Denis Lane, One World, Two Minds, 동서양의 사고 방식 비교

 

www.senduwiki.org/_media/oneworldtwominds.pdf

Denis Lane, One World, Two Minds, OMF, 1995 

The doctrine of God

The Western Approach: Agnostic By and large, Westerners feel that “God” is unknowable. The only things we as agnostics can know in reality are phenomena that we can touch and taste and handle and investigate in the laboratory. To the agnostic, noumena-the world of ideas and metaphysics-cannot validly be known with any certainty. Man has “come of age” and no longer needs the idea of God o explain his environment and to enable him to cope with life. For all practical purposes, therefore, God is dead and irrelevant. Modern Westerners have little concept of a God who really exists. Religion has to their minds evolved from human beings seeking to find a meaning in life which will unite the mass of individual events and experiences Therefore everyone is guessing at his or her own solution, and for one person to suggest that his or her guess is better than everyone else’s sounds intolerably arrogant. At the same time, Westerners, with their individualistic bent, feel that if people want to believe in God, there is no harm. In fact, this may provide them with a psychological prop that can be useful. Some people are more “religious” than others, and if you are religious, you are welcome to believe, but if I am not “religious,” I am made differently and will not need religion.

The Eastern Approach: Pantheistic God cannot be separated from His creation, the Easterner believes, and therefore He is not a person in the strict sense of that term. How the world began does not matter. We have to live in harmony with all that there is. The world is spirit al and not just material, and learning to relate to the forces permeating the universe is what leads to peace and harmony. Eventually being absorbed into the whole frees the individual of the sufferings and frustrations of existence as he or she melts into the eternal mass.

When East Meets West: Western secularism and materialism have invaded the East alongside scientific thinking and development. Large numbers of young people, therefore, see themselves free from the obligations of religion, especially those aspects of folk religion which are more superstitious. Eastern religious thinking has invaded the West in the West’ revulsion against the barrenness of materialism and the emptiness of secularism. New Age thinking incorporates the idea of a spark of the divine being in everyone and of our needing to develop that spark and live in harmony with the universe, thus finding our fulfillment. In stress-ridden societies the calm and peacefulness such teaching promises attracts many followers.

The Christian Viewpoint: Theistic The Bible turns other ideas of religion on their head. The God revealed there is the source of all being. He is reality, and all created beings o e their origin and sustenance to Him. They are created by Him, for Him, and will eventually return to Him. In the Bible we do not have a religion so much as a revelation. That revelation is progressive, culminating in God Himself becoming Man and revealing Himself in terms that no one can say are too difficult to understand, a Word made flesh, a living human life. Because of the nature of revelation over against a religion, Christians insist with all humility that you cannot put the Gospel alongside other religions and say that all are equally true. Guesses cannot rank equally with reality. Two times two equals five may be a good guess and better than two times two being made equal to seven, but it cannot rank alongside two times two equaling four. Christianity may be rejected as false, but it cannot be accepted as simply one of several ways to God. The Christian God claims to be both above creation as its Maker and Ruler and to permeate His creation as the One who sustains and keeps it. But He cannot be identified with His creation as “everything there is.”

The nature of sin

The Western Approach: Sin, an extreme offence against others. Because modern Western man has no sense of God and has dismissed Him from his thinking, only serious moral offences against others count as sin. Even adultery, which used to be looked upon as a serious breach of conduct, can now be dismissed as “an affair,” a minor event. Lying, disobedience to parents, stealing, and the like may have social consequences and offend people, but they are breaches of the socially agreed standards rather than “sin.” “Original sin,” in the sense of a basic wrong bias in man’s nature, has been dismissed as out of date. Man is basically good, the West has decided, and therefore needs educating rather than saving from his sin and sinfulness. If he goes wrong, he is the victim of his heredity or his environment.

The Eastern Approach: Sin is bad manners, ungentlemanly conduct In the Eastern mind right and wrong constitute two complementary parts rather than opposing sides to morality. Both are part of the whole and therefore balance each other. No more moral stigma attaches to right and wrong than to male and female, dark and light. Because wrong is usually visited with punishment and right with reward, wrong should be avoided. But the two do not cancel each other out. The Westerner balances his accounts in his mind between right and wrong to see whether he is in the red or in the black. The Easterner expects to receive evil in this life or the next for evil done in this one, and good in this life or the next for the good he has done in this one. To the Easterner “sin,” therefore, does not have the sense of moral turpitude. For that reason it does not need cleansing or blotting out. But sin breaches the harmony with reality and therefore disturbs the peace of the whole. And sin offends against society in the sense that it intrudes into the balance of harmony. The Asian sees man’s nature as basically good.

When East Meets West Modern Eastern and Western viewpoints are not that far apart. “Sin” is no very serious matter. Both see man as beginning with a basically good nature. People today are not aware of a God who will judge them and to whom they will one day have to give an account of their actions. They see sin as needing education and treatment rather than meriting punishment and judgment.

The Christian Viewpoint Sin to the Christian is primarily an offence against God, the Creator of the universe and the final Judge. Man was created “very good” but morally untested. When God commanded him not to eat of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”(Genesis 2:17), man failed the moral test. Instead of trusting his Creator and believing that He meant what He said, man reached for control of his own destiny, broke the commandment and rebelled against God. The Christian believes that the sin of the first man has affected all human beings ever since, so that man is born with a warped nature and proceeds through life in a spirit of rebellion against the will and rule of God. Man wants to be master of his own fate and captain of his own soul, whereas in reality he is a mere creature before the almighty Creator, made to serve Him. Sins flow out of this basically sinful nature of man, leading to offences against God and other men and women. Sin, therefore, accounts for the horrifying history of man’s inhumanity to man and for man’s lost state, in which he cannot find his true way. Christians maintain that this is not only the revealed truth about man, but also the only rational conclusion to be drawn from the evils we see around us daily. Sin, therefore, is man’s basic problem. Moreover, when the first man sinned, the Bible teaches that death entered the world in the form of separation from God, who is life. This leads in turn to the separation of body and soul in death. As Paul expresses it in Romans 6:23, “The wages of sin is death.” Sin therefore, not only has disastrous consequences in this life and in society, but leads man to a lost eternity. Christianity is virtually the only religion which teaches this fundamental truth, taking it from the revelation of God and not from the musings of men. Lin Yu Tang understood the difference when he stated that before you can make a Chinese person a Christian you have to make him a sinner, i.e., make him aware of the real situation. Western people need the same revelation of the truth.