Exploring the Social Theology of Amish Lancaster

I recently had the opportunity to visit Lancaster County, Pennsylvania where 34,000 Amish live and work.  I have lived an hour south of Lancaster for most of my life, but as my interests in marginalized religious communities grew, I only recently “rediscovered” the Amish. The Lancaster Amish in this part of the country are part of the Old Order Amish and are what most people think about when they imagine Amish communities, although it should be noted that the Amish differ in self-governance from one "church district" to another so there can be quite a variety of factions and differences in communal prohibition. 


I decided to take a few day trips to Lancaster over the past few weeks, tour some of the county, talk with locals and visit a few Amish sites where I came into contact with a few working families.  I do not intend the following to be any kind of scholarly treatment of the Amish, just an attempt to work out initial impressions of this very unique people.

I think what struck me most about the greater Lancaster community where Amish and “English” mix is how the latter is often territorial about their Amish community. Both I and my guests felt the tour guides were doing their best to preserve and balance the quaint and quirky self-exile of the Amish community despite the fact that our guides themselves were coming out of conservative evangelical Christian communities that have very robust opinions on right and wrong living and the requirements for salvation.

Lancaster is about as conservative as a county can get, which aside from a reverence for biblical Christianity includes all the subsequent feelings of patriotism that come with the typical conservative profile today. As we toured the countryside, our guide was peppered with a question about the Amish stance on nonviolence, which took us back to World War II in which the community either served in non-combat roles or paid individuals to fight for them. Asked about it, the guide suggested that the Amish were patriotic insofar as “they recognized that others were fighting for them and that without that they could not enjoy the life they have today.” I found it interesting the way this guide absolved the Amish from patriotism and wondered if the same scenario presented itself with people of Middle Eastern descent, how the community might react.  Nevertheless, I saved such questions for myself but remain hopeful that evangelicals in Lancaster appreciate the comparisons.

As the tour continued, a pattern began to develop that I caught on quickly. The Amish will work in English-owned businesses that use electricity provided they aren’t supplying it themselves. The Amish can ride in vehicles provided they are not the ones driving. The Amish can own a rental property to turn a profit but will hire the English (i.e., those outside the community) to enforce any late payment retrieval or eviction because they reject confrontation.

This idea of using an intermediary is a social theology which has the effect of absolving the Amish of the responsibility and risk required in moral decision making where retreat or inwardness is not possible. It does not seem very different than the Jewish Orthodox community which use Shabbatgoyim to take care of business they themselves cannot on Sabbath.  Bringing the English in to do the work the Amish cannot because of the rules imposed upon them by their Ordnung (order or law) brings into question their own moral righteousness.  To put it bluntly, the Amish believe that the English are not on the path of salvation because they embrace the world. Rather than evangelize them to their form of salvation, the Amish seem contented with allowing them to continue along a path of perceived disobedience and self-destruction. When spun positively, it is only that the Amish are a non-proselytizing group so that the English way of life should not be of concern for them. To speak into their way of life would be as presumptuous a task as the English attempting to convert the Amish. Yet it is precisely because they let the English continue in their “error” that, with regard to biblical theology, the Amish are blame-worthy. They do not act as their brother’s keeper and do not believe the world around them is worth saving. Neither do they believe that against the Ordnung, one should seek to save someone outside the community in the same way an oxen that has fallen into a ditch should be saved on the Sabbath despite the midrash teaching.

This perhaps is the conversation that the million-dollar tourism industry does not want you having coming out of Lancaster. The tourism industry has continued to grow, so much that land developers have “spared” a few tour companies positioning themselves on historic Amish property because those businesses represent a growing channel of revenue. Instead, they want you leaving with a superficial feeling that the Amish don’t reject you and your existence, or think of you as hell-bound reprobates, but that they are just people minding their own affairs in a world gone off the rails. In fact, there were multiple times one tour guide reminded us that the Amish read all the English newspapers and observe how bad the world around them is--a position with which our tour guide agreed. Indeed, the Amish are the largest participants in the local English fire departments. And no one can forget the Amish response to their own tragedy in 2006 when the world forced its way through their closed doors and five girls were shot dead in Lancaster by an outsider in a now razed one-room schoolhouse. Yet separation is not a response that simply rejects a way of life that they believe is not in keeping with righteous living, but involves a tacit rejection of the people around them. Righteous biblical living has never just been about living in the midst of one’s enemy, but participating in the life of the community outside your own.  One recalls that in the legendary Amish story of Dirk Willems, a Dutch Anabaptist whose pursuer fell through ice, everyone tends to focus on the fact that the fleeing Amish man turned and saved his pursuer's life, and forget what the Amish have not; namely, that at the end of the tale, Willems is apprehended and put to the stake for his faith. The "strangers-and-sojourners" lifestyle of the Epistle of 1 Peter has been replaced by an alternate social order that seeks to set up camp in the land, but doing so outside the gates of the enemy. The early connection, most likely lost on generations of English that have come and gone, is that the Amish were victims to terrible religious persecution, a mindset that was brought and remains here. Within the evangelical community, there is plenty of room to commiserate with their Amish cousins even as the evangelical church has moved more to the fringes with regard to setting up activities, social events, and commerce that is self-interested and self-sustaining. Both communities share a "martyr mentality" and both have their place.

Amish Lancaster can be a mystifying, romanticized experience or it can be viewed as a social derivation of a theology gone wrong. Rejection of the world should remind those versed in Christian theology how far the Amish are from scriptures that are fundamental to the mission of the eschatological Jesus. Amish that have left the community and found English communities have complained that the Amish have replaced the salvation gospel of Jesus Christ with a gospel of social inwardness, family, and good works. It is hard to read Matthew chapters 5 through 7 and not see places where the Amish completely fail. These are a people who have hidden their lamps under bushels.  They do not go out into the world and preach the gospel and therefore they cannot act as lights to the world or salt for the unsavory, because in all of these cases, there is risk involved, one which threatens the Amish with a loss of identity and self.  So while thousands of people visit the Amish every year, the impressions they leave with from tours and local lore, while helping to demystify some misconceptions, never get to the heart of the people and their social theology.

Jesus and the Shin Buddhist: An Encounter from the Japanese "Bible"

The Story of Jesus and the Buddhist Teacher

Of all the episodes in Christian literature that fall outside the canon, one of the most delightfully bizarre is the Tenchi Hajimari no Koto, commonly translated as The Beginning of Heaven and Earth. While the content has very little to do with the origins of the universe, it does contain a number of very interesting stories about Jesus living out his existence in a uniquely Japanese world.

To what extent the Tenchi was considered sacred scripture and read within the communities of southern Japan is a matter of scholarly debate. What makes this work unique is that unlike other non-canonical works, such as the Gnostic gospels that competed for attention among ancient Christians in the same communities and geographical regions where the Bible would come to dominate, the Tenchi represents as genuine a cultural appropriation as one can imagine.  Given what appropriation has come to mean in our time, it can certainly be argued that one way to view the Tenchi is as a deeply flawed attempt at Christian testimony. But perhaps the reason for this has as much to do with the short, but palpable, existence of Christianity in the age prior to Japan’s expulsion order, which forced Westerners out of the country.  The incomplete nature of the Tenchi and its mix of broken biblical narrative suggests that those Japanese Christians in the south who were most affected by the foreign religion never entirely succumbed to its influence.

