Negative Salvation

In John Paul II’s book “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” a chapter dedicated to Buddhism and Christianity covers a few interesting relations between these two major world religions. The book was written in the mid-90s when Buddhism’s appeal was a vibrant voice in conversations concerning the spiritual landscape in the West, which I participated in as an interest my freshman year of college strictly out of the desire for spiritual practices other than reading the Bible and extemporaneous prayer taught to me by my Baptist friends. Like many people who are attracted to Buddhism, it was the practice of meditation that lies at the center of it that appealed to me. This is not to say that Bible reading and extemporaneous prayer are deficient as spiritual practices, but they are lacking in one area of the spiritual life.

I bought a few books, took up the practice of meditation for half an hour a day, and it’s something I haven’t completely removed from my daily life since.

My interest in Buddhism, though, ended after a few months, and I moved on to Augustine and the early church. If someone were to ask me years later why I walked away from Buddhism I would say it’s because I felt isolated and removed from everything.

But that’s what Buddhism is about. It’s an atheistic religion that sees detachment from the world, enlightenment, nirvana, as the goal and way of salvation. The appealing aspect of this is that it is salvation, though only half of it. It’s what JP II calls “negative salvation.”

In psychology we call this negative reinforcement. The good is the removal of the bad, or more particularly, detachment from the world which leads to suffering, which is bad. Much of what Jesus says with his “dying to the world” talk relates to this. Christianity is right in line with Buddhism so far. Open up “The Imitation of Christ” and you’ll see passage after passage dealing with detachment from the world. I read this work alongside my Buddhist readings and saw the similarity.

So, Christianity and Buddhism are the same, right?

They’re not, and for this reason they’re not- Christianity poses a negative salvation along with a positive one. Both make up the Christian view of salvation. We are called to detach ourselves from the world, and transcend it because we are not made for it. Something’s off, we’re not at home, and the absence of suffering is not the answer to this problem, nor is it the complete answer.

The Christian view of salvation is that we remove all love of this world and cling to God.

That’s the big difference. Humans are not called to transcendence alone, but to be transfigured, lifted above the mountain and changed into something not of this world. And this can only happen through God’s intervention in our downward spiral away from Him.

God is not a nothingness we cling to, though Christian mystics might allude to this at times. What they’re getting at is that the great “cloud of unknowing” is the mystery beyond the world, beyond human reason, where God resides. It’s in the emptiness of the cross, the peak and lowest point of human suffering, that God saves us and we have access to Him.

So, what was the one thing I wanted my freshman year that Bible reading and extemporaneous prayer didn’t seem to offer? Silence.

Buddhism will give a person plenty of that.

One last point. The differences in meditative practices show this divergence between the two because Buddhism seeks silence and detachment while Christianity seeks the same, though only in order to fill it with the voice of God. The question on a practical level, then, is whether or not a person’s spiritual life has both these elements.