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.                                                                                                                                                                                                           

How Christianity adapted to survive Buddhist Persecution in Japan

Recently the movie Silence appeared in American cinemas to little fanfare despite Martin Scorsese’s name being attached to the project. The 40 million dollar project only netted about 15 million in theaters and is set for home release on March 28, 2017. The movie is based on a historical fiction book by the same name written by Shusaku Endo.

Most Christian scholars and lay people I know didn’t even acknowledge this movie’s existence, unlike Mel Gibson’s The Passion, partly because the few trailers that made their way to advertisement did not portray the religious crisis in a way that would pique curiosity and even fewer knew about or had ready Endo’s novel to be interested in the historical connections. The real story of the Shimabara Rebellion, Hara Castle, Amakusa Shiro, and the Kukure Kirishitans (hidden Christians) can be found in books and amply online. It is one of the most underrepresented periods of Christian history and rarely finds its way into historical survey courses at seminaries and universities primarily because interest in Asian Christianity is so few and far between and Eastern religious courses connected to Japan tend to focus on Taoism, Shintoism, and Buddhism.

What is interesting about Kakure Kirishitans (the emphatic syllabic resemblance to “Christian” is part of the Japanese system of borrowed words, also known in its written style as Katakana) is represented in their art and cultural forms. Despite heavy pressure from the Society of Jesus and Catholic Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century to convert the native population of Nagasaki and beyond in exchange for weapons, guns, and tactical assistance during the Edo Period in Japan where warring factions fought for supremacy, the missionaries surprisingly left their Japanese converts to their own customs. Since traditional Shintoism and Buddhism were intricately woven into cultural norms, Christianity was introduced as a form of syncretism among locals and daimyo who did not distinguish religious duty and practice as something superimposed on cultural practices.

When the Takugawa shogunate outlawed Christianity in 1620 and forced many underground, the Japanese Catholics, like their Roman spiritual ancestors before them, found interesting ways to represent their faith. What I wanted to display here were a few photographs I found around the internet during this time with captions about the significance of the object in the photo.

  

Votive altars like the one pictured here were popular among Kakure Kirishitans.  The altar itself resembled the more Japanese kamidana, a small shrine dedicated to an ancestor spirit (mitama). While there are obvious Renaissance images in the shrine's belly that are undeniably European, the structure of the votive was enough to convince authorities of its Japanese utility. 

 

The netsuke was an artistically fashioned carrying pouch that was hung on the belt of a kimono or yukata. The one displayed here is of Jesus. The absence of arms and cross may have likely been intentional so not to draw too much attention in public when worn during the ban of Christianity.

This Buddhist statue has a clever placement of a Christian cross on the back of the statue (murti) hidden from the view of prying eyes.

Perhaps one of my favorite devices for hidden Christian worship was the use of native bosatsu (enlightened beings) as substitutes for Christian figures. Since Catholicism openly supported the role of figurines/statues in worshipful experiences, native Japanese saw similarities and responded accordingly. This statue of the Japanese goddess of mercy, Kannon holds a child. It is actually based on its Chinese counterpart Guanyin. However, Kakure Kirishitans honored the statue as a representation of the virgin Mary. Disguising its true intent as such behind its obvious depiction, the Japanese Christians could openly display such a statue without fear of being revealed as Christians.

In Defense of the Star Wars’ Prequels: A Response to Marc Barnes

In recent years, the Star Wars’ franchise has happily revealed itself as a faith-finding exercise for many pop culture enthusiasts. But this was not always the case. As a child of the ‘80s, the spiritual signposts that helped give meaning to my own world in the Catholic Church did not translate favorably to pop culture expressions, where Star Wars, with its aberrant talk of holistic oneness with an unseen power, disrupted the frailty of my theological speculations, which were limited to Sunday sermons about personal and individual relationship with God.

