Everything Is Tottering

Abstract

Although the demise of our reliance on absolute truth at times may seem threatening, it actually is an opportunity to do exciting new explorations in scholarly methodology and research. BuddhistChristian dialogue is at the cutting edge of that constructive work. In 1896 Ernst Troeltsch attended a lecture by Jules Kaftan. He disagreed with Kaftan's presentation, and, in the question and answer period that followed, legend has it that he leaped to the platform and announced to those gathered, Ladies and Gentlemen, everything is tottering.1 The specific tottering to which Troeltsch referred was the collapse of the constellation of absolute presuppositions that supported the notion that, of all the religions in the world, Christianity was singular in its salvific power. Although Troeltsch's challenge to Christianity was unique, the late nineteenth century was peppered with approaches that challenged time-honored constellations of thought. Darwin challenged how human beings understood themselves in the order of creation. Freud and Jung introduced a new way to understand human motivations. Marx attacked the political and economic theories that had sustained the wealthy and powerful for centuries. Intellectual positions such as these are representative of how ideas change from one era to the next. They are part of the way human understanding edges forward. They present human beings with the necessity to reevaluate the usual and thus encourage the encompassing of new ideas. They provide intriguing solutions to old problems, suggesting novel organizing principles that gradually become part of the cognitive milieu. Human beings react best to change when it proceeds at a slow enough pace that they can accommodate it. Change does not come in neatly packaged bundles, however, and the experience of the twentieth century is no exception. Two world wars (plus significant but less encompassing conflicts, such as Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, several African nations, Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia), combined with countless technological advances and the space program, ushered in a time of unprecedented change. Structures of thought we had at one time considered essential, if not divinely ordained, have been Buddhist-Christian Studies 18 (1998). ? by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.111 on Tue, 09 Aug 2016 06:19:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms SHARON PEEBLES BURCH placed into question. I understand us to have lost nothing less than a concept of God that knit together Euro-American society as a relatively cohesive whole. I am not referring to a concept of God that can be argued intellectually, or tinkered with without penalty. I mean a thoroughgoing loss of the absolute presuppositions on which our testing of reality was based. Absolute presuppositions are not wholly available to human consciousness. We learn them, but we learn them from how our language is structured, and from the pattern of cognition represented by news announcements, comic strips, soap operas, and sports events. They are part of the expectations that are passed on, both verbally and tacitly, as we are socialized. Thus they have a tensile strength that knits our expectations into a