253 6 ○○○○○ ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ Indian

WHEN ONE SPEAKS OF Indian Christian Theology, it is generally considered as articulated reflections on God, Christ and the , and how the Christian faith meets with Indian people in their views, culture and belief. To an outside observer the church in seems to be dominated by western thinking as evident in , organization, music and publications. Again, a glance at the syllabus of any theological institution would reveal that it is dominated by western theology with the result that the preaching of an average Indian minister or evangelist reflects a western theological perspective. But efforts have been made to bring in ‘indigenization’ in its life and worship. There have been experiments in many other areas as well, such as Indian architectural styles. It is interesting to note that the Christian ashrams or religious communities, from the earliest days of western activity, have used Christian lyrics composed in Indian metres and sung to tunes played on Indian instruments. Also there have been Indian Christian poets in every area and Indian Christian ascetics () as well. Yet a pertinent question remains; was there a truly Indian expression of theological thought? One factor which has tended to discourage the emergence of a formulated Indian theology is the widespread dislike, both among the and Christians, of anything dogmatic. Hindus tend to think that is an authoritarian religion, which lays down dogmas as essential,

253 254 Through the Centuries and demands unconditional acceptance of them as prerequisites for salvation. This attitude has received considerable encouragement from the writings of Dr S Radhakrishnan, who has criticized Christianity for the tendency to fix its doctrinal categories. The absolute character of theological doctrines is incompatible with the mysterious character of religious truth.1 Indian theologians have related themselves to a number of Hindu philosophical systems. Western theology has never been able to dissociate itself from philosophy, from the time of Platonism of Justin onwards. Plato lies behind Augustine, and Aristotle behind Aquinas and even Calvin. In the West, the philosophy with which theology was been associated has not necessarily been , and theologians in their systematic statements have used the language and thought patterns of such philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Buber.2 The Indian Christian theologians are concerned with two chief options. One is to remain faithful to their experience and knowledge of Christ who is the centre of their life. This involves a loyalty to that knowledge which the theologian has learned and the love of Christ. The other is to be concerned about the interpretation and proclamation of their understanding and experience so that others may come to know of it. The earliest Christian theological response of the traditional South Indian Christians in the early centuries was that they adapted the life pattern of their community to the socio-cultural life of their non- Christian neighbours. To them, the church was a religious congregation; they had occasional celebration of the , which expressed their acknowledgement of the deity of Christ and set them apart as a Christian community from their Hindu neighbours and their worship pattern. At the same time, they attempted an integration of the Christian faith with its Semitic roots and religious ethos. While they separated themselves from the rest of the society by their profession and practice of the Christian religion, they and their Hindu neighbours believed that every religion was effective as a means of salvation for its followers and they adapted themselves socially to the prevalent caste-hierarchy in India. Although this approach was not formulated in depth at any theological level, its historical significance in the wake of any contemporary discussion on the roots and relevance of the Christian faith in a pluralistic society cannot be ignored.3 The ancient church in included in it a number of traditions of Indian Christian Theology 255 the Persian Church, commonly referred to as Nestorians, and of the Syrian or Jacobite Church. But the early Indian Church did not evolve any distinct theological point of view, which could guide and inspire the Indian people. Probably it was because the Indian Christians existed in the midst of an alien Hindu environment and they had fitted into the caste-pattern of the society. Moreover, the language of the , Syriac, was not understood by most of the people for a long time till the was translated into the vernacular () in the 19th century. So, naturally, Syrian influenced the Indian theology of the time.

Indigenous Theology Before the 16th century As there were no official records prior to the 16th century, in order to find out about indigenous Indian Christianity, one has to examine the general outlook and religious mentality of the community in regard to their life, customs and traditions. Robin Boyd says: It might be expected that the Syrian Church, with its long Indian tradition behind it, would have evolved a distinct type of theology which could be a guide and inspiration to Indian theologians of other, more recent, traditions. It must be admitted, however, that this has not been the case, and that it is only comparatively recently, and under the influence of western theology, that theological writers of note have begun to emerge.4 However, Antony Mookenthotam feels that it is possible that the ancient Indian Church had developed some theology of its own and this theology is not written in books but is implicit in the life, experience and traditions of the community. If one examines the certain aspects of the socio- ecclesiastical life of the St Christians, he may come to the same conclusion that of Antony Mookenthotam: Their identification with their socio-cultural milieu implies an incarnational theology lived as awareness that Christ in becoming man assumed everything human and redeemed all social and cultural values.5 The relationship between St Thomas Christians and the Hindu communities of the time gives an idea of their theology. The Portuguese noticed that they followed a number of pagan customs. In the Synod of 1599, the Portuguese forbade a number of customs and practices, which they considered pagan (Hindu). These prohibitions and restrictions are a witness to the communal harmony and cordial relationship that existed between the Christians and the Hindus. This communal harmony and the spirit of 256 Christianity in India Through the Centuries tolerance should be considered a typical Indian contribution to the Christian witness of the time. In Act III, Decree 4, of the 1599 Synod it referred to ‘a perverse dogma of politicians and those tolerant. . . .Consequently being indifferent they wander very far away from the truth’. The Portuguese sensed a danger in the more liberal attitude of the Christians towards the Hindu religion. This attitude of the Indian Christians was due to the fact they had been living for centuries in a positive encounter with high caste Hindus and had developed a theological vision of the Hindu religion, which was positive and liberal. The Indian Christians never accepted the idea that only the form of Christianity was the true form, and they differentiated the ‘law of Peter’ from the ‘law of Thomas’. They believed that each Christian community had its own customs and usages, which probably originated from the apostles. The presence of Christians in India has had its impact on Indian society. Just before the arrival of the Portuguese, Christianity was confined almost entirely to Kerala, and the Hindus, and Jews co-existed. This brought a modus vivendi, which some historians called a ‘cultural symbiosis’ in which it is not easy to discern the specific influence of one religion on another. Small communities had existed here and there outside Kerala at one time or another before the 16th century. There are speculations and theories with regard to the influence of Christianity on . One such speculation arose in connection with the alleged belief in a prophecy among the Hindus, particularly in certain literature about the coming of a ‘redeemer’. The Portuguese heard in Mylapore about some such prophecy.6 The St Thomas Christians as a community had adjusted to the environment in which they had to live and function over the centuries. Any student of history would wonder at the spontaneity with which the community adjusted itself to its mileu at least as far as their social life was concerned. This naturally led to the acceptance of certain practices and customs, a few of which perhaps tended to be in conflict with a genuine Christian life. Probably the Synod Diamper (1599) had some justification in correcting them. Unfortunately the Synod went a step further, which probably led the community gradually to become less and less open to change. The Syrian Orthodox Church is often called the ‘Jacobite’ Church Indian Christian Theology 257

(although a number of Orthodox Syrians do not accept it), the term ‘Jacobite’ being usually equated with ‘monophysitism’, which is a dogma associated with Eutychus who held that human nature of Christ is absorbed into the divine. The with its affirmation that in Christ the two distinct forms, divine and human, are found in one ‘Person’ condemned Eutychus. A modern Syrian (Indian) writer E.M. Philip feels that the Chalcedon formula fails in effect to safeguard the true unity of Christ’s Person, or ‘nature’.7 A few Indian Syrian theologians who raised the questions were Syrian fathers like Severus of Antioch (who died in 538 CE) ‘Monophysites’.8 It seems that the traditional attitude of the Syrian Church to the Council of Chalcedon is that the Chalcedon formula is not the only way of expressing a true Christology. That is, in Indian theology today the formula of Chalcedon cannot be accepted as a sine qua non, for there are those who, with a long tradition to support this, question its terminology.9

Relationship Between Portuguese and Indian Christians in the 15th Century The first encounter between the Christians of the West and India had remarkable impacts on Indian Christianity. For the Portuguese, the meeting was more than just discovering India with its rich commercial dreams; it was the coming into contact with the Christians in India, which they hoped would pave the way for Christian expansion. They were able to understand more about the form and nature of the Christian world as well. The St Thomas Christians stood to gain greatly. They were respected by the local rulers, and were brought into contact with the western community. The mutual respect was certainly beneficial to all parties concerned. If only the Portuguese had cared a little more to study the eastern Christians, their mentality and approach, it would have certainly helped avoid most of the misunderstanding, resentment and tension which gradually surfaced and which eventually led to the distortions of identity and subsequent loss of unity and autonomy. Instead of exaggerating the ‘abuses’, ‘errors’, ‘schism’ and ‘heresies’, if only they had had the good sense and willingness to recognize that both held the same Christian faith, if only they had consistently followed such a policy and left the Indian Christians free to live their own life, and if only they had refrained from making them conform to the Latin 258 Christianity in India Through the Centuries

Church and encouraged them to follow their own philosophy of life, the situation would have been different. But there is no ‘if’ in history. What the Portuguese did was to attempt to absorb Indian Christians into the instead of recognizing their original status as ‘the Church of All India’. The Portuguese policy of viewing everything from a Western, Latin point of view led to the curtailment of any expansion of the Oriental church in India. The root cause of disharmony probably was that the Latin Church gave itself rights and privileges that were not given to the Oriental church. Although they laid the foundation for the growth of Christianity in modern India, one of the clear drawbacks was the quasi-identification of Christianity with the West. A clear example was that the converts were asked to adopt Portuguese proper names as well as Portuguese surnames, and even the western way of dressing. All this certainly paved the way for making the Christian church in India a ‘western garb’. This, of course, came in the way of many well-placed Hindus becoming Christians. This criticism is not in any way belittling the tremendous contribution the Portuguese Christians made in various fields of activity. The encouragement the Portuguese gave to inter-racial marriages, their disregard for the caste distinction, the strong measures they adopted against such evil social customs as widow-burning, abandoning of children born on certain inauspicious days and abuses connected with the devadasi institution certainly give credit to the Portuguese.

Contribution to Christian Thought by Hindus

Ram Mohan Roy (1773-1833): The Christ of the precepts Raja , whose contribution to Hinduism from his contact with Christianity was outlined in the last chapter, has been called the prophet of Indian nationalism and the pioneer of religious reform in Hindu religion and society. He may be said to be the first Indian to have written seriously and extensively on Christian theological themes. Ram Mohan Roy was a Bengali who, finding no real satisfaction at home for his religious longings set off at the age of fifteen and wandered as far as Tibet. He studied Persian and Arabic and became thoroughly familiar with Islam. This strongly influenced him in understanding the unity of God and the Indian Christian Theology 259 meaninglessness of idol-worship. The turning point in his life happened in 1811 when he was an unwilling witness of the of his brother’s wife. From that time on, he was determined to overthrow this and other similar abuses in society. The two chief sources of his information came from the and the moral teaching of Christ. What attracted Ram Mohan to Christianity was its ethics rather than Christian dogma and he saw no reason why a compromise should not be possible between his own Hindu monism based on the Upanishads, and the morality of the , which so greatly attracted him. His study of Christianity led him to publish a book entitled The Precepts of Jesus, in 1820, which is a collection of extracts from the four Gospels covering the greater part of Jesus’ teaching and which was primarily intended to enlist Hindu intellectuals in the cause of the moral reform of Hindu society. Some contemporary Christians felt that this was the beginning of a change for the better in the Hindu attitude towards Christianity. But the , especially Dr Marshmann, wrote an editorial in the Friend of India No. XX (February 1820), commenting critically on the manner in which only a part of was published, and saying that it ‘may greatly injure the cause of truth’. Their arguments and counter-arguments continued. Ram Mohan sailed for a visit to England in 1830, which brought him great fame and popularity. His name is revered in India as a great patriot and pioneer of social reform. A look at four of the fundamental Christian doctrines may explain the attitudes which he adopted, which have become very familiar in India, and which are still influential in Hindu- Christian relations. Ram Mohan’s attitude to the person of Christ is one of reverence, as for a great teacher and ‘messenger’ of God, but he denies that the title ‘Son of God’ attributes a divinity. Here he is taking up an Arian position, which is quite natural because of his monistic background, his Islamic studies, and his association with Western Unitarianism, and that too at a time when the Arian controversy was at its peak in England, Ireland and elsewhere. For Ram Mohan, the saving work of Christ is accomplished through His teaching, and His death is simply the supreme illustration of those precepts whose communication was ‘the sole object of his mission’.10 The idea of vicarious suffering and the sacrificial death are rejected, and he uses his arguments 260 Christianity in India Through the Centuries simultaneously to attack the doctrine of the two natures. For him, God is impassable, so if Jesus suffered in His divine nature this would be highly inconsistent with the nature of God, which is ‘above being rendered liable to death or pain’, and if on the other hand Jesus suffered vicariously in His human nature, the innocent for the guilty, this is in turn inconsistent with the justice of God.11 As a Unitarian, Ram Mohan was unable to accept the as a person of the Godhead, or as possessing personality or deity at all. In his Second Appeal, he devotes a whole chapter to this. For him, the Spirit represents the holy influence and power of God but he denies any self- evident or distinct personality. The Spirit is that influence of God from which we may expect directions in the paths of righteousness.12 Ram Mohan was considered a Unitarian and he regarded ‘the Trinitarians’ as his opponents, although after his England visit in 1830 he was inclined to change his mind. He had devoted most of his time to a polemic against Hindu polytheism and idolatry, and he felt if he included Christ and the Spirit as ‘Persons’ in the one Godhead, it would be a reversion to something primitive, and yielding to polytheistic trends of Greece and Rome of the early centuries as against the clear monotheism of Judaism.13 It is to the credit of Ram Mohan Roy he raised serious theological objections, and in that process he proposed his own versions of Christianity, on the basis of a rationalist and monistic interpretation of the biblical evidence. C F Andrews testifies that some leading Bengali Christians certainly acknowledged that they owed the starting point of their faith in Christ to the study of The Precepts of Jesus.14

Keshub Chandra Sen (1838-84): The doctrine of the divine humanity. was born in Calcutta in 1838 and completed his college education at the age of 20. His liberal English education raised many challenges to his beliefs. Keshub then turned to Christianity and began to study the Bible and to read philosophy and theology with the missionaries. He was a born leader and organizer; started the Colutolah Evening School; founded the British India Society to discuss issues of culture, literature and sciences; and organized a religious and devotional organization by name Good Will Fraternity, which was absorbed into after two years. He joined the Brahmos in 1857 when was their leader. Indian Christian Theology 261

