Harold Stewart Christianity

Muryoko: Journal of Shin Buddhism



Harold Stewart

Christianity

By being adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire some sixteen hundred years ago, Christianity gained the ascendancy over its rivals and became the predominant Tradition of Europe. But after the decline of the Middle Ages, with the Renaissance and Reformation and increasingly during the past century or two, many Westerners have become disillusioned with their old religion, so that for more and more today it can no longer serve as a vessel to hold that water which alone can satisfy our spiritual thirst. Reacting against its institutions and tenets, both theological and moral, the overdeveloped ego of modern Occidental man demands a new method, one by which the individual can 'conquer happiness' by his own will power and enterprise, unaided by faith, prayer, ritual, or divine assistance. So devotional and invocatory practices are anathema to our self-sufficient contemporaries, who presumptuously assume that their scientially finite and conditioned minds can probe and comprehend the mysteries of the Infinite, when in truth they cannot even solve man's petty social and psychological problems on this minor planet.

Such popular disaffection for the Christian faith is less the result of any intellectual investigation and refutation of its theological doctrines than an emotionally charged reaction against its politics and an irrational belief that its teachings have been undermined and disproved by the current theories of secular science. In consequence, many defectors have taken the path of least resistance and surrendered to the mindless hedonism and hardened materialism of our times. Whether they consider themselves agnostic humanists or practising atheists, they credulously accept without question or criticism the latest tentative hypotheses (Greek for 'guesswork') popularized for laymen by the mouthpieces of Scientism, as though such suppositions were already proven truths.

Those adherents who still strive to practise an inherited religion no longer suited to their needs find to their dismay that their Church is desecrating its own liturgy and committing theological suicide in an attempt to adapt its traditions to the demands of modern secularism and to accommodate its doctrines to contemporary attitudes and opinions. As though the twentieth century constituted some timeless and unchanging criterion of absolute truth; and as if, already more than three-quarters elapsed, it had not proved itself to be as ephemeral as all the other centuries! So they have had to look elsewhere for a spiritual path. And where else to look but Eastward, since from that quarter in the past have come all the major extant Traditions? Ex Oriente lux, ex Occidente nox.

Reflections on the Dharma - Harold Stewart

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