The Soul of Christianity by Huston Smith
"The Soul of Christianity" by Huston Smith is a scholarly examination of Christian beliefs and their significance in the contemporary world, aimed at both defending and explaining the faith. Smith, a respected scholar of world religions, presents a traditional Christian perspective while also acknowledging diverse interpretations of Christianity and other faiths. He argues that modern scientism, which emphasizes only what can be measured, has undermined the deeper meanings of life and faith, leading to a cultural disconnect from religious truths.
The book is structured into three main sections: the Christian worldview, the Christian story, and an overview of the three primary branches of Christianity. Smith emphasizes the importance of symbolism in religion, asserting that it provides insights into divine realities that transcend literal interpretations. He recounts the life and teachings of Jesus, discussing significant events in Christian history and core doctrines, all while employing vivid imagery and analogies to make complex ideas accessible.
In his exploration of the various branches of Christianity, Smith highlights core principles that define each, including the sacramental life in Catholicism, the communal view of salvation in Eastern Orthodoxy, and the personal faith emphasized in Protestantism. Ultimately, the book seeks to illustrate the relevance of Christianity in a modern, pluralistic society, while respecting the insights offered by other religious traditions.
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The Soul of Christianity by Huston Smith
First published: San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005
Genre(s): Nonfiction
Subgenre(s): Church history; didactic treatise
Core issue(s): Church; connectedness; prayer; redemption; religion
Overview
In The Soul of Christianity, Huston Smith, a renowned scholar of world religions, attempts to explain and defend Christianity against its secular detractors in the modern world. Although he uses symbols and analogies drawn from sources as diverse as quantum mechanics and Muscle Beach body builders, his outlook is basically that of traditional, even “establishment” Christianity, referencing the early church fathers, Church councils, and the classical tradition of Christianity’s first millennium as the “gold standard” for Christian belief. Smith is, however, scrupulously fair. He readily admits that others’ interpretations may differ from his and that this does not invalidate either their positions or his own. While speaking “from the inside” as a practicing Christian, he also brings the perspective of a scholar who honors the insights into the divine force held by the other great religions.
Smith asserts that the scientific revolution has been a disaster for Western culture because it has enshrined as the dominant worldview a scientific outlook, one that holds that only those things that can be seen or measured, or worked out based on observation or measurement, are real. Proof of this outlook’s pernicious effects is seen in the barbaric events of the twentieth century, which far exceed the worst that happened in prior centuries, Smith argues, and even technology, the vaunted offspring of science, has removed us from the natural world and led to the poisoning of it. The things that give most people’s life meaning—their thoughts and feelings, and above all, their religious faith—are devalued because of their lack of fit with the scientific belief system. That way is madness, Smith feels.
Fortunately, there is a cure for our plight, according to Smith. Once we realize what went wrong, we are free to seek what is missing. The fatal mistake, he says, is that scientism confuses the absence of evidence with evidence of absence. Because the scientific method cannot produce evidence of a divine order does not prove its nonexistence. To explore the higher level of truth that religion is concerned with, however, requires some different tools. Science and religion work with different realms, and each uses a specific technical language. Science’s primary technical language is mathematics. Religion’s technical language is symbol. Only symbols can negotiate the paradoxes that religion poses in exploring the multiple levels of reality.
With these preliminary guidelines, Smith takes up the task of introducing Christianity to the reader. The Soul of Christianity consists of three main sections: “The Christian Worldview,” “The Christian Story,” and “The Three Main Branches of Christianity Today.”
“The Christian Worldview” lays out the structure of Christian thought. As it deals with fairly abstract concepts, many anecdotes, images, and analogies are used to clarify the ideas it discusses. One of the first concepts presented is that the world is infinite. This infinity encompasses the finite. There is a hierarchy in the finite world, and humans stand midway in it. The universe consists of nested systems, which lead into ever deeper levels of knowledge. Multiplicity increases as the infinite unrolls “downward,” whereas “Everything that rises must converge,”—that is, distinctions disappear in the divine oneness, where absolute perfection is found. Absolute perfection, though, brings up the sidelight problem of evil. Smith disposes of it with the traditional Christian explanation of free will.
Smith states that God is not unilocal—contrary to logic, the divine can be both “out there” and within. The infinite is essentially opaque to our efforts to know it. Revelation is multiple, not confined to one event or religion, but reports, even of revelations, have to be interpreted, and the literal is the lowest and least reliable level of interpretation. Symbolism is the key to unlocking revelation. At best, however, it gives us only partial glimpses of a luminous universe.
