6 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality
‘Particularity’ versus ‘universalism’?
We have been tracing some of the outlines of the historical and the political contexts within which debates over ‘conversion’ have been situated: the missionary locations at the interstices of the colonial administrators and the natives, the emergence of certain Hinduisms as oppositional forms to Christianity, and the mobilisations of the ‘lower’ castes in a Christian direction are only a few strands in a complex tapestry structured by claims and counter-claims over the nature, significance, and motivation of conversion. Such debates often run close to the crux of the matter, namely, the centrality of Christ in mainline Christian theology which holds that the final and true end of human existence – salvation – can be attained only through a response in faith to the lordship of Jesus Christ. For many Hindu critics of this standpoint, the ‘scandal of particularity’ produces a dogmatic ‘intoleration’ while Hinduism is, in a manner of speaking, a rainbow of many faiths which can accommodate diverse practices and beliefs. This criticism was forcefully put forward by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan who, in the light of his appeals for a ‘harmony of religions’, argued that theistic religions such as Christianity, based on a dualism between the self and the supreme reality, promote aggression towards the members of other religions. In contrast to religions such as Christianity and Islam that were often associated with fanaticism and autocracy, the Hindu, according to Radhakrishnan, regards religion in terms of entering into the depths of the spirit that is beyond the bounds of time and space, and the persecution of others for their views or doctrines is largely unheard of in Hinduism (Radhakrishnan 1927: 35–8).
Radhakrishnan’s charge that Christianity, along with other Abrahamic religions, is a form of religious ‘imperialism’ appears in two broad forms in contemporary criticisms of Christian evangelisation. First, it is often claimed that Christians should accommodate themselves to the ‘Hindu’ view that there are many valid ways to the ultimate, and not seek to put forward their path as the sole avenue to the divine. The belief in a plurality of paths to the transcendent, which is often put forward as the basis of Hindu ‘toleration’, was expressed clearly by Swami Vivekananda:
We believe there is a germ of truth in all religions, and the Hindu bows down to them all; for in this world, truth is to be found not in subtraction but in addition. We would offer God a bouquet of the most beautiful flowers of all the diverse faiths.
(1972: vol. 4, 191)
A more recent presentation of this view comes from N. S. Rajaram: ‘If there is one belief above all others that defines Hinduism it is pluralism: there is no one chosen path and no one chosen people … All paths of spiritual exploration are equally valid, and there is no such thing as heresy. This is what makes Hinduism pluralistic’ (Rajaram 1998: 10–11). In the view of some Hindu critics of Christian evangelisation such as Ram Swarup, the difference between Hindu ‘pluralism’ and Christian ‘exclusivism’ translates into a dichotomous opposition between ‘Eastern’ religions which are mystical and ‘Semitic’ religions which are revelatory (Swarup 1995: 27). Swarup writes that unlike mystics who seek the truth for themselves and partly become that truth, adherents of the revelatory religions follow the self-revelation of God to a favoured intermediary. The implication is that the former are ‘universal’ in that the deepest truth lies within all individuals and can be appropriated by all, whereas the latter are ‘particularist’ for the truth that they declare is historically grounded and can be attained only through a path that admits a few who are specially chosen. This line of criticism repeats a widely articulated view that the ‘Hindu attitude’ to religion is ultimately a quest for the realisation of the timeless spirit, so that accessory elements such as symbols, creeds, or dogmas – the paraphernalia of the Abrahamic religions which, it is claimed, are devoid of any mystical interiority – are regarded as having only an instrumental value to the extent that they help the aspirant in this personal search (Radhakrishnan 1940: 316–17). Second, it is argued that because Christianity, with its foundation in a specific point in history and subsequent elaboration in a set of canonical texts, claims to monopolise religious truth, it cannot but breed forms of fanaticism and violence towards religions which do not move around its pivot. As Arun Shourie puts it, every ‘revelatory, millennialist religion’, whether it is Christianity, Islam, or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, is grounded in the notion of ‘one Truth’, revealed to ‘one Man’, enshrined in ‘one Text’, and guarded over by ‘one Agency’ (Shourie 1994: 12–13). Thus, while millenarian faiths produce collective identities centred around specific foci which lead to the demonisation of the other, Hinduism is the all-encompassing horizon that fosters the conversation of humanity, a horizon often characterised by the metaphors of many rivers merging into one ocean, many tones welded into one symphony, and many roads culminating in one summit. S. R. Goel even argues that because every individual has a right to seek ‘truth and salvation’ in their own way, Christian missionaries, who might otherwise invoke the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Constitution of India, should know that ‘they are riding roughshod over the most fundamental human right, that is, to know God directly, without the aid of officious intermediaries most of whom are no better, if not worse, than those whom they choose to evangelize’ (Goel 1989: v).
