Download Will the Real Christian (Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist) Please Stand

Will the Real Christian
(Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist) Please Stand Up?
The issues involving religious identity – and especially questions about who belongs to a
particular religious category – are complex and controversial. Large religions such as
Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam each include an astonishing array of sub-groups and
traditions.
Who decides what it means to be a Christian or a Hindu or a Buddhist? On what basis?
Islam, for example, with 1.6 billion adherents, is a massive religion that is undergoing significant
internal tensions as it tries to come to grips with the modern, globalizing world. Muslims
themselves, as well as many “outsiders”, are struggling to determine what it means to be Muslim
in today’s world and what “authentic Islam” really looks like.
Descriptive identifications
Descriptively, anyone who is identified with a particular religion, or self-identifies with that
religion, can be said to be an adherent of that religion.
Normative identifications
Each major religion has internal disputes over questions of legitimacy and proper identity – who
is “in” and who is “out” (boundary maintenance). Each religion has something that is regarded
as distinctively authoritative and normative (a sacred scripture, particular kind of experience, a
particular person or office) for making such decisions. Even so, there are often ongoing internal
disputes over the proper criteria for resolving these questions.
So who is a “real” Muslim (or Christian or Buddhist)? What do “real” Muslims look like?
1. Descriptively, all who self-identify as Muslims are Muslims. But much depends upon
where one looks. Those who self-identify as Muslims in Paris or Toronto might look
quite different than Muslims in Pakistan or Malaysia. Well educated second or third
generation immigrants in modern democratic societies will be different from illiterate
farmers in highly authoritarian societies. Both of the above groups will differ from radical
Islamist jihadists such as Aq Qaeda or Isis.
2. We must avoid extrapolating from particular examples or local expressions and drawing
sweeping generalizations about entire religions, either descriptively or normatively, on
the basis of these examples. Large religions include many highly diverse traditions and
movements and on the descriptive level we must allow such diversity (even
inconsistency) to speak for itself.
3. “Boundary maintenance” (normative disputes) serves various functions, not all of which
are strictly religious or theological. Issues of class, ethnicity, or economic / political
power can also affect how a group maintains boundaries and excludes certain “others”.
4. There is an important sense in which “insiders” to a religion have priority in answering
the question of legitimacy and normative identity. Religions are dynamic and continually
undergoing some measure of change, and it is the insiders who ultimately define or shape
the religion.
5. Nevertheless, it can be appropriate for “outsiders” to make judgments about what is
regarded as normative within a given religion, but such judgments should reflect in large
measure criteria which emerge from within the religion itself. For example, an outsider
can point out that a particular form of highly modernized Christianity bears little
resemblance to the kind of Christianity one finds in the New Testament and the early
church.
6. For purposes of missiology or the theology of religions, it is not essential to resolve
questions of who is “really” a Hindu or Buddhist or Christian. In missiology and theology
of religions we are concerned with the encounter between the gospel of Jesus Christ and
contemporary religious traditions – whatever they might be. The realities at the time of
the encounter are what matter, and one’s understanding of and response to another
religious tradition are shaped in part by the characteristics of the person(s) encountered
and the surrounding traditions within which the person(s) are embedded.