Theology Today - Vol 31, No. 2 - July 1974 - TABLETALK

132 - Reflections of a Repatriate

Reflections of a Repatriate
By Richard H. Drummond

People who, like myself, went overseas for missionary service in the early years after the end of World War II almost all went in the context of the dominance of neo-orthodox theology. In some ways even more than Karl Barth, Hendrik Kraemer was our mentor. Kraemer the, great exponent of Barthian theological understanding in missiological theory and practice, famous for his bearding of the "old-fashioned theological liberals" at the Tambaram, Madras, conference of the International Missionary Council in 1938. ¹ We accordingly carried a weighty baggage of religio-theological superiority-consciousness, with, no doubt, not a few overtones suggestive of a cultural and perhaps even a racial superiority-complex.

But we who went overseas to teach began to find that willy-nilly we also had to learn. We who had been given to understand, by the educational institutions in which we had been trained, that we were being educated for leadership suddenly found ourselves unable to communicate adequately even with a child. And so began the long, arduous, literally life-long task of language study. Even now, back in the United States Almost as a kind of psychic necessity, I rarely let a day go by without doing some work in Japanese language materials. But serious language study introduces one into more than familiarity with an evangelistic tool. It is, for those who will let it be, the door to a nation's mind and heart-and through them to all the historic cultural and religious influences from other sources that have worked to form a people's past and present. This study became the most challenging intellectual endeavor of my life and as time went on began to have unexpected repercussions at the deepest levels of my self-awareness and faith-understanding.

Like Francis Xavier, who had come to Japan in 1549 bearing both the grand aspirations of a new missionary society and the limited theological horizons of a medieval theological education, I had to learn-and I did rather soon-that in the case of the Japanese I was

For many years a teacher in Japan, Richard H. Drummond is currently Professor of Ecumenical Mission and History of Religions at Dubuque Theological Seminary. He is the author of A History of Christianity in Japan (I 971) and his Gautama the Buddha was published this spring by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. He received his education at UCLA, the University of Wisconsin, and Gettysburg Lutheran Theological Seminary.
¹ Kraemer's book, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, first published in 1938 for the IMC, is now available in a reprint by Kregel Publications of Grand

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dealing with my cultural peers, in not a few cases with cultural superiors. Admittedly, Xavier had moved beyond the understanding of the head of his order, Ignatius Loyola, who shortly after his conversion is said to have met a Moor in Spain and wondered whether it was not his duty to kill the dog. ² Xavier literally believed, however, when he arrived in Japan that the souls of non-Christians are eternally lost unless Christians come to their rescue with the gospel and sacraments and that the invocations of the gentiles are displeasing to God, for all the gods of other nations are demons. ³

In Japan, Xavier quickly came to recognize and acknowledge the cultural sophistication of the Japanese. But he was also compelled to qualify his theological judgments. Earnest Japanese were troubled because they could not reconcile the infinite goodness and mercy of God as proclaimed by the missionaries with the fact that he had not apparently revealed himself to them and their ancestors before the Jesuits arrived. And if, as the latter first taught, all who did not worship the true God went to hell, then their ancestors must all have gone there too. Xavier reported in a letter to Europe that the Lord helped the missionaries to deliver the Japanese from this terrible misgiving. They explained to the inquirers, drawing especially on the first three chapters of Paul's letter to the Romans, that the moral law and knowledge of God were imprinted on men's hearts from the beginning, that the Creator had taught them apart from human mediation .⁴ In this way the missionaries tried to affirm the unqualified goodness and justice of God without ascribing any divine significance or value to the non-Christian religions.

But this theological understanding and methodology of mission became increasingly untenable in the context of day by day experience. For one thing, we learned that many Japanese did not object, indeed were quite open, to being instructed even by foreign religious teachers if it occurred in the context of respect for their traditions, religious as well as cultural. At first blush, capitulation on this score appeared tantamount to committing the then-in neo-orthodox theological circles-ultimate sin of syncretism. But as time passed, new knowledge came our way. We began to gain factually based understanding of the faith and lives of, for example, certain Japanese Buddhists of the past and present.

Apart from meeting and knowing various individual persons, one of the key events in my growth in understanding was the reading of a

Rapids, Michigan, 1963. His views on this theme are developed in pp. 101-283, and only non-substantive changes appeared in his later books, Religion and the Christian Faith, World Cultures and World Religions, and Why Christianity of all Religions?

² Cf. Richard H. Drummond, A History of Christianity in Japan, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1971, pp. 32-33.
³ Georg Schurhammer and Joseph Wicki, Epistolae S. Francisci Xavierii, Vol. I, Roma: Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu, 1945, pp. 123, 148.
⁴ Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 262-267.