To examine these charges of ‘intoleration’ and ‘religious imperialism’ against Christian evangelisation, we have to address three basic issues that are often sidelined in these polemic contexts:
1 the classical and the modern responses of Hinduism to intra-traditional and interreligious diversity;
2 the relation between toleration and truth-claims; and
3 the significance of Christian theological ‘uniqueness’ which is the basis of the claim that the understanding of the human predicament as mired in sinfulness is somehow ‘objectively’ true for all human beings.
Christian thinking in these matters has often taken as its springboard the three-fold typology of ‘exclusivism’, ‘inclusivism’ and ‘pluralism’. In contrast to the ‘exclusivism’ of most orthodox streams of Christianity – which holds that the revelation of God in Christ is the normative yardstick with respect to which all other human conceptions of the divine reality are shown to be inadequate – and some of its ‘inclusivist’ traditions – which while maintaining the normative character of the Christian theological claims sees certain pre-figurations of Christian truth outside the Church – ‘pluralism’ is often put forward as a ‘universalist’ vision in which diverging religious conceptions and practices are regarded as valid responses to the ultimate reality. According to the pluralist hypothesis developed by John Hick and other critics of the ‘myth of Christian uniqueness’, the major world religious traditions are regarded as legitimate in their distinctive ways, for they are said to foster life-worlds associated with a turn towards the Real, engagement with socio-political realities, and so on. However, in Hick’s ‘pluralist’ view, historical religions such as Christianity and Islam are located within a neo-Kantian schema, and their truth-claims are reduced to the homogeneity of ‘mythological’ assertions, a reduction that could be severely contested by the adherents of these religions (D’Costa 2000). Be that as it may, this three-fold typology has been recently defended by Paul Hedges (2010) who develops a theology of religions around a reworked version. Our primary objective in this chapter, however, is not to develop a typology of religious diversity from either a Hindu or a Christian theological perspective. Rather, we will argue that both the Hindu and the Christian traditions have developed distinctive modes of comprehending religious diversity which are grounded in ‘particular’ metaphysical and epistemological criteria that structure their views on the nature of the divine reality, human personhood, and the human capacity to know the ultimate.
One of the most common characterisations of various forms of modern Hinduism is their toleration, which is associated with a universality, catholicity, and pluralism that can accommodate not only the various socio-religious streams indigenous to the Indian subcontinent but also the diverse religious traditions of the world. A number of influential Hindu figures from around the turn of the twentieth century began to emphasise that Hinduism is not, in fact, a ‘religion’ but a way of life that embodied the deepest levels of spirituality in which people with diverse inclinations and temperaments can participate in harmony and concord. However, statements about the ‘tolerant’ nature of Hindu thought and spirituality often do not address the key question – what is ‘toleration’? As we will note, this lacuna can be partly explained by the fact that toleration itself is a rather slippery notion bordering on others such as scepticism, relativism, indifference, and so on. Thus, in the literature on Hindu approaches to religious diversity, its claimed ‘toleration’ is usually connected to its ability to engender peaceful co-existence with other religions, but the crucial question that is usually not addressed is whether religious ‘toleration’ requires that all religions are viewed as equally correct. In fact, as we will note shortly, the Hindu life-worlds have sometimes been declared to be ‘intolerant’ of religious diversity on the grounds that they locate the ultimate truth in one specific transcendental focus, whether this is Viṣṇu, Śiva, or trans-theistic Advaita. The relation between truth-claims and toleration therefore needs to be carefully articulated. With such a conceptual clarification in mind, we shall address three main issues centred around the structure of Hindu toleration. First, we shall connect recent scholarship in political theory on the theme of toleration with some classical and contemporary Hindu approaches to the religious other. Second, we shall argue that Hindu conceptual toleration, both classical and contemporary, is underpinned by a metaphysical framework relating to the empirical world of rebirths structured by karma and liberation from it (mokṣa). In other words, Hindu toleration should not be characterised as a form of doctrinal nihilism or strong relativism in which anything goes, for it is grounded in a specific set of views relating to the nature of ultimate reality, the structure of the human response to the divine, and the possibility of moral progress across life-times. Third, we will review Paul Hacker’s influential claim that the Hindu approach to religious diversity is based on a form of ‘hierarchical inclusivism’ which, according to him, is distinct from ‘toleration’ – we will argue pace Hacker that ‘toleration’ is not opposed to such ‘inclusivism’ but, in fact, requires the latter as its conceptual underpinning.