Smith notes that the worldview that he has described is not exclusively Christian. It is the worldview of all revealed religions, an underlying structure that they share. “The Christian Story” unrolls upon the framework of this structure.
Although “The Christian Story” is the book’s longest section, it contains the smallest amount of material unfamiliar to the average Christian. There is a brief account of Jesus’ life and message. Smith places Jesus within the Jewish tradition of charismatic healers inspired by the Spirit and summarizes his ministry as “He went about doing good.” He presents some discussion of Jesus’ preaching and language, which he characterizes as “gigantic,” casting them in such terms to cut through his listeners’ cultural conditioning.
Smith describes the events of Holy Week, the Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost. The account of post-Pentecost events summarizes Church history from the first disciples’ spread across the Mediterranean world through the Council of Nicaea in 325 c.e. At this point, with Christianity officially united, Smith turns to capsule discussions of its doctrines: the Incarnation, the atonement, the Trinity, Apocalypse, life everlasting and its associated concepts, and, somewhat unexpectedly, the virgin birth. Smith does not so much put his own spin on these doctrines but rather tries to clarify them by the use of many parables and metaphors. The Apocalypse, for example, is neither a step-by-step prophecy of the world’s end nor the wish-fulfillment fantasy of oppressed first century Christians. Rather, it was God’s effort to stop and reverse humanity’s headlong rush toward doom. Smith implies that the effort failed, and God may have decided to close history down—but he did not. Because of his love, the world goes on, with humans getting intimations of the divine power and goodness that is waiting for them at the end of history.
The final section, on the three major divisions of the faith, profiles two concepts that are the defining traits of each branch. For Roman Catholicism, the Church’s teaching authority and the sacramental life of the Church function as its mainspring. Eastern Orthodoxy is defined by its corporate view of salvation: The Church as an entity is charged with sanctifying the whole world. The other pillar of Eastern Orthodoxy is the importance it gives to mysticism. On Protestantism, Smith quotes Martin Luther’s “everyone must do his own believing” to explicate its key doctrine of justification by faith. Its awareness that all humans are fallible accounts for “the Protestant principle”: a wariness of idolatry, of lifting anything, even a doctrine or the Bible, to the status of unquestioned truth.
Christian Themes
As a work aiming to establish the relevance of Christianity to the modern reader, The Soul of Christianity pays much attention to imagery. While frequently cautioning that spatial, gender-based, and similar terms do not really apply to the divine realm, the author continues to uses them fairly consistently. The result is a strong, if unintended, theme of the inadequacy of words to describe God.
In contrast, the book presents the Christian story as the way the infinite breaks through such limitations and makes itself known in the world. Jesus Christ, a man without ego, was completely open to God and God’s love. His story reveals the divine nature in a way that no mere words or definitions can.
The question of whether transcendent truth or salvation can be found outside Christianity is one on which Christians today differ greatly. Even the earlier, united Christian Church had varying opinions about this, Smith says, and then points out that the Vatican makes a distinction between the church visible and the church invisible. As a student of world religions, he finds the same underlying structure and sense of the divine infusing all religions. However, the author is not willing to go beyond this in this work, which makes a persuasive case for Christianity.
Sources for Further Study
Bryan, G. McLeod. Voices in the Wilderness: Twentieth Century Prophets Speak to the New Millennium. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1999. Autobiographical reflections by a religious scholar on five prophetic voices of the twentieth century: Clarence Jordan, founder of the interracial Koinonia farm in Americus, Georgia; civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.; C. F. Beyers Naude, Afrikaner pastor who battled apartheid; Jaroslav Stolar, Christian leader in Communist Czechoslovakia; and Smith. Sheds light on Smith’s thoughts about Christianity.
Griffin, David Ray, and Huston Smith. Primorial Truth and Postmodern Theology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. This debate between Griffin, an exponent of process theology, and Smith, a leader perennialist, reveals their differing views of Christianity.
Holst, Wayne A. “A Devoted Christian.” Review of The Soul of Christianity. The Gazette, May 6, 2005, p. G5. A sympathetic review of Smith’s work. Notes that the author is known for his book The World’s Religions (1958) and his television program.
Johnson, Luke Timothy. Review of The Soul of Christianity. First Things 163, no. 55 (May, 2006): 55-57. Reviewer sums up Smith’s statements and beliefs.
Smith, Huston. Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions. 1972. Reprint. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. A powerful, personal statement that presents in depth Smith’s theory of a common framework shared by most religions.