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book written by a Japanese Christian, Karnegai Ryōun, who had earlier in life succeeded his father as priest of a True Pure Land (Jōdo-Shinshū) Buddhist temple in the Hokuriku district of western Japan. Karnegai had received a first-rate education, including studies in Buddhist philosophy at the then Tokyo Imperial University. As a result of his studies, wide range of contacts, and long search for truth, he became a Christian and a pastor near the place where he had served as Buddhist priest.

After thirty years of service as a Christian pastor, Kamegai published in 1951 an account of his life and thought in a book of rare beauty and spiritual sensitivity. As a distillation of long and loving meditation on the events of his life, including the religious significance of his background and early training, and the specific relationship of Christian to Buddhist faith, the book created a sensation in Japan and has been reprinted, in many subsequent editions.

Karnegai had none of the scorn which some converts show for the views and practices of their former religious affiliation. He wrote with warmest appreciation of the zeal and joy in faith which he found in many of the parishioners of his father's temple. He recalled the lives of thanksgiving and dedicated, practical morality which these men, women, and even children led as a result of their faith in Amida (Amitābha), the Bodhisattva who had become the Buddha of infinite light and life and the supreme object of faith-devotion for Pure Land Buddhists. In thinking of the effect of their faith upon these, people, upon his parents, and upon himself, he could not but conclude that the grace of the living God whom he had come to know in a new way in Jesus Christ was truly present and at, work in the lives of these people, and, specifically, in the loving care and training which he himself had received from his parents . ⁵

As he came to know Christian faith in more depth, Kamegai began to sense the need to make certain discriminating evaluations with regard to his spiritual and cultural heritage, some of them critical. He hoped for a while that he could be both Buddhist and Christian believer at the same time. He finally came, however, to make the decision of utter commital to God in Jesus Christ. He felt that this step required him to give up his position as priest of the temple and to make formal and public profession of Christian faith.

This renunciation, however, did not mean for Kamegai a rejection of the people who are Buddhists nor a denial of the religious significance of the Buddhism of his heritage. His new faith rather confirmed his long appreciation of the religious worth and cosmic significance of the life-in-faith of these people. The Spirit of the living God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the Lord of history, the Father whom he had come to know in Jesus Christ, had always been present and at work in the whole of his creation, and the history,

⁵ Kamegai Ryōun, Bukkyō kara Kirisuto e, Tokyo: Fukuinkan Shoten, 1958, pp. 2-10.

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the total experience, of his own people lay in this context of divine providence and were therefore not without meaning in the divine economy of salvation. Thus Kamegai came to conclude that Jesus Christ is not the destroyer of Buddhism; rather he is its builder, its fulfiller, its completer. ⁶

This mode of interpretation is not without its theological difficulties, but it constitutes a rather forthright rejection of the principle of "discontinuity" proclaimed by Hendrik Kraemer et al. Some understanding of this kind would seem to be essential for "indigenization" of Christian faith in any land or cultural situation and for the integration of a person with the past, both personal and collective, without which mental and psychic wholeness is hardly to be presumed. It is also in effect to recognize that truth is unto goodness and that the presence of authentic moral goodness in specific foci in history suggests a basis of some truth. It is not without significance that both the Christ and the Buddha affirmed the primary criterion for the authenticity of religious teachers to be their fruits in ethical living. ⁷

The reading of a book like Kamegai's served actually as a clarifying confirmation of my own experience and developing awareness. In fact, I was increasingly being compelled to face the raw data of life and fact, of human experience, both religious and that which hardly deserved the dignity of such a term. I learned from study of the life of the Buddha that central to his own public ministry was his experience of what afterward came to be known as the Enlightenment and which Christmas Humphreys has called "the womb, the heart and raison d'etre of Buddhism." ⁸ Its importance was such as to make direct or personal experience a primal element in the entire movement which the Buddha initiated.

III

Krister Stendahl has said that it is characteristic of neo-orthodox theologians to use the put down of "the Christian faith teaches" or "according to biblical thought" as an answer. Stendahl argued that this was of little use in communicating with people who insisted upon including within their purview deeper levels of the human psyche than the merely intellective. In fact, I began to perceive that not only neo-orthodoxy but a large part of the whole modern theological enterprise was really ideological, the handling of ideas

⁶ Ibid., p. 117.
⁷ Mt. 7:15, 23; 11:19; 12:33-35; Lk. 6:43-45. Anguttara-Nikāya 1, 187-192, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, F. L. Woodward, tr., London: Luzac & Co., 195 1, pp. 170-175. This criterion was the one which Jeremiah employed as primary in his evaluation of contemporary "false prophets" in Judah (Jer. 23:14-22). Cf. Alfred Guillaume, Prophecy and Divination, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938, pp. 349, 353; Didache 11:8-12, The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. 1, Kirsopp Lake, tr., Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1945, p. 327.
⁸ Christmas Humphreys, Buddhism, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1958, p. 16.