‘Hinduism’ and the ‘harmony of religions’
A dominant theme in several representations of Hinduism by Hindu writers over the last hundred years or so is its ‘synthetic’ quality, that is, its ability to weave together the diverse religious experiences of humanity into a harmonious whole. In influential figures of neo-Hinduism such as Swami Vivekananda and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan we find the Hegelian view that ‘the truth is the whole’, and that Hinduism provides the overarching unity for the truths that people seek through their own religious traditions. They creatively grappled with the Advaitic tradition initiated by Śaṁkara (eighth century CE), which emphasised world-renunciation to realise the essential identity of the finite self with the transpersonal absolute (nirguṇa Brahman). Their neo-Advaita universalised Advaitic wisdom as realisable across cultural, national, or ethnic boundaries, and was characterised by an emphasis on social activism, and, more importantly for our purposes, a ‘catholic’ acceptance of religious diversity. Swami Vivekananda strikes this note when he urges us to gather nectar from many flowers in the manner of bees which are not restricted to only one; therefore, he expressed a wish for ‘twenty million more’ sects which would provide individuals a wider field for choice in the religious domain (1972: vol. 1, 325). In his words at the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893, Swami Vivekananda stated that he was ‘proud to belong to a religion that has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance … [and] proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth’ (1972: vol. 1, 3). In a similar vein, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan argued that the distinct religious traditions of the world are a product of an individual’s temperament, location in a finite cultural environment, and daily experiences. Therefore, Radhakrishnan emphasised that the different religions, with their specific impulses and values, should approach one another in relationships of friendship so that they are regarded as complementaries on their journey towards the Advaitic ultimate (Radhakrishnan 1927: 46).
Classical Hindu approaches to religious diversity
The toleration of Hinduism, as these remarks indicate, is often associated with its synthesising ability to harmonise the truths in multiple religious paths which are regarded as valid responses to the ultimate reality. As early as 1823, Rammohun Ray declared: ‘It is well known to the whole world, that no people on earth are more tolerant than the Hindoos, who believe all men [sic] to be equally within the reach of Divine beneficence …’ (Ghose 1885–87: vol. 1, 168). In this section and the next, however, we shall examine in greater detail the views of some historical and contemporary Hindu figures regarding intra-traditional and interreligious diversity, and indicate that the claim that the Hindu traditions hold all religious views to be ‘equally valid’ should be carefully qualified. We will note that while the religious streams of Hinduism hold that their rivals possess some measure of validity, this assessment is located in a dense network of metaphysical, ethical, and soteriological views.
