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1: the Nature of the Divine

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1: the Nature of the Divine Notes 1: THE NATURE OF THE DIVINE 1. See The Crucified God (London, 1974) p. 277. Moltmann's perspective in this work is very much towards the future, to the 'Trinity in the glorification' in which the whole creation will participate in this End, and this glorification of God in the liberation of his creation is achieved by the inclusion of creation within the divine life. 2. The survey was done in 1981 and published in M. Abrams, D. Gerard and N. Timms (eds), Values and Social Change in Britain, (London, Macmillan, 1985), in association with the European Value Systems Study Group. I take the information from Kenneth Thomp­ son, 'How Religious Are The British?', in Terence Thomas (ed.) The British, Their Religious Beliefs and Practices 1800-1986 (London, Routledge, 1988) p. 231, who adds: 'Furthermore, little more than a quarter of the population accept absolute, as opposed to relative, guidelines concerning good and evil, and only a quarter accept the full range of Christian beliefs when these are taken to include both hell and the devil.' 3. There are of course a good many other passages where a threefold formula is found, from the angel's words to Mary (Luke 1:35) to Jesus's commission to his disciples: 'Go therefore to all nations and make them my disciples; baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19); others are John 20:21-2, 1 Cor. 12:4-6, 2 Cor. 13:14. Examination of the precise significance of these passages for the understanding of the Trinity in the New Testament is beyond the scope of this work. They are cited simply to establish that some doctrine of the Trinity is already found there, even if the focus is on the position of the Christian in relation to God rather than on the elaboration of the doctrine as such. 4. This type of modalist approach, which leads to an overemphasis on the unity of the Godhead by treating the three persons as interchangeable facets of a single, basically undifferentiated deity, was indeed propounded by Sabellius in the third century. 5. No other creed achieved as wide a measure of acceptance as this Nicene Creed. Even the so-called Apostles' Creed, retained by many Protestant churches, in its present form is a later formulation of the eighth century and so is a Western creed, never formally accepted by the Orthodox Church. 6. This way of looking at the world as containing good and evil as 190 Notes to pages 19-25 191 objective and cosmic forces does indeed resemble the explicit dual­ ism in the religion propounded by Zoroaster, and elements of that dualistic outlook do seem to have infiltrated Christianity at times, along with certain other ideas from the same source. 7. It is interesting to note that the early missionary, Roberto de Nobili (on whom more will be said later, especially in Chapter 8) tried first of all to use the Vedas as the basis for constructing a Christian­ oriented natural theology in the same sort of way that Thomas Aquinas had used Aristotle but later, and with more success, simply adopted Thomas's 'five ways' as a common foundation with theistic Hindus on which to erect a Christian superstructure. 8. The Mima:q1sa system (to be discussed further in Chapter 3) is a school of exegesis of the Vedas which adopts distinctive views that they are eternal and uncreated - with their inerrancy uncompro­ mised by any author, whether human or divine - and develops principles of interpretation for those texts. 9. I am indebted for the ideas expressed in this and the preceding paragraph to George Chemparathy, An Indian Rational Theology (Leiden, 1972) and especially to John Clayton, 'Religions, Reasons and Gods' (Religious Studies 23, 1987, pp. 1-17) and 'Piety and the Proofs' (Religious Studies 26, 1990, pp. 19-42). It is incidentally worth no!_ing that such philosophical debate centred around the concept of Isvara, making the same assumption as Western philosophy of religion that there is only one deity. On the other hand, the empha­ sis on the self-validating nature of these means of knowledge means that, rather than being concerned with issues of verification as in Western philosophy of religion, Hindu philosophical systems tend to be concerned with theories of error. 10. In fact a more cogent parallel to the concept of Brahman as saccid­ tinanda in Western thought is to be found in neo-Platonism as found in the writings of Plotinus in the third century. Here the divine existence took a threefold form: the One which was beyond being and naming, the voil<; or Mind, and the Soul or World-Soul, each of the latter two forms (mr6aTcuru<;) drawing its power from the one above. There are also traces of such ideas in Pythagoreanism. In both instances there is at least a possibility of some influence from Indian thought. 