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and concepts which, however cosmic in scope or divine in significance, were expressive primarily, at times almost totally, of human apprehension at the level of the rational mind. ⁹ I knew of course that this had not been totally so. I myself had been trained in a seminary where Scottish and other British theologians of the early part of this century were among our main fare, and H. R. Mackintosh had insisted that "the heart makes the theologian." Moreover, friends who had personally studied under Karl Barth assured me that there were dimensions of the man which were not adequately represented in his theology, certainly not in "Barthianism." Yet I could not but see that the "life style" of neo-orthodoxy was primarily ideological and at many points of little help in my personal and professional dilemmas.

The upshot of all this was that my existential confrontation with history of religions, in the concrete forms of persons and events as well as books, compelled me not only to rethink and relive, at least in part, my own faith. It prepared me also to begin to cope in some measure with what has become a major development in American religious life and theology, confrontation once again with the dimension of human experience called religious. Krister Stendahl was able to look beyond the "shambles" of modern theology with "joyful anticipation" and to suggest that "it will be beautiful, glorious," because he saw theologians now willing to express "straight" theology out of religious experience rather than being confined to the historical approach.

Stendahl saw not a world religion but a world theology in the offing, indeed "in the making." He did not perceive this development as leading to the "swallowing up- of Christian faith as a distinctive witness but affirmed that "ultimately it will bring us to give much more serious attention to other religious experiences than Christianity alone."

This is indeed to move out of the sphere of neo-orthodoxy. It is to do theology in a way different from what has long been traditional in either Catholic or Protestant orthodoxy, which were both one in limiting the "sources" of their theological thinking to the "revelatory circle" of the Christian faith and church. This is to agree with Gregory Baum that religious pluralism is part of the divine dispensation, ¹⁰ with Raymond Panikkar that we have to do with a "universal economy of salvation and a certain mysterious presence of the Lord in a multitude of epiphanies." ¹¹ This is once again to move within the cosmopolitan comprehensiveness of the main

⁹ For a detailed historical treatment of this theme see Morton Kelsey, Encounter with God, Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, Inc., 1972, pp. 15-140.
¹⁰ Gregory Baum, "The Jews, Faith and Ideology," The Ecumenist, Vol. X, No. 5 (July-August 1972), p. 75.
¹¹ Raymond Panikkar, "Faith and Belief: A Multi-Religious Experience," Anglican Theological Review, Vol. LIN, No. 4 (October 197 1), p. 230.

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stream of Christian thought of the second and third centuries to see evidences of the "wider work of God in the world." ¹² Karl Rahner has reminded us that we have heretofore looked too ineptly and with too little love at the other religious traditions of mankind to perceive the "traces" (Spuren) of the divine presence and work in them. ¹³ Surely it is of the providence of God that we can once again in "good faith" and with understanding affirm with Georges Khodr, Metropolitan of Mount Lebanon, that "all who are visited by the Spirit are the people of God." ¹⁴ And the wind of the Spirit blows where he wills.

The concept of the work of the Holy Spirit, of course, brings us back into confrontation with the reality of religious experience. Many of us did not know quite what to make of the pronounced hostility of neo-orthodoxy to what its exponents called "mysticism," within which term they apparently included much of the spirituality of both western and eastern traditions of Christianity as well as that of the religions of the Orient. But it is increasingly clear that neo-orthodoxy, in spite of its admittedly great contributions, was simply mistaken in some of its scholarly pronouncements.

One of the great clich�s-I feel that we should use the word-of neo-orthodoxy was the radical, almost ultimate distinction which it generally affirmed between the Hebraic and the Hellenistic mind and world-view. In particular, it concentrated its fulminations against the movement it called Gnosticism, which it saw emerging solely out of Hellenism as a kind of b�te noire to distort and sully the purity of Hebraic faith and understanding. We now perceive, however, that the consensus of specialists in Gnostic studies avers Judaism to be the source, or at least the main channel, through which the larger activity centered around the term Gnōsis entered the Graeco-Roman world. ¹⁵

One of the current growing edges of New Testament and early Christian scholarship is the area of Christian Gnosticism, sparked both by the Qumran Scrolls and the find of Christian Gnostic materials in 1946 at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. We are learning that fundamental distinctions need to be made between extreme Gnostics like Carpocrates or Marcion, who represented respectively the moral and theological extremes of libertinism and asceticism, and Christian Gnostics of the main stream, such as Clement of Alexandria or Origen. The latter two used the term Gnostic in its literal sense of knowledgeable, understanding it as appropriately designative of ma-

¹² Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis VI; J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, Vol. IX, col. 280-288.
¹³ Karl Rahner. "Das Christentum und die nichtchristlichen Religionen," Schriften zur Theologie, Vol. V, Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1964, p. 153.
¹⁴ Georges Khodr, "Christianity in a Pluralistic World-The Economy of the Holy Spirit," The Ecumenical Review, Vol. XXIII, No. 2 (April 197 1), p. 126.
¹⁵ Menahem Mansoor, "The Nature of Gnosticism in Qumran," Le Origini dello Gnosticismo, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967, p. 390.

