Attitude To Other Religions
Buchman's willingness to work with people of different religions without demand that they convert to Christianity was often a source of confusion and conflict with other Christians. In a speech in 1948 he said: "MRA is the good road of an ideology inspired by God upon which all can unite. Catholic, Jew and Protestant, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Confucianist - all find they can change, where needed, and travel along this good road together." He had several meetings over the years with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whom he greatly respected saying: "the sphere of his usefulness will be sainthood, and a compelling one at that." He also expressed the hope that Muslim countries should become "a belt of sanity to bind East and West and bring moral rebirth".
Yet, according to his biographer, Garth Lean, Buchman would always give those at his gatherings, whatever their faith or lack of it, "the deepest Christian truths he knew, often centred round the story of how he himself had been washed clean from his hatreds by his experience of the Cross at Keswick and how Christ had become his nearest friend. This was done with the utmost urgency - that everyone must face the reality of their own sin, and find change and forgiveness. But he never added that those in his audience must break with their traditions, or join this or that church."
Read more about this topic: Frank Buchman
Famous quotes containing the words attitude to, attitude and/or religions:
“I read ... an article by a highly educated man wherein he told with what conscientious pains he had brought up all his children to be skeptical of everything, never to believe anything in life or religion or their own feelings without submitting it to many rational doubts, to have a persistent, thoroughly skeptical, doubting attitude toward everything.... I think he might as well have taken them out in the backyard and killed them with an ax.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“It is perverse that a nation so rich should neglect its children so shamefully. Our attitude toward them is cruelly ambivalent. We are sentimental about children but in our actions do not value them. We say we love them but give them little honor.”
—Richard B. Stolley (20th century)
“This Administration has declared unconditional war on poverty and I have come here this morning to ask all of you to enlist as volunteers. Members of all parties are welcome to our tent. Members of all races ought to be there. Members of all religions should come and help us now to strike the hammer of truth against the anvil of public opinion again and again until the ears of this Nation are open, until the hearts of this Nation are touched, and until the conscience of America is awakened.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)