Among all the episodes found in the Tenchi, the confrontation between Jesus (who is called The Holy One) and the Buddhist teacher Gakujuran in a temple is among the liveliest. And perhaps it is because the confrontation fails to promote Christianity in a way that recommends the new religion above other religions, that the Tenchi becomes uniquely Japanese, both because it retains the content of its Japanese surroundings as well as the Japanese tendency to blend religious traditions.

Christal Whelan’s popular translation of the Tenchi records how Jesus first encounters Gakujuran, whose name signals his function in society.  The word gakusha in Japanese means scholar, and so it seems more appropriate to think of this man as a scholar in the Buddhist scriptures, rather than only a teacher or practitioner.  The Holy One comes to a temple to hear from this man, who teaches the Buddhist scriptures and others (we can assume the latter means other holy books outside the Buddhist canon). Gakujuran tells those listening that the six-lettered name Amida Namu Butsu, a reference to the Shin Buddhist recitation formula known as the nembutsu, saves those who recite it so they may attain Buddhahood in the next world. The reference to Amida leaves little doubt about the influence of Shin Buddhism on the Tenchi given that the practice of this recitation is unique to this sect. In an interesting exchange, Jesus does not argue this point with Gakujuran, but asks him to further explain about the types of places people go after they die. The scholar responds that on a Boat of Vows (a popular image in Shin Buddhism) they go to either the Buddhist heaven or hell. Again the Holy One appears to concede this point and changes the subject, asking about the terms under which creation came into being. The teacher responds by asking him instead to explain those origins. The Holy One accepts the challenge and after a short exposition tells the people that those worshipping Buddha are in fact worshipping Deusu (the God of the Christians) who made all things. Gakujuran’s disciples decide to follow the Holy One but note that the former had taught them the truth of cause and effect, a nod to the continuing wisdom found in Buddhism. The final movement creates a bit more drama, as the Holy One tells Gakujuran to cast aside the Buddhist scriptures to follow him. Gakujuran responds that the scriptures are important and too valuable to discard. The narrator tells us that because such an argument about which scriptures are important is futile, The Holy One instead creates a test in which the full body of the Buddhist scriptures are set up against the weight of one book (presumably the Tenchi itself or a reference to the Christian scriptures, which the Japanese Christians may or may not have encountered at some point in time). When the books are weighed, the one book is heavier than the issai-kyo (all the Buddhist scriptures combined). At this point, Gakujuran asks to be baptized.

Looking at this short episode, some observations about the text can be made that provide insight into the Japanese Christians, their culture, and the continuing influence of Buddhism in their lives. It is no accident that the whole incident occurs in a temple. Jesus’ first encounter of the Jewish religious leaders was at the Temple in Jerusalem. But this is no Jewish temple in the Tenchi. Rather than a bimah (a raised platform in the temple used for reading the Torah scroll), we find a raised seat in the center of the temple, reflecting Buddhist architecture.

Second, Amida Buddha is compared to Jesus and both function as saviors. One cannot but help to hear echoes of St. Paul speaking in front of the Greeks at the Areopagus in Athens, where he declares that the statue they erected to an unknown god is actually the Christian god (Acts 17:23-31), and continues by quoting from their own poets and dramatists to explain the ways in which God is omnipresent to us all. Or one is reminded of the words of St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans who notes that the pre-Christian world knew God in their hearts but intentionally chose not to serve him. These small glimpses may have been the same kind that influenced Japanese Christians to respond to the possibility of universalism, even if the Western tradition does not retain these stories in such a way.  Yet the Tenchi’s universalism is even more pronounced. The Holy One gives no indication that Buddhism is a flawed path. The classic example of the Japanese doctrine of honji suijaki, in which Shinto deities take on roles in the Buddhist pantheon, is on full display as Jesus simply lets Gokujuran’s statement stand about Amida as a means to salvation. In fact, The Holy One directly supports this view, when in his concluding remarks, he declares: “As for the one you worship as Buddha, he is called Deusu, Lord of Heaven. He is the Buddha who introduced the salvation to help humankind in the world yet to come.”

If we take seriously the Pure Land teachings of Shin Buddhism that most notably arise in this episode, then we can look to the contest of the books as they are weighed against each other. Shin Buddhism was often distinguished by its appeal to simplicity and the common people against meditative versions of Japanese Buddhism that developed alongside their counterpart as institutional norms. Teachers such as Yuenbo and Rennyo argued that Shin Buddhism did not require the level of literacy or sophistication found among the followers of other sects whose central focus was meditation. Nor did Shin Buddhism require long hours of meditation in the pursuit of enlightenment (satori), which was both a luxury reserved for those who had the means and a hardship for those who could not forsake their livelihoods. Shin Buddhism invited simplicity and this was reflected in the recitation of the nembutsu as the only necessary practice.  So perhaps it is not surprising that in an ironic twist of fate, the Tenchi appears to reverse the roles of its characters in this final moment. While the Shin Buddhist Gokujuran adopts the role of the book-smart scholar who has accumulated a vast library of Buddhist learning (the issai-kyo), it is Jesus who reflects the virtue of simplicity when he recommends just one book, which is heavier than all the other books combined. The writer may have been having some fun at the reader’s expense. By reflecting a Shin Buddhist value as a Christian one, it turns out that Jesus becomes the more observant Shin Buddhist because he understands that a great repository of book smarts is not the answer to a more virtuous life.

Whelan reports that Japanese Christians became embarrassed by the fantastic stories and the mythical quality of the contents found in the Tenchi when confronted by outside Christians who later returned to Japan and were not a part of these generational communities. Yet the Tenchi’s view of a Jesus who maintained a close connection to Buddhism is important given the ease with which foreign materials and ideas were apprehended, boiled down, but often reshaped into the collective consciousness of the Japanese people. From kanji and tea culture that found its way from China and a syllabary language known as katakana built intentionally for foreign loan words to pop culture and sports, cultural philosophy in Japan has regularly affirmed foreign influence, rather than chasing it away. It is only under such conditions, where appropriation is not a scare word, that Jesus can become a Buddhist and the adoption of a text like the Tenchi became possible.

Are the Four Noble Truths Really the First and Primary Teaching of the Historical Gautama Buddha?

One of the most interesting questions, at least among scholars, in all branches of Buddhism remains whether the historical founder and teacher known as Gautama existed. But a second, and probably, more ascertainable, question has to do with the nature of his teaching (i.e., when, where, and how it developed). This not only a classic line of inquiry among Western scholars of Buddhism, but Christianity and other world religions as well. Scholars routinely find that great teachings and teachers do not develop in a cultural vacuum, but within a cultural context. And it is not only the language of the time that tells the story of an ancient people used in a such a manner that is appropriate for a prescientific world, but it is also the appropriation of ideas that already exists in the culture that tends to make the teachings less “miraculous” in their rise as well. For example, while there are unique differences between the resurrection accounts of Jesus and Attis of the Greeks or Horus of the Egyptians, the idea of rising from the dead in a salvific form was not unknown to these two cultures that bumped up against one another, usually through some unremarkable form of cultural interaction like mercantilism.