While Christian-style ‘exclusivism’ has received much bad press in Hindu circles, as we noted above, certain analogues of such themes often appear in the Hindu traditions as well. For Dayananda Saraswati the Vedas are the supreme authority in the ascertainment of true religion and indeed are ‘an authority unto themselves’; therefore, they do not ‘stand in need of any other book to uphold their authority’ (Quoted in Richards 1989: 124). It may be countered that Dayananda, who wrote his Satyarth Prakash in 1875, was himself a product of the Orientalist discourse within whose spaces Hindus had begun to construct their ‘religion’ along Christianised lines in colonial India. However, ‘exclusivist’ rejections of philosophical beliefs and cultic practices are not unknown in the precolonial Hindu traditions. In taking the Vedas as the normative standard for assessing religious truth, Saraswati was echoing a view common to the classical Pūrva Mīmāṁsā and the Uttara Mīmāṁsā that the Vedas are the sole means of knowledge in matters of ultimate reality. By grounding himself on the criterion of the Vedic revelation, Kumārila Bhaṭṭa (650–700 CE) denied the status of orthodoxy not only to the Buddhists, but also to the Sāṁkhya and the Yoga systems, and the theistic Śaiva Pāśupata (Clooney 2003). Kumārila argues that the texts of the Buddhists must be rejected because they were compiled by people whose practices were opposed to Vedic injunctions and were taught to the ‘lower’ castes who were outside Vedic orthodoxy. Further, since the Buddha himself, while born as a member of the ‘higher’ kṣatriya caste, taught and received gifts, which are practices reserved for the brāhmaṇas, ‘how can we believe that true Dharma or duty would be taught by one who has transgressed his own Dharma?’ (Jha 1924: vol. 1, 167). Medhātithi too in his commentary on the Manusmṛti rules out the beliefs of the Buddhists, the Vaiṣṇava Pāñcarātras, the Śaivite Pāśupatas and others as erroneous because they are based on gifted personalities and specific deities which do not have a Vedic basis (Jha 1920: vol. 1, 173–4).
The insistence on doctrinal correctness rooted in Vedic authority is also a recurrent theme in the works of classical Vedāntic theologians such as Śaṁkara and Rāmānuja. Śaṁkara regards the Sāṁkhya school as heterodox (nāstika) for its teaching of a primordial, insentient matrix of pradhāna which is the ‘material’ substrate of the empirical world. Such traditions are to be rejected because they do not accept the Vedas as the only reliable source of knowledge regarding dharma and ultimate reality, for without such guidance human reasoning (tarka) or experience (anubhava) are insufficient for this task. Further, in his Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya (II.2.32) he argued that the Buddhist way should be totally renounced by those who seek the highest good. In turn, Śaṁkara’s views on the nature of ultimate reality were subjected to criticism by his arch-rival Rāmānuja (1017–1137) who argued that they had been:
Devised by men who are destitute of those particular qualities which cause individuals to be chosen by the Supreme Person [Viṣṇu–Nārāyaṇa] revealed in the Upanishads; whose intellects are darkened by the impression of beginningless evil; and who thus have no insight into the nature of words and sentences, into the real purport conveyed by them, and into the procedure of sound argumentation….
(Thibaut 1904: 39)
The numerous Purāṇas, some of which are written from distinctively Vaiṣṇavite and Śaivite perspectives, launch sharp invectives at their doctrinal rivals. For instance, the Viṣṇu Purāṇa includes exhortations to avoid any form of contact with the Buddhists who have transgressed the norms of Vedic life, and the Padma Purāṇa declares that the teachings of the Vaiśeṣika, Nyāya, Sāṁkhya, and Advaita Vedānta systems lead to hellish suffering (Wilson 1961: 271–3). From a Śaivite standpoint, the late eleventh-century theologian Somaśambhu turns the tables on the Vaiṣṇavites by claiming that the worshippers of Viṣṇu will be reborn in hell unless they undergo a ritual transformation to Śaivism (Nicholson 2010:3).
