Christian Karma
I was walking across a large indoor area at work where UPS package cars and trams cross and I noticed someone driving by and I thought to myself, "Hey, I should smile and nod at him, because that's a nice thing to do and maybe it'd keep me from getting hit by one of those tram drivers in the future."
Then it hit me that what I thought was no different than the Buddhist concept of karma. Here's a definition of karma if you are not familiar with the concept: for every event that occurs, there will follow another event whose existence was caused by the first, and this second event will be pleasant or unpleasant according as its cause was skillful or unskillful.
As I ponered this while walking it occurred to me that more Christians than just myself sometimes think this way. We often get the idea in our heads that if we do something nice to someone, then God will make something "nice" happen to us. On the other side of this, we think that if we do something like, say, run over a puppy, frown at someone in the grocery store, or not help someone on the side of the road, then God will punsih us with a similar bad occurrence.
When we think along those lines what are we really doing? Is that possibly anything that the Word teaches? I really do not think so. I think that we are just fooling ourselves with Christian Karma. We make God into an image of something he is not. Sure, it's because we view him through our lenses that are tainted by our culture and life experience, but we should realize that God does not sit up in heaven checking off lists of good and bad things we do and making sure we recieve equal amounts of good and bad things in our lives.
We need to move beyond culturalizing God, and get back to understanding him through his word.
Book of the day The Doctrine of God by Gerald Bray
Then it hit me that what I thought was no different than the Buddhist concept of karma. Here's a definition of karma if you are not familiar with the concept: for every event that occurs, there will follow another event whose existence was caused by the first, and this second event will be pleasant or unpleasant according as its cause was skillful or unskillful.
As I ponered this while walking it occurred to me that more Christians than just myself sometimes think this way. We often get the idea in our heads that if we do something nice to someone, then God will make something "nice" happen to us. On the other side of this, we think that if we do something like, say, run over a puppy, frown at someone in the grocery store, or not help someone on the side of the road, then God will punsih us with a similar bad occurrence.
When we think along those lines what are we really doing? Is that possibly anything that the Word teaches? I really do not think so. I think that we are just fooling ourselves with Christian Karma. We make God into an image of something he is not. Sure, it's because we view him through our lenses that are tainted by our culture and life experience, but we should realize that God does not sit up in heaven checking off lists of good and bad things we do and making sure we recieve equal amounts of good and bad things in our lives.
We need to move beyond culturalizing God, and get back to understanding him through his word.
Book of the day The Doctrine of God by Gerald Bray
posted by Bobby's blog at 3:13 PM
3 Comments:
Does this mean I'm really not going to receive a blessing for forwarding Christian emails to 10 people?
:)
LOL Melissa.
This is a good post. I have a couple of questions, though:
i) Could you please explore a bit further the concept of culturalising God?
ii) Did you end up smiling and nodding to him??
I enjoyed sitting through an intensive week of lectures with Gerald Bray last year - he was essentially going through the content of the book. He did lose me a bit towards the end, though.
More significant for me was chatting to him over dinner. He's a great guy.
I'll make a post about culturalizing God at some point soon.
As far as smiling, I just gave him "the nod" of acknowledgement, which I give most people at work anyway.
Bray would be awesome to hear. I'm envious.
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