It is popular among Western Buddhists to disarm Gautama’s teaching of its supernatural dimension to focus on the Dharma. While this is fine, the approach is certainly not historical, at least according to scholars of the Pali Canon, who work on the issue of the historical canon. The reason being is quite elementary. The Dhammacakkapavattana sutra, which contains the Dharma teaching, known synonymously as the Four Noble Truths, is thought to be a latter development, with other scholars suggesting the Truths are themselves a latter addition to the sutra. The teaching does not come to prominence nor is it recommended until the commentaries written about 1,000 years after the Buddha’s death. That is a thousand years of oral and ancestral transmission....a thousand years to play the game of telephone and eventually turn the message into something that may  have looked quite different from its original intent. Indeed, variations in the Theravada texts show that the  earliest readings of the Four Noble Truths were not thought to be keys to the liberation of the practitioner. Even the question of whether the teaching is original with Gautama is questioned, since various scholars see it as a syncretic appendage of Indus Valley philosophy and Jain theology. Others like Carol S. Anderson have questioned its compartmentalized nature. Are the Four Noble Truths really the Dharma or simply a part of a larger Dharma teaching? The latter tends to be the current trend in scholarship.

The question of the Buddha’s existence is not a new one in Western scholarship. Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism sums up the view that not even Buddhism is immune to immortalization: “After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.” Yet given that there is less resistance in Western Buddhism to withdraw from the historical nature of such a person called Gautama than in Christianity where resistance to the elimination of Jesus is much more unified among both believing and agnostic scholars, it is more than likely that the Buddha need not remain for the teaching to maintain its attractiveness.  Buddhism in the West has become its own experiment that allows for ample testing away from the harsh realities of dogmatic communities in the East that clutch at the reigns for control.

While it might not matter whether the Buddha existed as a historical figure and even the manner in which the insights of the four noble truths arise, if we are looking to keep one another honest, it may stand to reason that we are no longer dealing with “Buddhism” as in the “teaching of the enlightened One” but one teaching of 84,000 possible teachings attributed (though most likely impossibly) to the Buddha that gained prominence through the tradition.


Again, not even the transmission history needs to matter if we find what we want. This is precisely the critique leveled against Mahayana followers of Jodo Shinshu, namely that the recitation of the nembutsu is a periphery teaching of tertiary importance, and not a core teaching like the Four Noble Truths. But if the Four Noble Truths is not the primary teaching as we are led to imagine, but the one which through a transmission history rose to prominence, then the criticism against nembutsu practitioners who through Amida have already overcome the world through Tariki power, is also dubious.  This is why scholarship is an importance dimension of Buddhist study. The placement of the Four Noble Truths as the core around which all other teachings orbit is not settled. Using Occam’s Razor may very well end with cutting out the teaching we suppose is the core. And if the core has not been proven in its essential connection to Buddhism, then perhaps all a follower of the Four Noble Truths can declare is only the practicality with which it might be practiced. But what we cannot say is that it deserves more attention, veneration, or reflection than other components if one remains a Buddhist. 

However, all of this does matter, if, for the sake of historical accuracy, teachers who write on the subject of practical application and meditation continue to invoke the name of Buddha and articulate that the Four Noble Truths rise with Gautama’s earliest teaching all while claiming that talks about gods and divine beings were latter accretions that should be ignored as attempts by tribal sects to import their own unique presentation.  It may not matter the way it matters to Christians who are trying to secure textual inspiration but cannot tell us why God can inspire the text but not preserve it properly given the many variations of the texts that have existed through the Christian era. For those interested in Buddhism, whether Gautama existed or what was central to his teaching matters in a way that does not summon divine judgment. But it matters if we are interested in honesty. It matters if we are interested in the integrity of our own words and if we are going to be people of integrity. It matters because saying that it doesn't matter actually makes us just as dogmatic if we were to say it does matter! Such a statement is simply reverse engineered to the same effect.


We can certainly say "we don't know" in a way that maintains the integrity of our intellectual curiosity and practice. But we should not put ourselves in a position to suggest that ideas and material developments are two different creatures. We actually lock ourselves into a kind of Western materialistic dualism by doing so, where ideas just float "out there" but the only truth that we should take seriously are material truths, such as the medical dosage necessary to administer to a patient in the proper amount without taking his life. Those material realities with the force of science backing them should not be non-negotiables while our thought life is scattered to the winds of arbitrariness. Science always maintains room for modification and so should we. There is a measure of responsibility that the Buddha teaches that each one of us maintain over our thought life. It is actually a part of the Four Noble Truths and appears as a component of the Eightfold Path. And while I cannot recommend that it did or did not come first, or whether the one to whom we attribute its existence himself existed, it is ample reinforcement from the tradition that holds our attention.

Theology through the eye of Anthropic Reasoning – Can a Case be made for a Comparative Theology?

Finding comparative material as a scholar of comparative religious studies is a different task from finding comparative material as a theologian. To begin, the theologian is interested in a field that is scarcely viewed as anything more than hypothetical at best with regard to a system of belief or faith, all while working with ideas that because of their lineage are causally disconnected. Verses that crop up in ancient texts expounding the wide reach of some divine being are often subsumed under the  doctrinarian impulses of the tribe that prefer a more insular revelation. Those who study their faith do so under the superintendence of history and anthropology, where any deviation from the well- defined borders of what the tradition has come to regard as part of its heritage is jettisoned as rank supernaturalism, despite the supernaturalist expressions those traditions honor. Supernaturalism does not becomes a dragnet of God’s activity interdicting other religious revelations but a pencil-thin line traceable only through the texts and practices approved by those communities. A God whose dominion spans the world but is only known by those who actively engage this God in their own tradition is the farce of all supernaturalist claims primarily because such claims always lack universal footprints.

Books that are published that compare the statements of Muhammad or the Buddha with that of Jesus are done so tongue-in-cheek, as good-hearted experiments thanks to the pluralism of our day, but rarely with a meaningful goal in mind that might inspire a new approach to faith. Universalists, other than the Unitarian brand, are often looked at with caution, as those taking part in a non-sanctioned experiment, whose companionship is often tolerated.  

But when someone moves from one religion to another, he cannot help but bring with him a store of information and experience that at times appears to intersect with the new information and experience he obtains. These incidents make for curious encounters and oftentimes lend to an experience of the divine that defies well-defined boundaries. Recognizing for example the New Testament in the Tannisho, where certain verses run deeper than the broad overlay of general religious principles is always exciting for someone who takes the claim of a universal God interested in the universal welfare of all beings seriously. The cross-pollination of ideas is acceptable only insofar as the unspoken rule against proselytizing will not be secretly violated.  It is not the hope of the organizers of Vatican II or the Parliament of World Religions that one might walk out seeking a new religious approach, but indeed these opportunities do occur. We see those like Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths, or Paul Knitter looking to the East for guidance, while we see those like D.T. Suzuki, Takeda Kiyoto, and Kitaro Nishida of the Kyoto School looking to the West. One will not find, however, existential communion with scholars who study religion as a cultural phenomenon or through a linguistic approach linked to creating a better understanding of the original textual interpretations in which events arise. In each of these approaches, religion in its most diagnostic form is not a living experience but a series of events that evolve or perish through objective causation.

