Daniel Burke of Religion News Service has reported that Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester’s bid to become the next bishop of Northern Michigan was rejected on Monday. Why? Because Forrester is a Zen Buddhist. He has practiced Zen meditation for almost a decade, and has apparently “received Buddhist lay ordination and is walking the path of Christianity and Zen Buddhism together.”
During the February election, Forrester received 88% of delegate votes and 91% of congregational votes. However, in a rare case, the bishop-elect didn’t gain approval from the standing committees and bishops because of concerns involving his Buddhist background and the fact that he was the only nominee on the ballot. Other concerns included the “changes he made to baptism rites, and ideas he espoused about salvation, including the existence of multiple paths to God.”
Ever since Forrester’s nomination, conservative Episcopalians have been opposing his confirmation as bishop, calling attention to what they see as an infidelity to the Christian faith. According to one blogger, “the vows required of a Bishop in Christ’s one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church exclude a person from being beholden to any other faith tradition save Christianity.”
A couple months back, Forrester sent out a personal statement to clear the air about his relationship with Christianity and Buddhism: “I am quite honored, as an Episcopal priest, to have been trained in the art and practice of Zen meditation. I am not an ordained Buddhist priest. I am an Episcopal priest, eternally grateful for the truth, beauty and goodness, experienced in meditation.”
That being said, do you think there’s room for one to be bi-religious without being condemned for betraying either sect?
2 Comments
I am still trying to resolve this idea of being bi-religious, but it is becoming more and more common. The problem, I think, is that usually if one is both a Christian and Buddhist, it seems the religious identity is mostly Christian and then Buddhist practice, primarily meditation, is used to bolster Christian faith. So I don't think this bi-religiosity often expresses equality.
Recently I heard a Thai monk say that one can be a Buddhist and another religion because Buddhism doesn't have a declaration of faith. I hadn't thought of this before. He said taking the 3 refuges is a ceremony created in 'modern Buddhism' so that Buddhism could have a tradition similar to Baptism. But taking the 3 refuges does not indicate religious identity. With this argument, having a hyphenated Buddhist identity makes more sense to me, but it usually seems that the identity is more as a Buddhist meditator than a Buddhist.
I confess that I don't know much about the details of Kevin Thew Forrester's conflicted situation. But this can be a very complex issue. There are quite a few Catholics, mainly priests and nuns, who have become Zen masters in at least two or three lineages, most notably the Sanbo Kyodan. Such practitioners have varying interpretations about their practice — some feel no need to assimilate Buddhist Views. On the other hand, the late Jacques Dupuis and other pluralistic theologians have tried to think through how "God's plan for humankind might be revealed in non-Christian religion. And the issue of Dual Indentity or Dual Religious Belonging has been discussed within the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies in its journal.
Vatican II officially let this cat out of the bag, But the current pope has long been uneasy with this. While he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, that office issued a very long, nuanced statement provisionally commending non-Christian spirituality, but advising caution. The CDF ruthlessly attacked much of the work of the (by then deceased) Jesuit Anthony de Mello, who practiced under S. N. Goenka ( it must be said that de Mello was very provocative).. Since then Ratzinger/ Pope B12's scholarly writings on the subject of religious pluralism have been published as "Truth and Tolerance" — a critique of pluralistic theologies. The issue, as he puts it, is about complete and unique salvation through Christ in the Church.
Some dual practitioners don't feel the need to collapse either religion into the other. I confess to taking this approach, allowing whatever synthesis may occur to happen naturally (it does in large part). And I understand that the Sri Lankan theologian Aloysius Pieris ("An Asian Theology of Liberation"), who is also a highly trained Buddhist practitioner has a somewhat similar view. This is also congruent with the method of the new field of Comparative Theology (a modest alternative to Theology of Religions) practiced by the Buddhist John Makaransky, among others.
Steven Deedon is both Catholic and Buddhist, and during the past year has worked on a history of Catholics and Buddhism, entitled "HOW THE BUDDHA BECAME CATHOLIC: From Matteo Ricci to Pope Benedict's Zen Masters."