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ture Christians. We may recall that the Apostle Paul similarly employed the word Gnōsis (regularly translated into English as "knowledge") as a characteristic of the mature Christian, a vital element of the growth-process of the life of faith. 16 One of the positive elements-there are also many unacceptable elements-in the recently published two volumes by Morton Smith is substantial evidence (which we are not seeing for the first time) that in the early church Christian life was widely, and by the great theological figures representatively, seen as involving, however sudden or dramatic a conversion experience might be, a long-range growth-process in faith-understanding and quality of life. 17 However we may dislike the implication that in the early church elements of Christian teaching could properly be termed "esoteric" or "secret" or the like, the fact is still with us." 18

One important conclusion from this understanding is that neoorthodoxy was factually in error in certain of its historical presuppositions and at least somewhat off the mark in its perception of what the Christian faith really is (in so far as we may take the witness of the New Testament and the main stream of the faith-practice of the early church for our formal criterion). A further implication is that we have a very sound basis-biblically, historically, theologically-for taking seriously the expressed and unexpressed desires of the present younger generation in our land that we religious professionals, along with them, relate to religious realities in terms of experience as well as opinion or ideology.

Martin E. Marty in his most recent chronicle of the shape of American religion insists that the first element for our consideration in what he calls an emerging "spiritual recovery," within as well as without the mainline churches in the 1970's, is the dimension of experience. Marty asks the question that many an intellectually sophisticated as well as unsophisticated churchman has asked in the face of much theologizing over not a few centuries: "Why should believers be told that once upon a time there were prophets and mystics, visionaries and ecstatics-but that now all potential for a revisiting of their kind of experience has disappeared? Why should the churches recall the story but not re-enact it? Why should people

¹⁶ See Rom. 15:14; 1 Cor. 1:5; 8:1; 12:8 (cf. 13:8-13); 14:6; II Cor. 6:6; 8:7; 11:6; Phil. 3:8. Cf. I Pet. 3:7 (in the Greek); II Pet. 1:5-6.
¹⁷ Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1973; The Secret Gospel, New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Cf. the review by W. H. C. Frend, "A New Jesus?" The New York Review of Books, Vol. XX, No. 13 (August 9, 1973), pp. 24-25.
¹⁸ Cf. Mt. 7:6; 13:11 (Mk. 4:1 1); Jn. 16:29; 1 Cor. 2:6-16. This theme was extensively developed in one of the "Tracts for the Times" issued as a product of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England in the first half of the nineteenth century. See Isaac Williams, On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge, London: Gilbert and Rivington, 1840. Cf. R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement, London: Macmillan & Co., 1892, pp. 264-265.

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content themselves with words about experience instead of having the experience itself? " ¹⁹

Richard R. Niebuhr and James M. Gustafson are currently affirming the need for American theology to turn from its excessive dependence upon the "maternal theology" of Europe. Gustafson in a recent statement asks us to "discover and exploit in greater self-reliance the experiential sources of a 'native' theology"; and Niebuhr has written an entire book on the theme of "experiential religion ." ²⁰ This is, of course, to grapple once again with the "experiential sources" of religion in the grand American tradition of Jonathan Edwards, Charles G. Finney, Dwight L. Moody, William James, and others of like stature.

Seward Hiltner, in a recent article, threw down the gauntlet to the entire theological establishment with a forthright challenge that they take seriously for the work of theology the phenomena and the data provided by men like the southern clairvoyant Edgar Cayce or the Scottish-American healer Ambrose Worrall. ²¹ There thus seems to be a fresh honesty and boldness, an aspiration for deeper or higher levels of Christian faith and life, emerging in the religious life of our country, not least in our churches and among not a few theologians. Perhaps modern theology of the recent past has indeed ended in "shambles." There is much reason to believe, however, that out of the ruins, phoenix-like, new life is arising.

¹⁹ Martin E. Marty, "The Fire We Can Light," The Christian Century, Vol. XC, No. 35 (October 3, 1973), pp. 973-974.
²⁰ Richard R. Niebuhr, Experiential Religion, New York: Harper & Row, 1972. In this context I should again like to mention Morton Kelsey, Encounter with God, op. cit.
²¹ Seward Hiltner, "Comment on the God of Ambrose Worrall and of Edgar Cayce," Religion in Life, Vol. XLI, No. 3 (Autumn 1972), pp. 410-414.