This is a funny cartoon from The Sacred Sandwich. Of course, as with all humor, there is a good bit of truth in the biting sarcasm. According to a recent article in the Denver Post, for instance, Buddhism is being merged with Christianity on a regular basis by Christians pulling in meditation and other Eastern spiritual practices into their Christian “practice.” There are even special names for people who do this. Jubus for Jewish Buddhist, and Bujus for Buddhist with Jewish Parents. UUbus, which are Universal Unitarian Buddhist, Ebus, which are Episcopalian Buddhist, Zen Catholics, and many others. The key is experience. The modern church has moved from knowing God to experiencing God (with no apologies to Mr. Blackaby).
“There is a definite trend and movement that will not be reversed,” said Ruben Habito, a laicized Jesuit priest, Zen master and professor of world religions at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “We are in a new spiritual age, an inter-religious age.”
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People are hungry for a deeper spiritual experience — meditation, mindfulness, personal transformation, deep insight, union with God or the universe.
And what happens when you don’t get the experience you’re looking for in the local church? Well, you de-baptize, of course, as explained by the Augusta Daily Gazette.
These people are not merely renouncing their standing in a church or staying home on Sunday mornings. They want everyone to know they are out. They get dunked in a mockery of Christian baptism and then are dried off by the hairdryer of reason, which is said to blow away the effects of mysticism and myth from their lives.
The writer of this article goes on to say that a lot of the problem with the modern church is the church knows what it hates, but not what it loves. While there is truth in this, there is no solution in turning to experience. Centering on experience centered is supposed to build an emotional connection with God, in an effort to turn to a positive, rather than negative, view of God. Experience gets you no closer to God than only knowing what you hate, in the end, for you simply turn to what feels good, rather than what is true. Knowing God is being one of the Saints who cry Hallelujah at the smoke of Babylon rising eternally, as is described in Revelation, as well as crying Hallelujah when a new soul is added to the Kingdom of Christ. The essence of faith is believing even when we don’t feel like it.
Of course, this can all be seen as a larger movement against fundamental Christianity, as well. We all know, don’t we, that Christianity isn’t the problem? The problem is those Christians who insist on believing in a literal reading of the Scriptures. The Fundamentalism Project shows how bad it is to believe in the Scriptures as literal truth, doesn’t it? As they say in a paper, “Too Bad We’re so Relevant.”
Over the past seven years—in the face of changed political, economic, social, and religious realities; after ten conferences, the employment of the energies of two hundred international scholars, considerable financial expenditures, and thousands of hours of fieldwork, air travel, computer use, telephone calls across time zones, and visits to libraries; after numerous conversations among experts, testings of existing hypotheses and inventions of new ones, wieldings of editorial blue pencils, and the like—both the Fundamentalism Project and its theme could have become irrelevant. That would have been the case if civilizations turning toward what has come to be called the “postmodern” had found they no longer had room for “modern” movements like fundamentalism; or if secularity and secularism had swept the globe, leaving little room for anything religious; or if the prospering forms of late-modern religions had turned out to be modernist, liberal, moderate, concessive, reconciliatory, and interactive, leaving no room for fundamentalism.
Yes, it’s too bad people are still out here worshiping God based on a real, literal meaning of the Scriptures, isn’t it? It’s too bad people still believe in an absolute moral right and wrong, isn’t it? It’s too bad, because, after all, as long as people still believe in absolute right and wrong, they won’t go along to get along, and they won’t buy the world’s agenda, will they? And if you’re in doubt this is the message, take a look at this article over at NewsBusters. Reverend Wallis, of the “Christian” group Soujourners, clearly states that “right wing fundamentalists” are the problem in the health care debate. They just won’t get with the program, and buy the world’s view of things. They keep clinging to God, holding on to promises and a worldview the world really hates.
Deception in the Church has an excellent article about the “theology” of the Emergent Church crowd, the crowd that blends Buddhism with Christianity to create a “third way,” or a “new way.” The Church needs to get back the Scriptures, to taking them seriously, to understanding that God’s way is not the world’s way, and there is no hope in Zen Christianity, or a Messianic Buddha, or anything else other than God Himself.
