The Spirit Of Contradiction In Christianity And Buddhism

The cognitive science of religion has shown that abstract religious concepts within many established religious traditions often fail to correspond to the beliefs of the vast majority of those religions' adherents. And yet, while the cognitive approach to religion has explained why these "theologically correct" doctrines have difficulty taking root in popular religious thought, it is largely silent on the question of how they developed in the first place. Hugh Nicholson aims to fill this gap by arguing that such doctrines can be understood as developing out of social identity processes. He focuses on the historical development of the Christian doctrine of Consubstantiality, the claim that the Son is of the same substance as the Father, and the Buddhist doctrine of No-self, the claim that the personality is reducible to its impersonal physical and psychological constituents. Both doctrines are maximally counterintuitive, in the sense that they violate the default expectations that human beings spontaneously make about the basic categories of things in the world. Nicholson argues that that these doctrines were each the products of intra- and inter-religious rivalry, in which one faction tried to get the upper hand over its ingroup rivals by maximizing the contrast with the dominant outgroup. Thus the "pro-Nicene" theologians of the fourth century developed the concept of Consubstantiality in the context of an effort to maximize, against their "Arian" rivals, the contrast with Christianity's archetypal "other," Judaism. Similarly, the No-self doctrine stemmed from an effort to maximize, against the so-called Personalist schools of Buddhism, the contrast with Brahmanical Hinduism with its doctrine of an unchanging and eternal self. In this way, Nicholson shows how religious traditions, to the extent that their development is driven by social identity processes, can back themselves into doctrinal positions that they must then retrospectively justify.

Hugh Nicholson examines the role of social identity processes in the development of two religious concepts. The first of these is the Christian claim that the Son is of the same substance as the Father, a concept which forms the basis of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. The second is the Buddhist doctrine of No-self, the claim that the personality is reducible to its impersonal physical and psychological constituents. Both doctrines are massively counterintuitive in the sense that they violate the default expectations that human beings spontaneously make about basic categories of things in the world. The book argues that the development of counterintuitive doctrines like No-self and consubstantiality can be understood in terms of the social psychological principle that, all things being equal, members of a group will seek to maximise the contrast with the dominant out-group.

This project at the interface of Buddhist-Christian studies, comparative theology, and Christian systematic theology proceeds by way of exploring questions related to the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit in a 21st century world of many faiths.

Buddhists and Christians examines Christian teachings about other religions to argue that the next step to dialogue is ""comparative theology."" Fredericks asks why the Buddha refused to engage in God-talk and suggests that understanding the answer to this question will help Christians and Buddhists to have better communication and to find that God reveals the way to mutual comprehension and deeper solidarity.

A model of interreligious theology that seeks to reconcile the ideal of religious tolerance with an acknowledgement of the extent to which religious communities construct identity on the basis of religious differences.

A Comparison And A Contrast (Non-Christian Religious System Series).

The interjection of pneumatology in both theologies of interreligious dialogue and in the theology-and-science conversation comes together in this volume. The resulting Christianity-Buddhism-science trialogue opens up to new pneumatological perspectives on philosophical cosmology and anthropology in interdisciplinary and global context.

If the Western world knows anything about Zen Buddhism, it is down to the efforts of one remarkable man, D.T. Suzuki. The twenty-seven year-old Japanese scholar first visited the West in 1897, and over the course of the next seventy years became the world's leading authority on Zen. His radical and penetrating insights earned him many disciples, from Carl Jung to Allen Ginsberg, from Thomas Merton to John Cage. In Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist Suzuki compares the teachings of the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart with the spiritual wisdom of Shin and Zen Buddhism. By juxtaposing cultures that seem to be radically opposed, Suzuki raises one of the fundamental questions of human experience: at the limits of our understanding is there an experience that is universal to all humanity? Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist is a book that challenges and inspires; it will benefit readers of all religions who seek to understand something of the nature of spiritual life.