Greg and Amy share practical questions Christians can ask Buddhists to gently challenge their beliefs about guilt, the end goal of life, and objective truth.
Transcript
Question: What question should I initiate to put a stone in the shoe of my Buddhist nail tech? I’ve known her 20 years, and we’ve talked about Christ. However, it has been too surface, and I need to do more.
Greg: Well, she may be Buddhist because she was raised in a Buddhist home and this is associated with her ethnicity. Then you’ve got American Buddhists. And these people don’t know anything about Buddhism—many of them.
Buddhism, at its core—first of all, it’s non-theistic. God is not a factor in Buddhism. You do have godlike characters, like bodhisattvas, who have attained a certain level of enlightenment, but ultimately, Buddhism is about suffering. That’s the core. And how do you escape suffering? You could take the five-fold path to try to escape suffering, but ultimate escape comes in nirvana, and nirvana is extinction. You disappear. There’s no permanent self—no ego—no permanent individual in that view.
For some reason, Americans, when they do Buddhism, they have these little bits and pieces that they think are so cool, but they are not really engaging the religious philosophy itself. So, you might want to start by asking a lot of questions just about, when you say you’re Buddhist, what exactly does that look like? What is that view?
I think, if they’re American—you know, people who are kind of doing the Buddhist thing—what they’re going to talk about are individual aspects of Buddhist practice that they like. “Well, I do meditation, and it makes me feel better.” They’re not in touch with the structure of reality that Buddhism offers. It’s a false characterization of it, but it does offer a structure of reality.
But you mentioned something earlier, and it has to do with guilt. What is it that you do with your guilt? And this goes back to the forgiveness issue. Let me tell you why Jesus is important: because the suffering in the world that we see and we’re trying to avoid, that is a result of sin. And sin isn’t just out there somewhere. Sin is what we commit. We’re responsible for that.
Here is a way—and maybe sometimes it’s just a contrasting view. This is what Buddhism teaches. I’m going to tell you what Jesus thought. Jesus understood that there is a God before whom we live and who we have disobeyed, and therefore, we are guilty and subject to punishment.
“Well, I don’t like that.”
Well, I don’t like it either. But that’s not the issue. The issue isn’t whether we like Buddhism or not. The issue is whether Buddhism is true—or, in this case, Jesus is true. Jesus wasn’t a Buddhist. He was a Torah-observant Jew. Some people have tried to remake Jesus into some kind of Eastern mystic. That’s a New Age approach, but it’s not sound, because there’s nothing New Age about Jesus at all. So, we tell what the truth is, and even if it’s just by contrast.
Now, here’s one thing to avoid—if what we’re doing is offering a contrast. It’s not a matter of, “Okay, this is your view and here is my view, and you adopt that religion, and I adopt this religion.” We’re not just trading religious stories here. What we’re trying to help people see—and this needs to be built into the way we communicate it—is that this is the way the world actually is.
Last weekend, we were at Reality Student Apologetics Conference, and I gave a presentation at the end, which included the gospel. I talked about how my brother, 50 years ago, told me before I was a Christian, “The things that I’m telling you are true, Greg. Sooner or later, you’re going to find that out. I just hope that when you do, it’s not too late.” That stuck with me all these years because it was so powerful. He wasn’t making a defense for Christianity. He was communicating the stakes in a clear way and a confident way. “This thing is true.” So, I told the kids, “You’re going to stand before Jesus someday. Then, he will open the books and see how you’ve done, and that’s not going to be a pretty picture, and you know that. And one of two things is going to happen. Either Jesus pays, or you pay. That’s it. That’s the calculus.”
So, notice, in this situation, I’m not saying, “Well, Christians believe this is going to happen, but Buddhists believe this.” Now I’m relativizing everything. I’m telling these students, “This is the way it is, and one day, you’re going to stand before him. As a matter of fact, sooner or later, it’s going to happen. I just hope when it does, it’s not too late,”—kind of thing, to repeat what my brother Mark told me.
So, that’s the way I would try to approach this. I was influenced by my brother’s grace towards me but also his confidence and non-compromise. “Greg, I love you. I’m telling you this. But this is the fact of the matter.”
Even if a person is a postmodernist, they’re still human beings made in the image of God, and they have this existential desire for forgiveness—to get past the guilt that they know they carry, even though it may be underneath the surface. It’s still there.
Amy: I think one thing that might be helpful—and you touched on this, Greg—is to ask, “What is the goal of Buddhism? What are you trying to get? What are you trying to achieve? What’s the highest goal?” If the goal, as you say, Greg, is to separate yourself from all desires so that there’s no more suffering, and then you’re kind of absorbed into the oneness of the universe, or whatever it is—I mean, surely that’s not the greatest thing we can imagine.
Maybe you could just ask her, “How do you feel about that—being kind of annihilated and becoming one?” I mean, sure, that ends the suffering, but then it stops there. Christianity ends the suffering, but then we offer the kindness of God lavished on us for eternity. So, there’s no, sort of, reward. We lose all the things that have been hurting us, but then that’s it. And that, to me, seems bleak. I don’t think I’d put it this way, but I think I would just draw out her vision of what is the best outcome of reality or if she desires more. I can’t imagine that she doesn’t, if she really thinks about it.
Greg: Well, there’s another question, too, and it’s standard for the tactical approach. Why would she think that particular way of looking at reality is accurate? How did you come to that conclusion? What are your reasons for this? Why would you think that’s actually the way the world is? So, why should we believe the Buddhist take? Oh yeah, there’s suffering. That’s the human condition. But why should we believe Buddha’s take on it and his solution and the ultimate end of all things is accurate?
We are talking about stories of reality here. We are not talking about preferred belief systems. “Oh, I like this one, and you like that one.” Actually, I don’t like Christianity. There are a lot of things about it I don’t like. I think it is noble and good because God is noble and good, but there are aspects of it that are difficult. So, the goal isn’t to find something we like. The goal is to find out what’s true, ultimately. And I’m convinced Christianity is true, even though I have tons and tons of unanswered questions, especially about how we live the Christian life and different things like that, which have to do with sanctification, not apologetics issues. But I don’t think those are the hard ones. I think it’s the theological issues that are more difficult.
Amy: We’ve talked about this before. You mentioned, how do we know this is true? Well, you have one man having a vision and having an idea about what’s true with really no way to test it. Whereas, with Christianity, you have God interacting with history, and you have a whole 1,500 years of interacting with a nation, and then Jesus and the resurrection—and all of these things are publicly accessible. God interacted with multiple people over the years.
Greg: And we have a quite thorough historical record of that, not just the kind of story of Gautama Buddha and what he endured and what he thought.
Amy: So, that is one advantage that we have when we’re making our case, is that we have reasons that aren’t just internal reasons or subjective reasons to think that Christianity is true. So, when you ask that question, just keep that in mind as something you can offer: “How can I know if it’s true? You can tell me how you know it’s true, but how can I know it’s true?”
Greg: Just remember: Emmanuel. God with us. God came down. That’s huge. God came down. He Is There and He Is Not Silent is the name of the book by Francis Schaeffer. And that’s his point. God is really there, but he has not hidden himself. He has not only spoken, but he has come down to earth to make himself known. And his feet touched the dirt in a way that could be quantified and chronicled for us.