Another strategy historically employed by the Hindu religious traditions vis-à-vis their doctrinal rivals was to re-centre philosophical and cultic diversity around their central concept or deity. In the Bhagavad-gītā, Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna that it is he who is the ultimate recipient of the sacrifices made to the lower gods. In this vein, Vaiṣṇavas have often argued that the blessings bestowed on the worshippers of Śiva have their ultimate origin not in Śiva himself but in Viṣṇu, while Śaivites have inverted this order by claiming that Viṣṇu is, in fact, a manifestation of Śiva. A standard Vaiṣṇava way of dealing with Buddhism was to argue that Viṣṇu became ‘incarnate’ as the Buddha in order to instruct the demons not to follow the Vedic path and thereby lead them astray (Long 2013). In this way, figures in the tradition of south Indian Vaiṣṇavism have sometimes argued that the reason why there are so many gods in the world is because the supreme Lord Viṣṇu–Nārāyaṇa produced these lesser deities, so that individuals who seek lesser goals may turn to them till they reach the highest goal, the Lord himself. Piḷḷan, a twelfth-century disciple of Rāmānuja, raises the question as to why the supreme Lord Viṣṇu–Nārāyaṇa leads some individuals to take refuge in the lesser gods, and answers it in the following way:
If everyone were to get liberated, then this earth, where people who do good or evil deeds can experience the fruits of their karma, would cease to function. To ensure the continuation of the world, the omnipotent supreme Lord himself graciously brought it about that you who have done evil deeds … will, as a result of your demerit, resort to other gods and go through births and deaths.
(Carman and Narayanan 1989: 208)
In a religious culture that was not antipathetic to ‘polytheism’ – even if the different gods were regarded as manifestations of the ultimate reality – such ‘hierarchical encompassment’ was therefore the mode through which religious diversity was both affirmed at a penultimate level and negated at the ultimate level. Medieval doxographers such as Mādhava and Madhusūdana Sarasvatī too utilised these motifs to syncretise a wide range of philosophical views by assigning them different ranks in a hierarchical scheme, at whose pinnacle they placed Advaita Vedānta. For instance Mādhava placed a series of philosophical–theological systems in such a manner that the truth of each succeeding item on the list negated and corrected, that is to say ‘sublated’, the deficiencies of the former. The hedonists (Cārvākas) are defeated by the Buddhists, who are overturned by the Jains, who are refuted by the various devotional systems of Vaiṣṇavism and Śaivism, till one arrives at the penultimate stage of Yoga, whose truth is most fully realised in Advaita Vedānta (Nicholson 2010: 160).
Modern Hindu approaches to religious diversity
More recently, in the neo-Hinduism of figures such as Swami Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan, we can see an extension of this ‘hierarchical encompassment’ not only to the internal variety of the Hindu traditions but also to the external diversity of world religions, so that the latter are often regarded as being ultimately oriented – whether or not their adherents are aware of this deep truth – to the neo-Advaitic transpersonal ultimate. Radhakrishnan argues that just as the author of the Brahma-sūtra (c. 400 CE) tried to harmonise the divergent doctrines of his time, Hindus today have to perform the same harmonising (samanvaya) in the ‘present state’ of knowledge (Radhakrishnan 1960: 249). Hinduism is now unmoored from its classical connections with specific codes or injunctions (dharma) relative to an individual’s caste-location and presented as the ‘eternal religion’ (sanātana-dharma) of universalised values such as compassion, non-violence, and toleration, which sublates the ‘historical’ religions such as Christianity and Islam. That is, the ‘pluralism’ of neo-Advaita is based on the criterion of the Advaitic realisation of non-dual awareness as the conceptual lens through which human existence is to be interpreted. Thus, when Swami Vivekananda argues that the religions of the world ‘are not contradictory; they are supplementary’, it turns out that these religions are ‘supplementary’ to the higher-order truth of Advaita Vedānta, which, because it lies at the apex of human religious expressions, is able to encompass the lower truths. Thus, reading the proclamation of Christ ‘I and my Father are one’ through a specifically Advaitin lens, Swami Vivekananda argued:
To the masses who could not conceive of anything higher than a Personal God, he said, ‘Pray to your Father in heaven’. To others who could grasp a higher idea, he said, ‘I am the vine, ye are the branches’, but to his disciples to whom he revealed himself more fully, he proclaimed the highest truth, ‘I and my Father are One’.
