Where Everybody's Crazy

I've got loads of blog posts in the mental queue, it's a Friday night, and the cricket is washed out, so let's make a start...

I was asking someone the other day why Buddhist monks in Japan get married when the first premise of Buddhism is that you have to avoid attachment, and the first rule of the monk's code is that monks shouldn't have sex.

It was my opening gambit in a time-honoured evangelistic technique: take someone's deeply held beliefs, caricature them beyond recognition due to a superficial understanding of them, and then paint an overly-rosy picture of Christianity to show how my deeply held beliefs are better.

In other words, the same trick we pulled with Judaism, and it was wrong then as well. It goes something like this: we look at a religion with a lot of rules, then we ask why people don't live up to those rules, then we conclude - on their behalf - that it's because either (a) they're weak and/or (b) they're not meant to live up to a system of rules, and then produce Christianity, "a relationship, not a religion!" I've done this countless times.

But it's completely bogus. Jews don't follow the covenant in order to gain favour with God, they follow the covenant because they already have favour with God. That might sound a bit too unfair to be true, but that's grace for you. It's not fair.

As for the question about Buddhism, the answer is that, since a lot of temples ended up being owned by the monk's family, the monk needed a heir for the temple to survive. But isn't it against the rules? Sure, but if there's a good reason, the rules can be bent or broken. That might sound crazy to us, but that's just because deep down we're legalistic and so we expect everyone else to be. "You see," said my informant, "Buddhism isn't like Christianity."

This wasn't the turn the conversation was supposed to take. I was supposed to say "Christianity isn't like Buddhism", and then point out how Christianity frees us from all these onerous rules. But of course it's not true. Given that I'm working with a national church that has a Puritan streak a mile wide, (to give it some credit, this is at least the widest thing in Japanese church thinking) the list of things I must and mustn't do as a missionary has increased drastically since coming here. I mustn't drink alcohol in public. I must turn up for the 10:30am service every week, since that is the main service; the early service is not enough. (Have you noticed how the vast majority of Protestant churches have the main service at 10:30? You'd think it was Holy Writ, but it actually just dates back to the days when most people had jobs to do around the farm until that time in the morning. Now most people don't have farms, they could have the service any time they like but...)

Lest you get the wrong idea, I love the local church here and I don't begrudge it the rules it puts on me. I want to be part of the community, I play by the community's rules. That makes sense. But it does give the lie to the cheap debating point that Christianity is about a relationship, not about rules. I am reduced to trying to argue that at least our rules are better than your rules, and apologetically that one goes down like a brick parachute.

And with good reason. Because the rules we put on ourselves are not like the Buddhist rules. The Buddhist rules are supposed to free Buddhists from attachment - they develop those who live by them. The rules we put on ourselves in the more Puritan wing of the church are more concerned with how we look in front of other people. I can drink alcohol in private, but not in public, because I must be seen to be upright. (as it were) I must turn up at a certain service because that's where I'm expected to be seen. Since when, I wondered, did Christians judge each other based on external appearances?

The Bible has a word for those who are more concerned with external appearance than internal renewal: it is the word "hypocrite", and it is something that Jesus said an awful lot about, especially those who "load people down with burdens difficult to bear". As Dick Dowsett of OMF puts it, when writing about the scarcity of men in the Japanese church, the church needs to stop "creating man-made rules which exclude mainstream males." What do you do when the church becomes a barrier to mission rather than an agent of it?

You pray. What else can you do?