To exert yourselves in religious practice, trying to produce enlightenment by doing religious practices and zazen [sitting meditation], is all wrong, too. There’s no difference between the mind of all the buddhas and the Buddha Mind of each one of you. But by wanting to realize enlightenment, you create a duality between the one who realizes enlightenment and what it is that’s being realized. When you cherish even the smallest desire to realize enlightenment, right away you leave behind the realm of the Unborn and go against the Buddha Mind. This Buddha Mind you have from your parents innately is one alone — not two, not three!

Bankei Zen: Translations from the Record of Bankei
translated by Peter Haskel

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Bankei Yōtaku
1622-1693

Bankei was a Japanese Rinzai Zen master and abbot. He was an immensely popular and influential teacher who spoke directly, avoiding sutras (scriptures) and ceremony. He adhered to no particular school and his teaching was remarkably individual and raw — the essence of Zen. His concern was with the truth as an immediate experience, not with a systematic approach to a far off goal.

Bankei preached what he had discovered in his own experience — “the unborn” or “the birthless Buddha-mind” — and he spoke in plain language that anyone could understand. He is best known for his talks on the Unborn as he called it. According to D. T. Suzuki, Bankei, together with Dogen (1200-1253) and Hakuin (1686 – 1768), is one of the most important Japanese Zen masters, and his Unborn Zen is one of the most original developments in the entire history of Zen thought.

The Christian can accept Jesus as God’s revelation without denying those nonreligious pictures of him as a finite, conditioned individual, describable in terms of the same type of cause-and-effect relationships applicable to all men. For these external accounts only give the outer, externally perceivable events and do not penetrate to the other aspect of Jesus, his inner self. This aspect can only be known by another approach, by participating in the historical community emanating from Jesus’ personal impact upon his contemporaries. Hence the “two-aspect theory of history” is said to allow belief in revelation without any warfare between faith and reason.

A Process Christology
David Ray Griffin

Much of the greatest writing done by Christian theologians, such as Augustine [4th century], Kierkegaard [1800’s], and Reinhold Niebuhr [20th century], has been motivated by the desire to analyze man’s “original” sin, to show how all his other spiritual problems arise out of this “originating” sin. But what of modern man’s difficulty in honestly believing there is a divine reality, and, hence, any ultimate meaning of life? These problems can, of course, be interpreted as flowing from some underlying perversity common to man, defined as self-centeredness, or pride. But such interpretations seem more ingenious than illuminating.

A Process Christology
David Ray Griffin

Man cannot speak of “God” except from the perspective of a particular faith; there is no neutral knowledge of deity with which one’s faith can be compared… We must not absolutize anything relative, and this includes our religion and revelation. We should not try to defend our faith; we cannot prove its superiority to other faiths. And we can only say what revelation means for Christians, not what it ought to mean for all men. We cannot say that revelation has not also taken place in other communities. Accordingly, we cannot “prescribe what form religious life must take in all places at all times.”

The Meaning of Revelation
H. Richard Niebuhr

H. Richard Niebuhr
1894-1962

H. Richard Niebuhr is considered one of the most important Christian theological ethicists in 20th century America. He wrote many books, and is most known for The Meaning of Revelation, Christ and Culture, and Radical Monotheism and Western Culture. The younger brother of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Niebuhr taught for several decades at the Yale Divinity School. Both brothers were, in their day, important figures in the neo-orthodox theological school within American Protestantism. His theology has been one of the main sources of postliberal theology, sometimes called the “Yale school”.

Niebuhr illuminated from many perspectives the split between the oneness and absoluteness of God and the division and relativism in religion and culture. His way of mediating these polarities made him not only a prominent ecumenist, but also an ethicist of universality who recognized God as the value-center for every human being in the world. He promoted a theology of personal responsibility based on an existential faith in God.