Those interested in theology as a comparative activity will find it hard to express themselves where no objective causation is testable. At best, we can say human situations are not that different. People tend to experience many of the same problems, and complicated social structures do not entirely condemn those problems to variation. The same questions that stir action in one religion are not unknown to those in others: equal rights, monasticism vs. individualism, faith vs. works, all of these come from the same observable encounter with the world around us. Rather than diminish the supernatural origins of any religion by appealing to a kind of directed human evolution we share in common, could it be that what drives those essential similarities uncovers a core experience in the domain of human existence that could only propagate such questions? One is reminded of the old dilemma posed from the Anthropic Principle: is it because the world is observable that I see it, or do I see it because it is observable?

Could it be that a comparative theology is possible because the similarities experienced across religious borders are possible? Learning how we evolve socially and structurally as religious-minded people may best be learned through a genuine examination of the way religious ideas come into existence across unrelated spectrums rather than in spite of them, in the same world claimed by divine.  This represents a possible philosophical basis for a comparative theology that is not merely glimpsed as another cause for celebrating our shared humanity, but one that captures and equalizes it at a much deeper level.

The Silent Survival of Jodo Shinshu and the Westernization of Buddhism

In this post, I wanted to examine the background of adversity which has silenced Jodo Shinshu Buddhists over the centuries, and especially address this through the lens of the modernization of Buddhism, which has effectively removed all sects from their supernatural (or superstitious) origins to forms that attain towards self-reflection and modesty.

Buddhism has not been apt to resist the incursion of Western rationalism. One likely reason has been that Buddhism’s lack of resistance is evidence of the absence of an intellectual heritage, which unlike in Christianity saw doctrinal disputes and intellectual showdowns as the norm. Of course it would be a somewhat simplistic effort to paint over disputations that occurred in Buddhism, and the sects that did form did not do so out of an abundance of encouragement towards self-expression. It does, however, seem that the Western assault by scholars of Buddhism was much fiercer than ever could be anticipated. One only has to look at the parallel incursion into Islam made by challenges to its origins, texts, and ideas that have been met with severe and even radical retaliations, including fatwas against Western intellectuals. The West has always done a tidy job of forcing its neighbors into conversations they didn’t want to participate in, and using language that isn’t always familiar or appropriate.

In Japan, Jodo Shinshu has been censored at numerous points in its history. During his own time Shinran, the founder, was persecuted and defrocked, and sent into exile. The sect rose to prominence again under Rennyo, but was shortly after persecuted by the Tendai school who used sohei (warrior monks) to oppose him. Rennyo had to flee for his life, but the Shin Buddhists found their own form of resistance in the ikko-ikki, a group of warrior monks that came from the ranks of the common people and fought back. Eventually, the Tokugawa shogun Ieyasu split the sect in two in order to diffuse the concentration of power. The West and East schools were formed as a result. Still in many places, Shin Buddhists were persecuted and had to go underground, practicing their strange nenbutsu in secret.

The swirling defeat of Japan at the hands of the United States had serious religious repercussions. Emperor Hirohito spoke to the people of his country directly and offered a surrender of Japanese forces to the Allies. For many in Japan who were hearing his voice for the first time, the revelation of the emperor was a painful and unbearable thing. The religious organizations around Jodo Shinshu suffered as well. Existential realities were laid bare:  the emperor who was thought to be a god living among his people, a descendant of the sun god Amaterasu, was not invincible. The Ohigashi Schism of 1962, urged by the Dobokai movement, which was itself in favor of joining the modern world, demonstrated how deeply divided the faithful (shinjin)were on issues relating to Pure Land doctrine. The Dobokai Movement (of the Eastern Jodo Shinshu) wished to scrub much of the superstition of the ancient order and replace it with a “thoughtful” alternative that enjoyed a kind of Buddhism a la carte, trying to undo the more tenuous doctrines of reincarnations and Pure Lands that exist on some otherworldly metaphysical plane. Like many of the Buddhist sects in Japan, Jodo Shinshu was able to escape annihilation primarily because nothing like the Western philosophy of a church and state architecture existed. The questions raised by secularism did not require an answer that required the takedown of the entire sect. If one looks deeper, it is worth mentioning that the full canon of Buddhist doctrines (issai-kyo) were never venerated in the community of Shin Buddhists who built their own path primarily on three seminal sutras. But the same was true of most sects. Yet, discriminating never took on the form of rejection that it did in the a la carte style of the West that ignored or invalidated material. Shin Buddhism again could transform without having to rebrand itself given and so it did.

Across seas, the situation was similar. In the United States, where Shin Buddhism was introduced on the West Coast in the 1800s, there were minor outcries and concerns that priests from Japan had come to convert. Despite this, temples stayed secluded in their respective immigrant communities. To keep suspicion at an absolute minimum, many temples were built to resemble churches, used pews and lecterns, and featured songs similar in style to Christian hymns. The Buddhist Churches of America, drew their name in 1944 for the purposes of not being singled out, but assimilating, after many Japanese had been interned under suspicion of loyalty to Japan during the war. Under the terms of their internment during the war, many Japanese were forced to sell their houses and businesses and shut down their Buddhist temples. So when they were released and others came to the United States, it was clear that blending in remained the only reasonable gamble.

Shin Buddhism, which is currently the largest sect of Buddhism in the United States, is perhaps the most invisible, since despite sharing Buddhism in its namesake, the sect carries on traditions that are quite different from the meditative components found in other Southeast Asian forms. The rise in popularity of meditation in the West and the move away from the more superstitious elements has caused Jodo Shinshu Buddhists to re-evaluate their fundamental core principles. Both immigrant and native Shinshu Buddhist populations have in one form or another surrendered to a more sophisticated aura that is enjoyed in the West. This has not been received as a defeat as the very nature of the Buddhist scriptures and the overwhelming amount of material meant that Buddhism itself was never a canonistic religion. There was never a New Testament canon that had to be venerated by all of the sects, so that each sect was free to hold onto those writings near and dear to its own understandings. In such a scenario, shifting emphases seemed to invite variation. The newfangled rise of psychological sciences over the past 100 years, gave Buddhism further leverage with which to work as the study of the brain became more sophisticated. Even today, those like the Dali Lama have embraced this relationship and expressed how psychology is a sibling of Buddhist practice, while scientists run observations or do brainwave scans on meditating Buddhists to give further credence to the performative structures that have long been a part of its methodology.  Given the lack of contemplation on a First Cause or Creator God, the faithful had as much a chance of enlightenment as the Buddha who offered it. Not even the moral exemplarist model found in Christianity could compare. All Buddhists had the ability to become buddhas. All could become enlightened. And since there was no need for a Creator God, even an atheistic Buddhism could be established in the a la carte Buddhism of our day. Books like Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor, a New York Times bestseller, demonstrated the potential of a Buddhism that is capable of recognition in a world that is increasingly hostile to religious belief and dogma. Nevertheless, where the West had created a Buddhism that could be appreciated for its secular flexibility, Buddhism in its various native contexts never fully extricated itself from its supernatural origins.

