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INTRODUCTION
This book
will deal with items of faith central to the Christian tradition.
It may therefore be in order to clarify where I stand vis-a-vis this tradition.
For most practical purposes, I belong to the Catholic community in my country:
schooling, membership of cultural organizations, trade-union etc. I confess
(therewith upholding a Christian ritual) that several times, I have voted
for the Christian-Democratic Party, a non-confessional party that vaguely
adheres to “values” upheld by the Christian tradition.
Moreover,
in my youth I was a genuine believer, more than most of my class-mates
and my generation as a whole. My father was one of the last polemizing
Catholics in Belgium, and a sharp critic of the degenerative secularizing
tendencies within the modem Church. I have always respected this
wholehearted acceptance of the authentic doctrine and tradition more than
the wishy-washy approach currently taken by our bishops and taught in our
Theology faculty.
All this
may be worth mentioning to clarify that I do not belong to that category
of people, fairly widespread in my country, who have a deep-seated hatred
against the Catholic Church and traditions, either because they were brought
up as militant atheists or because they slammed the church door behind
them during adolescence, never to look back again except to pour contempt.
There is quite a literature by writers who in adult life continue to react
against the frustrations, mostly sexual, which they associate with their
years in the Jesuit college. Today, it is no exaggeration to say
that the anti-Christian people in countries like mine are more fanatical
and intolerant than the dwindling number of churchgoers. My motive
in writing this book has nothing to do with that type of anti-Christian
reaction.
The point
is simply that we, European Christians of many generations, have outgrown
Christianity. Most people who left the Church have found that they
are not missing anything, and that the beliefs which once provided a framework
for interpreting and shaping life, were but a bizarre and unnecessary construction
after all. We now know that Jesus was not God’s Only-begotten Son,
that he did not save humanity from eternal sin, and that our happiness
in this world or the next does not depend on believing these or any other
dogmas.
When staying
in India, I find it sad and sometimes comical to see how these outdated
beliefs are being foisted upon backward sections of the Indian population
by fanatical missionaries. In their aggressive campaign to sell their
product, the missionaries are helped a lot by sentimental expressions of
admiration for Christianity on the part of leading Hindus. Many Hindus
project their own religious categories on the few Jesus episodes they have
heard, and they base their whole attitude to Christianity on what I know
to be a selective, incoherent and unhistorical version of the available
information on Jesus’ life and teachings. That is why I have written
the present introduction to one of the most revealing lines of proper scientific
research into the origins of Christianity, viz. the psychological analysis
of Jesus and of several other Biblical characters.
As Jawaharlal
Nehru said, we do injustice to the Vedas by treating them as divine revelations
rather than as milestones of human understanding. Glad that for once
I can agree with Nehru, I affirm that we should take a secular, historicizing
look at the factual human basis of religious scriptures. In the case
of religions, which describe their own basis as God-given, directly revealed
by God’s word, such a secular approach will imply an analysis of the consciousness,
which claims to receive direct revelations from God. That is the
line of research to which this book offers a brief introduction.
Delhi, 24 January 1993
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