In 1861 he resigned his post in the bank to become a Brahmo missionary, and started Indian Mirror, the weekly, in order to reflect his opinions. Soon he became a popular leader of the Brahmo Samaj. Two distinct parties emerged in the Samaj, which was finally divided into two groups in 1866, one under the leadership of Debendranath Tagore (Adi Brahmo Samaj) and the other under the leadership of Keshub (Brahmo Samaj of India). Keshub later became the sole leader of the Brahmo Samaj. His respect for Christ grew, but his understanding of Christ was different from that of the Christian missionaries who were alarmed at his teaching. In 1870, he went to Britain where his lectures were well received. He was under the impression that Britain was a great Christian nation. On his return, he developed a doctrine called ‘ades’ by which he meant ‘divine command’. His followers could not understand his position. The majority of its members left Keshub and founded the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj and Keshub organized a new movement, named Navidhan (New Dispensation) by which he could manage to synthesize Hinduism and Christian elements and transform it into something new. Keshub wrote and lectured on a wide variety of subjects. The main expression of his Christology is expounded in his series of lectures delivered in Calcutta. In ‘Jesus Christ: Europe and Asia’ he dealt with the moral excellence of Jesus. To him, two fundamental doctrines of the Gospel ethics were the doctrines of forgiveness and self-sacrifice. He thought that in these doctrines one could find the moral greatness of Christ, and felt that nothing short of self-sacrifice would regenerate India. In his lecture ‘India asks, who is Christ’ (1879), he dealt with the stumbling blocks of Hinduism, and pointed out that Indians refused Christianity because of His divinity and not His ethics or His ministry. Keshub understood Christ as the great manifestation of His Father, and affirmed the pre-existent Christ as Son and the incarnation in Jesus. His lecture on ‘God-Vision in the Nineteenth Century’, Keshub dealt with the Christ and His ascension to heaven. He affirmed the resurrection of Jesus. To him, Christ dead and decayed is a deception. Christ rose from death is Christ indeed. M M Thomas has pointed out in a later lecture that Keshub found some meaning in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.15 In his lecture on ‘The Marvellous Mysteries, the ’ (1882), Keshub explained this concept. On this, he stood between the rationalistic Unitarians on 262 Christianity in India Through the Centuries the one hand and the Orthodox Trinitarians on the other. He used the Hindu term Sat-chit-ananda for Trinity. Later, people like Brahmabandhav Upadyaya and Swami Abihisiktananda developed this idea. On the topic of the church, Keshub made a distinction between the church and Christianity. Though he adored Christ, he rejected the popular idea of the church. To him, Christ was universal and in Him Europe and Asia should find harmony. M M Thomas has pointed out three strands in Keshub’s thought about the church: (i) belief in the supremacy of Christ as the God-man centred in whom he saw the harmony of all established religions; (ii) all established religions are true; and (iii) Keshub considered himself as the divinely appointed teacher of the New Dispensation and his doctrine of ideas should be seen in this context. Keshub always looked for harmony of all established religions with Christ as the centre.16 No doubt, Keshub had a deep affection for the faith in which he had grown up, but he constantly sought to relate Christianity and Hinduism in a meaningful manner. He was also not unaware of the ethical monotheism of Judaism and the activist tradition of Islam. He was sure that Christ had come to fulfil all that was best in all of these faiths, to fulfil the Hindu dispensation as well as the Mosaic. He writes, Behold Christ comes to us as an Asiatic in race, as a Hindu in faith, as a kinsman and a brother, and he demand your heart’s affection… He comes to fulfil and perfect that religion of communion for which India has been panting, as the hart panteth after the waterbrooks… For Christ is a true , and he will surely help us to realise our natural ideal of a Yogi.17 So he asks his Hindu friends to turn to the Christ who is already with them, the Christ who is hidden in their Hindu faith, using words which give clear expression to the thesis, words given great cogency by Raymond Panikkar and others.18

P C Mazoomdar (1840-1905): The Oriental Christ and the unfolding spirit P C Mazoomdar was born in 1840 near Calcutta in the Vaisya caste. After two years of college education he came into contact with the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, especially Maharashi Debendranath Tagore and K C Sen. He served for a short time at the Bank of , but he was more interested in the work of preaching religions. In 1865, Mazoomdar along with many others left the Adi Brahmo Samaj, and started the Brahmo Samaj of India, Indian Christian Theology 263 and became a Minister of the Samaj and began to preach in Bengali, and English. From 1872 he started to edit and publish, Theistic Annual (a yearly record of religious thought and missionary activities, followed by Quarterly Review and Interpreter. He also wrote articles for Dharmatattwa (the Bengal Organ of the Brahmo Samaj). In 1874 he visited England, and revisited England and America in 1883 when he attended the Parliament of Religions with and K C Sen. After his second visit, he published the Oriental Christ, which was essentially a new contribution to Christology. While in America in 1884, he published his most important work, Spirit of God. In his twenties Mazoomdar had a spiritual experience of Christ, which was a turning point in his life. He writes that his personal circumstances forced him into a personal relationship with Christ. His response was unhesitating and immediate. Jesus, from that day, became a reality he might have to lean on. Certainly that vision had a lasting influence on him. He therefore attempts to synthesize Hinduism and Christianity, the Hindu and Christian conceptions of the Spirit being an important element in this, providing a framework for his Christology. According to him, the Spirit lives in man as the presiding spirit of his mind, heart and soul, and the same Spirit of God as the evolutionary principle is a fundamental doctrine of Hinduism. Mazoomdar had a soft spot for pantheism, which was rejected by Brahmo Samaj. According to him the Divine Spirit permeates every core of matter and humanity, different in both matter and humanity, and this is eminently the spiritual instinct of India. The Spirit lives in man as the presiding spirit of his mind, heart and soul; that the Spirit illuminates the Triune nature of God.19 Most Brahmos of his time had an entirely different understanding of Christ to that of the missionaries. Mazoomdar was no exception. Mazoomdar’s Christology is an attempt to describe the difference between the terms ‘Western Christ’ and ‘Eastern Christ’. According to him, the western Christ is a learned man well versed in all the principles of theology, and His doctrine is historical, arbitrary and opposed to the ordinary instincts; whereas the eastern Christ is simple, natural, a stranger to the learning of books, and He speaks from the profound, untaught impulses of His divine soul. According to Mazoomdar, Jesus Christ completes and reconciles all 264 Christianity in India Through the Centuries revelation of the Spirit in the religious history of humankind.20 According to him, Christ is unique for various ways. He thinks that in spirit, Jesus was in Socrates, Abraham and such other men. He is the Divine Man, who perfectly embodies the true and universal relation between God and man. Regarding the Holy Spirit, Mazoomdar thinks that the Christian scriptures testify abundantly to the personality of the Holy Spirit. He feels that it was the Spirit which led him to Christ, and sees the working of the Spirit in the expansion of Christianity. However, he complains that the church has pushed the Holy Spirit to the margin, with the result that in theology the church has become perverted; it does not conceive the primacy of the Holy Spirit in creation, in the spiritual development of humankind, in the manifestation of divine humanity and in the building of the church. Jesus Christ, according to Mazoomdar, completes and reconciles all revelation of the Spirit in the religious history of humankind. He does not hold the view that all religions are equal or, on the other hand, that any one religion has a monopoly of the Spirit. But he expects the emergence of a universal religion in the future, and in his view the harmony has already been realized in the Brahmo Samaj.

Swami Vivekananda (1862-1902): Christ as Jeevanmukta Swami Vivekananda, a successor to Sri , referred to below, had received a thorough western education, graduating from Calcutta University in 1884, and absorbing much of the current materialism of the day. In 1886, when Ramakrishna died, Vivekananda was the obvious person to succeed him as a leader of the band of disciples. Ramakrishna was a man of great simplicity and little formal education, and found it possible to obtain ‘realization’ in the adoration of different deities of the bhakti marga, and later mastered the way of advaita, attaining the state of nirvikalpa or complete absorption in nirguna , the unqualified Absolute. Later he turned to Islam and then to Christianity, where he had a vision of Christ. From the very beginning, Vivekananda was keen to consider Ramakrishna as an incarnation of God, and also to appropriate some of the methods and terminology of Christianity. He referred to Ramakrishna as the ‘foremost of divine incarnations’ and saw his own position as bringing to Ramakrishna what Peter or Paul did to Christ. Vivekananda was a brilliant speaker, a man of great charm, and he Indian Christian Theology 265 created a sensation when he appeared at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. He addressed the theme that India had discovered a principle of priceless worth to the whole world, the gospel of the harmony of all religions. This finding had a ready audience in the West. On his return to India he founded the Ramakrishna Mission in 1897, which centred on the life and teaching of Ramakrishna, and visualized a close relationship of members of different religions who recognized their faith to be a different manifestation of the one eternal religion whose purest form was advaita .21 In the Ramakrishna Movement under the leadership of Vivekananda, Vedanti Advaitism came to the forefront as the leading system of religious thought in Indian Christianity and the relation between religions began to be interpreted in the conflict between the experience of mystic oneness and ultimate metaphysics.22 On the claims put forward by Christians that Christianity is the only universal religion, Vivekananda argues that it is ‘the Vedanta and Vedanta alone, that can become the universal religion’ of men, as it alone is based on the solid rock of an eternal impersonal principle in contrast to the shifting sands of the historicity of a personality. He argues that except in the Vedanta, all the other religions have their theories, teachings and ethics ‘built round the life of a personal founder from whom they get their sanction, their authority and power’ and everything depends upon the historicity of the founder’s life. By contrast, the religion of Vedanta ‘rests upon principles’. He introduces the wonderful theory of Ishta, which gives one that fullest and freest possible choice among the great religious personalities.23 For him, it means there is no need for a Christian to become a Hindu or Buddhist, or a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian, but each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet perceive his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth, ie, within the Ishtam.24 Swami Vivekananda tries to interpret Jesus Christ in terms of the principles of the Vedanta, and he believes that the Jesus of the can only be properly understood within the framework of the Vedanta. Christ to Vivekananda is a Vedantin. For Vivekananda, Buddha is ‘the greatest [person] the world has ever seen; next to him is the Christ’, but it is foolish to interpret these characters as other than the manifestations of the spiritual principle of Buddhahood or Christhood, to which every man is destined.25 266 Christianity in India Through the Centuries

A number of Indian Christian scholars have examined the position taken by Swami Vivekananda and it seems that they feel that the main point about Vivekananda is not that he rejects the core and history of the Christian faith, centred as it is on personality and history. It is, rather, that he is redefining the core of Advaitic faith to make room for personality and history, and make Hinduism relevant to the human issues raised in contemporary India through the impact of western culture and Christianity. Some have criticized him for taking biblical texts out of context and interpreting them in a theological framework alien to the Bible. This criticism would be valid only if Vivekananda claimed that he was clarifying the mind of the biblical authors in his interpretation, but he did not make any such claim. He has a theology of religion, which sees the mystic vision and the experience as the goal and end of all religious experiences, and what he does is to interpret the truths of the religion of the Bible in the light of his faith in the ultimate truth of the Advaitic religion.26

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948): The supreme Sathyagrahi Mahatma Gandhi was neither a systematic thinker nor a religious leader. He was primarily a man of political and social action who was inspired by a religious interpretation of human existence. Mahatma Gandhi declares his philosophy of life in his autobiography: My uniform experiment has convinced me that there is no other God than Truth. And the only means for the realisation of Truth is —a perfect vision of Truth can only follow a complete realisation of Ahimsa. To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face-to-face one must be able to love the meanest of all creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life.27 Apart from (Truth) and ahimsa is his third principle swadeshi (service towards immediate neighbourhood). So, for Gandhiji this may be considered as his fundamental principles of philosophy and . He speaks of truth as God, rather than of God as truth, and he is totally ‘devoted to none but Truth’, and he owes ‘no discipline to anybody but Truth’. Gandhiji thinks satya is always coupled with ahimsa as if they are almost two sides of the same : ‘One of these is: Ahimsa which is the Supreme Law or dharma. The other is: There is no other Law of dharma than Truth. These two provide us with the key to all lawful and .’28 He advocates Indian Christian Theology 267 that the practice of true ahimsa should not be confined to mankind: Ahimsa includes the whole of creation, and not only human.29 The message and the person of Jesus have greatly influenced Gandhji, particularly the Sermon on the Mount which clearly stands out: The message of Jesus as I understand it is contained in his Sermon on the Mount. The Spirit of the Sermon on the Mount competes almost on equal terms with the Bhagavadgita for the domination of my heart. It is that Sermon which has endeared Jesus to me.30 He has acknowledged that it was the starting point of his real awakening to ‘the rightness and value of passive resistance’, especially such passages as ‘Resist not evil’; and he says, ‘I was simply overjoyed and found my opinion confirmed where I least expected it.’31 Equality of religion is one of Gandhiji’s cardinal beliefs. It is based on five things: (i) the unfathomable and unknown character of the One God who is over us all, (ii) the never-ending forms of divine revelation and human religious responses to them, (iii) the centrality of the law of non-violence enjoined by all the religions, (iv) the existence of errors and imperfections in all religions, and (v) the conviction that all religions are in evolution towards fuller realization of Truth.32 Speaking about the creed of Islam on the unity of God, Gandhiji says that ‘the God who is one is unfathomable, unknowable and unknown to the vast majority of mankind’, therefore both his revelations and man’s worship of Him are varied.33 Gandhiji believes Swadeshi in religion, it means that men should adhere to the religion into which they have been born, seek to purify it by correcting its defects, assimilate into it the truths of other religions, build a fellowship of religions, helping one another in the pursuit of truth.34 So the first reason for he being a Hindu is that he was born into a Hindu family. He refuses to leave its fold because he considers it the best for him, ‘as my wife to me is the most beautiful woman in the world’ and ‘others may feel the same about their own religion’.35 Gandhiji rejects orthodox Christianity and he calls for a new form of Christianity in India. He admits that he was ‘tremendously attracted’ and felt ‘great leanings’ towards Christianity and for a time wavered between Christianity and Hinduism, but in the end he saw no reason for doing so was his conclusion.

Dr S Radhakrishnan (1888- 1975): The mystic Christ , in his autobiographical essay36 speaks of the 268 Christianity in India Through the Centuries national pride which Vivekananda inculcated in him with regard to Hinduism, and of the hurt inflicted to it by the attitude of his missionary teachers towards Hinduism. So, one can see, in his whole framework of thought, a search for truth in the context of the impact of Christianity on Hinduism. His writings focus on the character of Hindu apologetics. He tries to redefine Hinduism for the modern Indian intellectuals from the point of view of , bringing out its adequacy for contemporary life and interpreting and evaluating Christ and Christianity within its context. Radhakrishnan is essentially a philosopher, but he is a Hindu theologian as well. Among his numerous books, Eastern Religions and Western Thought and The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan are the most important.37 His starting point is that spiritual salvation is essentially jnana of Brahman, realization of the Absolute. He divided religions of the world into two classes: (i) semitic, which ‘emphasizes the object’ and (ii) those which ‘insist on experience’. He classifies Hinduism and in the second category: For them, religion is salvation. It is more a transforming experience than a notion of God… Belief and conduct, rites and ceremonies, authorities and dogmas are assigned a place, subordinate to the art of conscious self-discovery and contact with the divine.38 The Divine is Brahman (Absolute in ), which is ‘the principle of search as well as the object sought, the animating ideal self and its fulfilment’; men are ‘saved not by but by jnana or spiritual wisdom’.39 To interpret Christ and the truths of Christianity, he uses the framework of Neo-Advaitic Vedantism with its ladder of reality oriented to mystic experience for the ultimate criterion and goal of spontaneity. In his view, this approach is fully justified because ‘while retaining the Jewish beliefs in a living God and passion for righteousness’, Christianity has from the very beginning ‘absorbed Greek thought’, which is related intimately to Hinduism: ‘The Christian view point represents a blend of the Greek and the Jewish conceptions of the historical.’40 On the ‘Secret of the Cross’, Radhakrishnan says, In Gethsemane, Christ as an individual felt that the cup should pass away. That was the personal desire. The Secret of the Cross is the crucifixion of the ego and yielding to the will of God: Thy will be done.41 The kingdom of God for Radhakrishnan is Brahmaloka, the kingdom of the Spirit, ‘the transfiguration of the cosmos, his revolutionary Indian Christian Theology 269 change in men’s consciousness, a new relationship among them as assimilation to God’.42 A number of Christian thinkers have critically evaluated the philosophical and theological points of view of Radhakrishnan. Some of them are: P Chenchiah who writes against Radhakrishnan’s idea of the ‘Absolute’, P D Devanandan against the struggle to promote a spiritual basis for the New India, D G Moses against the Doctrine of Equality of Religions, Surjit Singh against Christology in terms of Dynamic Monism, and Leslie Brown and Stanley Samartha against the Doctrine of Mysticism.43

