God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (52 page)

35
. “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 2009,” Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, http://www.gcts.edu/sites/default/files/IBMR2009.pdf.

36
. “Christianity in all Regions,” World Christian Database, http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org.

37
. Noll,
New Shape of World Christianity
, 20.

38
.
Deseret News 2009 Church Almanac
(Salt Lake City: Deseret News, n.d.), http://www.deseretbook.com/item/5018625/2009_Deseret_News_Church_Almanac). See also “World LDS Membership,” Rickety Blog, http://www.rickety.us/lds/world/.

39
. “Social Values, Science & Technology,” Special Eurobarometer 225, European Commission, June 2005, 9, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_225_report_en.pdf.

40
. Jenkins,
Next Christendom
, 24. “At the time of the Magna Carta or the Crusades,” writes Jenkins, “if we imagine a typical Christian, we should be thinking not of a French artisan, but of a Syrian peasant or Mesopotamian town-dweller, an Asian not a European.”

41
. Jenkins,
Next Christendom
.

42
. The Hartford Institute for Religious Research maintains a database for all American Protestant churches “with a sustained average weekly attendance of 2000 persons or more in its worship services.” See http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/definition.html.

43
. Dana L. Robert, “Shifting Southward: Global Christianity Since 1945,”
International Bulletin of Missionary Research
24, no. 2 (2000): 50. See also Dana L. Robert, “World Christianity as a Women’s Movement,”
International Bulletin of Missionary Research
30, no. 4 (2006): 180–88. How easy it is to forget this history was brought home to me during a conversation a few years ago among friends from Europe and India. After it became clear that the German Protestant in the conversation was assuming that the Indian was Hindu, she corrected him. “I’m a Mar Thomas Christian from Kerala,” she said, adding that her church, which claims the biblical Thomas as its founder, had been professing Christ for centuries before Luther was even born.

44
. Cox,
Future of Faith
, 222, 1, 20.

45
. Noll,
New Shape of World Christianity
, 111.

46
. “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 2009,” Status of Global Mission, Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, http://www.gcts.edu/sites/default/files/IBMR2009.pdf.

47
. According to Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, Christians would do well to examine their own history of violence and anti-intellectualism before criticizing Muslims for the same. The Bible, Spong writes, has been used “to oppose the Magna Carta and support the divine right of kings, to condemn the insights of Galileo and Charles Darwin, . . . to support slavery and later apartheid and segregation . . . to justify the Crusades and their unspeakable horrors against Muslim peoples, as well as the murderous behavior of the Inquisition and the virulent anti-Semitism of the Holocaust.” See his
The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love
(New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), dust jacket.

48
. Quoted in Debray,
God: An Itinerary
, 264.

Chapter Three: Confucianism: The Way of Propriety

1
. Analects 15:24, 15:23, 4:16; Miles Menander Dawson, ed.
The Ethics of Confucius: The Sayings of the Master and His Disciples on the Conduct of “The Superior Man”
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), 76; Analects 15:6. These and subsequent quotes from the Analects are from Confucius,
The Analects
, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1979).

2
. Max Weber advances this argument in both
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
and
The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism
, which first appeared in German in 1904–05 and 1915, respectively. The key observation is that capitalism failed to emerge in China as it had in Protestant countries in Europe.

3
. There are competing systems for transliterating Chinese characters into English. Until recently, the most common was Wade-Giles, which rendered China’s capital as Peking and the most popular Chinese scripture in the West as the
Tao Te Ching
. Here I use the increasingly popular Pinyin system (used by the United Nations), which spells that capital as Beijing and that scripture as the
Daodejing
. So the I Ching (in Wade-Giles) is Yijing (in Pinyin).

4
. The first Confucian canon actually included Six Classics, the current five plus the lost Book of Music. The Five Classics then swelled into the Thirteen Classics by the Song dynasty (960–1279
C.E.
). Tu Weiming sees in the Five Classics five different visions that constitute the Confucian way: the poetic, social, historical, political, and metaphysical. Human beings, he argues, are multiple. To understand them, and ourselves, we need sight lines from a wide variety of perspectives. See his “Confucianism,” in
Our Religions: The Seven World Religions Introduced by Preeminent Scholars from Each Tradition
, ed. Arvind Sharma (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 195–97.

5
. J. J. Clarke,
The Tao of the West: Western Transformations of Taoist Thought
(London: Routledge, 2000), 22.

6
. Grace Jantzen,
Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion
(Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1998), esp. 128–70.

7
. James Fieser and John Powers, eds.,
Scriptures of the East
(Boston: McGraw Hill, 1998), 158.

8
. Tu Wei-ming, “Confucianism,” in Sharma,
Our Religions
, 147.

9
. Tu Wei-ming, “Confucianism,” in Sharma,
Our Religions
, 214. Some leading Confucian scholars, including David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, contend that through the Han dynasty there was no sense of transcendence in Confucianism. Transcendence, immanent or otherwise, comes later, and is a product of foreign influence. See their
Thinking Through Confucius
(Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1987) and their
Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture
(Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1998).

10
. Tu Wei-ming, “Confucianism,” in Sharma,
Our Religions
, 207. See also Herbert Fingarette,
Confucius: The Sacred as Secular
(New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

11
. Gordon Haber, “The False Science,” Killing the Buddha Blog, http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/exegesis/the-false-science.

12
. Tu Wei-Ming,
Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation
(Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1985), 15.

13
. A thorough discussion of this term appears in Hall and Ames,
Thinking Through Confucius
, 176–92.

14
. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in Kirsten Fischer and Eric Hinderaker, eds.,
Colonial American History
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 85, 87.

15
. Analects 12:11.

16
. James Legge,
The Chinese Classics
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), I.87.

17
. Analects 7:1, quoted in
The Analects of Confucius
, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Vintage, 1989), 23.

18
. Confucius,
The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Confucianism
, trans. James Legge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 5.353.

19
. Fieser and Powers,
Scriptures of the East
, 148.

20
. Analects 1:2.

21
. Analects 2:5.

22
. Analects 12:1.

23
. See Fingarette,
Confucius: The Sacred as Secular
.

24
. Tu Wei-ming, “Confucianism,” in Sharma,
Our Religions
, 206.

25
. Analects 2:17, in
The Analects
, trans. Waley, 91.

26
. Analects 17:19, in Philip Novak,
The World’s Wisdom: Sacred Texts of the World’s Religions
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 116. This passage is often read as a denial of revelation, but it can also be read as an affirmation of a sort of mysticism.

27
. Personal interview with John Berthrong, May 27, 2009.

28
. Fieser and Powers,
Scriptures of the East
, 156.

29
. Tu Wei-ming, “Confucianism,” in Sharma,
Our Religions
, 175.

30
. Jennifer Oldstone-Moore, “Confucianism,” in Coogan, ed.,
Eastern Religions
, 329.

31
. Michael Nylan,
The Five “Confucian” Classics
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), 330.