As I grew older and developed an interest in theology and the religions of the world, I enjoyed the theoretical application of faith-dialogue concerning movies like Star Wars. From time to time, I would run across an article claiming George Lucas’ vision of Star Wars came from his Buddhist convictions, later only to read that no such conviction existed. But it did get me thinking. Was there a religious vision here that burrowed its way into the world created by Lucas and continued with J.J. Abrams and should such a vision include the prequels as well?  Then I read Marc Barnes’ article “Rogue One and the Return of Reverence,” and it got me thinking again. What became clear was that Barnes suffers no love loss for the prequels, as if Lucas inhabited two different worlds, never once thinking between stories, and this quickly became a problem for me.

One of Barnes’ strongest criticisms is the idea that the prequels were the manifestation of a world grown weary of the Force. In blaming the crass, mechanization of the Force on the move from its mystical basis in the first movies to its more immanent presence in the prequels, Barnes, like others before him, challenges a coherent narrative—and I suppose one could justifiably argue that part of a perceived breakdown in spiritual decorum would have to do with the same problem already recognized by other pop culture critics; namely, the massive failure of the prequels in general to win over audiences. What the original movies and now the new movies, however, share in common is their reverence for a picture of the world, cleared of wrongdoing, that has lost its roots and must reclaim a kind of neo-orthodox Force that can only be found through the fog of veiled and often cryptic references. It’s enough to make a Barthian blush, resonating with the echoes of C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra.

For Barnes, the problem rests in the disconnect between the application of the Force as a mystical power and its once-rife, even obnoxious, presence in the world. Yet this presence, one might protest is what is really at stake here. The problem however is that no one really knows what the Force is. Only when one accepts the idea of the Force does the function of myth-making project itself into the world as a spiritual experience, including all the various ways those individuals claiming the Force reshape themselves around what they do not know. If anyone embodies this in Rogue One, it is the character of Chirrut Îmwe, who Barnes regards as a true adherent of the Force, but who only approximates a concept of the Force (even his staff is meant to mimic the elegant features of a lightsaber), not knowing entirely what it is even while making his own unique attempts to put it into practice, a question that largely remains open as to its success. This point is made brilliantly in one scene in which he thinks himself protected by the Force while his partner Baze Malbus helps provide cover fire. Where Barnes sees prayers, I see the repetition of mantras that focus the mind.

The dilemma we face is that what Lucas would like us to accept is that the Force was defined in the articulation of the community in the prequels. Everything runs the gamut from bad (the dark side) to less-than-ideal (the post-purge Jedi). Under such conditions, Luke Skywalker’s eye of faith, as Barnes calls it, should be no different than Finn’s over-zealous attitude for which he is rebuked by Han Solo in his best Aquinian imitation, who only tells him what the Force is not. The same is true if we compare Rey’s way to the Force, found largely on her own and coaxed by non-practitioners, to Luke’s way. If action is an indication of intention, we only know that Lucas intended the prequels and willed them into existence. It is left to us either to make attempts at understanding or rejecting them. Unlike Barnes who rejects them, I think a more traditionally Eastern approach largely structures the content better to answer our most pressing questions about the Force, for instance, in the idea that knowledge once known can be lost. This is not just true in a galaxy far, far away, but also in Buddhist canon. In the Kali Yuga tradition of Hinduism, humans individuate themselves from the moral authority of the gods and suffer after a deterioration of spiritual and moral wisdom. Nostalgia, not boredom as Barnes notes, is characteristic of the prequels as Yoda speaks of Luke as the last of the Jedi even though he encourages him to pass on what he has learned and even Luke who overlooks his father’s past to remind the Emperor that he is a Jedi “like my father before me.”

Within the Church, supercessionism became the dominant feature of the Christian tradition over and against a general knowledge of God in the world. The way Paul has been read in the Church moving forward since the Reformation has certainly been towards a personal, privatist view of faith, and I think this view underlies Barnes’ analysis of the Force. Barnes’ sees the reverencing of the Force accomplished where it is least likely to be found; namely outside the Temple walls (compare to Jesus’ rebuke of the Samaritan woman who longs for the Temple with the Jedi Temple).  In such a case, Barnes’ ideal Jedi is the epiphany-seeking Skywalker, not the communally minded Mace Windu. So too, we realize that it is rebellion to the Force and the order under which it is supervised that allowed Qui-Gon Jin and Obi-Wan Kenobi to set in motion a path of destruction that brings about the victory of the Dark Side through Anakin.

