ABSTRACT

A crucial step leading to the Protestant-Roman Catholic joint declaration on ‘justification’ mentioned earlier,1 rested upon the insight that the mutual accusations and refutations of the sixteenth century were not exactly, or at least not necessarily, addressing what the other in each case had wanted to express. I hope that as a result of what I have attempted to show here, something similar can be said about Buddhism and Christianity. The atheism which Christians criticize and reject is equivalent to materialism and nihilism, and is therefore not identical with the ‘a-theism’ or ‘nontheism’ advocated by most Buddhists, even if the latter explicitly reject the notion of a divine creator. Conversely, the kind of theism and creator-concepts which many Buddhists oppose are not (at least not necessarily) identical with the theodicysensitive and apophatically modified theism confessed by a major stream of the Christian tradition.