(1972: vol. 2, 143)
Swami Vivekananda therefore believed that what separates Christ from us is not that he is God and we are not (for all are essentially identical with the transpersonal ultimate) but that he has realised his inner divinity to the highest level of perfection. All individuals have the potentiality of becoming perfect manifestations of the ‘eternal Christ’, and the historical individual called Jesus of Nazareth was only one token of this type. This is how Swami Vivekananda puts it: ‘The Atman is pure intelligence … But the intelligence we see around us is always imperfect. When intelligence is perfect, we get the Incarnation – the Christ’ (1972: vol. 6, 128).
As a disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahangsa (1836–86) who experimented with theistic, non-theistic, personal as well as transpersonal forms of mysticism as alternative approaches to the supreme reality, Swami Vivekananda too sometimes speaks of the harmony that his master achieved between the teachings of the followers of Śaṁkara, on the one hand, and of theists such as Rāmānuja on the other hand. Ramakrishna used various homely metaphors such as the water being called by different names by different people, an ascent to the top of a house by means of a ladder or a staircase or a rope, a mother who nurses her sick children with different kinds of food, and so on to emphasise the point that different religions have been produced by the divine to suit different aspirants, times, and countries (Smith 1991: 74–5). Chiding human beings for fighting over religious affiliations, Ramakrishna argued:
I see people who talk about religion constantly quarrelling with one another. Hindus, Mussalmāns, Brāhmos, Śāktas, Vaishnavas, Śaivas, all quarrelling with one another. They haven’t the intelligence to understand that He who is called Krishna is also Śiva and the Primal Śakti, and that it is He, again, who is called Jesus and Āllah.
(Swami Nikhilananda 2007: 423)
Ramakrishna does not suggest that the approach of the Advaitin ‘sage’ (jñānī) is superior to that of the theistic devotee (bhakti): the state that both may arrive at is that of the seer (vijñānī) who knows ‘that the Reality which is nirguṇa, without attributes, is also saguṇa, with attributes’ (Swami Nikhilananda 2007: 104). Swami Vivekanada, in contrast, seems to have placed Advaitic wisdom at a higher standing with respect to the devotionalism of the theistic ‘masses’, at least in passages such as these: ‘Devotion as taught by Narada, he used to preach to the masses, those who were incapable of any higher training. He used generally to teach dualism. As a rule, he never taught Advaitism. But he taught it to me. I had been a dualist before’ (1972: vol. 7, 414). For Swami Vivekananda (1972: vol. 2, 241), in fact, ‘ninety per cent’ of the world’s religious population were dualists, for the ‘ordinary man’ is unable to approach the formless ultimate without relying on concrete images.
Therefore, while the neo-Advaitin view that the different religious paths of the world are valid and that these are suitable for the psychological dispositions of different individuals might sound relativistic, they are backed by the fully realist claim that the goal of these endeavours – the transpersonal ultimate – is the timeless non-dual self which is independent of all human beliefs and linguistic constructions. Some forms of relativism claim that each conceptual scheme delimits a possible ‘world’ which is not compatible with another ‘world’ delimited by other schemes, and further that a statement such as ‘it is true that p’ should be read as elliptical for ‘it is true, within conceptual scheme C, that p’ (Baghramian 2004: 4). Radhakrishnan’s rejection of this form of strong relativism is clear in his statement that
Hinduism does not mistake tolerance for indifference. It affirms that while all revelations refer to reality, they are not equally true to it … While the lesser forms are tolerated in the interests of those who cannot suddenly transcend them, there is all through an insistence on the larger idea and purer worship. Hinduism does not believe in forcing up the pace of development.
