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Two Comments on Professor King's ArticleProfessor King's article ends without a summarizing conclusion, virtually inviting the reader to make animmediate response to the challenges he sets forth. While preparing this article for publication, two readershave done so, and their comments appear be low. Thom as J. J. Altizer is Associate Professor of Bible andReligion at Emory University, the author of Oriental Mysticism and Biblical Eschatology, (Philadelphia:Westminster Press, 1961) and of the forthcoming Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred, to be publishedby the Westminster Press. Harry M. Buck is Associate Professor of Bible and Religion at Wilson Collegeand Managing Editor of The Journal of Bible and Religion.

A COMMENT ON "TEACHING WORLD RELIGIONS"THOM AS J . J . ALTIZER

W e are fortunate to have Professor K ing's lucid statement of the practical difficultiesposed by the teaching of the history of religions, and I rejoice that he has chosen to empha-size the possibility of empathy, encounter, and comparison. In this brief note I shouldsimply like to point to the further possibility of relating such encounter to the actual situa-tion, conscious or unconscious, of the student. For I believe that the real problem posed bythe student is not that he is simply ignorant of religion, but rather that he is for the mostpart closed to the possibility of a genuinely religious experience. His very immersion in apost-Christian age has dissolved or suspended his religious sensibility with the result thatreligion has become for him an alien phenomenon which poses neither a conscious threatnor a vital attraction. Not even in the South have I encountered a single student who hasbeen hostile to the non-Christian religions. Furthermore the majority of students havebeen so effectively inoculated against their own religious heritage that it is almost impossibleto excite their interest in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In this situation, the very alien qualityof the non-Christian religions poses the possibility of significant religious communicationbetween student and teacher if only because religion here assumes a new and exotic form.Again, we must always keep in mind the fact that the great revolutionary movementsof our time have had at least an unconscious effect upon our students. If the traditionalWestern ideas of God, person, history, and nature are now in process either of dissolutionor of transformation, then our students will not be capable of a true response to a faith thatspeaks through these categories (and here I am speaking of Western theology and not ofthe Bible itself). The Oriental religions have for the most part never employed such cate-gories, and for this reason they offer the possibility of engaging the student's latent religioussensibility. W e should not be surprised at the great effect w hich Zen Buddhism can haveupon our students (I have yet to meet a student who is incapable of responding to Zen).For it offers a "religious" way which has no apparent contact with anything that theyhave known as "religion." Moreover the student who is in any way undergoing the existen-tial Angst which is almost an initiation rite of our time will almost inevitably be attractedto the radically world-dissolving, world-opposing, or world-transforming expressions of

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24 HARRY M . BUCKOriental mysticism. Surely it is not accidental that J. D. Salinger followed his early portraitof adolescent torment with a cycle of Zen stories. Thus by confronting the contemporarystudent with Oriental mysticism the teacher of religion can open himself to both the painand the joy of his student, and thereby share that interior world which is so effectivelyclosed to the probing of "academic" inquiry. But if we are to embark upon this voyage,we must be prepared ourselves to lose what little religious meaning may be left us andapproach the non-Christian religions as either an oasis or a mirage upon that great religiousdesert which our history has become.

A FURTHER COMMENTHARRY M . B UCK

Both Professor King and Professor Altizer have stressed the problem of communicatinga religious dimension to students estranged from their own heritage. "New religions," saysProfessor King, "are born out of old ones." They are indeed, and as King points out,whether they are perversions of the parent faiths or not, there they are. It is not enoughto show simply their genesis. Buddhism and Christianity in a sense can be regarded asperversions of Hinduism and Judaism respectively, but this is not all they are. To say this,how ever, is the beginning of a diagnosis, not th e prescription of a remed y. Professor Altizermoves another step in his perceptive observation that modern students are closed to thepossibility of a genuinely religious experience, and hence unable to find the necessary empathyto understand more than superficial facts about a faith which can command wholeheartedcommitment from its devotees.But why are they so estranged, and, more specifically, what shall we do about it? Theproblem is one both of methodology and pedagogy. W e m ay have been attempting torelate them to something which has no viability. When we teachers of religion talk about"a religion," we usually refer to a tradition, including a set of values, a way of life, andfrequ ently a bo dy of doctrine all more o r less definable, at least distinct enough foroutsiders to distinguish one religion from another. Religion, however, is never lived in

systems. Men live out their faiths in terms of rapidly changing environments. The defini-tions and descriptions we are prone to communicate to our students are not religion whereand as it is lived whenever it has been a vital dimension of human society.W h a t w e usually communicate is knowledge about systems, and we can scarcely hopefor more than the memorization of verbal definitions. As Dr. King points out, the terms weattempt to define have meaning only in a total frame of reference, the matrix which givesvalidity to a religious system. Dharma, karma, and samsara cannot be defined. Nor can theybe identified simply as terms peculiar to Hinduism or Buddhism. Th ey are basic com ponentsof the matrix of South Asian thought, from which both of these systems sprang. In similarmanner, American Protestant Christianity is a religious complex, combining the religious

system of Christian ity or, m ore accurately, the sub-system of Protestantism a his-torically identifiable tradition, with the environment of life in the Western Hemisphere.It is a unique combination, but it is not permanent. Even in the last decade the environmenthas changed profoundly, and to attempt to maintain the former complex without adjustment

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TW O COMM ENTS ON PROFESSOR KING'S ARTICLE 25

as though it were the very system of faith itself is to invite fossilization. Such a faith willeventually become as extinct as the dinosaur, and for the same reason: it could not copewith changes in its environment.All religious complexes in the world are faced with a similar situation. Our task,

therefore, as historians of religion, is not simply to dispense information about ancientsystems but to open up avenues of creative interchange in the contemporary world as well.Probably no religion in its present form is completely adequate to the demands of today'sworld, and right here is the challenge to those who study and teach in this area. I amthankful for Professor King's penetrating analysis of our problem. If basic considerationsare ke pt in mind, his pedagogical meth od can ca rry us far in the fulfillment of our tas k.