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A Christian Koan: Beyond Faith and Works [1]

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Date: 2023-07-09

The Protestant Reformation began with Martin Luther proposing a debate on such matters as the Catholic Church selling indulgences (get out of Hell cards) for cash. Luther founded his resulting church on the principle of Sola Fide, salvation by faith alone, not by works. After it blew up into a major theological war, Luther went much further than arguing, including marrying a former nun, shown above.

Now we have a problem with this. We think of works as helping the poor, the orphan, the widow, and if we get really serious, the stranger/immigrant/refugee who lives among us. But in Luther’s time, with the general corruption of Christianity over the centuries, works had come to mean reciting prayers and going on pilgrimages and fasting and the like. Conversely, faith to Luther was faith in the ability of Jesus/God to redeem us, while in our time it has degenerated for many into simply believing in God, sometimes accompanied by strident belief in the literal words of the Bible, especially the Genesis creation myth, which then becomes an excuse for bigotry of many sorts.

Our koan for today comes from the Epistle of James, which Luther dismissed as “an epistle of straw”.

Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works. Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.

James 2:17-26 KJV

Jews didn’t have this problem. The great commandment, according to the Law of Moses and the teachings of Yeshua bar Yosef, is to love God absolutely. And, Yeshua added, your neighbor as yourself. You cannot claim this love without doing something, everything possible, in consequence.

I am going to put existence and belief and observances and both Catholic and Protestant theology aside, and ask you to consider absolute love.

Let’s start with dogs. If you treat a dog at all decently, it will come to regard you as Mommy and Daddy, and the Center of the Universe. If you train your dog and teach it a few words of human language, it will be delighted with this gift and want to use it all the time. If you learn a bit of doggy language, sniffs and body language and such, so much the better.

Now, can you do that? I don’t mean literally, in doglike behavior. But can you reach for the absolute?

Buddhism doesn’t care about Gods, only about the selfless Unborn, and goes beyond neighbors to all sentient beings. Can you love all sentient beings absolutely, and feel compassion/empathy for all of their sufferings?

Or at least try?

OK, then. We’ve made a start. But this is a koan, not a philosophical question or a matter of rules. Are you willing to try to penetrate this koan absolutely?

What will happen if you start to meditate on such a koan? Well, your monkey mind will jump around and come up with every possible objection to such a thought, and every possible distraction from it. Let them come and go in their own time. Every possible selfish thought will arise at some point, and have to be let go of. You will have to get to where you can neither go forward nor back, which you might take to be a problem, but is merely a stop along the way. Don’t worry about it.

Next, after you get past that, you have the opportunity to put your new-found compassion into practice. Study in detail. This part of the process never ends.

We have gotten past belief, and past trust in something external, and self in all of its forms. We can be kind to everyone, which

will gratify some and astonish the rest

Mark Twain

But wait! There is more, which I will leave for next week, when we take up our first Buddhist koans.

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