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63 6 Celebrating Our Faith As we have come to learn more about our faith, as Buddhists and Christians have demonstrated it in responding to despair and aloneness prevalent in its absence, we find that this quality enables us to offset self-centeredness and simultaneously discover equipoise. The assumption working in this company of friends is that truth is liberating and unfolds compassionately, not as the result of our agency. This is a mutual awareness worth celebrating. It is difficult to translate this title into Japanese for Jōdo Shinshū or Shin Buddhists . This fact substantiates to a considerable degree the point that I have been making. We need to think more about what we mean when we use the English word faith. When I first suggested this title for a lecture that I was asked to give at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, a distinguished Japanese Buddhist professor responded, “Do you mean your Christian faith?” I replied, “No, I mean the faith of all of us who will be in the room.” That is what I continue to celebrate. But first, let us lay the groundwork to see wherein we might share this quality of life. WHERE DOES ONE BEGIN IN CELEBRATING OUR FAITH? There are several ways that Christian thinkers might set about to discuss what has been called Christianity and Buddhism. Their initial assumptions, occasionally not self-consciously acknowledged, are regularly intriguing. Have any of us who are Buddhists attended a conference with Christian thinkers at which a Christian thinker began his or her presentation of a scholarly paper by offering a prayer? Would it seem inappropriate to begin a paper with an authentic prayer of the heart, or would such behavior be considered out of place? There have been conferences at which representatives of the various religious traditions have met for a day or two, or more, to study together, to hear papers presented, and, as a 6 4 I n t he C om p a ny of Fr ie nd s separate part of the program, to meet together for devotional activities, usually meditation, prayer, chanting, and song. But why not begin an academic paper with a sincere prayer? Moreover, Christian thinkers, in considering other religious traditions, have tilted toward, or have stressed, or have given primary emphasis to the Greek heritage of the Western intellectual tradition. However, on some occasions, when these thinkers deal with the strands of our human religious history that have derived from a Semitic background, the tendency has been to dwell more centrally on biblical concepts, on the Semitic heritage that Jews, Christians, and Muslims share. It seems that when discussions are held with Buddhists, and to some extent with Hindus, there is a tendency on the part of Christian thinkers to move into a Greek arena of discourse, to discuss problems of time, say, or the notion of the absolute, or causality, or the question of ontology, of being and becoming, or of substance and substancelessness, of fundamental reality, and so forth. The Greek heritage in the West has often been the strand of our intellectual thought to which we have turned for rational arbitration. We call the mental activity, in this process of rational discourse, “reason.” We become engaged with reason with great respect for it, and we participate in this process with genuine and deep commitment. Our academic tradition is largely based upon this commitment to reason and to each other. Whereas the biblical view suggests that men and women are to decide whether to say Yes or No to God’s salvific activity, the Greek view suggests that we are to decide whether to say Yes or No to the honest inquiry of reason. The dynamic between these two stances has also led some to promote a mode of philosophical inquiry that seeks to investigate what would constitute that to which we should say Yes or No. Joachim Jeremias, to whom we will return in our penultimate chapter, has demonstrated that a key theme in the message of Jesus, seen particularly in his prayers, was a creative and vibrant orientation to God as Father.1 Although the argument advanced by Jeremias, and widely endorsed—that ‘abbā = “Daddy”— is no longer persuasive,2 the centrality of Jesus’ relationship with God as Father, to whom and about whom he spoke as “Father,” was at the heart of his own self-understanding and ministry. “Father,” as a sincere mature address to God, then, for Christians, is a New Testament...

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