(This essay includes excerpts and ideas from my 2012 article in Asbury Journal, “Christian Sensitivity in Interreligious Relations,” used with permission.)
I am not a Roman Catholic, but I often cite Nostra Aetate (or Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions), a document from the Second Vatican Council (1965), as sound advice for Christians who engage adherents of other religions. The document states, “The Church therefore exhorts her sons and daughters to recognize, preserve, and foster the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among the followers of other religions. This is done through conversations and collaboration with them, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life” (translation by Thomas F. Stransky).
In this essay, I focus on the phrase “good things” in Nostra Aetate. What qualifies as a “good thing”? How do I recognize good things “among the followers of other religions,” specifically Buddhism? And what does it mean to preserve and foster such good things “through conversations and collaboration with them, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life”?
A “Good Thing”
My course syllabi include the objective of augmenting students’ ability to engage religious others with both sensitivity and integrity. Sensitivity requires an accurate understanding of other religions on their own terms; integrity requires evaluation of other religions according to the standards of one’s own religion.
I agree with the Catholic theologian Hans Küng’s approach to interreligious engagement: Each participant “stands by the normativity of his or her own tradition and yet is open to other traditions.” I draw first and foremost upon the normativity of the Christian New Testament, which provides me a plumb line for evaluating what is “good”—as well as what is “not good”—in another religion.
Recognizing “Good Things” in Buddhism
My graduate school adviser once explained that Buddhist and Christian ethics are consistent with each other, though the doctrinal underpinnings of the two ethical systems differ. Like me, my adviser was an ordained Protestant minister. I followed his lead and began looking for the ethical “good things” in Buddhism, without necessarily adhering to the doctrines that inform them.
One of my favorite texts is the Kucchivikara-vatthu from Theravada Buddhism. As the Access to Insight website summarizes, “In this touching story the Buddha comes across a desperately ill monk who had been utterly neglected by his companions. The Buddha leaps to his aid, and offers a teaching on those qualities that make patients easy (or difficult) to tend to and those that make caregivers fit (or unfit) to tend to their patients.” Commenting on this and a similar text, the scholar Lily de Silva explains that a good Buddhist caregiver should follow the compassionate example of the Buddha, who on two occasions tended personally to extremely ill and abandoned monks: “Thus the Buddha not only advocated the importance of looking after the sick, he also set a noble example by himself ministering to those who were so ill that they were even considered repulsive by others.” De Silva continues: A good Buddhist caregiver “should be benevolent and kind-hearted; he should perform his duties out of a sense of service and not just for the sake of remuneration (mettacitto gilānaṃ upaṭṭhāti no amisantaro). He should not feel repulsion towards saliva, phlegm, urine, stools, sores, etc. He should be capable of exhorting and stimulating the patient with noble ideas, with Dhamma talk.”
Note the doctrinal underpinnings of this ethical behavior. The Buddhist caregiver understands suffering in the light of the Buddha’s teaching (Pali: dhamma) about the human predicament and its solution. Thus, as de Silva notes, beyond providing physical care, a good Buddhist caregiver should also be prepared to offer a dhamma talk. I would expect a good Christian caregiver to be prepared to offer a Gospel talk and a good secular caregiver to be prepared to offer a talk about the hope for “a world of mutual care and concern, free of cruelty and its consequences,” to quote the Humanist Manifesto III. In all these cases, the caregiver must discern when it is appropriate to share such a talk with a patient. As the Buddha says in the Kucchivikara-vatthu, dhamma talks should be given “at the proper occasions” (translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu).
The Kucchivikara-vatthu has the Buddha instructing his monastic followers, “Monks, you have no mother, you have no father, who might tend to you. If you don’t tend to one another, who then will tend to you? Whoever would tend to me, should tend to the sick.” For Christians, the last sentence calls to mind Matthew 25 in the New Testament, where Jesus says that compassion shown to the sick and other unfortunates is shown to him. Again, the doctrinal underpinnings of these two passages differ, but the ethics are consistent. Both traditions have founding teachers who set a noble example of caring for needy others. Benevolent and compassionate care looks the same no matter who gives it, and it feels the same to those who receive it.
De Silva identifies these two qualities, benevolence (mettā) and compassion (karuṇā), as “praiseworthy” in a caregiver. These are two of the four brahmavihāras or “sublime emotions,” the others being empathetic joy (muditā) and equanimity (upekkhā). The Theravada tradition developed meditative practices around the brahmavihāras with the ultimate goal of achieving “a state of mind that can serve as a firm basis for the liberating insight into the true nature of all phenomena, as being impermanent, liable to suffering and unsubstantial,” as the Theravada monk Nyanaponika Thera explains, referencing core Buddhist doctrinal propositions. This state of mind will have ethical effects: “A mind that has achieved meditative absorption induced by the sublime states will be pure, tranquil, firm, collected and free of coarse selfishness.” For instance, a person in the sublime state of mettā, which Nyanaponika translates as “love,” embraces “impartially all sentient beings, and not only those who are useful, pleasing or amusing to us.”