Is the return to reverence a recovery of something lost or a new experience altogether? Barnes of course is talking primarily about the act of storytelling—an indictment of Lucas’ own incoherence. But assuming we enter this universe as a place willing to grant us our creative interpretations, and imagine a time when the Force was an awe-inspiring encounter before the universe ground into boredom, what kind of recovery are the new brand of roaming Jedi discovering? Is it partial, or like the dark side, a corruption that cannot fully grasp the significance of other features, one such being the community upon which it was instantiated. Given Barnes’ criticism of the prequels, it is hard to understand how one’s encounter of the Force does not change the very nature of the Force if the community is essentially the channel through which the Force was practiced. Perhaps there never was one type of encounter. For every Anakin, there is a Yoda. For every fabled practitioner, there is a weak-minded fool with a high midi-chlorian count. 

Monastic doctrine in Buddhism is seen as a divine order reverencing the community as the ongoing authority and life force of the Buddha. One does not use the community but is a part of it. Ignoring the obvious undertones of Eastern philosophy in the ideas of oneness, samsara, or nirvana, the mandate to preserve the Jedi order and the nostalgia that follows its destruction is a coherence Barnes does not find between the prequels and the original movies. In the Buddhist tradition, Buddha-knowledge (buddha-jñāna)  which is rife in the world for a time eventually gives way to its corruption, it requires a new Buddha form to emerge (the Maitreya) in the world to recover the wisdom which was lost and impart that vision to a new generation of followers. It is also open, constantly shaped by the users’ own premonitions and experiences and weaved in as a way to make a larger tapestry. Such an eschatological framework acts as a bridge between the prequels and the original movies. Furthermore, part of this Buddha wisdom is that the natural order is one in which we are all a part, an idea Barnes dismisses as the secularization of the Force.  To revisit his own example, midi-chlorians as the chemical building blocks of a Jedi’s identity are also the chemical building blocks that exist in everything. The idea that midi-chlorians existing at the most basic level of life need not suggest that the spirituality of the prequels is somehow deficient to those of the latter movies. Midi-chlorians instead are symbolic of the way the Force pervades all of reality, and not one that was inaccessible or outside oneself. The content of faith is not outside the individual. It is when one learns that what is outside is also inside that the Force takes hold. One could condition his mind and body and achieve harmony through the discipline of both—a message that suggests a non-supra-interventionist spirituality, rather than a metaphysical faith that appeals to a concept of mind and body that was dualistic at best. The rigors of Eastern religions that have made their way into canon, including vocalizations, meditative positions, and bodily contortions (asanas), all play a role in reinforcing the way the body and mind work in harmony.  Such dualisms were not limited to material reality, but constantly became features of the prequels in their ideological presentations. The good vs. evil dualisms of the original movies could be problematized when suddenly complex motivations came into play in the prequels and actions that came from seemingly bad places achieved positive results, such as Anakin braving dangers to his own life and resisting his own code to save Amidala.

I agree with Barnes that reverence appeals to our sense of holiness as something that points away from the individual to the intangible. But there is no radical transcendence in the Stars Wars universe. The Force is always about participation in varying degrees, from the mundane to the mystical, and even light and dark are substitutes for a language of good and evil. In fact, without god-figures, one of the more solid parallels in Star Wars to the act of reverencing the Force is found in the context of time. As ways of participating in the Force, Master Yoda advises Obi-Wan to reflect on the future. Luke tries to make real an ancient past by looking backwards to Anakin. Obi-Wan is reminded by Qui-Gon that the present moment represents the more difficult task. If we are presented in the prequels with feats of ease concerning the Force to the point of making it common, there is at least an acknowledgement by those Force wielders that even this participation is limited if one does not mind the present. That is to say one’s reality is determined by its perception. I think Qui-Gon is right. The real danger to reverence occurs when the past or future is revered as some far-away thing at the expense of participating in the present. This is why so many non-Jedi characters who “get it” can run around and say “may the Force be with you.” It’s not an empty trope, but a safeguard against turning its reverence into something mythical. Participating in those words in the mundane has the opposite effect of allowing the present to pass for something familiar. It is precisely when the Force becomes a fairy tale after it has been forgotten, that reverence becomes open to a wide and indefinable range of expressions that potentially risks self-negation.