Contribution to Christian Thought by Western Christian Missionaries

Robert De Nobili (1577-1656) One of the early Christians of the 17th century who experimented with an Indian Christian theology was Robert de Nobili. De Nobili did not want to confine his activities to the fisher folk; he wanted to explore the reason for the failure of the early church leaders of Madurai. So he made friends with the schoolmaster who was employed by another Jesuit priest working in Madurai for eleven years. This schoolmaster was a spiritual teacher in his own sect, and was well versed in Hindu theology. He was a strict vegetarian and was an honest seeker of truth, but he had a very poor opinion of Christianity. De Nobili learned Tamil from this teacher; gradually they became good friends. Their relationship helped De Nobili to understand the Hindu attitude to Christianity. One of the important things he learned from him was the intense caste feeling among the Hindus. He learned about the four castes, Brahmin (priest), (warrior), Vaisya (trader) and Sudra (slaves). He also learned there were sub-castes as well as a number who were outside the caste-system (who were considered untouchables). He also realized that as the Christians did not observe caste rules, they all ate beef. So they called the missionaries parangis, and they called Christianity parangi markkam. A number of Indians thought the missionaries were polluting, thus tried to keep away from them. So De Nobili stopped referring to his religion as ‘parangi markkam’, and called Christianity Satya Vedam’ (true religion). His second experiment was learning Tamil and their customs and manners. Given the vows of and chastity of his , he 270 Christianity in India Through the Centuries wanted an Indian name for such a person, and he chose the word sanyasin (one who renounced everything.). He decided to lead a life entirely on alms he received. The schoolteacher decided to become a Christian, followed by some others. He got approval from his church authorities to wear the saffron cloth of a sanyasin, and took to wooden sandals. The third experiment was his decision to adopt a caste as casteism was embedded in Indian society. As De Nobili had a royal ancestry (from Otto II), he declared to the people of Madurai that they were mistaken in looking upon him as a parangi; in fact, he belonged to the Raja caste. De Nobili acknowledged valuable elements in the Hindu sacred writings and considered the caste system—the non-religious part of Hinduism—as an element to which the church might adapt itself. A further experiment he attempted was to compile a book in which he could show that Christianity was a religion which crowned the . He believed that this should have a claim on every orthodox Hindu. De Nobili called this compilation the Fifth Veda. De Nobili wanted to baptize his teacher Sivadarma; but some problems delayed it. One was the Kudumi or hair tuft. The front and back of Sivadarma’s skull were shaved, and the remaining part gathered into a ponytail, which hung flat over the back of his head. The paravas used to wear this, and had permitted the custom to continue. The other is the sacred thread—a triple strand of while cotton hanging from the left shoulder across the breast and back and tied near the right thigh. The four provincial synods of had forbidden Indian converts to wear this after . But De Nobili found some support in the principles laid down by St Thomas Aquinas. He interpreted this principle in such a way as to include the thread in the permitted category. De Nobili believed that kudumi was not a symbol of religion but only of the twice born, and found some support on the principles laid down by Thomas Aquinas. Eventually the Archbishop of Goa gave a positive ruling to the problem.44 It is interesting to note that these and similar experiments of De Nobili could open the door of India to Christ and many caste Hindus including accepted Christ.

John Nicol Farquhar (1841-1929) John Nicol Farquhar was born in Aberdeen on 6 April 1861. After his early Indian Christian Theology 271 education in the local schools, and higher education in Aberdeen University and later at the Oxford University, he joined the London Missionary Society in 1891 to work in India. After working for eleven years as a teacher at Bhawanipur, he worked for the YMCA in its literature department from 1902 to 1923; then he became Professor of Comparative Religion in the University of Manchester. Farquhar was one of the missionaries who reflected the new attitude of sympathy and openness towards Hinduism. He felt the crucial need of a workable ‘apologetic’ approach to the university educated Indians and as a means to that end tried to find a more satisfactory relationship between Christianity and Hinduism than that of mere mutual exclusion. Farquhar worked in India at a time when the Hindus themselves held Christ in high esteem. Ram Mohan Roy had written Precepts of Jesus, the Guide to Peace and Happiness. Farquhar took to heart the comment made by Keshub Chandra Sen: I found Christ spoke one language and Christianity another and he urged his readers to turn to Christ and not to the church. Farquhar was mainly concerned to develop a theology of religions in the context of the questions raised by Hindu scholars on Christianity on the one hand and the interest in the West in the Jesus of History on the other. His book, The Crown of Hinduism published in 1913 fully expounded this idea. He tries to explain that Christianity, or rather Christ himself is the ‘crown’ of Hinduism, because only Christ crowns, fulfils and brings to completion the various desires and quests revealed in Hindu history.45 In an article entitled, ‘The Relation of Christianity to Hinduism’ published in an issue of the International Review of Missions in 1914, he came to the conclusion that the rejection of Hinduism as evil could not be taken as a scientific judgement based on serious study, but as the result of hasty inferences from preconceived notions and superficial observations. He desired that the church should find a solution to this problem. It was his belief that there is an evolutionary connection between Hinduism and Christianity as of lower to higher, so that what is only foreshadowed in Hinduism is fulfilled and perfected in Christianity. A few of the conservative missionaries were critical of Farquhar’ approach. But he never held the passage from lower to higher was an automatic one, but rather that is depended on individual choice. He also believed that Christianity must ultimately replace Hinduism rather than merely transforming it. This approach, in some ways, foreshadows that later made 272 Christianity in India Through the Centuries by Raymond Panikkar in The Unknown Christ of Hinduism with its idea of Christianity as Hinduism, which had died and risen and again transformed. As late as 1909 Farquhar had written, ‘Hinduism must die into Christianity, in order that the best of her philosophers, and ascetics have longed and prayed for may live’.46 Although there was strong opposition to his view, for a time, this attitude gradually came to dominate the field and became perhaps a typical approach to Hinduism in the 1920s and 1930s, right up till 1938 when Kraemer’s, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World exploded on to the world stage. Undoubtedly Farquhar’s views had influenced Christian thinkers like Appaswamy and Chenchiah.47 Christ’s words, ‘I came not to destroy, but to fulfil’ is the basis for the new relationship between Christianity and other religions, and the parallel passages in the scriptures of other religions also support this idea. According to Farquhar, every religion has some truth in it and has been instrumental in leading men and women to God, and every religion is valid for a person, so long as it is the highest he/she knows. Farquhar maintains three things in dealing with Hinduism. Firstly, Christians should be able to demonstrate genuine sympathy with Hinduism without any uncritical admiration for everything Hindu; secondly, Christians should be able to maintain scholarly accuracy; and thirdly, Christians should continue to be directed by their own faith in Christ.48

Bernard Lucas (1860-1921) Bernard Lucas was born on 2 November 1860 in Birmingham. After his education and ordination in the Congregational Church, he came to to work as an L M S missionary. He worked in various places in South India. He was one of the founder members of the United Theological College, , and also of the South India United Church. He played an important role in the early negotiations for the formation of the . He published six books. The book, The Faith of a Christian went through three editions and was translated into Chinese and Conversation with Christ went through two editions and was translated into German. The main concern of Lucas was the evangelization of India. He realized that the missionary efforts had much less appeal than 50 years back. He said, ‘We no longer call the Hindu a heathen, and we no longer ignore his Indian Christian Theology 273 religion and philosophy.’ The great defect of the Indian Church, according to Lucas, is not its lack of Indianness, but its pronounced foreignness. It is foreign in its name and organization, and entirely Western in its thought and spirit. Lucas feels that in order to do evangelistic work in India effectively, it is necessary to distinguish between proselytization and evangelization, and the dominant theme of the gospel is not to be the church but the kingdom of God. According to Lucas, a watchword for the activities of the missionaries of the church was ‘India for Christ’, but in the changed circumstances of India it should be ‘Christ for India’.49

Pierre Johanns (1882-1955) Johanns was born in Luxembourg in 1882. After becoming a Jesuit priest he studied Sanskrit for four years in Brussels and then in Oxford to study the philosophical systems of Sankaracharya for two years, and took his B Litt degree. He came to India in 1921 and joined the staff of St Xavier’s College, Calcutta during which time he developed his major theological line, ‘To Christ through Vedanta’. Brahmabandhav Upadhyaya’s teaching that ‘Vedanta must do the same service in India as Greek philosophy did in Europe’ inspired him. The concept of Christ through Vedanta was his main contribution to Indian Christian theology. He drew inspiration from the writings of the early fathers like Justin Martyr, Clement of , Origen and Gregory of Nyssa who accepted anything valuable which they found in Greek philosophy and synthesized these ideas with Christian thought and with this background he dealt with different Vedanta systems.50 For him, Vedanta is the best among the natural religions, and therefore it would be the best foundation for the supernatural structure of Christianity. He came to the conclusion that Hinduism could be an authentic preparation for the Gospel. He also believed that although the Vedanta systems were not systematized, most of the systems of Thomas Aquinas could be found in one or other of the Vedanta systems. In order to study the different systems of Vedanta, Johanns confined his study mainly to the relation between God and the material world from Sankara and . For Sankara, God is Being. As Being by himself and for himself, he is perfect ‘selfness’ and inferiority of being perfect self- sufficiency or bliss (ananda). So for Sandkara, God is identically Saccidananda; i.e., Being is absolutely pure, intelligence unmixed, self- 274 Christianity in India Through the Centuries sufficiency absolutely complex. According to Johanns, Ramanuja wanted to justify the bhakti tradition of a personalistic religion, which affirmed the existence of a personal God, whom Sankara relegated to the position of a relative reality. Johanns thinks that God who is an infinite substance possessing infinite qualities is the ultimate foundation of everything. Johanns compares Sankara’s understanding of the unity of God to a ray of white light, while that of Ramanuja is like the same ray split up into its component colours. Johanns, in the Light of the East (December 1924) commenting on the same idea writes: To know God, we have to learn with Ramanuja all his infinite qualities but also to remember with Sankara that all those infinite qualities are not inherent in God, but identically pure infinite Light of Spirituality.51

Jules Monchanan (1895-1957) Fr Jules Monchanan (adopted name Swami Parama Arupi Anandam) was born on 14 April 1895 in Beaujolais (near Lyons). After theological education in 1922 and ordination in the same year, he worked in the Archdiocese of France for ten years. Fr Monchanan had a vast knowledge of ancient eastern religions and he was particularly interested in the religions and cultures of India. The idea of coming to India as a sanyasi and not as a regular missionary developed in his mind. He came to India in 1939. Before his arrival he had written to the Bishop in Palayammcottah that he would be satisfied with the ‘most modest post’ among the low- caste people in India. According to his wish, the people at Kulittalai made a modest presbytery, which he called Bhakti Ashram. His great desire was to clad himself in the saffron robe of a sanyasi and live in complete poverty, leading a vocation of study and contemplation. In 1950, a Benedictine monk, Fr Le Saux, joined him and they installed themselves as members of an ashram. Both of them adopted Indian names, Fr Monchanan as Swami Parama Arupi Anandam and Fr Le Saux as Swami Abhishiktananda. Their dwelling place was named Shantivanam, its formal name being Satchitananda Ashram. Fr Monchanan had suffered from asthma from his childhood, which became more severe in 1957 and the French doctors noticed a swelling, which could develop into cancer. On their advice he returned to France in September 1957 and he died in October. Indian Christian Theology 275

Fr Monchanan’s ideal of an ashram was that of Brahmabandhav Updadhyaya who wrote in Sophia (August 1898): The supernatural virtue of poverty, practised by our religious priests makes very little impression on the Hindus. They cannot understand how poverty can be compatible with boots, trousers and hats, with spoon and fork, meat and wine. To a European they may be the bare necessities of life; to a Hindu, they are objects of luxury. If India is ever to be conquered, it will be conquered by the power of poverty synonymous with abstinence from meat and drink, living as mendicants in humble dwellings.52 The two cottages in the ashram were made of bamboo fibres and coconut leaves, and one of the huts had a room, which was used for the celebration of Mass. They had no furniture except bricks on the floor. During the rainy season they were infested with frogs, ants and other insects, and scorpions used to take shelter between the bricks. This resulted in replacing the huts made of bamboo and coconut leaves by small buildings with stone walls and tiled roofs. They were not happy with such improvements.

Contribution to Christian Thought by a Non- Indian Christian Convert to Indian Culture

Swami Abhishiktananda (1929-73) The original name of Swasmi Abhishiktananda was Henri Le Saux. He was born in Brittanya, France in1910. He joined the monastery of St. Anne de Kergonan at the age of nineteen and became a professional monk in 1931. After spending nineteen years as a Benedictine monk, he felt the call to go to India to make experiments on Indian , writes Vattakuzhy: Before leaving France, he had prepared the fertile soil of his heart for the seeds of Indian Sannyasa. He had begun to study Sanskrit and Tamil already in France. His Benedictine background provided him with ample facility for adaptation of Indian Sannyasa because of its complementarity.53 He wrote to Monchanan expressing his desire to settle down in a hermitage somewhere in Tiruchirappally, to lead a contemplative life in the pristine tradition of . Monchanan wanted to lead a life of contemplative vocation. Since many are unable to fulfil this vocation because they are distracted by earthly cares, joys and sorrows, some at least have to be encouraged in the name of the rest to lead a life entirely committed to this vocation. Both these men cherished the concept of the Sanyasa ideal in 276 Christianity in India Through the Centuries their Christian monastic tradition. For Monchanan, a monk is a man who lives in the solitude of God, occupied with Him alone, and his primary duty is not to engage in social, intellectual or apostolic work, and he believed that the greatness of Indian culture rests in having made a place for Sanyasa. He considered that if Sanyasa is on the decline it is the urgent duty of the church to bring it to its final consummation with Christ.54

Contribution to Christian Thought by Indian Christians

Nehemiah Nilakanth Sastri Goreh (1825-95) Nehemiah Nilakanth Sastri Goreh belonged to a rich and well-connected family of Mahratta Chitpavan Brahmins. He was born on 8 February 1825. He had learned Sanskrit under his father and the ancient Hindu scriptures from distinguished pundits, and he earned for himself the title sastri (pundit). The street preaching of missionary William Smith drew his attention to Christianity. He listened to the preaching with a view to refuting it, as he thought Christianity was philosophically crude and fit only for ignorant people. He went on to argue with Smith, but the introduction of the New Testament and his reading of the Sermon on the Mount gripped him. Nilakanth lost faith in Hinduism; he refused to accept any alternative religion either. But in 1847 he attended the CMS church for the first time; his family vehemently opposed this. On March 1847 he received the name Nehemiah through baptism and was admitted into the church. In 1853 he went to England as a companion to Maharaj Duleep Singh who had become a Christian there. While in England, Nehemiah attended some theological lectures and studied Paley’s Evidences and Butler’s Analogy, which helped him to see the possibility of utilizing reason in the service of revealed truth. On his return to India he worked as a lay missionary for ten years among educated Hindus in Poona, Benares and Kanpur, during which time he wrote his main Christian apologetics of Hindu philosophical systems. In 1870 he became a priest of the , lived as an ascetic and became a novice of the Anglican religious community of the Society of St John the Evangelist (SSJE). He then went to England to complete his novitiate. On his return to India, he continued to work among the educated Hindus in Poona. He published ‘Proofs of our Lord’s Divinity’ Indian Christian Theology 277

