Buddhist - Taoist - Christian dialogue... in the 8th century (free post)

Professor Matthew Milliner discusses the Jesus Sutras, Merton, Watts, etc. for the Oxford Interfaith Forum

Here is a stimulating 51-minute video that picks up somewhat on themes discussed in our previous two posts. In this talk for the Oxford Interfaith Forum, Professor Matthew Milliner (a faithful and encouraging reader of this Substack page, incidentally) takes us back in time from the dialogues between Christianity and Buddhism in the twentieth century, citing along the way both the failed example of Alan Watts and the exemplary way of Thomas Merton, to the Church of the East’s interaction with Taoism and Buddhism in China in the 7th and 8th centuries. He talks about the exciting work that has recently been done on the so-called “Jesus Sutras” (the Jingjiao Documents), and presents us with inspiring insights of his own. (My thanks to him, by the way, for the mention of my The Ox-Herder and the Good Shepherd early in the talk.)

About the video, the accompanying notes read as follows:

“The Tao of Mary: Images of the Virgin in the Church of the East

15 June, 2023

We are deeply honoured to welcome Professor Matthew Milliner, Senior Fellow of the Oxford Interfaith Forum, and Professor of Art History at Wheaton College, USA, to lead a session of the ART in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group. Abstract: The Jesus Sutras are an extraordinary series of documents that have yet to be fully considered by those who explore the terrain between Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity. Written in China’s Tang Dynasty by Church of the East Christians who transposed the Gospel into a Taoist and Buddhist key, these documents make much of the Virgin Mary, even while the Christians who wrote them officially demurred from the doctrine of Mary as “Theotokos” (Mother of God), defined at the Council of Ephesus in 431CE. Departing from the way the Jesus Sutras have affected my classroom at a Christian college, this talk looks specifically at visual evidence for Marian devotion by the community that wrote the Jesus Sutras, and describes my experience worshipping with Church of the East Christians, many of whom reside in the Chicago area today.

“Speaker: Professor Matthew Milliner is Senior Fellow of the Oxford Interfaith Forum, UK, and Professor of Art History at Wheaton College, USA. He holds an M.A. & Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University, and an M.Div from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is a six-time appointee to the Curatorial Advisory Board of the United States Senate, and has written for publications ranging from The New York Times to First Things. He was awarded a Commonwealth fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and is author most recently of The Everlasting People: G.K. Chesterton and the First Nations (InterVarsity Press, 2021), and Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon (Fortress Press, 2022). Chair: Professor Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of History and Religion, Brown University, USA.”