Bonhoeffer and the Breslau Effect: Influences and Upbringing

One impact a theologian or historian considers when writing biography are the early influences that made his subject the person we have come to know. These influences not only pertain to family life, but also environmental factors such as the city where one was born and culture in which one developed a worldview. So as we move towards the 111^th anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s birthday, I wanted to briefly explore the cultural and social climate of his birth city during the days before World War II.  

Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany on February 4, 1906, which today resides in Poland and was renamed to Wrocław following the Potsdam Conference in July-August 1945. Characteristic of Breslau in Bonhoeffer’s time was its liberal environment, university, and significant Jewish population with respect to other German cities. Eberhard Bethge noted that Breslau’s reputation as a haven for liberal thought was a stumbling block for his maternal grandfather Karl Alfred von Hase, who found himself at odds with the liberal theology department over the appointment of another conservative professor, and who himself was given an honorary professorship, perhaps on the power of his family name. Even so, writes, Bethge, “there was little appreciation for a colleague in practical theology who was also a church official.”[1]

Breslau featured one of the oldest and most renowned synagogues in Europe, the White Stork synagogue, which was home to the Orthodox Jewish community and the New Synagogue, which became a center for Liberal Judaism, which formed after a schism within the Orthodox community.  Zecharias Frankel, one of the founders of Conservative Judaism also formed his movement here. His theology of positive-historical Judaism borrows from trends in German Protestantism at large. More specifically, Bonhoeffer maintained a proximity to the relationship of history and revelation through his association with his dissertation advisor Reinhold Seeberg, a leading systematic theology in Germany working in this method. Thus, the historical-critical method becomes identified with Frankel’s movement as the cutting edge of progressive Jewish thought in his day, challenging both the Reform and progressive Orthodox views. Abraham Geiger, the leading figure in the Jewish Reform movement was also a resident of Breslau. And with regard to the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), only Berlin and Konigsberg rivaled Breslau in terms of Jewish scholarship. Breslau was home to the famous Jewish Theology Seminary built to educate Jewish seminary students in 1854.  None of these facts should be recognized as a small matter. And the fact that two movements, progressive in character, can trace their origins to this city is remarkable given the dominance of Orthodox Judaism as the premiere Jewish chain of tradition (Shashelet ha-quaddah).

While scholars have noted that Bonhoeffer inserts himself into the Jewish crisis only briefly in his writings in the early 1930s because of the laws passed by the Germany government restricting Jews from serving in civil service jobs and later preventing converted Jews from serving in the churches, we can imagine that Breslau provided ample opportunity for the Bonhoeffer family to encounter the Jewish population, which, despite their bourgeois sensibilities, was reported to take special interest in the downtrodden, less fortunate, and outsider.

An interesting book I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer emerged in 1966 as a compilation of memoirs by friends who knew Bonhoeffer directly. In those reflections describing his early life, there is a significant emphasis on the themes of justice and social intercourse with people that went beyond his social circles. It is regularly reported that the Christian gospel was only a nominal part of his life at the time and did not play a role in his early interactions. When Bonhoeffer revealed that he wanted to pursue theological studies, he was met with less-than-enthusiastic responses from his family.  Perhaps what the Christian gospel did do, however, was work to reinforce what he was already burgeoning in his life and give his concerns divine sanction. Dietrich could then see his own interest in social justice and care for the outsider as a work mirrored by gospel virtues.  These anecdotal stories nonetheless prove valuable as we examine the circumstantial evidence for interactions with competing communities.

