Cedric Mayson
Spirit Level
South African religion needs a revolution. Many who seek a united country are still inhibited from playing a positive role in transformation by relics of divisive colonial theology which leap to the front in conversations about Israel and Palestine, the conflicts in India or unity in our own country. Religious attitudes which rely on stirring up past controversies should be consigned to museums.
One of the great insights of the 20th century has been the essential unity of spiritual awareness in all human beings. We value different traditions but recognise their common experience, and like Moses we have to take the shoes off our feet when we tread on the holy ground of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or African tradition for it is the common ground shared by us all. Whatever trans- cendent awareness people claim, and whatever they name it, is an acknowledgement of the same aspiration towards the divine. “This has always been true” writes W Cantrell Smith, “but we are the first generation … to see this seriously and corporately, and to be able to respond to the vision. We are the first gene- ration to discern God’s mission to humanity in the Buddhist movement, the Hindu, and the Islamic, as well as in the Jewish and Christian.” A key advance in the quest for moral regeneration will be when communities of faith in each local area come together to analyse why poverty, crime, corruption, HIV/Aids and other matters affect their neighbourhood, and how they can use their combined spiritual resources to combat them.
It is no good blaming it on others: a massive cooperative effort, fired by vision and self-sacrifice, will save us.
We must not expect religious or academic leaders to direct the way forward: some may, but their job is to maintain institutions which usually box them in. Prophets invariably come from the lower echelons or outsiders, so let’s hear from you!
Because most South Africans are Christians it is necessary to examine the exclusive claim that Jesus is the only way to God or heaven.
The notion that loyalty to Jesus means opposing all other religions and bringing their followers “to the foot of the cross” belongs to other ages and other places. Such exclusive antagonistic claims arose for political reasons when great empires were seeking to impose their will on conquered populations, whether in the period of the Romans, the Crusades, the colonial era or the modern apartheid and fundamentalist genre. Conquerors have never hesitated to promote a spurious religion to back their guns with threats of hell, or reward submission with the promise of heaven. Such exclusive teaching rests on “proof texts”, taken out of context, which were refuted years ago, but unfortunately many local clergy prefer not to update their congregations with accurate scholarship.
Periods of spiritual revival have often been accompanied by experiences of spontaneous psychosomatic healings, and Jesus was no exception. Luke tells a story of Peter and John healing a lame man outside the temple. Healers of that era believed (as some still do) that disease was caused by evil spirits who were cast out by calling their name, so they pressed Peter for the name by which the man was healed. Peter replied that it was done by the power of the name of Jesus and claimed that “there is no one else in all the world whose name God has given to men by whom we can be healed/saved”. From this people have claimed that Jesus alone is the way to eternal salvation. The blunt fact is that chapters 3 and 4 of Acts are about healing, not about eternal salvation, and the word translated “salvation” is also translated “healing” in this and other parts of the New Testament. Luke says the lame man was healed through Jesus’s name: he did not say that those who do not believe in Jesus will go to hell. Ripping a text from its context and ignoring the rest of Jesus’s teaching is an immoral misuse of scripture. Similar comments arise over the famous text where Jesus tells Thomas that he is the only way to the Father (John 14.6). To say this means that anyone who has not joined your church is going to hell is wild imagination. Whoever wrote John’s marvellous gospel long after Jesus lived had spent a lifetime pondering the master’s life and teaching, and we do well to ponder it deeply, too.
John is saying that God’s way to bring liberation or transformation to the world is through the total commitment and self- sacrifice which Jesus exhibited. This is the way to the Father.
It is a message carried in all great religions, and is a central contribution of Christians to the treasure chest of spiritual power that we need in South Africa today.