a review for the book of professor Kyeong-Jae Kim, Hanshin University

The original korean text: http://blog.naver.com/stevision/50025322480

 

 

(donga.com's netizen forum, Aug. 30, 2004)

 

 

Title: Nameless God

Author: Kyeong-Jae Kim, a professor of Hanshin University, a presbyterian pastor

Publisher: Samin, Seoul, 2003

 

The author understands in this book Yahweh, the God of Christianity, not as the only manifestation of the unique absolute God, but as one of many sides of the Absolute who is sought by all high religions such as Buddhism, Islam, and Won Buddhism, etc. Namely he says that it is Yahweh the God who, being the Absolute behind all religions, revealed himself in a certain region, Israel. He explains this religious pluralism by the metaphor of rainbow. A white light (that is the true Absolute) passes a prism (that is the social, historical conditions), and divides into seven colors of light. Colors of rainbow, he says, represent respective religions having their own understandings of God, religious rites, and dogmas. Therefore he asserts that all religions connect with the true Absolute. So he proposes that each religion should be open-minded and embrace the good features of other religions in order to develop into a better religion, while remaining faithful to itself. Of course, Christianity as well must change its skin of 'the belief of the unique God' inside which Christians are trapped, he says. I could infer from the book of professor Kyeong-Jae Kim the logic that Christianity should acknowledge Dharmakāya of Buddhism and Allah of Islam also, as Yahweh the God to whom she sticks.

 

Comment: Nonsense! Why do the islamic clergymen reject christian doctrine and worship Allah, and why do Buddhist monks also reject it, if all religions seek the same absolute God? How on earth can both the Buddhist dogma that man is able to be the Absolute(Buddha) and the islamic dogma that deny the divinity of Jesus come from the same Absolute that Christianity believes in? Such an absolute God as Kyeong-Jae suggests is none other than a God of whim and lie and a wicked God who makes fun of mankind and plays a wedge between people!

 

In relation to this, we have to follow the attitude of St. Paul. In Acts of the Apostles, Paul, seeing, in Athens, Greece, an altar which was built by Greek people for unknown gods, told them that the very unknown God is the God of the Old Testament who sent Jesus Christ to the world, and exhorted them to discard their false religion and to believe in the true God Yahweh. We Christians need this attitude indeed.

 

You have reason, so you can think about God. Therefore several men founded several religions. They have a common feature, that is the Absolute, because that is the characteristic of religion. Creation, love, power, glory, etc. are attributed to a god. It is a very dangerous attitude of study that you, seeing these appearances, identify the God of Christianity with the Absolute of other religions. The claim of Kyeong-Jae Kim is not academic, because at least an academic study should accomplish correspondence between theory and reality.

 

Professor Kyeong-Jae Kin declares in preface that he is a christian pastor. A pastor is to church what a general is to army! A soldier gets a pistol from the nation when he becomes a one-star general. In the movie Silmido, it was said that the pistol given to a general is for suicide, if necessary. He must kill himself if it causes damage to his nation for him to be alive, therefore the pistol was given to him! once a Christian was ordained pastor, the office of pastor is the license to martyrdom that permits him to risk his life in order to protect the gospel of salvation. Who are you that you as a christian pastor should use this license to support the religions of those who are blocking the way to the true God? (Your are spiritually too licentious!)

 

Why did Jesus suffer and die on the cross? Because he might redeem the human. Is there this sublime doctrine in any other religions? Aren't believers of other religions the men to whom the doctrine that God became a man sounds funny and tacky? A minister supporting their doctrines is not in his right mind, I think.

 

“Christian clergymen who destroy christian doctrine and support homosexuality will be deprived of their office.”​

“A protestant clergyman who teaches Yahweh the God to believers wrongly is a heretic. This man must no more be in Christianity, tasting the sweetness of Christianity, that is the fame and money of professorship and ministership.”