Life in Breslau for Jews and Christian dialogue during the 19th century and 20th century remains difficult to cohere entirely, as Till van Rahden has noted, since interest in Breslau has been marginal and source material for the past 200 years has produced nothing of noteworthiness. What we do know is that Breslau benefitted significantly from being in the Silesia region where rich mines and trade routes established the city’s prosperity, and where, as early as the 18th century, Frederick II reluctantly allowed Jews to return and trade in the area with limited resettlement opportunities due to their mercantile acumen.  By 1840, the Jewish community grew exponentially, an event that instigated conflict with its German Christian neighbors, especially as the former found their way into the more attractive social circles in the city. With this economic growth came expansions in social and religious growth. Records from the city show a rise in intermarriages, especially among Jewish women to Christian men, and this fact remains a way for historians to gauge social interactions, as van Rahden writes that private contact between the two religious communities became “a matter of course.”[2] This observation suggests that “the city’s social life offered people manifold opportunities to get to know, to befriend, and possibly to marry one another across denominational boundaries.”[3] Likewise, many social institutions and associations were open to Jews, even going so far as to allowing Jews to maintain their ethnic identities without fear of public shame. 

By 1910, when Dietrich was four years old, the population was about 500,000, the size of modern-day Baltimore city, with about 60% Protestant, 35% Roman Catholic, and 5% Jewish. Abraham Ascher notes that Breslau’s Jewish population remained a good deal higher than the rest of Germany.[4] Jews on the whole did much better economically than their Protestant counterparts, averaging about three times more the average salary, and represented about 20% of the total income in the city.

            While it is common to assume that Jews were reproached for their disproportionate wealth in the political rhetoric of Hitler, as early as 1918, Jews, and those in Breslau as well, were dealing with the effects of hyperinflation following the first World War. Many had their economic status threatened and in losing their wealth found their social status threatened as well. Van Rahden remarks that the geopolitics of Breslau made it more difficult for Jews where the Upper Silesian frontier town had been threatened by Polish-German tensions for years. Jews, who had lost their social and economic statuses, no longer had the benefit of asserting their “Germanness” as if to suggest that their national identities were on loan provided they maintain the economic health of the city. They were now under suspicion—as toxic to German stability as the Silesian Poles—and disdained as interlopers, even as national sentiment and anti-Semitism combined to aggravate the situation.

            One cannot point to a specific event in these early years that might have shaped the Bonhoeffers’ resolve and produced such a family which actively resisted Nazism. But it is hard to imagine living decades in a city and not being affected by its social and intellectual climate. The family finally moved from Breslau in 1912, when Karl Bonhoeffer 44, accepted a post in Berlin. Paula Bonhoeffer was 38, and her son Dietrich was just six.  If we are to believe anecdotal accounts about the family from this time, saturation in Breslau might had an extended effect on their near-future interactions. Even if it is highly unlikely to have had any direct effect on young Dietrich personally, these values must have been passed on by his parents. Every indication was that Karl was a man of unflinching character. In one instance, he reportedly told his assistant Fred Quadfasel that going to jail was nothing to be ashamed of, that his family had a history of spending time in jail, and, in particular, during the 1848 revolution.  Norman Geschwind also reported that Bonhoeffer never hung a picture of Hitler on his wall and maintain a “classic Greek quality of measure in all things.”[5]

Events like the Judenzählung (Jewish census) of 1916, no doubt increased public consumption of anti-Semitism, despite the alleged suppression of factual information about Jews serving in the military.  By the early ‘20s, when Bonhoeffer was himself a schoolboy, anti-Semitic antagonism reached a tipping point, and, in Breslau, that energy seemed to be intensified by its youth. “Young people, who had been spared any experience of the front”[6] were the main provocateurs of violence. Van Rahden asserts that the students defaced “school buildings with swastikas, handed out thousands of anti-Semitic leaflets, and sought to undermine Jewish teachers’ authority by bringing their hatred of Jews with them into the classroom.”[7] Perhaps it was Bonhoeffer’s strong family structure and upper middle-class accommodations that saved him. But others could also point to similar upbringings, and those who grew up in “religious settings,” like Martin Heidegger and Paul Althaus, went on to support the Nazis for a time. Rather, it was the character of that upbringing, the intellectual climate, and the combination of early experiences, not least of all in Breslau, which appears to have set the stage. The Bonhoeffers had left Breslau two years prior to the outbreak of open hostilities towards Jews, and so perhaps the sensibilities they carried with them of an open and morally egalitarian society remained firmly implanted despite the soon-tragedy facing Germany. Bonhoeffer became refined in these fires, a young theologian whose intellectual gravitas resounded Christian virtue and Breslau sensibility. Quoting on several occasions Proverbs 31:8, he wrote, “Open your mouth for those who have no voice,” followed once with the question: who still knows that in the church today; that this is the least requirement of the Bible in such times?”[8]