A Short, Deep Dive into the Demythologizing of Shin Buddhism

In the last century, Christianity was stress tested like never before, going through and surviving a period of deconstruction by some of its most notable thinkers. Rudolf Bultmann introduced the term demythologize, asserting that the Bible is littered with parochial superstitions that concealed the true meaning of the gospel that he believed could be mined out of the structure without damaging the meaning of the story. Concepts like heaven and hell were rendered parts of a fiction no longer sensible to the modern day mind while the true Christian narrative was secure in what Bultmann called the kerygma, a compact and precise proclamation of God’s victory for the salvation of humankind located in the message of Jesus Christ. To this end, everything else was just white noise.  

Less known are those Buddhist scholars leveling the same academic scrutiny against Shin Buddhism. Paul Watt’s Demythologizing Pure Land Buddhism (2016) is a similar attempt at reading Yasuda Rijin (1900-1982) in an attempt to challenge the otherworldly reality of Amida Buddha when Japan was at the crossroads of modernization following World War II, when the social order had been stretched thin and the country was reeling, both socially and intellectually, in the wake of its defeat.

In this short article, I wanted to focus on one particular passage by Rennyo that lends itself to the project of demythologization. Rennyo was the 8^th monshu (spiritual leader) of the Jodo Shinshu school and has widely been accredited with returning the sect back to a position of prominence in Japan. His writings are considered on the same level as the canonical writings of Shinran Shonin or the three orthodox sutras that derive from the Pure Land Mahayana tradition.

Rennyo’s letters (ofumi) were similar to epistles in which he answered questions received directly from other adherents. In one a letter dated from 1472, Bunmei 4, Rennyo is confronted by a follower’s question about whether one is saved at the moment of faith or whether one must further prepare himself until the moment of death when Amida comes to meet the follower spiriting him away to the Pure Land.

The entrusting of oneself, writes Rennyo, is not a matter that must be obsessed over prior to the moment of death but is secured in the moment of conversion since Amida is revealed to us in the one “thought-moment” in which we have committed ourselves to salvation.

The letter bears with it the same entanglements that complicates kingdom of God theology most often associated with Christianity. Is Jesus living in the believer because the kingdom of God has come? Or is it a kingdom that will physically manifest at a latter time?  And if it is both in us and yet to come, what do we make of this dualism? In essence, none of these possibilities can be tritely discarded. They all are inferred in some way in the question of where, when, and how humanity encounters the kingdom of God. The demythologizing of such ideas that was so attractive to theologians of the last century attempted to sift these options. Physicality was jettisoned and replaced with existential meaning. Jesus did indeed come, but that coming was an experience of faith in which humanity is called to judge itself so that they might pass from inauthentic life to a genuine life buoyed in faith. The kingdom of God was not something you awaited or expected to materialize in reality. And so some theologians reading Acts 1, in which the disciples asked Jesus if the kingdom of God would be restored on earth, pointed to Jesus’ response, which in fairness deflects from directly answering the question, and instead instructs them to be mindful of their continued life in the spirit of God. The kingdom of God was demythologized as a place that literally breaks into our time and space continuum to a sign marker that points back to ourselves.

Similarly, Buddhists like Rijin saw a similar parallel in Amida. Rijin and others learned to read Rennyo’s emphasis in the letter as one where Jodo (Pure Land) Buddhism is primarily about the faith conceived in the individual. Talk about a para-physical encounter with the cosmic Buddha who like Charon ferries one to safe shores (a belief that persists in both Mahayana and Theravada traditions) are images meant to act as pointers symbolic of the deeper meaning of salvation, but not to be actual descriptions of the next world. Rennyo asserts that the coming of Amida to meet his followers (at the moment of death) is relegated when we think of the moment of faith and the coming of Amida as one complete moment in which faith resides in the follower. Read as a complete moment, in which no further independent action is needed, the emphasis on an intercessory who comes at the end of one’s life to usher him into nirvana becomes absorbed into the act of faith so that the meaning of the faith event whose fingerprint is left on all subsequent actions has the effect of shifting the emphasis away from Amida. Hence, we have a de-mythologized salvation in which Amida is seen as a motivation whose primarily reality exists in how his “presence” influences us, not whether he has any reality in himself.

The move in Shin Buddhism to a Buddhism that is as non-theistic as its other sibling sects of Buddhism is a distinct movement attributed to modern Buddhism, as some would argue Rennyo never imagined a Buddhism without material reality. In fact, one should note that Rennyo was not doing anything novel. Pure Land itself can be traced back further than Japan to at least the first century in China and beyond to Gandhara, India where Pure Land had a bhakti (worship) element to it, rather than a movement that formed through another series of ritualistic endeavors aimed at divine propitiation.  

This idea, however, that Pure Land ought to look more like its sibling sects, became enshrined in the concept of Jojakoddo (Buddhism in one’s mind), which has only recently gained traction in the last century and into this century against the more traditional concept of Raisejodo (Pure Land in Reality). Arguments that neither Shinran or Rennyo intended Jojakoddo are persuasive on the grounds that their works are littered with references to the Amida Buddha, not simply as a force or concept that compels us to self-realization or self-awakening (Japanese - satori), but as a divine embodiment that himself lived a human life over five kalpas (very long periods of time) as the king Dharmakara. The idea that Amida shared in the sufferings and pain of human beings, only later being elevated to a supreme being, has a touch of incarnation theology to it as well. Just as no one has yet taken to task all Bultmann’s primary argument and sought to demythologize every statement found in the New Testament, so the tradition of Jodo Shinshu, vast and expansive, would be quite difficult to demythologize. The fact that it has not or will never be requires us to consider whether it should be. What causes Jodo Shinshu to stand out from its other Buddhism siblings is not that it is a more sophisticated rendering of existential ideas concealing its true non-theistic roots. The fact is that its trajectory seems compelling distinctive. Having read here one of Rennyo’s most compelling explanations on faith and the physical intercession of Amida actually ends in a way that only casts more doubt on the project to demythologize Buddhism cannon sutras. For, when pressed on the question of what is left to do once one has decisively settled his faith, Rennyo writes the following:

The point is that we must not think of the nenbutsu [the vow to Amida] said after the awakening of the one thought-moment of faith as an act for the sake of birth; it should be understood to be solely in gratitude for the Buddha’s benevolence. Therefore, Master Shandao explained it as “spending one’s entire life at the upper limit, one thought-moment at the lower.” It is understood that “one thought-moment at the lower” refers to the settling of faith, and “spending one’s entire life at the upper limit” refers to the nenbutsu said in gratitude, in return for the Buddha’s benevolence. These are things that should be thoroughly understood.

