My ethics professor was Henlee Barnette. Barnette was from North Carolina and never abandoned his blue collar background nestled in the textile industry of the South. He was a wily, crusty old man who could argue circles around not only his students but fellow ethicists. He intimidated his students with this announcement on the first day of class: “Now boys, just remember. I’m basically a barbarian with a thin veneer of Christianity. So don’t scratch too deep.” And believe me, none of us ever did!
With his southern accent and country ways, Barnette surprised many people with the positions he took on ethical issues. During the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, he invited Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to address the seminary chapel. This was at a time when King was offered few forums other than African-American churches, the most liberal of Protestant churches, and Jewish synagogues. Because of Barnette’s invitation and the position he took on civil rights, the seminary president, a petty, arrogant, and vindictive man (one of the few people I have ever known who could strut while sitting down), refused to give Barnette the coveted title of professor emeritus. The president of the seminary reminded Barnette of his past “transgression.” Cowardly administrators have long and petty memories. After his retirement Barnette was asked to teach ethics at the University of Louisville’s medical school. His dry remark was, “I hope I will have more success teaching ethics to physicians than I had teaching ethics to ministers.”
Frequently Barnette was accused of being a liberal. His response to this charge was classic Barnette: “I’m not a liberal. I’m a true conservative. I believe in conserving the truth wherever I find it.” I am convinced that Barnette’s words are powerfully relevant for our day. We live in a time of mass communication and massive exposure to other cultures, faiths, and value systems. East and West are meeting not only at the United Nations conference tables but also on street corners, market places, and medical centers in cities all over this country. The increase in the Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu populations of our citizenry demonstrates how small our world is becoming. Our present is very different from our past. In the small town where I grew up we had two Jewish families. Everyone else was Christian (or at least nominally so.) A good portion of the population was black, but in that Jim Crow society these oppressed people were ignored. Today’s world is very different. That town now has physicians who are Moslem, Hindu, and Buddhist. We are not “in Kansas” anymore.
Invariably we will come into contact with other religious faiths, value systems, and philosophies. The crucial question is how we will react to the changing world around us. Currently about 35-40% of the population is responding out of fear and paranoia. And many of these fearful and angry people claim to be Christians! The Jesus who told us to welcome and love the stranger would be appalled at the actions and attitudes of people bearing his name.
If we give those different from us a fair hearing, we may discover that there is truth in places we never looked before. I have spent considerable time studying the life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi was not a Christian, but I believe his understanding of God’s truth surpassed that of many who profess Jesus as Lord. He specifically said that his philosophy was based in part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, a portion of Scriptures too many Christians in our culture totally ignore. I know that his experience and faith in God far exceeded my own. And as a student of the Hebrew Scriptures, I am indebted to the spiritual insights of Jewish intellectual giants like Abraham Heschel and Martin Buber. I challenge anyone to read Heschel’s The Prophets or Buber’s I and Thou and then say they do not know and love the Living God.
Our passage in the first chapter of John (the Prologue) says that anyone who has ever been enlightened has received this gift from the Word. In other words, the Cosmic Christ has been at work from the beginning of creation and is present in every part of this universe. Anyone who has been open to truth is also open to the Word which was focused like a laser beam in Jesus of Nazareth but has been actively present in everyone. Where there is truth, there is God.
In our second passage from Matthew 13:52 Jesus says, “Every scribe who has been trained for the Kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” Jesus did that as he affirmed much of his Jewish faith (especially the prophets), but he also talked about the new wine that came through him. Wherever he found truth, he embraced it because he knew that all truth, regardless of the source, comes from God. On occasion he even commended “pagans” who worshiped other gods for their “faith” in him (although no mention is made that these “pagans” left their own religion). We should never be afraid of the truth or its source. All truth comes from God and is rooted in God.
So should we all come up with a hodgepodge faith made up of parts of all the religions in the world? That is not what I am suggesting. As a follower of Jesus Christ, I have chosen to anchor myself to him. We humans are not put together in such a way as to allow ourselves the luxury of drinking deeply from many wells. An admirer of Gandhi was so impressed by Gandhi’s life that he told the Mahatma that he was going to leave his Christian faith and become a Hindu. Gandhi warned him not to make such a transition. He told the man to go back and plumb the depths of Christianity because there was more than enough in his own faith tradition to guide him into truth. Gandhi challenged the man to “become the best Christian you can.” Gandhi understood that every religious tradition has depths that would take many lifetimes to uncover, understand and appropriate. A supermarket approach to faith whereby we take a little from one faith and a little from another and so on results in a shallow and surface faith. That, in my opinion, is one of the weaknesses of much of the New Age movement. It lacks substance and grounding. We need to put down our roots if we are to blossom in this in the world in ways that will bless us and others.
We can dialogue without abandoning what has come to be meaningful and precious to us. And in that dialogue we will probably discover truth which will help us see at a deeper level our own religious tradition.
However, we can listen to one another and glean truth wherever we may find it without fear or suspicion. We can dialogue without abandoning what has come to be meaningful and precious to us. And in that dialogue we will probably discover truth which will help us see at a deeper level our own religious tradition. For example, I have often wondered how wholesome our society would be if, instead of annihilating the indigenous people on our continent, our ancestors had entered into dialogue with them and learned from them a deep reverence for God’s creation. Their understanding of the Great Spirit certainly had more integrity than many “Christian” understandings of God at that time which allowed for and even promoted the rape of the land. Such a dialogue may have opened the eyes of our ancestors to the ecological riches in their own faith. (For example, they could have gained a fresh appreciation of the creation theology in the Hebrew Scriptures, the creation oriented faith of Eastern Orthodox theology, the breathtaking witness of St. Francis, the incredible insights of such Rhineland Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, Hildegarde of Bingen, and Mechtild of Magdeburg, and so much more).
I believe God is at work in all religions and all people, but I have chosen to bend the knee to the revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth. And the more I search into that faith and the more I am open to truth, I find an inexhaustible treasury which challenges and comforts me in ways I would never experience if I tried to commit myself to every tradition. When other traditions speak truth I choose to hear that truth coming from the God whom Jesus called Abba. And in that choice I must respect religious traditions other than my own that have truth to share.
So in honor of my mentor Henlee Barnette, I want to announce that I am a true conservative. I believe in conserving the truth wherever I find it. And I am convinced that as we face the future we shall need all the truth we can muster.
