God Is Not One

by Prothero, Stephen

  The expansion of Christianity into the Global South is not just changing the color of Christians, however. It is also changing the shape of Christianity itself. According to Harvey Cox, Christians now live in a “post-dogmatic” “Age of the Spirit” in which individual spirituality trumps institutional religion, creeds and catechisms are invoked more than they are followed, and “the experience of the divine is displacing theories about it.”44 Supernaturalism, chased out of many Global North churches by scientific theorems and philosophical arguments, is back in vogue. Faith healing, speaking in tongues, and even exorcisms are everyday occurrences in many of the world’s fastest growing denominations. This new wave of Christianity is eminently practical, addressing social problems such as poverty via something like the “preferential option for the poor” of Latin American liberation theologians. But it preaches personal salvation at least as much. According to historian Mark Noll, Christians are becoming more entrepreneurial and less deferential to tradition. The new pattern is “self-starting, self-financing and self-spreading Christianity.”45

  Observers of American religion have long noted that Christians are now divided along political rather than denominational lines. People on the Catholic left have more in common with liberal Protestants than they do with traditional Catholics, and traditional Catholics have more in common with conservative Protestants than they do with liberal Catholics. Something similar can be said of global Christianity, which is divided into North and South. Christians in the Global South tend to be more theologically conservative than Christians in the Global North, where biblical criticism, evolutionary theory, and comparative religion have created a large cohort of theological liberals. Christians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America also tend to emphasize their faith’s experiential dimension, while those in Europe and the United States emphasize its ethical dimension. American and European Christians incline toward the Social Gospel, which views sin and salvation in collective rather than individual terms and challenges the faithful to focus on thisworldly matters such as feeding the hungry and providing shelter for the homeless. Christians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America tend to preach the prosperity gospel and to focus on winning a ticket to heaven. Here angels and demons are no mere metaphors, and the supernatural is alive and well and testifying to its power.

  This growing gap between Global North and Global South Christianity is on display in the paroxysms besetting the Anglican Communion. The presenting problem is homosexuality, more specifically the election of an openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. But the broader issue is the authority of the Bible, which by any literal reading must be said to oppose at least male homosexuality. (Nowhere is lesbianism plainly condemned, or even contemplated.) What this controversy reveals is that Anglicans in Africa are worlds apart from Episcopalians in the United States. Of course there are liberals in the Global South, and conservatives in the Global North. In response to Robinson’s election, about 100,000 U.S. conservatives left the Episcopal Church in 2009 to form the Anglican Church in North America. Nonetheless, the story of contemporary Christianity is turning into a tale of two churches, with the Global North yielding influence as rapidly as the Global South is seizing it.

  Driving this browning of Christianity are two classic engines of religious change: births and conversions. The fastest growing churches are, not surprisingly, eagerly evangelistic, and their efforts are being augmented by family sizes in the Global South that dwarf those in the North. Much has been made of high birth rates in the Muslim world, but Christians are having children at similarly staggering rates in the Global South, especially in Africa. There is no way that Christianity can keep up the growth it posted in Africa in the twentieth century—from 9 million souls in 1900 to 355 million in 2000—but thanks to a combination of that old-time revivalism and old-fashioned population growth, Africa and Latin America alike should bypass Europe by 2025 in terms of professing Christians.46

  Christianity and Islam

  One of the great challenges of this increasingly global church is how to reckon with its Muslim neighbors. For most of Christian history, Jews were the Christians’ closest conversation partners. Christianity was from the beginning an amalgamation of Hellenistic and Hebraic influences, and just how the two should be mixed has always stirred contention. But today Christianity and Islam are the world’s greatest religions. Together they account for roughly half of the world’s population, and for more than half of the world’s suicide bombers and drone attacks.