11. The Bhagavadgftti is one of the most popular of Hindu religious texts, though not strictly scriptural, since it is incorporated within the great epic, the Mahtibhtirata, as the sermon preached by Kr~r:ta to Arjuna just before the great battle; further discussion will be found at the beginning of Chapter 2. 2: DIVINE INTERACTION WITH MANKIND 1. The term dharma is not in fact precisely equivalent to 'religion', for which Hinduism has no specific term, since it does not separate off religious activity from the rest of life in the same way that the 192 Notes to pages 27-45 Romans (from whom the term religion comes) once did or the modern West again does; if necessary, contemporary Hindus will designate their own religious and social complex as saniitana dharma, 'the eternal tradition'. 2. This point has been brought out by Madeleine Biardeau in 'Etudes d~ mythologie hindoue, I. Cosmogonies purat:tiques' Bulletin de /'Ecole Fran~aise d'Extreme Orient 63 (1978) pp. 87-238. 3. An account of the rituals performed in connection with images will be given in Chapter 4. 4. In particular Psalm 22 is used, but also Psalms 41 and 69 and Zechariah 9-13. 5. Earlier, Origen (c.185-254, also teaching at Alexandria), though recognising that the Son had been generated in and from eternity, had concluded from the Son's submission to the Father in his earthly life and work that submission was basic to his personhood and thus that the Son was eternally subordinate to the Father, arguing that whatever attributes were predicated of the Father must be predicated of the Son, as image of the Father, in a lesser and relative manner. 6. See in particular his East and West in Religion, London, 1933, pp. 59ff. 7. This is not quite exclusively an Indian view. Aldous Huxley (in The Perennial Philosophy, 1946, pp. 60ff.) criticises the error of Christian­ ity, as he terms it, in believing in only one avatiira, on the grounds that it is too pre-occupied with history and so with the uniqueness of the Incarnation. 8. Some account of de Nobili's missionary activity in South India is included below in Chapter 8. 9. In the verse Kr!?t:ta declares: 'Though myself unborn, with an un­ changing self, the lord of creatures, I establish myself in my own nature and come into being through my own creativity (maya)'. The ambiguity lies in the term miiyii which can also be translated as 'magical power, illusion' and would be so understood in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, whose greatest figure Sankara glosses this verse thus: 'I seem to be embodied and to be born, through my own miiyii but not in reality, only conventionally.' 10. See in particular his God and the Universe of Faiths, London, 1973. An Advaitin might still reasonably object to the theistic bias of his formulation. A thoughtful critique of Hick's views will be found in J. J. Lipner, 'Does Copernicus Help? Reflections for a Christian Theology of Religions', Religious Studies 13, 1977, pp. 243-58. 11. Before we too readily castigate the psychology underlying such notions about demons and other powers, we should perhaps reflect that modern concepts such as the id and superego of Freudian psychology are no more amenable to ordinary sense perception; they are essentially constructs, the value of which is to provide a model to apply in understanding the world around us and their relationship to reality is not susceptible to scientific testing. Notes to pages 50-78 193 3: AUTHORITY AND MEDIATION 1. On the phenomenon of fundamentalism as a reaction to modernis­ ation and secularism I am indebted to E. J. Sharpe, Understanding Religion, London 1983, pp. 120-2, and to Caplan's own contribution to Lionel Caplan, ed., Studies in Religious Fundamentalism, London 1987. 2. Nonetheless, with the decided pragmatism that the Mimaip.sa system also reveals, it accepts the principle that when two com­ mands contradict each other there is an option to follow either. The standard example concerns the kinds of grain used in a rite; some texts enjoin rice and others barley (cf. Sahara on Mfmtirrzstisfltra 12.3.15), and so Mimaip.sa allowed the use of either rice or barley. However, the system developed the theory of the eight faults of an option and avoided options whenever possible. 3. As Radhika Herzberger has neatly put it (Bhartrhari and the Buddhists, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1986, p. xix): 'Not to make the founder appear incompetent (Uddyotakara's oft repeated phrase: akusala~ sfltraktira~ sytit) becomes a guiding principle of many a philosophical commentary of the period.' 4.
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