(a letter to ), ‘Christianity not of Man but of God’ (his lectures to Arya Samaj of Allahabad) and Tenets of . Goreh’s main writing is, A Rational Refutation of Hindu Philosophical Systems, which is an exposition and critical evaluation of the six traditional systems of regarding the relation between God, the human soul and the world. This book is considered the best Christian critique of Hindu philosophy and apologetic for the Christian doctrine of the Triune God, over against monism and pantheism and of sin and redemption, over against ignorance and liberation through illumination. As a Hindu pundit, Goreh moved from Saivism to ; but as a Christian he found the bhakti cult of quite inadequate in providing a path to God. In this and other matters he was fighting against the tendency of Brahmo Samaj under Keshav Chandra Sen to revive the bhakti cult of Vaishnavism within its religion of Hindu theism. In his tracts Theism and Christianity, the Brahmos, Their Ideas of Sin and Atonement and Salvation, Goreh enters into argument with the Brahmo religion to show its inadequacy as a system. Just as he moved from Saivism to Vaishnavism during his early Hindu period, he shifted from the low Church doctrines of the CMS to Anglican Catholicism, and he was critical of both extreme and Catholicism. Although the call to an ascetic life of religious communities captivated his mind, he was sure that Hinduism with its spirituality was a sufficient genuine preparation for a Hindu to receive Christianity. Though he took an almost negative view of the teachings of Bhagavat Gita, he says: ‘Yet they have taught us something of ananyabhakti (undivided devotion to God) of (giving up the world), of namrata (humility), of kshama (forbearance) etc, which enables us to appreciate the precepts of Christianity’.55

Krishna Mohan Banerjee (1813-85) K M Banerjee was born in May 1813 in Calcutta. His parents were Orthodox Brahmins of the Kulin Class. The early 19th century was a period of cultural renaissance in Bengal under the impact of western education and Christian missions. In Bengal there emerged a process of liberal reform from traditional Hinduism. These reformers had three paths to choose from—to become agnostics and atheists and revolt against all religions, or to join the theist 278 Christianity in India Through the Centuries

Brahmo Samaj, which sought renewal of Hinduism from within, or to become Christian. Under the influence of Derozio, the rationalist professor at Hindu College, Banerjea joined the reform party of agnostics and atheists, and became the editor of their weekly journal Enquirer. This group attacked the supernatural metaphysical speculations of the idolatrous polytheism, as well as the irrational traditions of Hindu . It was during this period that Krishna Mohan and friends became acquainted with Alexander Duff, the young educationist of Calcutta. Although Duff had sympathized with their desire to reform Hinduism, he urged them to enquire into the truth of Christianity. This led to Krishna Mohan’s baptism in 1832 as a member of the Presbyterian denomination, but later he joined the . He was ordained as a priest in 1852 and was later appointed Professor at the Bishops College Calcutta, where he developed his theological scholarship and produced his works on Hindu philosophy. He retired in 1867. He made friends with members of the Samaj (the theistic reform movement for Hindu Renaissance). They all together gave shape to the Bengal renaissance, which was the vanguard for Indian renaissance. He also took his share in organizing the Calcutta University in 1857 as a member of its Senate, which conferred on him a doctorate in 1876. As the first President of the Bengal Christian Association he worked for the autonomy of the church from western missions. In the 1870s he turned his attention from the refutation of Hindu society, philosophy and religion to the question of whether there is a real possibility of building an Indian society in continuity with the Hindu traditions. One of his greatest contributions to Indian Christian theology is the attempt towards ‘the beginnings of indigenous self-propagation’ of Indian Christianity. Krishna Mohan brought forth his earlier concern for the transfer of Hindu society into his theology of the revelation between the church and the Bengal cultural renaissance. His works, The Persecuted (play), Nature of Female Education (1841), Kulin Brahminism of Bengal (1844), Transition States of Hindu Mind (1845), Essays on Hindu Caste (1851), and Bhavabhuti in English Garb (1822) showed his passionate feeling towards the inequality and injustice perpetuated by caste and joint family under Brahminism. The 19th century in Bengal was a period when a lot of controversies erupted among Christian rationalists and Indian Christian Theology 279

Brahmin theists and Orthodox Hindus about the validity of Christianity. He wrote a few apologies of Christian religion, viz. Truth Defended and Error Exposed (1841),The Claims of Christianity in British India (1864), and Dialogues of Indian Philosophy (1857). In the Dialogues, his main criticism concerned the doctrine of God and creation in Hindu philosophy, that ‘they failed to argue for the existence of a superior intelligence as the author and governor of the universe’. He also found its teaching on salvation (mukti) and morality defective. His approach to Hinduism experienced a change after 1865. In The Arian Witness (1875), Two Essays as Supplements to the Arian Witness (1880) and The Relation between Christianity and Hinduism (1881), he is concerned with establishing a positive relationship between Vedic religion and Christianity, and showing that Christianity does not merely displace Vedic religion but in some essential elements fulfils it. In his comparative study of the stories of creation and the Fall in the Bible and the Vedas, he says, ‘Christ is the true —the true begotten in the beginning before the worlds, and Himself both God and Man’.56 With this he developed an elaborate view of Hinduism, and especially the Vedic religion, and pointed to Christianity as its true fulfilment.

Lal Behari Day (1824-94) Lal Behari Day whose name before his baptism was Kala Gopal De, like K M Banerjee, was another recognized leader of the 19th century Bengal Christians. He was born in a middle class family of non-Brahmin Suvarna Vanik (banker) caste. Under the influence of Alexander Duff, he was baptized, and he became a full-time Christian worker of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and served the church in many capacities. A nationalist in politics, he was the first person in India to formulate a scheme for the foundation of a national church in India on the basis of the Apostolic Creed (inclusive of the Roman Catholics) and free from foreign control. He opposed racial discrimination both in salary and membership between European and Indian ministers as practised by the Mission Council. Lal Behari Day’s position was vindicated and a way was opened for Indians to have independent charge of mission stations, and otherwise being put on a footing of equality with Europeans in all matters except salary. Behari Day was a prolific writer in English and Bengali. His theological 280 Christianity in India Through the Centuries thought is closely related to his concern and his role in the Bengal renaissance of the time. Both K M Banerjee and Lal Behari Day were seeking the ultimate truth and an understanding of the ultimate human destiny, which they shared in common with the educated Indians of the time. Three theological debates arose at that time—scientific rationalism, renascent Hinduism (especially Brahmo Theism) and Christianity. Both Banerjee and Behari Day became Christians because they understood the foundations of truth in Christianity. Day’s theological thoughts were expounded through the four lectures he delivered in Calcutta, in which he disputed the adequacy of Brahmo theism to provide sufficient spiritual basis for the historical and the ultimate destiny of India and in his proposal for a national church. In 1880, the Brahmo publicly declared that their theistic belief and religion was not based on any revelation other than that of nature, which is available to all and which contains religious and moral truth. To discover these great truths of religion, they depended either on human reason and conscience or common sense and interaction. To Day, this was not possible. He insisted on the utter necessity of a divine revelation because human reason cannot know God unaided, and God Himself was pleased to reveal it to him through His Son. Day goes on to say that whatever truths of God Brahmos held was derived from biblical revelation and not from Hinduism or rational enquiry. He also contradicted the Brahmo doctrine of repentance as in itself the expiation of sin and the pathway to divine forgiveness, no divine attainment being required. Lal Behari Day was keen to find ‘one form’ of the church, which is scriptural, and which could communicate the gospel of salvation relevantly to the Indian people. He was one of the first persons in India to see denominational divisions of the church as a denial of that form. So he put forward to the missions a memorandum on, ‘The Desirableness and Practicality of organizing a National Church of Bengal’. To him, the Apostles’ Creed could be its basis; he was broad enough to include even the Roman Catholics with the proviso that they should abjure the dogma of infallibility of the Pope and acknowledge the supremacy of the Scripture as a rule of faith. The main reason for proposing a national church was as a response to the Brahmo who had established a new church, which they claimed to be truly Indian. Although Lal Behari’s vision did not take any practical shape at that time, it was to play its role continually in Indian Christian theology.57 Indian Christian Theology 281

Brahmabandav Upadyay (1861-1907) Bhavani Banerjee (later called Brahmabandahav) was born in 1861 in a high caste Hindu family. As a boy he was greatly influenced by K C Sen, and from his early boyhood he was firmly attached to the Person of Christ. Even in his younger days he was a burning nationalist with extreme nationalist views and wanted to start the revolution against the British. Around 1880, he met Vivekananda and they became close friends, and he joined the Brahmo Samaj, was counted among the followers of K C Sen, and took a keen interest in the life and teachings of Christ. In February 1891, he was baptized in the Anglican Church in Hyderabad. Later he became a Roman Catholic and took the name Brahmabandhav (a Sanskrit translation of the Greek name Theophilus, God’s friend). A number of other high caste Hindus also became Christians. He became absorbed in the relation between Hinduism and Christianity. His deepest insights of Hinduism, and especially the Vedanta, led him to study the Christian revelation in relation to the deepest insights of Hinduism. He was convinced that the ideal way of bringing home the Christian faith to Indian thinkers was by using the teaching of Vedanta. Following the idea of De Nobili and the Madurai tradition, he believed that if Hindus were to be won for Christianity, they should discard European dress and put on the saffron robe of a sanyasi. In 1894 he put it on, and also gave up his family name, and called himself Upadyay (= teacher) Brahmabandhav. Soon after his conversion, he tried to find a natural foundation for Christianity in the Vedic religion, during which time he vehemently opposed Vedanta. However, later on, after 1898, he attempted to build an Indian theology on Vedanta philosophy. After his baptism, he was mainly concerned with the development of some indigenous methods to preach the gospel of Christ. In this, he was greatly influenced by De Nobili. The Roman did not accept the ochre robe of a sanyasi dress he wore, but his appeal to the bishop was granted as he had reminded the bishop that Robert de Nobili had worn the saffron robe in the 17th century. In 1900 he moved to Calcutta and engaged more in journalistic activities. He was attracted to the Advaitic doctrine of Sankara as a means to express the Christian doctrine, and for a time he worked with in the founding of Santiniketan Ashram. He, along 282 Christianity in India Through the Centuries with N Gupta, brought out the Twentieth Century as a monthly review. Another evening paper, Sandya appeared at the close of 1904, which had an impact on the political life of Bengal. In the same year he started The , his Bengali Weekly. The basis of Brahmabandhav’s theology is the Thomistic natural- supernatural framework, and he seems to have been the first person in the Roman Catholic Church in India to apply this explicitly to the relation between Hinduism and Christianity. He was greatly influenced by K M Banerjee’s, Arian Witness. Although his approach was basically the same as that of Banerjee, his presentation of the Vedic-Christian philosophy was more elaborate and substantiated. His main argument was that ancient Hinduism had been a pure theistic faith, and that polytheism and idolatry, as well as the ‘pantheistic’ Vedanta philosophy were all corruptions of India’s original religion. He was convinced that the understanding of God found in the Vedas was the highest possible on a philosophical level and nowhere in the world (except perhaps in ancient Greece) had the ‘true light shone forth so brilliantly’ and nowhere had ‘human philosophy soared so high’.58 In the early period of this theological thinking, Brahmabandhav was convinced that two factors, the doctrines of reincarnation and transmigration and the Advaita philosophy were responsible for the deterioration in Hinduism. This view of Hinduism naturally determined his attitude to the Hindu renaissance movements of the 19th century. For him, Christianity was not the destroyer of Hinduism, but the fulfilment, for the primitive (Hinduism) and the new (Christianity) are linked together as root and fruit, base and structure, as outline and filling.59 There are two stages in his theological thinking. His theology before 1898 was that ancient Hinduism had been a pure theistic faith, and that polytheism, idolatry and pantheistic ideas of the Vedas were later corruptions. To him, the Indian religion had fallen from such heights and abandoned the true God. Although in this he agreed with the Arya Samaj, he did not agree with their anthropomorphic conception of God and the teaching on transmigration. He was also critical of the Vedanta philosophy of the Ramakrishna movement. He was more vehement in his attack on Annie Bessant. All these were to lead Hinduism back to its original form and from there to prepare the ground for Christian faith. Indian Christian Theology 283

The year 1898 was a turning point in his life and theological thinking when he moved from Jabalpur to Calcutta. Bengal was the centre of radical nationalism. Although a number of Christian leaders thought that the Hindu-nationalist movement in Brahmabandav was undermining Christian commitment, he was one of the very few who had the courage to justify the nationalist movement as a Christian. He wanted to acknowledge India’s cultural and religious heritage and he wanted to be a Hindu by culture and Christian by faith. Another important change took place in his thinking when he moved from Vedas to Vedanta, and he thought that Vedanta philosophy could form the basis for a Christian theology and also that the Hindu race has been preserved by Providence in order that its philosophy might mould the future theology of world Christianity. Brahmabandav found the solutions to the problems regarding the two religions in the concept of Sat-chit-Ananda; the Father is Sat—pure existence, the Son is Christ—the Logos, and Anand represents the bliss of the Holy Spirit. He believed that in this way he preserved a higher conception of God than is possible on a personalist interpretation.60 Brahmabandav, unlike many of the leaders of the renaissance movement, held the view that caste should be accepted. He also accepted the orthodox view of caste, as it is more scientific. He firmly advocated the integration of the caste-system into the Christian church, which was a position not acceptable to Indian Christian leaders including the missionaries of the time. On his return to Calcutta he threw himself into new projects. He opened a school for boys, which was later moved to Shantiniketan where he and Rabindranath Tagore worked together for a time. In fact, Brahmabandhav was the father of the famous Tagore’s institution in Santiniketan, a fact that is not mentioned in the many books about Tagore. In the last years he was completely absorbed in political journalism. He started a newspaper called Sandya, extremely radical and regarded by the British authorities as one of the most dangerous journals. In September 1907, he was arrested,having been charged with encouraging people to insurrection and revolution. Though he was released on bail, he knew he would be eventually imprisoned. But he had to undergo a hernia operation. He was given a chloroform injection, but suddenly collapsed and died. He was cremated like a Hindu according to Hindu rules. Probably it was in tune with his wish, as he saw himself not as a Christian but a Christian Hindu. 284 Christianity in India Through the Centuries

Brahmabandav Upadyay inaugurated an interesting revival within the Roman Catholic Church. He was disowned and discouraged by the authorities of the church. By 1920, a number of Roman Catholic thinkers, especially Belgian Jesuits, began to see his work in a better light and to realize its great significance. In 1922, the leaders of this group, Fr G Danday and Pierra Johanns (both Oxford trained orientalists), produced a monthly magazine, The Light of the East, which was in circulation for many years. Upadyay worked to create a positive relationship between Christianity and Hinduism. For many years Johanns wrote a series of articles entitled, To Christ through the Vedanta in which he made use of a detailed analysis of the systems of Sankara, Ramanuja, Vallabah and Caitany and how each of them could be used in the task of ‘reconstructing Catholic philosophy’.61 Johanns describes the purpose of his series as ‘to show that we can reconstruct our Catholic philosophy with materials borrowed from the various Vedantic systems’.62

Vengal Chakkarai (1880-1958) Vengal Chakkarai was born on 17 January 1850 in a Chettiar caste (highest non-Brahmin) family in Tamilnadu. He was brought up under the Hindu religious influence of his home. While he was a high school student, he was influenced by the anti-religious rationalism of Bradlough and Ingersoll and became an agnostic. This attitude was gradually changed, when he listened to Swami Vivekananda’s lectures, and began to see Hinduism as an integral part of Indian national awakening. At , he was greatly influenced by the Principal William Miller who believed that the Hindu would find his fulfilment in Christ. He was baptized in 1903 and was admitted to the Free Church of Scotland. He taught in high schools in Madras for five years after which he studied law and practised for five years from 1908 to 1913. He then left it and joined the Danish mission and started working among educated Hindus. He joined the Home Rule movement in 1917 and in 1920 in Gandhi’s Non-co-operation Campaign. He became a pioneer in the Trade Union movement in the South, and became Chairman of the All India Trade Union Congress in 1951. He became a member of the Legislative Council of Madras in 1954. Chakkarai was a socialist and after Indian independence, he co-operated with the Communist Party of India of Tamilnadu. Indian Christian Theology 285