  The history of Christian-Muslim relations is of course fraught. Arab Muslims seized Jerusalem (which they call Al-Quds, “the Holy”) in 637. Christians took it back in 1099, only to relinquish it to the Muslim hero Saladin in 1187. And so it has gone for the last millennia or so. There have been times when these two religious communities have lorded over distant empires, crossing paths only through pamphlet wars or military campaigns. There have been places, such as medieval Spain, where Muslims and Christians lived side by side without fear. Today, however, Islam and Christianity are again rivals, competing cheek by jowl for people, power, and public opinion. Africa is now fairly evenly split between Christians (47 percent of the population) and Muslims (41 percent), so a new Great Game is on there for the hearts and minds of the world’s fastest growing populations. The other Great Game, played out on television, in newspapers, and online, pits Christians against Muslims on their respective ethics of war.

  Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about Christianity’s own traditions of holy war and “texts of terror.” Like Hinduism’s Mahabharata epic, the Bible devotes entire books to war and rumors thereof. Unlike the Quran, however, it contains hardly any rules for how to conduct a just war. The Old Testament is replete with war, beheadings, and rapes. “I will make mine arrows drunk with blood,” a vengeful God brags in Deuteronomy 32:42, “and my sword shall devour flesh.” Elsewhere this same God is implicated in the mass murder of children, the genocide of entire peoples, even (in the case of the Great Flood) the extermination of almost the entire human race. The Psalms, read every Sunday in many churches, drip with vengeance, including a blessing that concludes Psalm 137 for whoever retaliates against the Babylonians by smashing their infants against the rocks. It is not just the Old Testament that is flesh devouring and drunk on blood, however. “I came not to send peace, but a sword,” Jesus says (Matthew 10:34). And who in his right mind can defend Jesus when He responds to a Canaanite woman pleading for help for her sick daughter by calling the two of them “dogs” (Matthew 15:22–28)?47

  Mystics and the “Negative Way”

  With all this religious ammunition loaded and cocked and ready to fire, it might seem that a clash of Muslim and Christian civilizations is fated. But both Islam and Christianity have strong traditions of mystics whose experiences of the divine have led them to embrace people of other religions as fellow pilgrims in a mysterious journey toward the Ineffable and Indescribable. These mystics provide resources for Muslims and Christians interested in turning swords into ploughshares, or at least in keeping those swords in their sheaths.

  Students of Christianity often learn far more about its philosophers than its mystics. There is, for example, the Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), who brought Aristotle into conversation with Christianity and famously defined the human person as a combination of body and soul that, though fragmented at death, would come together again at the resurrection. Aquinas also advanced a series of logical arguments for the existence of God that continue to be debated today. But like the other great religions, Christianity also has a mystical strain that, in the name of the mystery that is God, is skeptical of systematic theology and philosophy. Like contemporary Pentecostals, ancient and medieval mystics stressed experience over doctrine. The Orthodox hoped for theosis, or deification (“becoming by grace what God is by nature,” writes Athanasius). Medieval Catholics such as Teresa
of Avila (1515–82) sought union with God. But in any case Christian mysticism was about direct experience of the divine.

  Though Christian mystics offer a genealogy of their practice that goes back to Paul’s ecstatic encounter with Jesus and Jesus’s intimacy with His Father, Christian mysticism really flowered in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Like Augustine, who famously asked God to grant him chastity and continence, “but not yet,” Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) was a wealthy playboy when he turned to a life of poverty and communion with God through the glories of nature. Female mystics such as Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) reveled in the feminine aspect of God. Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) spoke eloquently of the via negativa, the “negative way” to a God who is beyond space and time and description and therefore can only be said to be, as Hindu thinkers put it, neti neti (“neither this nor that”). Even Aquinas admitted that “it is easier to say what [God] is not than what He is.”48