 

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[1] Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 7

[2] Till van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860-1925, Trans. By Marcus Brainard (The University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, WI, 2008), 18.

[3] Ibid., 19.

[4] Abraham Ascher, A Community Under Siege: The Jews of Breslau Under Nazism, Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture (Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA, 2007), 31.

[5] Norman Geschwind, “The Work and Influence of Wernicke,” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, 1966/1968, Volume IV, Edited by Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland, 1969), 10-11.

[6] Van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, 232.

[7] Ibid, 234.  

[8] DBW 13: London 1933:1935, 204-5.

My Conversion to Kinship with Judaism: A Reflection on the Holocaust through Elie Weisel

              It’s a fact:  Christians who express interest in Judaism most often come to that place by Jesus. After all, Jesus was a Jew, shared in the cultural traditions of Jews, and often quoted from the Jewish Bible. Most of us experience Judaism on a very superficial level.  Until the Holocaust, not many of us came to understand Judaism through tragedy.

When Nazi rhetoric ramped up in the 1930s, the biblical kinship with Jews felt by many Christians was broken through for many living in Germany and beyond. Clever theologians such as Paul Althaus (a leading scholar of Pauline theology in Germany) and Emanuel Hirsch found ways around the Jews to get to Jesus in the theologies of their day. In the immediate aftermath of the Nuremberg Laws, church officials were encouraged to leave out overtly Jewish references in their services that linked Jesus to his kin. Political propaganda helped to re-ignite hatred and suspicion and caricatures of a rebellious people whose bloodlust knew no bounds were summoned from the gospels. The Jews who killed Jesus were also responsible for killing the collective German spirit, ravaging the economy, and introducing strange and immoral behaviors into the social order of Germany. 

While many Christians who experience the Jesus of the Bible will only most likely ever experience Judaism the way a playwright casts an antagonist to push the action forward in his play, every year in some quiet corner of a university library, or in some integrated reading assigned by an ambitious teacher, a minority of Christians experience a “conversion to kinship” with their Jewish brethren care of the Holocaust.  For those Christians fortunate enough, their rite of passage will likely by through Elie Wiesel.  

In 1999, I first read Night as a high school teacher doing a one-year stint at a magnet school in the English department. I had the option of picking through all sorts of books to read with my class, and along with Archibald Macleish’s J.B. and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, I found a book by Elie Wiesel called Night. Because I had to do my reading prior to my students, I sat down with Night figuring I would set my goal to a couple of chapters a day. I was done the book that evening. Fighting back tears and hanging on every word, I read the book as many fellow Christians had come to read it:  as a form of penance for things I had not done.

I felt guilt. Not as a Gentile, since I wasn’t a Jew, and not as a German, though I had some German heritage, but as a member of the human race who was desperately troubled by the realization that something like this happened and it took me almost 24 years to read about it. I wasn’t completely immune to the Holocaust. I had gathered information from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. But remembering a childhood in which Spielberg created E.T. on the other end at best prejudiced me against the voice I would eventually answer.

At best, I knew how to separate Hollywood from my little world in the Towson suburb of Baltimore. The only Jewish friends I had was a family my family grew up with and they never struck me as a Jewish, as if the word was supposed to conjure occasions for difference.  As far as I was concerned Jews were people living in the pages of my Bible.

