Our Childish Understanding of Christianity

 Paul Williams

G. K. Chesterton has commented somewhere that usually when a Westerner converts to a non-Christian religion they never really convert to that religion at all. All they really convert to is Christianity minus the parts of Christianity they find unpalatable. ... Often part of the problem, it now seems to me, is that the knowledge of Christian thought and experience of Christian practice possessed by many Westerners is quite childish and elementary. It is what we learned in school. It is no more sophisticated than what may be expressed by an 11 year old. Very few people are sufficiently interested in Christianity to study Christian theology and philosophy in any depth during their teens. The situation is perhaps even worse in the United States, where religious education is not a compulsory part of the school curriculum.

 When we come to Buddhism as adults we immediately start studying Buddhism at a level that traditionally would have been the preserve of an elite of highly talented and advanced practitioners, usually monks and nuns. We read the advanced stuff even if we cannot practice it. This knowledge of really quite advanced Buddhist thought gained from the many books now available in the West, plus deference to a dominant culture and the level of Western education, is one reason why Tibetans tend to think Westerners are so very clever, if lacking in self-discipline and application. Thus when we come to compare Christianity and Buddhism it is not surprising that Buddhism often seems so much more doctrinally and spiritually sophisticated. The Christian thought outside the New Testament that many people are familiar with is commonly found in what are called the Christian 'mystics'.

The Unexpected Way