  It is of course a long and circuitous route from contemporary evangelicalism and Pentecostalism to medieval mysticism—from suburban megachurches and their confident sermons about how Jesus would vote to Meister Eckhart. But Eckhart and your average megachurch pastor are both engaged in the ongoing Christian conversation about creation and crucifixion, sin and redemption. What the pastor has on the mystic is the simplicity of his story: we are sinners, Jesus died for our sins, and we can achieve salvation if we have faith in Him. What the mystic has on the pastor is his awareness that sometimes things are not as simple as they seem. Sometimes Christianity cannot be captured in simple formulas of sin and salvation, faith and works. The mystic sees nothing scandalous or even odd about the fact that Mother Teresa of Calcutta went for years without being able to conjure up the presence of God. The mystic knows as well that doubt is always part of genuine faith. She knows that, because (as God puts it in Isaiah 55:8, NIV) “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” So, for her, faith and doubt are always partners. Yes, the problem of Christianity is sin and the solution is salvation. Yes, you get to that goal through works or faith or both, by following the examples of the saints or of the more ordinary “knights of faith.” But such simple formulas by no means put an end to the mysteries of Christianity’s core symbols of God and Christ and Bible and Church. And the big question of death and flourishing, mortality and creativity, far from being answered by faith (or, for that matter, by doubt), abide instead.

  Chapter Three

  Confucianism

  The Way of Propriety

  To many Westerners, Confucianism seems about as relevant as a fortune cookie. We probably know less about Confucianism than we do about any of the other great religions, and what we think we know we do not like. Confucianism is old-fashioned and formal. It is about empty rituals, banal aphorisms, antiquated etiquette, and otherwise maintaining the status quo—wives bowing before husbands, workers scraping before bosses, the masses endlessly deferring to governmental authority. Could anything be more antimodern (or antihuman) than that? Thanks to the Enlightenment and The Beatles, we celebrate the new and the young, while Confucius, a self-described lover of antiquity, commands us to commemorate our elders and the dead. In an age of Ashleys and Olivias, Confucianism seems to side with Berthas and Gertrudes. So when confronted with a choice between Confucians and Daoists, we side with the freedom, spontaneity, and naturalness of Daoism. If you google “Confucius,” you have to wade through page after page of “Confucius says” jokes (many of them off-color and almost all with some error in grammar or syntax) before you arrive at any actual quotations from the man himself. Confucianism, it seems, is a joke.

  Over the long haul of human history, however, Confucianism may have carried more clout than any other religion. Confucius is almost certainly one of the five most influential people in recorded history. And although Daoist classics are far more popular in the West, the Analects, the authoritative collection of Confucius’s words and deeds (the Confucian equivalent of Islam’s Hadith), is among the world’s most influential books. In fact, it has wielded more power over more people over more time than any other scripture, with the possible exception of the Bible. Before Socrates, Confucius told us that real knowledge is knowing the extent of your ignorance. Before Jesus, he gave us his own version of the Golden Rule: “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.” Before Wall Street crashed, he said, “The gentleman understands what is moral. The small man understands what is profitable.” Before we fell in love with the romantic comedies of Hollywood (and Bollywood), he said, “Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.” And before President Bill Clinton was impeached, he asked, “If you fail to be conscientious and trustworthy in word … then can you be sure of going forward without obstruction even in your own neighborhood?”1

  Observers once widely believed that Confucianism was, as German sociologist Max Weber argued, not just a barrier to economic development but a blockade.2 Now that capitalism is booming in East Asia, however, many now see the invisible hand of Confucius guiding the post–World War II economic miracles in China, Japan, and Korea. Yes, Confucius valued learning over profit, and his emphasis on filial piety and loyalty may have promoted crony capitalism in Japan and elsewhere. But his emphasis on education has been a huge driver of recent economic development across East Asia, and Confucian values such as industriousness, thrift, family loyalty, duty, and respect for authority have propelled China to its current status as the world’s top exporter, the leading buyer of U.S. debt, and a major trading partner with the United States, the European Union, and Japan.