Love is the core Christian ethical prescription (see 1 Corinthians 13 in the New Testament). The kind of selfless love characterized by the state of mettā is certainly consistent with Christian love, though the Buddhist concept extends love beyond the human realm. Note how the Karaniya Metta Sutta describes the attitude of a person living in this state of mind (translation by The Amaravati Sangha):
Wishing: In gladness and in safety,
May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born—
May all beings be at ease!
Some Buddhists who otherwise generally appreciate Jesus’s teachings criticize him for showing “little concern for the welfare of living beings other than human beings,” as José Ignacio Cabezón writes. Cabezón participated in an essay forum in the journal Buddhist-Christian Studies that illustrates Küng’s point about standing by the normativity of one’s own tradition while remaining open to the insights of other traditions. The editors—a Buddhist and a Christian—explain their intention in facilitating the forum: “If Buddhists could speak candidly of their thoughts and feelings for Jesus of Nazareth, both good thoughts/feelings and not-so-good thoughts/feelings, the potential for learning was great. The same dynamic would apply to Christians speaking about Gautama. Commenting on the other religious tradition’s founder, we thought, could become a significant mode of interreligious dialogue.”
Preserving and Fostering the “Good Things”
Nostra Aetate asks Christians to preserve and foster the good things “found among the followers of other religions . . . through conversations and collaboration with them, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life.” Again taking Buddhism as a case study, how can Christians engage followers of other religions in ways that will and will not further these laudable goals?
In appraising the Buddha’s core teaching of the Eightfold Path, and “the Buddhist way of life” generally, according to the criteria of the fruit of the Spirit, two Catholic missionaries conclude that “God is at work in the Buddhist tradition,” indeed, that God had planted this “good tree” of Buddhism which bears “good fruit” (“A Christian-Catholic Appraisal of Buddhism,” in Catholic Engagement with World Religions: A Comprehensive Study). To assert that God planted the good tree of Buddhism diminishes the Buddha’s own religious genius and ignores his nontheistic solution to the human predicament. This approach can subvert interreligious dialogue if it seeks “to collect evidence to prove that the Christian way of salvation is superior to and inclusive of all other ways” (quoting William Skudlarek, “Nostra Aetate at Forty”).
In the volume where the two Catholic missionaries make their assertion about the good tree of Buddhism, one of the editors clarifies that Catholic teaching does not see everything “good and true . . . in human beings, their religions, or their cultures” as necessarily stemming from the Holy Spirit. Efforts to develop a so-called pneumatological theology of the Holy Spirit’s presence in other religions have recently gained traction in certain Christian circles. Some engaged in this enterprise, however, recognize its limitations. The Pentecostal theologian Amos Yong asserts flatly, “The goal of a pneumatological theology of religions can never be to state dogmatically or precisely: ‘This is where the Spirit of God is!’” Yong answers the pointed question, “Is the Holy Spirit present and active in Buddhism?” with “Maybe yes, maybe not . . . maybe yes in this situation or context, maybe not in that.”
In an address during the Vatican’s Year of the Holy Spirit (1998), Pope John Paul II asserted that “every quest of the human spirit for truth and goodness, and in the last analysis for God, is inspired by the Holy Spirit.” Moreover, said the pope, many of the founders of the world’s religions, “with the help of God’s Spirit, achieved a deeper religious experience” and, further, “every authentic prayer is called forth by the Holy Spirit, who is mysteriously present in the heart of every person.”
Rather than declaring where the Holy Spirit is definitively present among the followers of the world’s religions, Christian pneumatological theology would do better to make a lesser claim. As the Protestant theologian Stanley Samartha writes, “[Christians] may have to be far more sensitive than before to what may be signs of the Spirit in the lives of neighbours of other faiths outside the visible boundaries of the church in the world.” A definitive claim about where the Holy Spirit is present among other religious adherents co-opts those others for Christian purposes.
Christians need not demand that the Holy Spirit be responsible for the “good things” in other religions. Christians can instead seek to discern how other religions are consistent—or not—with the workings of the Holy Spirit as Christians know those workings from their Christian heritage. Of course, this means that Christians must know their heritage well in order to determine what is consistent—or not—with it. In these ways, Christians can preserve and foster the good things “found among the followers of other religions . . . through conversations and collaboration with them, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life,” as Nostra Aetate asks. Moreover, as Küng writes, “So far as they do not directly contradict the Christian message, these religions can complete, correct and deepen the Christian religion.” This approach will enhance a prudent and loving Christian witness.
Paul David Numrich, PhD, is Professor in the Snowden Chair for the Study of Religion and lnterreligious Relations, Methodist Theological School in Ohio. His recent publications include The Religious Dimensions of Shared Spaces: When and How Religion Matters in Space-Sharing Arrangements (Lexington Books, 2023).