Chakkarai belonged to the Rethinking Christianity in India group of theologians in South India, along with Justice Chenchiah, S J Appaswamy and others. He was also one of the founders of the Christo Samaj. He opposed the imitation of in India and advocated Indianization in the external life of the church as well as in its spirituality and theology. He owned and edited, Christian Patriot from 1917 to 1926. Like K T Paul, he wanted Christian community to be like the salt, which dissolves itself to serve rather than becoming a communal political entity. Chakkarai was quite keen on making his public confession of Jesus as Lord by accepting the of baptism. However, he was critical of the church in its ecclesiastical organization and in its considering its tradition as the standard of faith. For him the scriptures and the direct experience of Jesus Christ are the sources of authority, and church traditional dogma is secondary. He believed the church as an organism was constituted ‘not by mere cults but by communion with the living Lord for social action’. He opposed the Church of South India scheme of Church Union as a western imposition on India, and irrelevant to the building up of an autonomous church in India.63 Chakkarai’s theology is clearly stated in his two books, Jesus the (1927) and Cross and Indian Thoughts (1932). He made extensive use of Hindu terminology in stating his faith and formulating his theology, but at the same time, he did not commit himself to any one school of Hindu philosophy. Chakkarai’s theology was mainly Christological. Instead of interpreting the life, death and resurrection of Christ in the light of the prior conception of God or the Ultimate Reality, he felt that one should interpret God in terms of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. He spoke first of the Christhood of God rather than the Deity of Jesus. For him, ‘the humiliation and exaltation, the death and resurrection, the historical Jesus and the spiritual Jesus constitute the two sides of one reality’. According to Chakkarai, though metaphysics cannot be ignored, the divinity of Jesus is not to be interpreted mainly in metaphysical terms, but spiritually and morally as the incarnation of the True Man (Sat Purusha) living in complete communion with the Father in whose image God created and continues to create all humanity. Chakkarai was concerned about the need for Indian Christianity to develop its own theology or theologies to express its understanding of Christ 286 Christianity in India Through the Centuries and Christian experience. He refused to accept that ‘the Christian faith and Indian thought are diametrically opposed to each other; further, Christianity as it has been interpreted today is a ready-made and finished product; and still further, that any departure from the traditional views is contrary to the genius of Christianity and to the Christian scriptures’.64 Chakkarai could not think of having a uniform theology for India as a whole. It would be like having one system of religious metaphysics for the millions of Hindus from Mount Kailas to Kanyakumari. So, Indian theological business is twofold: one for the non-Christian people of India, and the other for the Christian brethren who acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus. For Chakkarai, Christology is the starting point of theology as for Chenchiah. This leads him to formulate what he calls a ‘doctrine of the Christhood of God’, 65 for he was convinced that real and valid knowledge of God must begin with personal experience of Christ. Chakkarai links the idea of God’s self-revelation with the concept of imminence, which is so popular in Hindu bhakti, but he gives his own interpretation. For Chakkarai, God’s imminence takes a special form when Christ becomes incarnate: ‘It is a “human imminence” where God in Christ comes into the time-order for the redemption of man, the imminence of Immanuel, God with us.’ 66 Chakkarai sees the work of the Holy Spirit as a continuation of the incarnation or avat¯ar, and in effect identifies the Spirit with the risen living Christ at work in the world today. Then the starting point of our knowledge of Christ, and so of God is the experience of the power of the Spirit. So, to a direct question of the relation between Jesus and the Spirit, Chakkarai’s answer is ‘the Holy Spirit is Jesus at work in the human personality’.67

P Chenchiah (1869-1959) P Chenchiah is one of the most striking personalities in the history of Indian Christian theology. He was a layman, a distinguished lawyer and for a time Chief Justice of Pudukkotta State. Along with his brother-in-law Chakkarai, he was influenced by Dr William Miller, an outstanding Scottish missionary and Principal of the Madras Christian College, and was instrumental in the formation of the ‘Rethinking Group’ after the publication of, Rethinking Christianity in India (1938), as India’s reply to Henry Kraemer’s Barthian theology, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World. As a convert from Hinduism and as one who had established a secular Indian Christian Theology 287 career, he was keen on retaining ‘Indianness’ to the fullest extent, which he felt was threatened by the organized form of Christianity. To some extent, he was in conflict with the institutional church although he remained a loyal church member till the end. He felt that the Indian Church seemed to be heading towards a slavish copy of the western church. To him, Christianity represented a new stage in the evolution of man. He is the true man, the new man: So with the power of the Holy Spirit, we can become one with Him, and so become a “new creature”’. Two great personalities played a significant role in his theological thinking—the ‘Integral ’ of the famous of Pondicherry and the practical teaching of Master C V V of Kumbakonam.68 For Chenchiah, these two Hindu thinkers were of decisive significance and greatly helped him in his theological enquiry, just as Plato helped Justin Martyr or as Sankara opened insights for Up¯adh¯ayaya. Creation for C V V is just m¯ay¯a; it is precisely through creation that God reveals Himself and demonstrates His power (´sakti). Chenchiah saw this approach as having a close bearing on the Christian understanding of the Holy Spirit and on the nature of the new life in Christ. In a similar way, Chenchiah found much that appealed to him in the work of Sir Aurobindo whom he visited at his famous ¯ashram at Pondicherry. Along with these ideas emerged a new fellowship, in an ashram where integral yoga empowered by a new spiritual force became a daily routine. Like a number of Indian Christian theologians, his attitude toward organized church was very negative. He felt that the institutional church was trying to usurp the place of the kingdom of God— the Spirit-filled fellowship of ‘new creatures’. He regarded the church as purely a historic human institute. Like Brahmabandav, Chenchiah believed that the Christian faith must be open to receive new insights from Indian culture, and he urged his Christian friends to ‘let the sluices of the great Indian culture open for the inundation of the Christian mind’.69 Regarding the relationship between Hinduism and Christianity, he asserted that our understanding of the Christian faith may gain new depth and richness from its contact with Hindu culture. Moreover, Indian religion and philosophy are far richer than were the Greek scholars in the early centuries of the church.

Armugam S Appaswamy (1848-1926) Armugam S Appaswamy was born in 1848 in Palayamcottah (), 288 Christianity in India Through the Centuries in a family belonging to the Vellala Caste and he followed the Orthodox Saivite religious traditions of South India. The young Appaswamy came in contact with Christianity through CMS missionaries. He studied at a mission school at Palayamcottah, and through the influence of Pandit H A Krishna Pillai he converted to Christianity. In 1867, he went to Madras for higher education, where he began to examine various alternatives, Brahmo Samaj and philosophy. Although he faced hostilities and suffering, he made the heart-rending break with family and caste traditions. Appaswamy received baptism on 15 July 1871 at Madras. In 1875 he studied law and took up the legal profession, and kept good social relations with people of all castes and religions both at Tuticorn and Palayamcottah. In 1900 he gave himself completely to evangelistic work, and wrote pamphlets in Tamil such as, Why I Became a Christian. He was also associated with the organization of the National Missionary Society. During his years of retirement a radical change was noticed in his attitude to Hinduism. The continued study of Hindu scriptures he saw as a preparation for the gospel. He became more contemplative, spending more time in meditation and prayer. He adopted his nephew, a Saivite mystic and scholar in Saiva Siddhanta, as his in his practice of dhyana (contemplation) and yoga (spiritual discipline). It deepened his understanding of the Christian truth and the experience of the mystery of Christ. With his study, Prologue to the Gospel of St John, Appaswamy was able to relate Christ to the Saivite religion. Thus he became the pioneer in South India (as K M Banerjee was in Bengal) of Indian Interpretation of Christianity. Just before his death he wrote the book of Yogasadhana entitled, Use of Yoga in Prayer. The concept of the church, according to Appaswamy, was not a religious community totally separated from the Hindu religious community, but at the level of religious form and cultural life it was in some sense regarded as part of the Hindu community. He demonstrated this concept in his refusal to remove the kudumi at baptism, to adopt a new name or to eat meat, at a time when there was a regular crusade against Christians retaining Hindu elements. He sees the difference between the two religions only in the essence of faith.

Sadhu Sunder Singh (1889-1929) Sunder Singh is perhaps the most famous Indian Christian who ever Indian Christian Theology 289 lived, and whose influence has been under spread. Many scholars have compared and contrasted Bramabandhav and Sadhu Sunder Singh in mission literature. Both were Christian sanyasins travelling all over India; both advocated indigenous methods in the mission of the church; and both were more or less outside the organizational church. Yet both were quite different. Bramabandhav was an agitator, organizer and nationalist, who in his last years was deeply involved in politics while Sadhu Sunder Singh was primarily a religious guru and preacher, mainly concerned about the other world, the spiritual world. He had nothing to do with politics, and lived most of his life in the Himalayas far from the turbulence of the national struggle. If Brahmabandhav was a ‘Christian Vivekananda’, Sadhu Sunder Singh might be called a ‘Christian Ramakrishna’. Sunder Singh was born in 1889 at Rampur (in the present ), the youngest son of a wealthy family. Although his parents were Sikhs, they were very broad-minded and Sunder Singh was introduced to the sacred writings of other religions. By the age of seven, he knew by heart, and by the age of sixteen he had read the Granth of the Sikhs, the Quran of the Muslims and several of the Upanishads. The death of his mother whom he loved so much and that of his elder brother at the early age of fourteen were responsible for his serious religious conflict, which eventually led to his conversion to Christianity. He had come to know of Christianity from the mission school, but was strongly opposed to this foreign religion. He was anti-Christian to the core and, in fact, had thrown stones at missionary preachers, and even burned a copy of the Bible. A careful study of his own account of his conversion shows that it came as the culmination of his search for the realization of God through yoga. Through the yoga technique he obtained some kind of relief—by falling into a trance a couple of times, and becoming oblivious to the outside world for short spells.70 However, it did not satisfy his spiritual thirst. Like Ramakrishna, he wanted to obtain the realization of God and in his utter despair he decided to take his own life unless God would reveal Himself to him. Sunder Singh, in the providence of God, had reached his illumination; obtained samadhi through a vision of Christ at a very strange place, on the railway track. He immediately decided to become a Christian, though his family tried to persuade him not to do so. Like Brahmobandhav, he did not join any organized church; a month later, he took on a sanyasi saffron robe 290 Christianity in India Through the Centuries and began his wandering life, first in the Punjab and later all over North India. From 1915 he began to be known all over India and very soon, all over the world. In the early 1920s he undertook two travels to the West; there he preached to thousands. Sunder Singh, like his predecessors Keshub Chandra Sen and Swami Vivekananda, was every bit an Indian and he spoke from a profound religious experience and self-revelation of God in Christ. He produced eight short books, the first of which was At the Master’s Feet in 1922. He wrote these books in Urdu, and then, with the help of friends like A J Appaswamy and T E Riddle, worked out an English translation. On his return to India, he was sick and worn out. Tibet was closed to foreign missionaries; but Sunder Singh had a fascination for Tibet. In 1928 he went to Tibet, but had to return due to a violent haemorrhage. In September 1929 he made a new attempt after which he never returned. The cause of his death was not known, probably due to a heart attack. It is possible that his desire was fulfilled—to die as a martyr for his faith. The basis of Sunder Singh’s theology is similar to Apostle Paul’s direct experience of Jesus Christ. His Christian life goes back to a definite and clear-cut experience of the risen Christ. His spiritual life was based on constant communion with Christ in prayer. For him, the aim of prayer is union with God, union of two free personalities rather than absorption in the divine. His method of teaching was that of his Master by the use of parables; he draws his own experience from everyday life, from nature, and from the books he has read including the Upanishads. It is difficult to define his relationship with Christ. Though he was baptized as an Anglican, he later surrendered to preaching in the church. For the rest of his life he preached wherever people invited him. He was not really interested in the church as a visible, organized institution, but preferred the church to be the whole body of those who belonged to Christ. Sunder Singh, in his book Reality and Religion, tells of a philosopher who travelled around the world to find peace and rest, but everywhere found sin and sorrow, suffering and death. This made him realise that ‘this world is not meant to be our permanent and real home; but that real home for which we have such deep longing in our soul is elsewhere’.71 The philosopher referred to might very well be Sunder Singh himself. He also learned from the Upanishads as well as from his own experience that atman, the soul, is a stranger and pilgrim on earth, and a prisoner in our Indian Christian Theology 291 body. Later he gave up the advaitic Vedanta and discarded its doctrine completely. He is also strongly opposed to Sandkara’s Vedanta and attempted to disprove its logicality. The main reason that Sunder Singh gave up the advaitic philosophy was probably that he found its monism incompatible with Christianity. Instead he seems to have turned to the Svetarvastara Upanishad or to the Bhagavatgita or to both of them for a philosophical basis of his theology.72 Sunder Singh’s philosophy being so saturated with Hinduism, one would expect it to be severely criticized or even condemned by church authorities. But it was not so. His messages, writings and books were enthusiastically accepted both by theologians in the West as well as by the missionaries in India. His theology was clearly Christocentric, insofar as he preached Christ and his own experience of him. He denounced Hinduism openly and practically never used Sanskrit religious terms in his speeches. Instead, he used Johannine terminology. Moreover, he lived at a time when western theology was greatly influenced by philosophic idealism, or Platonism, and his supporters interpreted his thoughts along those lines. His contribution to Indian Christian theology is certainly much more than a superficial reading of his writings. It had a profound influence on many Indian Christians. Probably it still has.

Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) Ramabai is one of the most popular Indian Christian women missionaries, and she is considered a ‘builder’ and ‘mother’, and a missionary model person of modern India. She was a high caste Brahmin, and was born at Mulharanjee near Karkal in South Kanara State in India in April 1858. Her father was a scholar in the Sanskrit , and gave his daughter a good education in Sanskrit and taught her the Dharma Shastras. Ramabai spent most of her childhood and youth in pilgrimages with her parents, brother and sister. In 1874, her parents died, followed by her sister a few months later. Ramabai married Babu Bipin Dshan Das Madavi, a Sudra (low caste) man. By this time she had lost her faith in traditional Hinduism and had become a Brahma Samajist. Her husband died two years after their marriage, leaving her with a baby girl. After the death of her husband, she and her baby Manorama moved to Poona where she joined the Brahmo group, Pratana Samaj, and established 292 Christianity in India Through the Centuries the Arya Mahila Samaj in Bombay and other towns of for the education and emancipation of Hindu women. She wrote the book Stree Dharma Neethi, dealing with questions of morality and justice for women in Hindu society. Through some mission contacts Ramabai had come to know of Jesus Christ and Christianity. While in Bombay, she came to know Nehemiah Goreh at the Cowley Fathers Mission and had conversations with him on Brahmoism and Christianity. However, she remained a Brahmo theist. Ramabai left for England, and it was during her stay at the Community of Anglican Sisters at Wantage that she corresponded with Sashtri Goreh further about Christianity. This resulted in her conversion to Christianity and subsequent baptism on 29 September 1883. She travelled to America to enlist support for establishing a House for Brahmin child widows. On her return to Poona she started the Sharada Sadan as a secular rather than a Christian institution, which the Christian community in Poona did not appreciate. A famine in Maharashtra led her to start the Mukti mission at Kedgaon conceived as a Christian settlement. Ramabai’s great contribution was her pioneering leadership in the movement for the liberation of Indian women. Although her conversion from traditional Hinduism to Brahmoism was accepted, her conversion from Brahmoism to Christianity created a great controversy among Hindu reformers. She considered herself a non-denominational Christian, participated in the Hindu liberating movement and continued her recitals and lectures on the Hindu . This caused many Christians to question her Christian conviction, resulting in her leading a life of isolation from Christians and Hindus alike. However, in the end she attained the Pentecostal experience of the indwelling Christ. Pandita Ramabai’s main contribution to Indian theology lies in the fact that her upbringing as a Hindu and her love for freedom led her to question and turn against the relevance of the established dogmatic Christianity imported to India from the West, and her honest search for a spiritual authority for an Indian experiment defining the Christian faith in simple metaphysical forms in relation to service in society. No doubt, Nehemiah Goreh helped her see that Christ transcended Brahmo theism, but in argument with the Anglicans, she asserted that Christ transcended the of Goreh and the Community of the Sisters of Wantage. Indian Christian Theology 293

In the direct experience of the Holy Spirit, she saw the possibility of a form of Christianity which corresponded to the ethos of liberation from all established traditional forms and dogmatic formulations and of individual liberty. Although the Sisters were tolerant of her vegetarianism up to a point, they considered it pure caste prejudice to which Ramabai’s answer was, ‘I like to be called a Hindu, for I am one who also keeps all the customs of my forefathers as far as I can’. She had serious doubts about some of the Anglican doctrines. She did not see her confession of Christ as leading to the automatic acceptance of all Anglican doctrines. She contended that faith was not just blind acceptance, but involvement in an attempt at understanding, in the light of reason, Hindu tradition and Christian experience. She wrote: You have never gone through the same experience of choosing another religion for yourself, which was totally foreign to you as I have. The denominational structure within the church confused her. In a letter to the wife of Justice Ranade, she complained that to an already caste- divided Hinduism, Christianity adds denominational divisions; and the only answer to it for missionaries and preachers of all denominations is to establish ‘one united Christian church—an indigenous church to Indians’, for only then will they ‘be worthy’ to preach Christ to the Indians.