  Confucianism is an eighteenth-century Western European term for what the Chinese refer to as Rujia, or “School of the Scholars.” The term scholars here refers to scholars of the so-called Five Classics that came to constitute the Confucian canon: the metaphysical Book of Changes (Yijing, or I Ching3), a divination manual that provides readings of human events through sixty-four randomly produced hexagrams; the historical Book of Documents, a collection of historical records and speeches of the great sage rulers of early Chinese dynasties detailing the virtues of governing by virtue; the poetic Book of Odes, the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry; the social Book of Rites, describing proper etiquette and rituals and envisioning society as a beloved community of mutual cooperation; and the historical Spring and Autumn Annals, documents from Confucius’s state of Lu that underscore the centrality of collective memory in creating a stable society.4

  Of these Five Classics the most celebrated in both China and the West today is the Yijing (I Ching). Perhaps that is because this endlessly intriguing book of divination doubles as a book of wisdom about chance and circumstance that reveals ancient secrets about how things are born, die, and change through the endless interaction of yin (feminine, shady, cold, hidden, passive, soft, yielding, Earth) and yang (masculine, bright, hot, evident, aggressive, hard, controlling, Heaven). Widely translated into English, the Yijing has traveled a long and winding road in European and America popular culture, influencing the television series Lost, the dances of Merce Cunningham, the novels of Philip Pullman, and the musical compositions of John Cage and Pink Floyd.

  Confucianism is grouped today alongside Daoism and Buddhism as one of China’s “Three Teachings.” Unlike in the West where the jealous God of the jealous monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) dictates that people choose one and only one religion, in China the Three Teachings mix and mingle quite amiably. While Jews for Jesus is a misnomer to many Christians and almost all Jews, Daoists for Confucius and Confucians for the Buddha are thick on the ground in China. According to a popular Chinese saying, “Every Chinese wears a Confucian cap, a Daoist robe and Buddhist sandals.”5 Or, according to another, Chinese are Confucians at work, Daoists at leisure, and Buddhists at death. So if you were to phone random people in China and ask them, as American pollsters do, “What is your religion, if any?” almost everyone at the other end of the line would be hard-pressed to pick just one.

  Co
nfucianism may be just one of the Three Teachings, but more than Daoism or Buddhism or communism even, Confucianism gave us Chinese mores and the Chinese mind. Whether this bequest is a boon or a burden—the secret ingredient that gives Chinese civilization its special flavor, or the stench seeping out of China’s dying feudal past—is open to debate. What is indisputable is the powerful role Confucianism has played in shaping Chinese thought, politics, economy, and society. For roughly two millennia, Confucianism was China’s official orthodoxy, and its lessons on how to become human through education, ethics, and ritual were taught and learned for much of that time in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Confucianism’s Five Classics were the core texts in Chinese schools beginning in 136 B.C.E., and for more than a millennia the only path to jobs in the vast civil service ran through exams on these scriptures. Thanks to the influence of a Song dynasty (960–1279 C.E.) reform movement known as Neo-Confucianism, Confucianism’s Four Books—the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean—replaced the Five Classics as the core texts in schools and on civil service examinations in 1313 C.E. This curriculum remained in place until 1905.

  You no longer need to know what Confucius says to work for the Chinese government, but Confucian values such as reverence for antiquity, respect for education, deference to elders, and filial piety continue to influence profoundly how ordinary people act politically, conduct business, interact socially, and seek after harmony with Heaven, not only in China but throughout East and Southeast Asia. It is impossible to understand contemporary life in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Singapore, or Vietnam without reckoning with the long shadow of Confucianism. The deference of the Chinese to the Chinese Communist Party is attributable in part to this Confucian sensibility, as is the success of China’s factory-based export economy. Although the number of self-professed Confucians is quite small even in East Asia, a Confucian sensibility runs through almost every Buddhist and Daoist there. And hundreds of millions of East Asian Shintoists, Christians, Muslims, and Marxists are deeply Confucian too. So are the Asian Americans of “model minority” fame who excel in school and workplace alike at least in part because of a reverence, bordering on faith itself, for Confucian values such as learning, hard work, and family. The United States is often described as the globe’s only remaining superpower, but the supercharged Chinese economy holds over $1 trillion in U.S. government debt. So these two countries are partners in an intimate dance not only of lender and borrower but also of Christian and Confucian values. For all these reasons, Confucianism seems, despite its relative obscurity in the West, to stand among the greatest of the great religions, behind only Islam and Christianity and ahead of the remaining Three Teachings of Buddhism and Daoism.