 129.