While those engaged in the project of  demythologizing might read his summary statement as one that indeed articulates the sole importance of the decisive act of faith, where all other acts lose their meaning, others may read how the faith act (shinjin) is emphasized not above and over other acts so that the latter are absorbed, or collapse, into the former, but as the source wherein all other acts derive, so that the concern of competing loyalties (one to the faith act and one to the faith act done prior to death) that spurns the project of demythologizing in the first place never becomes a question. Thus, the question of Amida’s intercession at the end of one’s life does not become a question whose independent reality creates the scenario whereby the initial faith act is placed in tension. Likewise, it is not because Amida’s intercession has no reality beyond the initial faith act, but because its meaning does not become a competing intuition whereby a decision must be made in favor of one end of a dualistic reality. The act is accomplished because the notion of shinjin harmonizes where there is seeming contingencies.

Returning to our example from Christianity, the harmonization of the kingdom of God that is said to exist in and through the believer with the kingdom of God that exists as a supernatural para-physical reality that is rendered as an eschatological event need not be competing views. The person who has inherited the kingdom of God through faith no doubt inherits the kingdom of God as a material reality because that same individual has received the kingdom as a matter of faith, and so inherits the fullness of its multi-dimensional reality without the introduction of another conditional act. The speaking into being of the two realities as one that allows for intentional “contextual eliding” has different effects, at times confusing Jesus’ enemies, friends, but also lends depth and hope to his followers whose Holy Spirit moments are much like the character of satori moments experienced in Shin Buddhism when one gives himself faithfully to Amida Buddha.

The Strange Phenomenon of Religious Practices Developing Simultaneously in Remote Cultures and an Example from Buddhism and Christianity

I am often intrigued by the way in which religions that have had no historical or intellectual contact in the developing of their traditions nonetheless develop their traditions along similar lines and arrive at similar conclusions. Anthropologists and philosophers who study cultural movements and glance bigger picture dynamics have commented on the way scientific, social, ethical, and religious movements trend to develop synchronically over periods. One can point narrowly to the rise of new religious movements in the 18^th century when new scientific discoveries challenged traditional orthodoxies as a key contributor to the emergence of new religions from North America to the Far East against a period directly prior where there was mostly stagnation and status quo expressions.

Or one can point to the broader historic pictures of a Bronze Age or Karl Jasper’s famous term “Axial Age” which reinforced the teleological notion that history had a goal from the suggestion that new ways of religious thinking and ethical behavior corresponded to a relatively small window from the 8^th to 3^rd Century BCE.

Oftentimes, these similarities are not limited to a broad ethos towards progress, but remain eerily myopic in scope despite the fact that they are treated at best as generic placeholders meant for context, even while they do not suggest a conclusive scientific worldview.

Most of the books written in the past century about Christianity and Buddhism that reflect positively on the two as conversation partners often take the view that similarity cannot be overstated. From those with deeper comprehension to those with minimal interest, Western thinkers from Karl von Hase to Marcus Borg have engaged the topic of similarity, often without reference to Jasper’s Axial Age theory. My examples here are one directional, primarily because the rigid dogmatism of Christian thinkers in the past has often detracted from their ability to be open to Buddhism. Conversely, Buddhists historically have often been open to syncretic treatments of their religion and giving honor to other religious leaders standing outside. In particular, Japan Buddhists who operated under the tradition of honji suijaku have lived comfortably within a Shinto-Buddhist worldview that has only temporarily been challenged in modern times.

One similarity comes from the writing of Rennyo Shonin, a Japanese Buddhist monk writing in the 15^th century. Speaking on the topic of entrusting oneself to Amida Buddha as a means of salvation in his Pure Land sect, Rennyo notes how his message of shinjin (trust) is open to all peoples both male and female, young and old. Feudal Japan’s legacy as a patriarchal society, a fact common in most societies around the global, meant that the place of women was often structured to a more subservient role. The declaration that women had the same rights to salvation as men was radical and “foreign” to such a culture, and its development was unprovoked by Christianity and the work of St. Paul who also made pivotal and radical statements about the social standing of Greeks, Jews, men, and women in Christ Jesus. Christianity did not touch the Japanese mainland until the 16^th century, and for about 200 more years its contact was limited to the extreme South in Kyushu. Like Christianity, these changes were not preempted by social change in the culture (e.g., from a broader push for equal rights) but seem to come directly from within the workings of the religious writing of which they were a part.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of similar stories of “axial” phenomena, and I am not offering a thesis as to why this happens. The fact that it does happen should be taken at face value until some better theory arises. We cannot appeal to supernaturalism despite its attraction. Any such appeals are tacitly appeals about greater meaning. And one might challenge any such attempt at meaning by introducing a reductio ad absurdum in which two movies with similar themes are released one after another despite the fact that in prior years, public interest and consumption of such topics is nowhere to be found. Why does this occur? We can posit reasons. We can suggest “studio espionage” in such cases with no proof since conspiracy theories help us cope when information is limited. But in such cases, we would be cautious to attribute cause to supernatural forces. The temptation towards meaning reminds me of a scholarly debate I once watched between historian Bart Ehrman and theologian William Lane Craig, in which the latter noted that despite what we cannot say in the academy without committing career suicide (a riposte against Ehrman), what we think and do in the privacy of our homes is quite different. And so it is.

Yet the problem persists as cultures with no contact, one with another, progress to views that often seem borrowed from each other. While the topic is not popular in academic circles today, it remains one of those “energies” found beneath the current of anthropology and philosophy, for which we, as post-moderns, are either too quick or too slow to attribute causation and develop meaning.

Jodo Shinshu: The Gateway from Christianity into Buddhism

When Christianity first appeared on the Japanese mainland in the 16^th century, it took a little while for Francis Xavier to understand why the Japanese people of Kyushu (the Southern island in the Japanese mainland) were so open to the foreign religion and its god. While supernaturalists might disagree, the primary reason was not the miraculous nature of the message or God’s Holy Spirit moving over the masses. There were first  and foremost more practical explanations. The daimyo (warlord) in the South named Sumitada was in desperate need of defending his lands, so he found himself making deals with Portuguese merchants for weapons to use against other enemy daimyos. This period of time was known as Sengoku (a time of internal conflict among warring territories), and so out of cultural politeness, the daimyo gave the Portuguese missionaries a stage on which to speak. Both were using the other to get an advantage. But as time wore on, it became apparent to Xavier that much of the Jesuits’ success had to do with the confusion of the Dainicchi he preached. Dainicchi was the word that Francis was given as a suitable translation by a recent Christian Japanese convert named Anjiro for the Christian god, not knowing that the same word was already part of the canon in Shingon Buddhism for Buddha. Furthermore, it was assumed that Francis, who had come from India, was a native of the land of Shakyamuni, i.e., from India, the place from which the historical Guatama Buddha arose. The Japanese, who had little scruples about blending their own Shintoism with Buddhism simply supposed that Jesus was just another piece of a very large Buddhist worldview, and so their curiosity was often misinterpreted as religious zeal.  