Narayan Vaman Tilak (1862-1919) Narayan V Tilak was born into a Chitpavan Brahmin family at Karazgaon in Bombay district in 1862. His mother, a pious woman of soft temperament, and his father who lived as a Sadhu in the last part of his life, influenced him. He could not continue his education for a long time, and had to find work as he had the responsibility of looking after large a family of brothers and sisters. When he left school he got married, but leaving his wife at her home he had a few years of a wandering life. He spent time on speeches and songs in different places and working as a teacher in various schools. He got interested in education and became the editor of the Vedic literature gathered by a wealthy citizen, Appa Saheb Butt. He entered the religious controversy then raging in Maharashtra, where he showed his knowledge of the Hindi Sastras and earned the name Sastri (Pandit). He then started studying the Hindu Sastras more intensely and began to be critical of Hindu orthodoxy. This was also the time when he became more 294 Christianity in India Through the Centuries interested in the political awakening in Maharashtra and started thinking of the future of India as a nation. A chance encounter with a Christian stranger who gave him a New Testament resulted in his being convinced of the Christian faith. Tilak was baptized in 1895. Tilak worked within the framework of the American Marathi Mission, and taught Hinduism and Indian languages in its theological seminary. He was ordained in 1904. At the end of the 19th century, he was one of the acknowledged leaders of the ‘romantic revival’ in Marathi literature. He became a Christian sanyasi in 1917, seeking to gather round him a group called ‘God’s Darbar’, a ‘brotherhood of the baptized and unbaptized Disciples of Christ’.73 Christian poems written by Tilak include many lyrics, which are used in congregational worship as well as for evangelistic proclamation. Narayan Vaman Tilak’s theological ideas are embodied in his poems and lyrics. Marathi poetry has a rich tradition, and it has provided many a - poet of the past such as Jnanesvari, Namadev, Eknath and Tukaram. Tilak followed that tradition in his poems on Christian themes, in which he deepened his appreciation of the rich Marathi religious tradition. The Marathi-Hindu religion’s poets and traditions greatly appealed to him; and he was a pioneer in innovative movements in Marathi poetry. He considered the Marathi saint- poets as a preparation for the Gospel. His greatest contribution to the nation was his poems of which he left a very large collection. He also gave the western- Indian Church many devotional lyrics to express their devotion to Christ. His aim was to establish a mission in Maharashtra in terms of ‘a Tukaram and St Paul blended together’, and he felt that ‘the Hindu saints form our first ’. In the process of writing, he deepened his appreciation of the rich Marathi religious tradition. He believed it appropriated Christ ‘over the bridge of Tukaram’s verse’. Tilak sings praises to God, the one Creator of heaven and earth, which reveals His glory, and he speaks of God as ‘the Home of all our trust’, as father-mother, source of life and love and as the foundation of all existence. For Tilak, Jesus Christ is God’s avatar, the love incarnate, historically once-for-all event, but existentially a daily occurrence for Christians and in the life of the church. It was the cross of Jesus Christ that made the deepest impression on Tilak. He saw and experienced a certain ecstasy in his vision of the crucified Christ; he sang, ‘Hast thou seen the Lord, Indian Christian Theology 295

Christ crucified? Hast thou seen those wounded hands? Hast thou seen His side? Hast thou ever, ever seen love that was like this? Hast thou given up thy life wholly so be His?’74 In his poems, sin and salvation by grace have an important place. He uses terms like adhi, vyadhi, bhranbi and avidya to characterize sin, and bhakti salokotta, sanipatta, sarupata and sayujata for salvation in Christ. Tilak was firmly committed to the indigenization of the Indian Church’s worship, pattern of life and mission, and certainly his lyrics and poems made a great contribution towards this end. He believed in a church larger than the institutional church of baptized Christians only; but the Durbar of God and the church of his concept was ‘a brotherhood of the baptized and unbaptized disciples of Christ’, which included adherents of other religions who acknowledged the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, as their guru and imitated his path of utmost love as manifested in the cross.

Vedanayagam S Azariah (1874-1945) V S Azariah was born in Tinnevelly on 17 August 1874 into a Nadar (Shanar) caste of (toddy) tappers as the son of a pastor of the Anglican Church. He was educated in Tinnevelly and Madras Christian College. After his education, he joined the YMCA in 1896 as a travelling secretary, when he came into contact with Sherwood Eddy, John R Mott and J H Oldham. Evangelization of the large masses of Indians by Indians was his greatest urge, and he helped to organize the Indian Missionary Society of Tinnevelly at Palayamcottah in 1903. Along with K T Paul, Kalicharan Banerjee and other Christians nationalists he founded the National Missionary Society of Indian Men with Indian money and Indian direction in 1905. He worked as the first General Secretary. Urged by the desire to build up a growing church in the midst of poor outcasts of Dornakal, Azariah was ordained priest of the Anglican Church in 1907 and consecrated as the first Indian bishop of Dornakal . He attended the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference in 1910 and later both Jerusalem (1928) and Tambaram (1938). It was at the Tambaram Conference that he made a strong plea to the church to recognize the centrality of . He took a very active role in the Tranquebar Conference in 1919, which launched the South India Church Union movement. Azariah was a veteran leader of the National Christian Council of India for a number of years. 296 Christianity in India Through the Centuries

Azariah was influenced in all his thinking and action by the nationalist movement of India under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1932 he raised his voice against the . He did not want the church to be turned into a static community protected in its ‘minority status’ by legal safeguards, but he wished the church to be without strict boundaries and open to grow through evangelism. He wrote many books in English, Tamil and Telugu, especially the structure of the church in the light of evangelistic and transforming mission. Being primarily an evangelist, Azariah’s contribution has been in the theology of evangelism within the context of an emerging Indian nationhood and of the existence of millions of Indians in the villages who never had the opportunity to hear the Gospel. His idea of theology is embodied in the booklet, India and the Christian Movement (1936), which is a revision of his earlier booklet, India and Missions (1909). Azariah called for the theological recognition that evangelistic mission and the corporate life of the church are integral to each other. He also believed that a missionary church must move towards an organic unity, overcoming the existing confessional divisions. The church should also become increasingly indigenous to the people of India among whom it witnesses to Christ. This meant the foreign missions and missionaries must become friends and not masters, helpers and not directors of the indigenous church. This was his passionate call at the Edinburgh conference in 1910. The influence of Azariah in calling for the unity of the church is seen in the Tranquebar Manifesto of 1919, which was the beginning of the negotiations of church union in South India.75

K T Paul (1876-1931) He was born on 24 March 1876 in a Tamil Christian family at Salem in South India. After graduation from the Madras Christian College, he studied law and entered government service. He became the headmaster of the Arcot Mission School at Pungannur and later, a tutor in History at the Madras Christian College. Paul’s period of history was a time when the was demanding representation of educated Indians in the government. Paul saw political nationalism as a self-awakening of India, which would transform the totality of India’s traditional life. He understood the mission of an Indian Christian Theology 297

Indian indigenous church in India. Along with other Christian leaders, he founded the National Missionary Society (NMS) at Serampore () in 1905 and became its General Secretary. He made it a nation wide evangelistic agency; many newly formed Christian ashrams and several Indian missionary societies joined it. Several times he travelled to the West and advocated the cause of national self-government and an indigenous Indian Church. In his book, British Connection with India he supported Indian nationalism, written for Christians in the West as well as in India. He served NMS for 7 years and the national YMCA for 18 years; then he devoted his time to public service. K T Paul’s main contribution to Indian theology is his interpretation of the Indian national movement as a way to understand the self-awakening of the people of India, and the subsequent response of the church. In his speech at the all-India Christian Conference in Cuttack, he discussed God in relation to human history. God’s purpose worked out in human history makes it possible for us to speak of Divine Providence in the life of nations, he believed. Therefore, the British-Indian connection and national self-awakening he saw as covering not only the political but also the whole life as falling within the framework of Divine Providence. He felt that the Indian connection is good for the British because ‘there are forces embedded in Indian personality and treasures enshrined in the Indian culture’ which are useful for Britain as well as the world at large. His idea of the reconstruction of Indian society meant synthesizing what is good and true in Indian and western cultural heritages, and felt that the caste system is full of evil; but the Hindu idea of dharma with its emphasis on the discipline of social responsibility was, for him, a valuable inheritance, and India needed to develop ‘a new dharma of citizenship’ which would synthesize the values of Hindu dharma and those of democratic individualism and equality from the West. Paul was not at all keen on Christians receiving any special communal self-protection, but instead they should get themselves involved in the mainstream of national responsibility. He opposed the ‘communal’ attitude of safeguarding the interest of the Christian community through communal electorates and other means; as it not only threatened national unity by increasing communal tensions; it is also a denial of the mission of the church to be the corporate consciousness of the nation. He believed that the church 298 Christianity in India Through the Centuries is called upon to evangelize and grow, rather than be a static minority community. He also believed in the indigenization of the church. The church should not only transcend the denominational but also the caste, ethnic and racial dimensions so as to be the true fellowship in Christ. For him, the essence of Indian nationalism is that Christ of western culture has awakened Christ of Indian culture, preparing the people for the new life and for the Gospel. He also advocated the ‘reconstruction’ of Indian society, synthesizing what is good and true in both Indian and western culture. For him, the Indian Church should be an indigenous one rooted in Indian reality, drawing membership from various communities of India, realizing fellowship in Christ, oriented to evangelism and witnessing in secular areas of Indian life.76

Surend Kuam Datta (1878-1948) Dr Surend Kuam Datta was born in 1878 in and was educated in Lahore and Edinburgh universities. He worked in Foreman Christian College, Lahore for a time and was also a member of the Senate of Punjab University from 1908 to 1914. He served in the army during World War I and later worked as the Secretary of the India-Burma-Ceylon YMCA from 1919 to 1927. He was also appointed as a member of the Lytton Committee on the education of Indian students in UK from 1921 to 1922; and was also President of the All India Conferences of Indian Christians in 1923, 1933 and 1934. He also became one of the vice- presidents of the World Committee of the YMCA. He was later appointed as Principal of the Foreman Christian College, Lahore. Datta, like K T Paul, was a nationalist and was against giving communal franchise to the Indian Christians. He pleaded for a joint electorate and for giving primary importance to the integration of the nation and not the development of communal consciousness. He considered himself not as a member of the Indian Christian community, but as an Indian who is a member of the Christian church. He considered his interest in the national movement as a Christian response. Datta was conscious of the positive influence of Christianity on Indian society. He believed that in India there is a search for truth, but Hinduism cannot give a positive answer to it. To him, Hinduism is not a sufficiently strong moral force and in Hinduism all sorts of immoralities are tolerated Indian Christian Theology 299 in the name of religion. Like a number of people of that time, Datta thought that it was a Dark Age in India. He questioned a number of the social evils, superstitions and even some of the important doctrines of Hinduism such as and transmigration of souls. Datta believed that the Hinduism of his time could not meet the moral and religious needs of India; only Christ could meet this. In his book Desire of India, he explained his stand.77 He criticized the Indian Church as having the following weaknesses: (i) lack of a spiritual awakening, (ii) lack of a missionary spirit, (iii) absence of distinctive theology, (iv) not governed by Indian Christians.78 Datta believed that caste distinctions within the church could not be tolerated. He gave various examples to show that the Indian Christians maintained caste distinctions such as (i) occupying separate seats in churches, (ii) going up at different times to receive the Holy Communion, (iii) insisting on their children being seated on different sides of the school, and (iv) refusing to eat, drink or associate with people from a different caste.79

P D Devanandan(1901-62) P D Devanandan was born in Madras; his father was an ordained minister. Devanadan studied in Trichinopoly and Hyderabad. K T Paul took him as his secretary on a trip to USA in 1924-25, stayed there for seven years and earned his doctorate in 1950 on the Concept of . On his return to India, he became a teacher of Philosophy and the History of Religions at the United Theological College, Bangalore. Later he moved to his last and perhaps the most influential post as the Director of the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society (CSIRS) till his untimely death in 1962. Devanandan’s theological works include, besides a number of articles, the following books: Our Task Today, The Gospel and Renascent Hinduism, Christian Concern in Hinduism, I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes (Sermon and Bible studies with a biographical Sketch) and the posthumously published Preparation for Dialogue. The very decision of Devanandan to study the concept of mãyã in Hinduism shows that his entry into theology was through the study of religions. He considered religion or, more accurately, faith, as a series of concentric cycles—creed, cultus, and culture (a system of doctrinal beliefs, 300 Christianity in India Through the Centuries the religious rites and ceremonies, and the worldview and lifestyle respectively). Devanandan affirmed that these resurgent or renewal movements in a religion are of four types—reform movements, renewal movements, renascent movements and revolt movements.80 He further affirmed that in modern Hinduism there is a new renascent movement taking place, and the new values of person, society and history are definitely foreign to the age-old Hinduism with its caste systems and karma sansara. In his, The Gospel and Renascent Hinduism we see the ‘Devandandan discovery’ in Christian theology. It is that the new Hinduism is the result of the Christian message and the interaction with the gospel of Jesus Christ that neo-Hinduism has imbibed. Devanandan believed that when Christians entered into dialogue with Hindu friends, they would often find that the hidden Christ was there at work in them in Hinduism before Christian contact. This is a useful point of contact for Christians with Hindus. Devanandan called this discovery a second spiritual crisis, a second conversion, equivalent to his own experience of conversion to Jesus Christ. In such a dialogue Devanandan sees three steps: (i) there is a study of the different types of Hinduism, (ii) there must be a clarification of the terminology so that the concepts used are properly understood both by Christians and Hindus, and (iii) there must be an Indian theological expression of Christian faith.81 Devanandan opposed the theological liberalism of the day and found in Kraemer and Barth a basis for making a new start. He rejected Kraemer’s negative approach to the ‘non-Christian world’. He was on the side of the authors of Rethinking Christianity and totally rejected the Barthian idea that all non-Christian religions are basically human enterprises. His attitude to the Creed is orthodox, and we find little that is especially ‘Indian’ in what he says about the Scripture, the atonement or the church. Devanandan’s approach to Hinduism is thoroughly modern and practical. As a Christian, he tried to share the rich and varied life of contemporary India, and to join his Hindu friends in a ‘dialogue’ or sharing experience. He tried to understand his Hindu contemporaries and make an analytical study of the different modern movements. After preliminary study, he entered into frank dialogue in which he not only shared with the Hindu friends, Christian insights and the whole meaning of the new creation in Christ, but also their understanding of the high values of Hindu culture. Indian Christian Theology 301