My conversion to kinship (as I prefer to call it) with Judaism came when in the final year of doing work at a Christian seminary I focused my attention on Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was then that my reading blossomed to other resistance figures in the anti-Nazi movement. Soon I was reading Jewish writers, thinkers, theologians, and philosophers. And in the summer of 2012, after spending time at two interfaith retreats, I entered a Jewish Studies graduate program at Towson University where I am currently working on a thesis in Jewish theology.

This conversion to kinship was a ground prepared by those seminal moments, encouraged by Wiesel who showed me the depths of human depravity, who showed me that my own reservations about an all-loving God now seemed infinitesimally irrelevant against the very real hardship on losing one’s entire family in the camps. And the guilt I derived from this inadequacy moved me to study Judaism with Jews who suffer and celebrate their Judaism.

In the course of my studies, I learned  that I was not alone. My path was similar to other paths. My Jewish Ethics professor let me on to conversation he had while dining with Peter Schäfer, a scholar in early Jewish-Christian studies, Jewish mysticism, and Rabbinics. I used Schäfer’s work as reference materials for papers I wrote during that time, and was interested to learn that Schäfer, a native German, told my professor that his interested in early Judaism arose as a form of atonement for the sins of his people. Using scholarship as a way of making atonement struck him as the right thing to do with the kind of work he was pursuing. Through his continued efforts, and numerous teaching assignments, he eventually became director at the Jewish Museum of Berlin.

Arguably, one of the most famous books on Jewish theology emerging after the Holocaust was Richard L. Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz, which offers a powerful look into the theology of Judaism in a post-Holocaust world and challenges many of the fundamental ideas that Rubenstein felt influenced the genocide. Rubenstein dedicates his second edition of his book to two men, one of whom, John K. Roth, was a Christian. Anyone who read After Auschwitz with open eyes confronted a problematic God, a depraved world, and a Christianity that was invariably set on the destruction of the Jews. Roth grew up a Presbyterian and had a burgeoning career as a Christian scholar, even while his knowledge of Auschwitz was as incomplete as any Midwesterner’s living in the shadow of the War. Roth recalls that he was “too young to be much aware of World War II, barely hearing of Auschwitz afterward, and knowing practically nothing about the Holocaust for a long time. Yet I increasingly think of myself as a post-Holocaust American Christian. Auschwitz stalks my soul, too.” It wasn’t until reading After Auschwitz that Roth found himself on a path of understanding that would last much of his life. 

It was through a brush with Wiesel’s portrayal of Sarah in his early novel The Accident that contrasted against the birth of Roth’s own child he named Sarah.  And then the words from Wiesel himself: “Whoever listens to Sarah and doesn’t change, whoever enters Sarah’s world and doesn’t invent new gods and new religions, deserves death and destruction.” The reality of his daughter’s birth against the backdrop of a fictional character living through a nonfictional event was deeply moving. Roth went on to create a new god and a new religion that some would argue was always there and in time realized that what is so important in our journey is the humanity that binds us, without which, there could be no religion, no gods, no opportunity to make distinctions like “Jew” or “Christian.” It was no longer enough that Jesus or Moses spoke through the pages of ancient scripture. Roth reported that after reading about Sarah that he often found himself on the verge of tears. “I began to understand that my tears were partly a response to the Holocaust and to Wiesel in particular, an awareness that has become all the more poignant with the passing of time.” It was because of Wiesel, Roth admits, that he experience a conversion of kinship, that his life took a “decisive Holocaust turn.”

Each year, I encounter new names and fresh faces at various conferences or in journals as they bring forward their research on Holocaust studies. A lot of those presentations come from outside the Jewish community by those building careers, who found the Holocaust through the insight of a teacher, a friend, a summer reading project, or a movie. Their genuine attempts at understanding a detestable event reflect the complexity of a world that does not provide easy answers. Wiesel himself will remain a prominent figure even as many academics have moved on to other Holocaust voices. Unlike Noam Chomsky, who beaconed the world with transformational grammar, only to move far afield to political philosophy, Wiesel never moved away from his original mission. And despite the controversy created around him in later years, like Jesus, Wiesel’s reach into the hearts of people who were not his own is a profound accomplishment.