God's true brew
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL WINDS John Garvey GOD'S TRUE BREW SOME SOUPS CANT BE WATERED DOWN In a recent column (December 16, 1988) I suggested that the differences between religions sometimes matter more than...
...The similarities between Jesus and Baldr the beautiful, in Norse mythology, struck me first when I was about eight years old and read Padraic Colum's The Children of Odin, a wonderful retelling of the Norse myths...
...This statement is not untypical of Campbell, and it shows his debt to his mentor Jung...
...This attitude would indeed be intolerant and terribly impolite if all the gods were equally true, or if they were all equally inadequate symbols...
...She further suggested that Campbell respected the power of commitment to one religion, quoting him as saying that "a chap like myself, who likes to play with the software-well, I can run around, but I probably will never have an experience comparable to that of a saint...
...It has been the insistence of Jews and Christians that they are not...
...That we can learn from other traditions is undeniable, but the claim that Jesus is uniquely the incarnation of God can't be watered down or abandoned for reasons of politeness...
...Ordinarily I wouldn't return to a subject brought up in a previous column without covering my tracks by allowing a few years' distance to intervene, so that only the most compulsive reader of Commonweal would notice...
...For the Christian, there is something coldhearted here: if we were died for by someone who loves us, it is more than interesting...
...OF SEVERAL WINDS John Garvey GOD'S TRUE BREW SOME SOUPS CANT BE WATERED DOWN In a recent column (December 16, 1988) I suggested that the differences between religions sometimes matter more than what they have in common...
...This is what, I believe, one letter writer (Ann Storz, Commonweal, March 10, 1989) found good about Joseph Campbell's comparison of religions to various software options, each trying in a limited way to get to the heart of the mystery of being...
...Where Christianity and the other religions of revelation (Judaism and Islam) differ from the Eastern religious traditions is in the belief that God has moved toward us...
...Before saying what it is that seems strikingly wrong to me in their positions, let me say that I once found this approach extremely attractive...
...The one who died rose from death to show us that this risen life is what we are finally called to share...
...Stories have been written about such incidents, and they move us, as they should...
...This does not mean that the search represented in other traditions is futile or wrong...
...But the issues here are very important, and some of the letters,raised them well...
...I know a lot of Christian children have found their faith enlivened by an encounter with Asian inC.S...
...Christianity has insisted that this happened for all of us-and for each of us...
...As interesting as the stories are, it is not enough to see how Jesus and Baldr are alike, or what Christian ritual has in common with Mithraic ritual, or what meanings can be found in the several myths of the dying king...
...If all religion were simply the human search for a profound meaning which lies, passive and hidden, at the depths of the universe, there would be nothing wrong at all with the software metaphor...
...Here a critic could jump in: marriage does not imply that your wife or husband is the best or only possible wife or husband...
...Lewis'sNarniaChronicles...
...Our Scripture, however, is full of the belief that meaning has moved towards us, and is not passive...
...that is, its unwillingness to allow its God to be placed in a pantheon alongside all the other gods...
...First of all, suggesting that differences matter is not a call for warfare between religious traditions, nor does it mean consigning non-Christian religions to the outer darkness-or, like fundamentalists, considering them works of the devil...
...A fuzzy reverence for everything religious, with no sense that one approach to truth might finally be more compelling than another, is like a commitment to monogamy without being married to anyone in particular...
...It is not at all clear that Hindus would claim historicity for Krishna, and nothing in Hinduism depends upon it...
...No problem, so far...
...It is certainly much harder to accept this than it is to see its literary appeal, but it is the difference between being a Christian and finding Christianity an interesting idea...
...When an order to kill a specific number of prisoners was given, she was chosen for death...
...For reasons of scholarship or simple literary delight there is nothing wrong with this...
...Once I would have thought that this is what makes those other religions seem so much more sophisticated than Christianity, which shares with Judaism something that strikes surrounding cultures as unreasonable...
...To accept the Jung/Campbell approach is to place the Christian claim in the background, while finding the resemblance of the Christian story to other stories the more important thing...
...A comparison can be made with the blandness of American civic religion: in an effort to be nonexclusive, American culture developed a kind of Saturday Evening Post cover religion and gave us the God who is regularly invoked by politicians and by the ministers who open legislative sessions...
...I believe a Christian can accept the relativistic view of a Campbell only by being insensitive to the claim that has been at the center of Christianity since its beginnings...
...One danger is that in trying to reconcile the very different Buddhist and Christian approaches to (for example) the question of the reality of a subsistent ego, which Buddhism considers illusory, we run the terrible risk of making neither position as pointed or challenging to the other as it should be...
...The comparison moved me then, and still does...
...Atone point I could have subscribed without qualification to the belief that all religious systems aim in different ways at a point in infinity which none of them can articulate completely or adequately, and therefore all are worthy of equal veneration...
...But there are sound reasons for a Christian rejection of Campbell's, and Jung's, approach...
...The words of Christ's teaching and the events of his life may have grown dull for us because of repetition and familiarity, and any new light thrown upon them is helpful...
...This brought in several letters, a few to Commonweal and a few addressed to me personally...
...Rather than weaken any Christian feeling I had, it strengthened that feeling...
...Someone had enough compassion, someone was able to empty, herself enough for the love of someone else, to die for her...
...And again: religious traditions other than Christianity tell profound truths...
...True enough...
...The similarities in the great myths and religions of the world are fascinating, but the ideology behind the Jung/Campbell approach is exactly backwards...
...One is the fact that they deal with all traditions as if they were stories, to be compared as one compares literary texts, searching out meanings that may not be apparent on the surface...
...From an orthodox Christian point of view, however, there is something more here than a story...
...it means that we celebrate the fact that the One we have searched for also seeks us, and has shown us an unqualified love in a way we could not have imagined...
...It would be tone-deaf for Christians not to sense something resonant there, and it is plain thickheaded of fundamentalists to see only the demonic and the dark in what is so clearly beautiful and helpful...
...I know of a Greek woman who, as a girl, was imprisoned with other Greeks by the Nazis...
...I believe even now that the insights of Buddhism, for example, are genuine and profound, and that the Bhagavad Gita should be read by Western readers for religious as well as literary reasons...
...Taking issue with the late Joseph Campbell on matters of comparative religion is, apparently, a little like beating up Mother Teresa...
...On more than one occasion other prisoners, older women, asked the authorities to allow them to die in her place, so that this child might have a chance at life...
...The Nicene Creed says that Jesus "suffered under Pontius Pilate" to emphasize that his suffering happened at a particular historical moment...
...But she is alive because she.iMt$ in fact, died for...
...They deserve a clarification, though I am not sure it will make the objectors any happier...
...She is alive because of something much more profound than a story...
...It is not a story we aspire to understand, but a movement of God's love towards us...
...Christianity says that this happened in history, that a particular person was in fact divine as well as human, that his suffering was not a story but something done to him at a particular moment, that he rose from the dead and revealed that death has been overcome* Buddhism has not claimed anything like this for the Buddha...
...In Christianity, however, everything really does depend upon the idea that this is not simply a story representing a human aspiration, but a revealing of God's movement towards us...
Vol. 116 • April 1989 • No. 8