M M Thomas (1918- 95) Madathilparampil Mammen Thomas was born in 1916 in Kozencherry, Kerala and belonged to the . His father was pious and quite well-to-do, a well-known evangelist, also an enthusiastic patriot who wore khaddar. Thomas had his early education at his native place, then university education at Trivandrum. It was during the first year at college, that he came into contact with Christ in a meaningful way. After his college education he worked as a teacher at Perumpavoor Ashram School. At the same time he was actively involved in the creating of an international fellowship of students. Here he rejected both evangelism and the exclusive claims of Christianity, and held the view that ‘love is at the heart of the universe’ and in love we need not pressure one another to change their conviction. A significant event in Thomas’ life occurred in 1938 when he became the co-founder of the Youth Christian Council of Action, whose primary objective was to bring out the social implications of the gospel, to express the evils within and without the church and to act to remedy them. In his autobiography, he wrote that he wanted to have a double orientation by getting ordained into the ministry of the Mar Thoma Syrian Church and by becoming a member of the Communist Party of India. But both of them refused, the church’s ordination committee on the grounds that he was not Christ-centred enough because he did not adhere to the ethic of truth and non-violence, and the Party on the basis that his religious conviction would bring disruption to the party ranks and pave the way for reaction.82 Although he made an impossible attempt to reconcile the spirit of Christ to the Marxist-Leninist ideology, this has remained a dominant characteristic and thought throughout his life. Thomas also crystallized his views on the church: ‘I have come finally to that strong conviction that as things are now I can better serve the church by being outside the official ministry.’83 The anti-clerical attitude of Thomas has remained throughout and he has worked only with para-church organizations. In 1941 he was instrumental in defining the social creed of the Mar Thoma Student Organization, which also became the social manifesto of the church. The basis of the manifesto was the divine purpose of human brotherhood, the work of human brotherhood, the work of human 302 Christianity in India Through the Centuries personality and the equality of men in the sight of God; these elements have remained with him. During the period 1943-45, he joined the Student Christian Movement, and this association led him to Geneva as a political secretary to the World Student Christian Association, during which time he toured and organized conferences such as the Asian Leaders’ Conference at Kandy in 1948; attended the World Youth Conference at in 1947; attended the Oslo Youth Conference the same year; and eventually became an outstanding personality in the World Council of Churches (WCC), having served as the Moderator of the WCC from 1968 to1975. Thomas’ theological output is enormous. Besides hundreds of articles, he has written many books. Some of the outstanding ones include: The Acknowledged Christ of the Indian Renaissance, Man and the Universe of Faiths, Salvation and Humanization, The Christian Response to the Asian Revolution, Christian Participation in Nation Building, and the Secular Meaning of Christ, Towards a Theology of Contemporary , and Risking Christ for Christ’s sake. Thomas is not an academic theologian. Therefore, his method of approach is quite different from many others. The first step in his theology is what can be called a contextual or situational approach. Thomas starts with the world. He looks at it, analyses what is there and explores what the Christian solution can be. Since he speaks only to those issues, which are relevant, that becomes selective theology, and since the human situation is his starting point, his theology asks for pluralistic answers. Some may feel that his theology is too action-orientated. Like the Liberation theologians of Latin America, he places praxis before orthodoxy. Responsibility is the key word here. WCC calls this the action-reflection method. He finds the basis for this in the New Testament as ‘faith working through love’. Boyd labels Thomas’ theology as ‘The Way of Action’.84 One can study Thomas’ thought under the following headings: Man’s quest, Christ’s offer, the Mission of the Church and the Goal of History. Thomas starts with what is happening in the world, that is history, and as he looks at it he discovers that above all phenomena, revolutions are predominant. He also finds basically three revolutions in the world: (i) the scientific and technological; (ii) the revolt of the oppressed groups, nations, classes and races demanding social and international justice; and (iii) the Indian Christian Theology 303 break-up of the traditional integration between religion, society and the state in the secularization of human life.85 Between these revolutions, Thomas sees another revolution in the human spirit. He says that the traditional understanding of man as being created in the image of God as ‘the obligation to respond to the call in freedom is the core of his personality, the basis of his eternal status as a person’. Thomas visualizes a new spirituality which is his famous ‘Christ-centred syncretism’. He comes to the conclusion by continuing on the process of revolutions as seen in society. He says there must be a fundamental change in our understanding of spirituality, which he defines as ‘the way in which man in the freedom of self-transcendence seeks a structure of ultimate meaning and sacredness’, the goal being self-realization through involvement in history. He sees the goal being either the kingdom of God or the Marxian classless society and since religion is a most potent source for strife in the world, it does not help towards a classless society, and so there must be inter-religious dialogue, thus deriving his Christ-centred syncretism.86 Thomas affirms the universal lordship of Christ, ‘the certainty that Christ reigns as the sovereign Lord of the cosmos and will sum up all things in Christ is an essential part of the biblical faith’. He sees the whole world as being under the hidden kingship of the risen Christ and moving towards the day of His open reign at His second coming. Thomas states that the mission of the church is to participate in the revolutions of our time, and this is primarily an act of humanization and not salvation. For him, salvation or redemption is only one aspect of humanization, catering to the inward, the spiritual aspects of humanity. He comes to the conclusion that evangelism in our time equals service, and unless the church exercises the priestly ministry of the suffering servant, it has lost the salt. He goes on to give details of the task of the church in several national and international spheres —the political, the economic, the cultural, the social, the religious. Thomas being a critic of clericalism emphasizes the ministry of the church in the world, when he talks about the church. Thomas’ insights have led him to the formation of the church in Hindu and other religious systems: ‘Once we acknowledge that the Christ-centred fellowship of the church and ethics transcends the Christian religious community, are we not virtually saying that the church can take form as a Christ-centred fellowship of faith and ethics in the Hindu religious community?’ He calls 304 Christianity in India Through the Centuries for a ‘Christ-centred Hindu church’. Regarding the goal of history, Thomas takes the Marxian analogies of history as class struggle, and so the goal is, in his own words, the unity of all things, his equivalent of classless society. It seems evident that Thomas’ theology is quite unlike theology in the sense that it looks more like a political or sociological history of humanity. Thomas does not see the spiritual aspect of man isolated but as integrated with all other aspects.87

Paulos Mar Gregorios (1922- 95) Paulos Mar Gregorios (T Paul Varghese) was born on 9th August 1922 in Kerala. He had his earlier education in Kerala and then in Princeton Theological Seminary, USA, also at the Yale University and at the Serampore University, where he obtained his Doctor of Theology. A turning point in his life was when he went to Ethiopia as a teacher where he eventually became the personal advisor of Emperor Sellasie (1956-59). He had held many highly distinguished posts and positions in both secular and religious fields in India and overseas. He worked as Principal of Principal of Orthodox Theological Seminary, Kottayam. He was consecrated as Bishop in 1975 and has been the Metropolitan of the Diocese of . As an ecumenical leader he worked fruitfully in various capacities with the WCC as the Associate General Secretary, Member of the Faith and Order Commission, Central Committee Member, Executive Committee Member as well as one of its Presidents. He is well versed in several languages— English, French, German, Hindi, Tamil, Russian, Hebrew, Greek and Syriac and so on. He had written more than a dozen books. Paulos Mar Gregorios is critical of the western theology (both Catholic and Protestants) based on Augustinian authority88 and secular philosophy based on reason and objectivity. He took the eastern Christian spirituality very seriously and drew his theological insights from the Capadocian Fathers especially from Gregory of Nyssa. In addition to that of the ancient Fathers there are other formative factors in his theological development such as ecumenical theology, Indian philosophy, Marxian philosophy and his own life experience of the incomprehensive nature of God. He has a very different view from that of most of the current pluralistic theologians in matters of Asian religions. Some of his valuable theological contributions include re-interpretation Indian Christian Theology 305 of western theology critically and introduction of new ways. He tried reconstructing theology basing on eastern tradition and attempting to bring out the Patristic theology. His theology is holistic, which includes reason, adoration, meditation and even silence. Paulos Mar Gregorios gives more emphasis on eastern Christian philosophy. He is certainly considered one of the champions propagating inter-religious dialogue. In his development of theological views from the ‘theological tension’ between East and West he finds eastern theology as an answer to the 20th century questions of humanity. He is a philosophically, religiously and mystically oriented thinker. Paulos Mar Gregorios concentrates a lot on ‘Enlightenment’ both East and West and proposes eastern enlightenment as an alternative to the western/ European enlightenment. He argues that European enlightenment was a legitimate reaction against the oppression of the common people by the clergy of the then powerful church (medieval ). To him European enlightenment is based on its spiritual boasting on the autonomy of human reason and objectifies everything.89 He also argues against the enlightenment based on secular culture of the west and its dualisms which questioned tradition, ritual, symbol, mystery, religion, faith and so on and promoted concepts and individualism. In contrast, he believes that the East is better equipped than the West to guide the present world and criticizes the present concept of ‘secular’ in India as a product of European enlightenment which was unthougtfully borrowed by early Indian leaders like Nehru. He further argues that the ‘secular’ of the West is inadequate and unsuitable in the quest for Indian national identity. So, he proposes Buddhist enlightenment as a paradigm for India’s secular identity i.e., the sense of ‘spirituality-grounded secularity’. The main central part of his argument is that ‘rationalism is supreme in the West, but spiritualism is supreme in the Eastern Enlightenment, and suggests that India should ‘go back to the original Buddhist Enlightenment’. In his theology, he stresses the limitation of reason and the so-called ‘objectivity’ and also the incomprehensibility of God as an aspect of his transcendence. Paulos Mar Gregorios tries converging eastern theology and Indian philosophy and argues that there are common grounds despite the difference between eastern theology and Indian philosophy. This he finds between Gregory of Nyssa and Indian sages like Sankara and Ramanuja. 306 Christianity in India Through the Centuries

Pioneers of Indigenous Christianity A number of modern Indian historians have called the Revolt in 1857 (‘the Sepoy Mutiny’ as the western historians called it) the First War of Independence, and with some justification too. Although it was not the result of any national movement aimed at the creation of a united free India, it was a spontaneous outburst of hatred against the foreign invader, the British. It is interesting to note that it marks the beginning of the Indian nationalism, which eventually led to independence. There were among Indian Christians several examples of national upheaval after 1857, which mostly led the form of opposition to missionaries. It seems that the first of these movements started in Tinnevelly in 1858, when a group of Nadar Christians broke away from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and formed the Hindu Church of the Lord Jesus, partly due to a dispute between CMS and partly because of national feelings. They tried to indigenize the church in various ways.90 In their zeal for caste Hindu nationality, they rejected everything from their system, which appeared to them to be of European origin – infant baptism and ordained ministry and the observance of Saturday instead of Sunday as their Sabbath, for example. They cut themselves off completely from European help in money and in influence. There was also a new spirit among the Christians in Bengal, which was evolved after the revolt. Lal Behari Day, an Indian pastor and author in the 1850s, started a movement against the exclusive control of the church, and demanded that the Indian ministers should be put on an equal footing with the missionaries and have membership in the Scottish Church Council. Alexander Duff quickly smashed the movement.91 Lal Behari Day later brought forward a proposal for a National Church of Bengal comprising all Christians—Orthodox and Roman Catholics included—the only confession of which should be the Apostles’ Creed, and which should give great freedom in matters relating to ministry and liturgy.92 The missionaries dismissed this too as unacceptable. However, in 1868, a number of educated Christians formed The Bengal Christian Association for the Promotion of Christian Truth and Godliness, and the Protection of the Rights of Indian Christians93 among whom were a number of radicals. One of the leaders of the radical groups was Charan Banerjee, born in 1845 as the son of a Bengali Kali Brahmin and, around 1858, he entered Alexander Duff’s college. He became a Christian Indian Christian Theology 307 in 1869, and obtained a Bachelor of Arts as well as a Bachelor of Law. In 1870, the group started a newspaper, The Bengal Christian Herald, which was later called the Indian Christian Herald. In its very first issue they stated that by becoming Christians, they have not ceased to be Hindus, and they are Hindu Christians, as thoroughly Hindu as Christian; and while embracing Christianity, they have not discarded their nationality.94 In 1877, K C Banerjee and J G Shome organized the Bengal Christian Conference, and they criticized the missionaries for denationalizing Indian Christians and making them compound-Christians. Although the missionaries generally agreed, they doubted whether time was ripe for the Indian Church to venture into that situation. Banerjee and Shome, in the meantime, left their church in 1887 to form what they called The Calcutta Christian Samaj,95 parallel to the Brahmo-Samaj and organized in a similar way. In 1885, the National Church in Madras was formed on 12 September 1886.96 The missionary opposition coupled with the financial influence of western missionaries did not encourage the progress of the National Church. However, in 1894-95 the movement recorded some progress. A number of Indian Christians in Tinnevelly, South and Bombay broke away from the missions and desired to be connected to the National Church. In the early 20th century a group of Christians in Kolar joined the church and Palani Andi ordained a few voluntary pastors. So one notices that the Hindu church of the Lord Jesus in Tinnevelly, the Christo-Samaj in Calcutta and the National Church in Madras were the pioneers in India to create a united, indigenous church. Although they never became widespread movements, their influence on the thinking of Indian Christians was considerable, especially in relation to their attitude to Indian culture and religion. It is interesting to note that the first Indian Christians who tried to formulate an indigenous Christian theology came from Calcutta, Madras and Tinnevelly. India has produced some of the foremost spiritual leaders of the Indian renaissance, especially of Neo-Hinduism. Some of them are Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the prophet of Indian nationalism, Keshub Chander Sen and P C Mazoomdar of the Brahmo Samaj, Swami Vivekananda and Dr S Krishnan representing Neo-Advaita and Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation. The first persons who attempted an indigenous interpretation of Christ in India were neither the missionaries nor Indian 308 Christianity in India Through the Centuries

Christians, but Brahmo Samajists, especially men like Keshavan Charan Sen, and P C Mazoomdar who inspired Indian Christians as well as Brahmabandab Upadyay to take up the challenging task of indigenization of Christian theology. M M Thomas in his book, The Acknowledged Christ of the Indian Renaissance has given a full treatment of their theology.

An Early Christian Pioneer Parani Andi Parani Andi in his lecture ‘Are not Hindus Christians?’ held at the Madras Native Society in 1884 attempted to engage in a rather less scholarly, superficial manner the same view expressed by Banerjee. His lecture began by ‘proving’ that Adam and Eve are the same names as Paramesvara and , and their sons Subramanya and Ganapathi no other than Cain and Abel. He then proceeded to show the great similarities between the religious ceremonies of . He claimed that different religions like Hinduism came up after the Deluge, when mankind was split into nations, and when the priests, in India the Brahmins, preserved the original true religion. He concluded that in the original forms of Hinduism one can still find the true religion from the days of creation, and if Hindus would turn to that, they would discover that Christianity, instead of being a foreign religion, is Hinduism as it was in the beginning.