Despite where scholars like Harold Bloom may object for finding common ground between Shin Buddhism and Christianity, it can be forgiven if a person who is of Christian background sees striking similarities between Amida Buddha, the worshipful being in Shin Buddhism, which is the largest sect of Japanese Buddhism today, and the Evangelical Protestant model of Jesus as the pathway and channel of salvation. This has been a touchstone between the two religions for the past 150 years, and has allowed for a somewhat non-confrontational introduction of Buddhism into American culture, notably the Buddhist Church of America, which represents the Nishi Hongwaji-ha school of Jodo Shinshu and is the largest, though most invisible, Buddhist sect in the United States.

When one takes the time to read the more important writings of Shin Buddhists, especially in the Jodo Shinshu sect where a clear distinction is made between self-power (the transient center of self-awakening) and other-power (the intransient center of self-awakening) one is reminded that the oft overemphasis on the self in no way represents the entire tapestry of Buddhism thought, life, and practice. Jodo Shinshu’s uniqueness is perhaps the reason why Christians have felt attracted and drawn to its precepts and energies, despite the fact that not many have sought conversion. Indeed, most self-enlightening forms of Buddhism are thought to be so radically different than Christianity, that for those converting, there is often a clear break with one’s past life in the Church. Prayer is replaced by Meditation. Intercession is replaced by self-realization. Repentance and reconciliation are replaced by a self-awareness of one’s imperfections for the purpose of self-enhancement. God is replaced, at least in practical terms, by the self.

This is not the case in Jodo Shinshu, at least historically, although there has been a movement, especially since the Dobokai Schism, to demythologize the more supernaturalistic elements of Amida’s intercessory action (it should be mentioned that in the larger framework of Mahayana Buddhist, the same could be said for many of the ancient scriptures in the Tibetan and Chinese traditions that speak of gods, demons, and otherworldly locations that have suffered demythologization at the hands of Westerner practitioners and reformers). Despite this, Jodo Shinshu still remains unique in that one may sum up its dimensionality as an ideology and practice that sees all religious duty through the filter of gratefulness. When practicing Jodo Shinshu Buddhists speak today, they supplant meditation for gratefulness. While enlightenment is still found in the pulse of Jodo Shinshu, self-awareness is not as important as it is in other sects. It is thought that Amida spent five kalpas (very long periods of time) to achieve enlightenment. So Jodo Shinshu Buddhists, much like their Western religious counterparts, do not think that perfect enlightenment is achievable in this space-time continuum.

It’s not until one gets into the writings of Jodo Shinshu thinkers and monshu that one truly appreciates the similarities found between the two religions. And in some cases, the Japanese thinkers surpass the channels of religious experience asserted by their Christian counterparts by presenting a more open and welcoming convocation. Let me end with one example where Jodo Shinshu goes beyond the promise of Christian salvation.

Perhaps one of the largest theological battles in Christianity consists between whether one is saved through Jesus or through some variation of Jesus and his own righteous works. This leads to the question of whether one remains in the faith or one can lose his salvation. Nobody has solved these questions, and depending upon your denomination, say, e.g., Assemblies of God vs. Presbyterian, the answer is likely different. When I was in a non-denominational church, I remember a conversation with a Calvinist who informed me that despite what I thought I had received in my “born again” experience, if I had backslidden (showing evidence of moral degradation), there was no way I could have ever received the salvation of Christ or that my confession of faith was in any way meaningful.

The Tannisho, a 13th century text that confronts the divergences in the sect only twenty years after the passing of its founder, Shinran Shonin, presents Amida as the Jesus that Christianity wants, but fails to give us: one who not only unconditionally accepts the validity of our antinomian confession of faith, but requires it, unlike the experience of Christian faith, in which confessionalism is never too far isolated from works righteousness, both in the scriptures and in the church's ritualism and emphasis on moral conduct becoming of the Christian. The salvation of Amida is wholly of Amida's own doing (tariki, other-power), a grace which Yuenbo, the writer of the Tannisho, deliberately goes out of his way to emphasize by continually providing illustrations how intellect, status, and one’s moral compass are no obstacle to Amida’s salvation--and not simply in the invitation but also in the keeping of oneself in the safeguard of Amida. One can infer that this is because Jodo Shinshu rejects the notion of perfectionism or perfect enlightenment (samyaksambodhi) as a possibility in this life. Jodo Shinshu in fact comes forward at a time in feudal Japan when corruption in Buddhism is thick and when sohei (warrior monks) of the Tendai school roamed the land like Christian crusaders, punishing enemies who disagreed with their schools principles.

This is just one, but perhaps the most important, way in which Jodo Shinshu inteprets salvation life. The call to all is truly a call to all and sweeps up all people despite their resistance or acceptance. The Tannisho is also very clear that is no good work worthy of one’s salvation or evil work worthy of damnation. It should be said that Jodo Shinshu, while a much more simple message, comes out of sutras that are very much mixed with other Buddhist sects, so that the translation of these ideas remain much a part of the identity of the sect without any larger claim on the tradition as a whole, but there is nothing like it in Christianity, for there is simply no antinomianistic faith that exists outside of some intimated works righteousness model, whether that be as a means of justification or as a manifestation of sanctification. And it should be said that even in the strictest of confessional models, the moral component of one’s fruit (or behavior) is never far behind. It remains a stumblingblock for so many who find themselves psychologically crushed under the weight of certain pretexts and conditions that come from within the Christian tradition, that not only model moral behavior for us as evidence of our faith, but place incredible pressure on how we should be growing in Christ. It’s enough to make one ask when one is not growing: what’s God’s part in all of this?

Jodo Shinshu has an answer:  It’s all God’s part.

 

 

samyaksaṃbodhily goes out of his way to emphasize by continually providing illustrations how intellect, status, and one's moral compass are no obstacle to Amida's salvation, not simply in the invitation but more so in the keeping of oneself. One can infer that this is because Jodo Shinshu (The True Pure Land) rejects the notion of perfectionism or perfect enlightenment (samyaksaṃbodhi) as a reality in this life.

The Beloved Dog in Japan

            Not many animal rights activists are aware of the deep-abiding love for dogs in countries outside the Western world. Especially in Asia, the Chinese in particular get a bad rap. We hear stories about the consumption of animals that are domesticated and beloved as pets. There is certainly truth to this.

             But despite that, there is also a sensitivity for animals that has not been cultivated through the religious traditions in the West that have in the East, primarily in their greatest religious export to the Western world: Buddhism.

Some of the earliest efforts towards animal rights came from Tsunayoshi of the Tokugawa Shogunate, known affectionately as the dog shogun.  Tsunayoshi was the great-grandson of Tokugawa Ieyasu and lived in seventeenth-century feudal Japan. He was born in the year of the dog and was known to Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician who wrote early Western observations on feudal Japan.  Tsunayoshi’s sensitivity towards animals came by way of Confucianism. Inherent to this Chinese-born tradition is the idea that humans cannot bear the suffering of other sentient beings and so they must be humane towards their non-human neighbors.  The shogun wrote edicts later titled Edicts on Compassion for Living Things, which were read daily, in which he encouraged the population to be kind to animals. Tsunayoshi’s is remembered for the rescue and kenneling of thousands of stray and unwanted dogs, especially those mistreated, abused, and left to die in the capital Edo. A fund was established from the general population tax, which provided fish and rice for the dogs that were kenneled and it became an enforceable crime to abuse dogs, an action that upset many and lead to the pejorative name “Inu Kubo” or dog shogun.

