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217 18 Will There Be Faith on Earth? We cannot fail to recognize the moral demand which requires persons of different religious traditions to work together in the hope of forming community in the face of interpersonal fragmentation and international war. We can begin to meet the corrosive effect of radical secular individualism by considering afresh what it means to be human, which the Christian and Buddhist witness affirm involves faith. Mutual understanding of religious persons—Theravāda and Jōdo Shinshū Buddhists, Christians, and others—is a pressing requirement for our times, of course. There are numerous crises in our world today: wars, bloody skirmishes, terrorism, more than fifty million political and economic refugees, the AIDS epidemic, widespread starvation, global warming, the environment— deforestation, air and water pollution—the genuinely helpless state of some of our huge population centers with the breakdown of infrastructure—whether in Calcutta or Lagos, and one could certainly continue with this list. A subtle, consequential crisis that confronts Buddhists and Christians today is the result of changes that have taken place in the broader context of our societies, in Europe, North America, Japan, and Sri Lanka, in which men and women aspire to live a religious life. This crisis is the result of a growing lack of faith, which has given rise to a movement toward radical individualism, coupled with an uninspired secularism, and a marginalization of the religious life. This crisis has arisen because, now more than ever, there seems to be a lack of faith: faith among persons, faith in a common cause, in a center of value, faith in reason, and faith in transcendence and the enriching experience of becoming engaged in the process of transcending. I will attempt to address this crisis by turning again to insights offered by H. Richard Niebuhr and Wilfred Smith, whom we have considered previously and whose thinking is rarely drawn upon in a contemporary complementarity. I will offer a tentative conclusion regarding compassion, wisdom, and faith. 218 I n t he C om p a ny of Fr ie nd s I turn again to the opening paragraph of a work published posthumously, in which H. Richard Niebuhr parenthetically, but with alarming relevance, quotes a question recorded as being asked by Jesus: “‘When the Son of man comes will he find faith on earth?’ (Luke 18:8).” Acknowledging that Jesus might have meant faith in God, Niebuhr suggests, “he may also have meant, ‘Will he find any faithfulness among men?’”1 Noting the depths into which faithfulness among us fell in the twentieth century, Niebuhr proposes another possibility for the end-time of our future: not the brotherhood reflected in the “Ode to Joy” of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony nor nuclear holocaust adumbrated by our horrible experiences at Hiroshima and Nagasaki nor cataclysmic natural calamities, but a fourth possibility —as he puts it, “the gangrenous corruption of a social life in which every promise, contract, treaty and ‘word of honor’ is given and accepted in deception and distrust. If men no longer have faith in each other, can they exist as men?”2 Niebuhr was well aware that we are promise keepers, but we are deceivers, too. THE CRISIS OF INDIFFERENT INDIVIDUALISM Individualism, often championed in the United States, having, for the most part, become cut off from its noble humanistic heritage, has floundered in an era when values are no longer shared, when cultural norms have lost their relevance. Individualism , set adrift without a compass, has no anchor, no interweaving nexus that can continue to support it as a governing ideology other than a sheer drive for individual achievement and career success. Individualism, without a centripetal core of shared values of a society, has become centrifugally connected in tangential pursuits for one’s own objectives. The modus operandi of this dislocated individualism is to succeed in any way whatever the cost. And the first consequential disposition that arises among persons is deception and the drive for self-aggrandizement. One no longer runs the risk of trusting another. Loss of responsibility for another is a correlative of failure to trust. The other person no longer matters unless that person has an immediate relationship to what is in one’s own interest. We see this in our politicians, trapped in a loss of public trust. They are fully aware of this, are made uncomfortable by it, yet to perpetuate their place in office find it more and more difficult to become responsible and innovative thinkers...

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