The Liberals The beginning of the 20th century saw the development of Indian Liberal Theology, which was pioneered by missionaries and derived from theological developments in the West. Although it did have its roots in traditional Indian thinking, it made an important contribution to Indian Christian theology. By and large, Liberal Theology was an attempt to present the Christian faith as meaningful and acceptable in a scientific age. So it rejected the metaphysical aspect of Christian faith and stressed the historical and ethical. The Christ of this theology was the Jesus of history and not the pre-existent Second Person of the Trinity. The crystallized Jesus’ ethical teaching in the Sermon on the Mount was the greatest ideal for man’s moral striving. Similarly, they did not understand the kingdom of God as a heavenly, other-worldly Indian Christian Theology 309 abode but as the perfect society, or the new humanity gradually built up on earth. So Liberal Theology became an offshoot of the social gospel. Liberals tried to arrange the different religions on an ascending scale, the lowest being animism, a more advanced being polytheistic religion, than a still higher the monotheistic faith of Judaism and Islam, and the highest of all the religion of Jesus. Therefore, to the Liberals, the theology of Christ was universal and His teachings were not just the fulfilment of Judaism but of all religions. These ideas were not new in India. Ram Mohan Roy differentiated between Christ and Christianity, and the concept of evolution played an important role in Kesavachandra Sen’s theology. Vivekananda and other Indian writers opposed ‘Christianity’ but adored Christ as a great personality and an ethical example. What the missionaries and Indian Christians did was to apply the idea of Liberal Theology in an attempt to persuade the Hindu accept Christ even though he rejected the Christian religion. E P Rice, an LMS missionary, read a paper at the Bangalore Missionary Conference in 1908, which is typical of the way in which missionaries distinguished between Christ and the church. His idea was that a new type of Christianity, which discarded the metaphysical doctrine and emphasized instead the character of Christ and the quality of his teaching was needed. The main contribution of the Liberals to an indigenous theology was found in the Fulfilment Theory. They tried to present Christ as the fulfilment of Hinduism, or rather, of religious aspiration found in Hinduism. Two different lines of thought were developed; the first one represented mainly by J N Farquhar in his book, The Crown of Hinduism and T E Slater in his book, The Higher Hinduism in Relation to Christianity. Other less known exponents were missionaries like William Miller (Principal, Madras Christian College) and Bernard Lucas, of Bangalore. This Liberal Theology, particularly its emphasis upon the historic Jesus, its distinction between the simple teaching of Christ and the doctrinal formulae of the church, and the way in which it applied the principle of evolution to the history of religion strongly influenced a number of Indian Christians. Some of the Indian Christian Liberals especially K C Kumarappa and S K George were influenced by Mahatma Gandhi as well and combined their liberal outlook with a Gandhian philosophy. S K George in his book, The Life and Teachings 310 Christianity in India Through the Centuries of Jesus Christ, charged the church as having fulfilled the Gospel by defying Jesus: the Jesus of the Gospels was not ‘the deified Christ (or) the Eternal Logos of Christian dogma, but a living heroic man’.97 A number of non-Christians, too, were influenced by the Miller-Lucas approach. O Kandaswamy Chetti, a member of the Vysia Beri Chetti community in Madras, was born in 1867. He was greatly influenced by William Miller and became Miller’s private secretary and for a time English tutor in the college. He was a strong advocate of social reforms. Although he came to believe in Christ as Lord and Saviour he did not want to be baptized, the reasons for which were explained in his speech to the Madras Missionary Conference in 1915 bearing the title ‘Why I am not a Christian?’ He later joined the International Fellowship, an association for the promotion of better understanding among people of different faiths. In one of his lectures in this association he spoke on the ‘Uniqueness of Christ’ which he said should not be brought out through a comparison between Christ and other religious prophets like Buddha, Sankara and so on: ‘The uniqueness of Christ consists in the fact that He was the fulfilment, culmination and climax of God’s revelation of Himself in the Jewish history and through His death and resurrection the starting point of a universal history.’98

The Bhakti Tradition in Christianity There has been a tendency both in the West and the East to consider pure monism of Sankaracharya as the typical Indian religious philosophy. There is also another tradition in Indian religion and philosophy, which equally claims to be derived from the inspired Vedas. This is the bhakti religion, which is defined as ‘faith in salvation through an eternal God and through saving fellowship with Him’.99 The teaching of this is found in Bhagavatgita, and Dr Radhakrishnan has given it a monistic interpretation.100 In the 10th century an emotional type of bhakti literature developed in which personal devotion to the God of one’s choice is the theme. The great Vaisnava reform movement in Tamil areas belongs to this period. But Ramanuja was the one who gave solid theological and philosophical content to this movement in the latter half of the 11th century. With the bhakti poets, he longs for salvation through personal fellowship with a personal God. He builds up his own system centred on God—Easwara, who has attributes. Indian Christian Theology 311

Ramanuja’s tradition was followed by a number of his followers, especially , and theistic thought radiated in all directions and leaders of the bhakti tradition arose in many parts of India—Tukaram for the Hindi speakers, and Tukaram in Maharashtra, Caitnya in Bengal, Mirabai on the borders of and . So when Christianity began to take roots in different parts of India, there was already a strong theistic tradition of bhakti. There were those who felt that the bhakti tradition had led them towards the light of Christ. Christian bhakti started during the early 11th century. A few convert Christian poets in Tamil Nadu deeply engrossed in the bhakti tradition of Hinduism from which they had come were already writing Christian lyrics which placed the offering of bhakti at the feet of Christ. H A Krishna Pilla (1827-1900), born into a high caste Vaisnavite, non-Brahmin family embraced Christianity in 1858. Rakshanya Yatrikam, an epic based on the Pilgrims Progress, and Rakshanya Manoharam, which describes lyrically the joy of salvation through Jesus Christ, are his best-known works. It was mainly men belonging to the bhakti tradition who stepped forward in self-expression of Indian Christianity. Practically all of them were converts who brought from Hinduism their lyric ability and vocabulary. The most famous of them was, perhaps, Narayan Vaman Tilak (1862-1919), a poet from Maharashtra who came from the same Chitpavan Brahman community which produced Nehemiah Goreh and Pandita Ramabai. Tilak’s poetry is much more devotional than theological. Tilak had been nurtured in the bhakti tradition and he had journeyed by the bridge of Tukaram to the feet of Christ. The contribution of Tilak and other bhakti poets represents a permanent treasury of devotion and theology for the Indian Church. These can be compared to the Latin hymns of the early church, Luther’s chorales or the hymns of Wesley of England. Tilak’s theological ideas are enshrined in his poems and lyrics. Marathi poetry has a rich tradition fostered by many saint poets of the past, and he followed this tradition in his poems on Christian themes. This certainly deepened his appreciation of the rich Marathi religious tradition. Tilak was passionately committed to the indigenization of the Indian Church’s worship and patterns of life and mission. His lyrics and poems made the greatest contribution towards it. The Durbar of God and the Christ of his conception was ‘a brotherhood of the baptized and unbaptized disciples 312 Christianity in India Through the Centuries of Christ’ and he wanted to give some historical expression to this larger church, as a universal family to be known as real friends of men and real patriots through whom the world would gain once more a mission of the Lord Jesus Christ so that the Christ who was originally Oriental may become oriental again’ and ‘Christianity may gradually lose its foreign aspect and become entirely Indian’.101

A J Appaswamy (1891- 1975) A J Appaswamy was a leading figure in the Indian church as a writer, teacher, pastor and bishop for a span of 40 years and was an Indian theologian who identified himself with the bhakti tradition more than any other scholar. He was born into the old Hindu family of Dewan Bahadur A S Appaswamy near Palayamcottah (Tamil Nadu). His father was a government revenue officer of the village, which was a hereditary post. The family was of the Vellala caste and adhered to the orthodox Saivite religious tradition of South India. He was brought up in a Christian home; his father having been converted to Christianity at a very early age from Saivism. During his school days, he came into contact with Christianity through the missionaries of the Church Missionary Society. After completing his early education in Palayamcottah, he joined the Madras Christian College where he completed his college education. In 1915, he went to America to study theology, during which time he learnt to appreciate in a way the culture and heritage of India. He also made a special study of the religions of the world: Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Then he proceeded to England and studied three years at Oxford for his doctoral studies on The Mysticism of the Fourth Gospel in Its Relation to Hindu Bhakti Literautre. He developed a keen interest in the work of Tamil devotional poets of both the Saivite and Vaisnavite traditions, and felt that Indian tradition had a close affinity to Christianity and it could be used as a lead to the fuller Indian understanding of the faith. Sadhu Sunder Singh who visited England in 1920 also influenced him resulting in his writing a book on Sunder Singh called The Sadhu. On his return to India he continued his studies on Sanskrit texts as well as Tamil. He searched for a philosophical basis of the bhakti tradition; this attracted him to the study of Ramanuja and his system resulting in the publication of two books Christianity as Bhakti Marga (1928) and What is Moksa? (1931), which are expositions of the Gospel of John with a Indian Christian Theology 313 wealth of illustration from the Tamil bhakti poets. To him, the Christian life is seen as a loving devotion to God in Christ, and the only goal of life in the or release through salvation for which Hindus and Christians long, is to be found in faith-union with Christ.102 ‘Abide in me’ as the chief end of man is a theme to which Appaswamy remained faithful in all his later writings; this seems to be the typical note of his theology. Later he became a bishop of the Church of South India.

Endnotes: 1 S Radhakrishnan, The Bhagavatgita, 1948, p 142. 2 op. cit., Boyd, p 4. 3 M M Thomas and P T Thomas, Towards an Indian Christian Theology, C S S Tiruvalla, 1998, p 1. 4 R H S Boyd. An Introduction to Indian Christian Theology, Madras, 1975, p 8. 5 A Mookenthotam, Indian Theological Tendencies, Berne etc, 1975, p 24. 6 op. cit., Mundadan, Vol 1, p 519. 7 ‘The Syrians believe that the nature of Christ is one; that the two natures were united with one another; because in Christ the two natures were mingled together—the nature of the Godhead and the nature of the manhood—like wine and water. And whereas it is said that there is one nature in Christ, it is for the of the unity of the two natures one with another. (E M Philip, The Syrian Christians of Malabar (1869) quoted in L W Brown op. cit., p 292. 8 V C Samuel, art in IJT, XI/1 192. 9 op. cit., R Boyd, p 10. 10 Second Appeal (1821), p 58. 11 op. cit., Boyd, p 25. 12 op. cit., Second Appeal, p 86. 13 op. cit., Boyd, p 25. 14 C F Andrews, The Renaissance of India, 1912, p 113. 15 op. cit., M M Thomas Towards an Indian Christian Theology, p 46. 16 ibid. 17 Lecture I, pp 388-9. 18 op. cit., Boyd, p 37. 19 The Spirit of God, 1894, p 10. 20 ibid., p 58. 21 op. cit., Boyd, p 59. 22 op. cit., MMT, The Acknowledged Christ of the Indian Renaissance, p 115. 23 op. cit., Complete Works of the Swami Vivekananda, Vol 2, p 182f. 24 ibid., p 22. 25 op. cit., MMT, p 125. 26 ibid., p 148. 27 Mahatma Gandhi, My Experiment with Truth, London, ed, 1945, p 404. 314 Christianity in India Through the Centuries

28 Quoted in Mahatma Gandhi’s Ideas, ed Anand T Hisrigorand, Bombay, 1962, p 86. 29 Harijan, March 1936. 30 M K Gandhi, The Message of Jesus Christ, Bombay, (cited as Messages) Christian Missions, Ahmedabad, 1940 (cited as Missions), p 8. 31 ibid., p 3. 32 op. cit., MM Thomas, The Acknowledged Christ… p 209. 33 ibid., MMT. 34 ibid. 35 Message, p 29. 36 My Search for Truth: in Religion in Transition, Vegilius Ferm (ed), London, 1937, p 15. 37 Eastern Religions and Western Thought, London, 1939, cited as Eastern Religions, and The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Paul A Schilpp (ed), New York (cited as Slchilpp). 38 Eastern Religions, p 21. 39 ibid., p 22, 24. 40 Eastern Religions, p 8f. 41 ibid., p 97. 42 op. cit., Schilpp, p 41. 43 op. cit., MMT. 44 op. cit., MMT & PTT, p 17. 45 Eric J Sharp, Faith Meets Faith, SCM, London, 1977. 46 Sharp, op. cit., p 360. 47 op. cit., Boyd, p 89f. 48 op. cit., MMT & PTT, p 96. 49 op. cit., MMT & PTT, p 79. 50 ibid., MMT & PTT, p 151. 51 Johanns, In the Light of the East Series ed. by Rev G Dandloy, S J, Calcutta, Taken from MMT & PTT, p 153. 52 op. cit., MMT & PTT, p 194. 53 Emmanuel Vattakuzhy: Indian Christian Sannyasa and Swami Abhishiktananda, Theological Publications in India, Bangalore, 1981. 54 ibid. 55 ibid., M M Thomas. 56 M M Thomas and P T Thomas in Towards an Indian Christian Theology, C S S Tiruvalla, 1998, p 29. 57 ibid., MMT, p 35. 58 Sophia , January 1895, p 5. 59 The Clothes of Catholic Faith; Sophia, August 1898, p 122. 60 op. cit., PTT, p 85. 61 op. cit., Boyd, p 91. 62 Johanns, To Christ through the Vedanta, 1944, Part I Introduction. 63 op. cit., MMT, p 140. 64 V Chakkarai, Cross and Indian Thoughts, p 2. 65 Chakkarai, Jesus the Avatar, 1929, p 210. 66 op. cit., Boyd, p 1687. 67 Avatar, p 117. Indian Christian Theology 315

68 ibid., Boyd, p 146. 69 Quoted by Dr A Thangaswamy, South Indian Churchman, June 1960. 70 op. cit., Appaswamy, p 19. 71 Sunder Singh, Reality and Religion, London, 1924, p 76. 72 op. cit., Kaj Baago, Pioneers of Indigenous Christianity, p 57. 73 J C Winslow, Narayana Vamana Tilak, the Christian Poet of Maharashtra, 1930, p 119. 74 op. cit., MMT, p 101. 75 ibid., p 118. 76 ibid., p 129. 77 In Desire of India, pp 108ff, he writes: ‘Hinduism is frankly agnostic regarding those great truths which alone can save and give hope to a nation, the righteousness of God and the moral order of the universe, the Fatherhood of God and His redeeming love for mankind, the eternal value of the human soul and hence of this life in which man is afforded this opportunity to develop character… He (Christ) alone has the power to make men and nations believe that these truths are eternal verities and to render it possible to build upon then in individual and corporate life.’ 78 op. cit., PTT, p136. 79 ibid. 80 op. cit., Sunand Sumitra, p 143. 81 ibid. 82 M M Thomas, Faith Seeking Understanding and Responsibility, p 1. 83 ibid. 84 Sunand Sumithra, Christian Theologies from an Indian Perspective, Theological Book Trust, p 175. 85 ibid. 86 ibid. 87 ibid. 88 He points out five distortions in the Augustinian theology and he finds in Gregory of Nyssa a valued alternative and necessary correction to the dominant western theology. 89 Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill and so on spoke of a sovereign and self-sufficient humanity. (Paulos Mar Gregorios, A Light too Bright—The Enlightenment Today: An Assessment of the Values of the European Enlightenment and a Search for New Foundations, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. 90 Joseph Mullens, A Brief Review of the Ten Years Missionary Labour in India, London, 1863, p 51ff. 91 G Macpherson, Lal Behari Day, Convert, Pastor, Professor, Edinburgh, 1900, p 70 f. 92 ibid. 93 Church Missionary Intelligence, 1871, 261. 94 Church Missionary Intelligence, 1821, 261. 95 Indian Evangelical Review January 1885, 372f. 96 A collection of papers connected with the Movement of the National Church of India, Madras, 1893, p 17. 97 S K George, The Life and Teachings of Jesus, Madras, Natesan (1942) Preface. 98 op. cit., Kaj Baago, p 84. 316 Christianity in India Through the Centuries

99 R Otto, Christianity and the Indian Religion of Grace, p 13. 100 S Radhakrishnan,The Bhagavatgita (1948). 101 Op. cit., MMT, Towards an Indian Christian Theology, p 101. 102 Op. cit., Boyd, p 119.