A second story comes from modernity, showing at least one dog to be most noble of all creatures. In a culture enamored with the Shinto ideal of ancestral remembrance, Hachikō’s unwavering loyalty became a symbol for national identity, unity, and faithfulness to the country. The story goes that the dog was taken in by a local professor who travelled back and forth from his home to Shibuya Station in the heart of Tokyo. The dog grew to the pattern of this routine, and so when one day the professor, who had a cerebral brain hemorrhage, did not return, the dog continued to wait for him - and waited, and waited for a total of nine years. The story played to the popular imagination when it was tabloidized on October 4, 1932 by the Asahi Shimbun, a large circulation newspaper serving Tokyo. Each year on March 8 in Tokyo on the spot where a statue honoring Hachikō was erected, dog lovers gather to pay tribute and remember the dog whose loyalty was said to be matchless.  There is no single dog that has been given as much attention as Hachikō. And the ideals of honor and loyalty and respect combined with the ideas in Confucianism and Buddhism of the innate worth of all living things plays well into the Japanese cultural conscience that teeters on an undefined line between the secular and sacred.

Christian Language and the Reality of War

Karl Barth’s response to those critics who denounced him for not equating the Cold War with the war waged by Hitler against Europe is an important insight into the way continental theologians determined to interpret war as a metaphysical concept.

Karl Barth

 One such example of Christian language at odds with secular application is in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s definition of war and peace, in which peace was deconstructed into two possible responses: one that acknowledged peace in the world reality (Wirklichkeit) and one that acknowledged the relationship between God and humanity as the summa bonum of peace. The fact that the former could not be reconciled to the latter attenuated the relationship between the two concepts of peace in such a way that the former was diminished to something done in imitation of the latter. Unless one was ready or even capable of operating within the language provided by theological context and accepted Bonhoeffer’s worldview; namely, that true and abiding peace meant “Christian peace,” only the possibility for greater distance between a worldly and sacred context remained.

Years later, when Barth was called to comment upon the Cold War, his hesitation to describe the current situation between the West and Soviet Union as one of war reechoes the dialectical language of his German tradition. Barth’s acknowledgement of Hitler’s aggression, not delimited to hypothetical fears, was part of a stock response that became ingrained in Protestant theologians during the last half of the twentieth century. Behind Barth's analysis is a discernible principle-based ethic at work in comparing Hitler and communism, the danger of which sets up one circumstance as the absolute condition for identifying aggression.

Like other Protestant theologians of his time, Barth seems to reecho the theme of war in terms of its metaphysical understanding. True war is not simply a human concern, one of a number of ways to collate information within a range of possible responses, but the ultimate response (what Barth calls ultima ratio). War goes beyond physical aggression between countries and acts as a rejoinder against life itself. As he writes:

Today we must continue to insist that war is identical with death in the sense that it is inevitable only when it has happened. In 1938 war was an actuality, but it could have been nipped in the bud with the right kind of determination. Russia has not created a similar situation today.

He goes on to write: A war which is not forced upon one, a war which is any other category but the ultima ratio of the political order, war as such is murder. . . . Every premature acceptance of war, all words, deeds and thoughts which assume that it is already present, help to produce it. For this reason it is important that there be people in all nations who refuse to participate in a holy crusade against Russia and communism, however much they may be criticized for their stand.

The force of true war is compulsion. When society finds itself unable to resist an enemy, war is the outcome. Yet Barth claims that compulsion can be resisted “with the right kind of determination” and war avoided, though he spares us any details.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

War is initiated in a various ways, the most dangerous of which is presuming war where war has not materialized. Hysteria and suspicion serve to antagonize the conditions towards war. And aggression is intrinsically connected to war. Yet the danger of war perhaps lies in the fact that one can have war without declaring it.  In the past century, for example, the Congress of the United States has been bypassed in its authority to declare war by presidents who send troops into global conflict zones. War without war has been the result.


The orchestration of a war is more than physical ravages, but a process in which countries formally assent to actions. Rather than create a more open understanding of war as violence, Barth creates a competing structure on the grounds of compulsion, denying the  language of technicality often referenced in political theater. One might assume that this movement is simply too rigidly fixed in the continental Europe of the 1940s to have any range of effect when pointed towards subsequent global conflicts.

A helpful analogy that gives us a view into the type of distinctions drawn by theologians when faced with secular and sacred crucibles comes in the form of Bonhoeffer’s distinction between murder and destruction of the individual (with implied reference to the assassination of Hitler). For Bonhoeffer, the physicality implied by the term “individual” presents a reality beyond its physical limitations. Bonhoeffer introduced the term “destruction” to assert the elimination of the person in a way that denies the very concept of personhood created in God. While murder is the physical destruction of the body, it is secondary to the destruction of the person. In this idea, Bonhoeffer seems to imply that the murder of an individual is not enough to kill his ideas, his political revolution, or writings, movement, etc., that beyond the physical remains a general existential order. In contradistinction, destruction accomplishes the elimination of the person, for it is the complete eradication of the individual’s person and as such a denial of God who created the natural order. Why this microcosm of destruction does not expand far enough to include all individuals who have this “personhood” may be as simple as an acknowledgement that the physical contains the universal mandate of God. The concept has a certain Aristotelian appeal, yet it also recalls Bonhoeffer’s similar analysis of original sin as a communal event and not an individual sin. This discussion in his writings, I believe, was an intellectual exercise that helped Bonhoeffer overcome his own misgivings about assassination.

Barth, however, is too much a pragmatist to assign war completely to some ethereal plane of contemplation. In the end, he levels six charges against the Germany people in opposition to war.  Despite his clarion call that war is murder, a charge that those in Western democracy abhor combining and grant such actions of physical violation as a necessary evil, Barth is not altogether opposed to the reality of wars, justifiable or not. His concern for war against Russia is the inevitability of dragging Germany back into the fray after having stripped them of their militaristic powers. He adjures that there is something morally suspect in demanding a country re-engage in war which has been told to abandon war. Towards the end of the letter, this pivot from high-minded Christian ethics to the realities of the Germany people fails to create a moral bridge between the two worlds of existence. In fact, Barth outright denies the need for a “Christian word” in our day since the political system has been until now keen enough to prepare in the event of a war, a sharp derivation from Bonhoeffer who felt that despite the current political climate, God speaks. It would almost seem that Barth and Bonhoeffer mixed up their own traditions with Barth adopting the more optimistic Lutheranism of human agency while Bonhoeffer falls under the Reformed dependency on the agency of God.       

Barth’s view is clearly not contained and controlled by the conditions imposed by a wanton pacifism that has not seen or does not know the terrible reality of war. It is certainly less optimistic about an intervening God, having lived through the aftermath of WWII, than Bonhoeffer’s whose years during the 1930s were consumed with God’s place in the world and his voice leading up to war.