'God Speaks to Each Person in Their Own Language'

Continued from page 1

When you say authentic, are there some religions that are not authentic? What do you mean by authentic?

Revealed by God as proven by their impact on human history. I have studied [other religions], and I am certain they have not made impact on this earth.

Is it always a good impact in the sense of helping people live better lives?

In the sense of realizing their full potential.

In your book you seem critical of the scientific mentality.

No, wrong. I am critical of modernity giving science and technology a blank check as if it were the fountain of all truth. That is not true. And I think I may have introduced a word which has now caught on quite a bit, scientism. Science is good. It simply reports a discovery. Scientism smuggles in two untenable points. Namely, that science is, if not the only reliable, then the most reliable [way of knowing]. And second, that the stuff that science deals with, matter, is the most fundamental stuff of the universe. Those are not scientific statements. There is nothing in the way of science to prove they're true. And truth to tell, they are both wrong. So I am not against genuine science. I think scientism may come close to doing us in, but I think we're in the nick of time discovering the mistake. Our culture will be opening out to allow the religious worldview to enter.

When I think of the religious worldview, I can't help thinking of fundamentalists and evangelicals. Is that the religious worldview that you're speaking of?

I think we're polarized. We are hamstrung between an unworkable, dogmatic, uncharitable religious fundamentalism, and the liberalism, mainline churches that are losing membership disastrously. The reason being that they are accommodating too much to modern secularism.

What do you mean by accommodating to modern secularism?

To enter seminaries you have to have a university degree. The universities are secular to the core. And it's inevitable that the professors in seminary will have been--I'm going to use violent language--brainwashed by the university, which is unequivocally secular. So the secularism of the university rubs off on seminary professors. And then ministers, pastors, must in the mainline churches, most have a seminary degree. So you can just see the secularism of our culture is infiltrating. The mainline churches, they adhere to the language [of faith]. But the adherent does not have the power, the force of the unbrainwashed Christian.

Can you give me an example of what you're talking about?

Well, let me come home. My heritage is Methodist, from my missionary parents [who raised me in rural China]. When I came to this country I went to a religious college. But when I went to graduate school--one year was at University of California at Berkeley. And being a Christian Methodist, I went to Trinity Methodist Church. Seated 800, always filled, standing room only. And then I went East, had a career. Now I'm back at that same church. The church has sold the sanctuary, which is divided into I don't know how many floors and office buildings. And our congregation meets in the chapel. And we have under a hundred people on an average Sunday. And we're still losing ground. Something has gone out of the dynamic of mainline.

How do you see religion helping us in the future? And what do you hope for your own children and grandchildren.

One of my favorite quotations from the Bible is "I am neither a prophet, nor the son of a prophet." I don't know what's going to happen. But the best I can say is, if we pull out of our scary political situation, then the world is wide open in the West and we live in a Westernizing world. What happens here is going to eventually happen around the world. We live in a time when secularism is over.

Archibald MacLeish said, "An age ends when its metaphor dies." And the metaphor of modernity has been endless progress through endless technology. And that is dead.

Is there a new metaphor that includes religion or spirituality?

Oh yes, because we're religious creatures. And the new metaphor will give every ounce of our strength to compassion. And help not just our own people, but everyone.

Do you think that religious phenomena, like the virgin birth, are symbolic or literal?

Symbolic. [Just as] science can access the very small and the unimaginably large with their special language, which is mathematics and equations, we in religion need a technical language to describe sacred things. And this [language] is myth, poetry, parable. Jesus spoke to them in parables. And so everything that transpires in that infinite world of the divine must be expressed metaphorically, not literally.

So when we talk of the virgin birth, it resonates with something in us about purity, about divinity.

No, no, don't try to say it. In ordinary language it won't work. Something happened. Something happened. And I sincerely believe it really happened. And it was really vital, crucial to Christ. But don't try to psych it out in ordinary language. Go at it in terms of symbols, which stretch our understanding from the finite to the infinite.

_Related Features

Huston Smith: Jesus' Core Teaching Religion vs. Spirituality