A recent posting in the popular Chinese language "chat" section of this site with the title "Buddhism or Christianity?" generated quite a bit of interest. I was a little surprised by the #1 most popular response to the post, which says that, if you like to think and ask a lot of questions, choose Buddhism, but if you just want to blindly believe, go for Christianity.

I doubt that some of my fellow Chinese have a full grasp of what Christianity is really about. Read St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, you probably will not say Christianity is all about faith and no questioning. Galileo, Copernicus, Isaac Newton and many others were pretty smart, and also Christians. Do you think they could have kept their faith without asking some very tough and searching questions?

Yet I know where this impression about Christianity may have come from. It is probably accurate to say that the Chinese Christian churches in America (and possibly elsewhere also) are dominated by one particular kind of Christianity - evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity, characterized by their bible-only or faith-only beliefs.

I am not saying these bible thumping Evangelicals are not Christians. The trouble is these folks have a tendency to consider themselves the only Christians around, and dismiss people from other denominations as non-Christians. I think this can be confusing for Chinese people as Christianity for us is, after all, a “foreign religion.”

The fact of the matter is that Christianity is so much more than just Evangelicalism. To begin with, Christianity is divided into at least 3 branches, namely Catholicism, Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy, with the size of the number of followers in that order. Evangelicals, although large and usually boisterous, especially in the U.S., are merely one of 30,000+ denominations of Protestants.

Catholics, as a single group worldwide still slightly larger than all Protestants combined, for example, do not hold the faith-only ("fide sola" in Latin) or bible/scripture-only ("solar scriptura"), but "fides et ratio" ("faith and reason") principle. As explained by this Catholic Bishop here, questioning and reasoning are very important to the Catholic tradition:

It is interesting to note Bp. Barron says that "authentic faith" cannot be "infra-rational," which means below reason - basically superstition, believing in something with no reason, but "suprarational," meaning above or beyond reason, ie, beliefs that cannot be comprehended by human reason alone.

This is a confusing part about religion, but it makes sense, right? As mere humans, with our obvious limitations, we cannot know everything about the universe, its past, present and the future - the kind of stuff religions are meant to comprehend. So, in the practice of any religion, you must at some point learn to “let go” to take a “leap of faith.”

Yet on the other hand, authentic Truth from any great faith traditions, including Buddhism and Christianity, must withstand the most vigorous of human questioning and cannot contradict basic, God-given human reason, in order for it to be real, relevant and life-enhancing for believers.

I am not here to promote any religion or beliefs, but as someone exploring both Buddhism and Christianity, speaking from personal experience, I want to point out that just because you are the doubting, questioning kind, do not eliminate Christianity from your spiritual search yet, if you are willing to search and move beyond the Evangelical or fundamentalist crowd.

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