Christian Ways of Being in a Multireligious World, from Friendship to Multiple Belonging: A Response, with Some Musings

In the multireligious arena of our contemporary global society, more and more Christians are turning to and finding nourishment in spiritual practices deriving from other religious traditions. This raises the question of how these practices, and the concomitant attitudes and worldviews entailed by these practices, relate to or affect Christian self-understanding and living. In addition to being a theological question, this is also a theme to be addressed in the study and practice of Christian spirituality. This symposium is a welcome forum for addressing issues in this regard.

Kwok Pui Lan writes, “spirituality is more than believing in a set of religious ideas or truth claims . . . Spirituality concerns the shape or mode of Christian living or ‘being-in-the-world.’”¹ Each of the essays in this symposium presents one or other possible shape or mode of Christian living in the context of this multireligious reality of today’s world that is accepting of, hospitable to, and open to learning from the Religious Other.

Lisa Hess, in her paper “Befriending Outsiders,” describes how such an act as sharing food with ultraorthodox and other Jews, including secular Jews, impacts her own spiritual life as a high-church Presbyterian Christian who “likes to sing hymns from an eighteenth century German prayerbook.” She refers to her own stance vis-à-vis her Jewish friends as a “befriended outsider.” She emphasizes that precisely because she as well as her hosts have this clear understanding that she is an outsider, albeit a favorably disposed, friendly one, (that is, “one who knows, values, advocates for, even stewards another tradition’s wisdom-practices without identifying or being identified with them as one’s own,”) she is accepted and welcomed among them as one who is trustworthy, as they themselves work out the various issues that divide them within their own tradition. Her presence and companionship thus become the treasured gift that she is to her friends across the religious divide.

Unlike Hess, who finds her ground firmly within her Presbyterian Christian faith and remains an outsider to her Jewish friends, the authors of the other three papers in the symposium have crossed this religious divide in one way or another, giving us accounts of their particular modes of religious hybridity.

Buddha & Light.

Courtesy of Nathan Wirth

Judith Berling, presenting herself as a “Confucian Episcopalian,” describes how her assimilation of Confucian practices in her own spiritual life has filled in certain gaps that her Christian upbringing had not been able to provide. She offers a moving account of how she was able to restore a spiritual connection with her deceased father through Confucian practices of ancestor veneration. The emphasis on the innate goodness of human nature, of the transcendent nature of ultimate reality, the cultivation of the humane ideals that affirm attitudes of love, benevolence, human-heartedness, and co-humanity, and the idea that love entails service, all aspects of the Confucian attitude and worldview, served to address the shortcomings of what Berling refers to as the “immature Christianity” of her youth. As someone of Swiss ancestry raised in the Middle West United States, she acknowledges that the Confucian heritage was not part of her “mother’s milk.” Thus, the adoption of aspects of Confucian spirituality and worldview is for her a deliberate, intentional act, largely helped by her academic studies in the area as well as her own lived experience in Asian societies informed by Confucian values. All in all, her way of being a Confucian Episcopalian provides us with a living example of how Christian life can be greatly enriched in adopting features of another spiritual tradition.

The question of what Berling, as a Confucian Christian, “gives back” to the Confucian heritage in adopting it as an aspect of her spiritual practice remains an open-ended one. In short, we must ask, not only about Berling as an individual, but also about the numerous Christians who live in societies informed by Confucianism: does their being Confucian Christian contribute anything to...