(Radhakrishnan 1927: 49)
Therefore, his views that India ‘realized from the cloudy heights of contemplation that the spiritual landscape at the hill-top is the same, though the pathways from the valley are different’ (Radhakrishnan 1979: 98) should not be read along relativist lines. To ensure that the different religious traditions are oriented towards the same goal, Radhakrishnan needs a vantage-point above the welter of particular traditions; for him, this is the Advaitic ‘realisation’ of the identity of the finite human self with the transpersonal ultimate. A key doctrinal underpinning of neo-Advaita is the view that, underlying the empirical ego and its manifold experiences, there is an inner core that is deathless, non-created, and absolutely real, which is the unconditioned spirit completely untouched by the imperfections of the finite universe that is existentially dependent upon it. Therefore, while the text from the Ṛg Veda ‘Truth is one, the wise call it by several names’ (1.164.46) is often used as the basis for projecting Hinduism as the most universalistic of religious philosophies, a closer analysis of such claims reveals not only that the ‘underlying Truth’ and the ‘same Goal’ are understood in specifically Advaitin ways as the ineffable absolute but also that the theistic religious traditions of the world are graded as ‘inferior’ to the ‘highest’ truth of Advaita. In the famous words of Radhakrishnan, ‘The [Advaita] Vedānta is not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance’ (Radhakrishnan 1927: 23). The spiritual ‘experience’ intimated by Advaita, of the realisation of one’s non-duality with the transcendent reality, lies at the core of all the religious traditions of the world, across the phenomenal bounds of culture, nation, and history.
The hierarchical positioning of the penultimate truths of the religious traditions with respect to the higher-order truth of Advaita appears prominently also in the writings of various figures from the Ramakrishna Mission. As W. G. Neevel points out:
It has been the characteristic view of the Ramakrishna Mission that theistic religion does find and must find its consummation and final satisfaction in the trance of nirvikalpa samādhi in which all personality, human or divine, vanishes. In this light, those Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu traditions that are based upon the conception of a personal Deity are seen as being of positive but preparatory value.
(Neevel 1976: 96)
Further, while modern-day Vaiṣṇavites have not commented extensively on ‘religious pluralism’, a Vaiṣṇava reponse to the issue of religious diversity too would seem to move along ‘hierarchical inclusivist’ lines, because not only is Viṣṇu himself the ‘all-including one’ but also Vaiṣṇavism itself has evolved by assimilating various deities to the name of the one Lord. For a contemporary extension of this logic to the world religions, we may turn to Swami Prabhupada, according to whom Jesus is not only an authentic representative of God, but is, in fact, the son of Kṛṣṇa, so that Christians, even when they do not have explicit knowledge of Kṛṣṇa, are by spiritual nature eternal servants of Kṛṣṇa (Gelberg 1993: 152).
To appreciate what is at stake in these doctrinal tussles over the relative positioning between Advaita and Vaiṣṇavite doctrines, we may turn to a Christian response to Hick’s argument that all religions are authentic responses to the noumenal Real, so that while the content of these responses are provided by the phenomenal forms, regarding the noumena we can only say that it is but not what it is. The implication here is that the phenomenal personal and impersonal characteristics attributed in Christianity, Vaiṣṇavism, and Advaita Vedānta to the ultimate reality do not apply to the Real in itself (Hick 1989: 246). However, against Hick who holds that the manifold personae and impersonae of the religious traditions are views or concepts in the human consciousness, and do not quite fit the Real in itself, Christian theologians have maintained that some assertions concerning the Real, conceived of as the personal source of being and goodness, are (at least) analogically true. For instance, Jacques Dupuis argues that the Christian representation of God as Triune is not simply a persona of the ultimate reality but is the Real in itself. He adds immediately that this is not to claim that Christians possess an intimate and perspicaciously clear knowledge of the intra-divine relationships, but ‘it does mean that the mystery of the Triune God – Father, Son, Spirit – corresponds objectively to the inner reality of God, even though analogically’ (Dupuis 1997: 259). In contrast to Hick’s position, Hindu ‘pluralism’ too, which views the different religions as manifold paths oriented towards the ultimate reality, is grounded in specific views about the nature of this reality – whether the transpersonal absolute of Advaita, Viṣṇu, Śiva, and so on. Therefore, the claim, often heard in neo-Hindu circles, that every individual is at liberty to choose the way that suits her or his dispositions and temperament must not be equated with an indifference to questions of truth, for it is based on a richly articulated system of doctrinal statements. Some of these doctrinal presuppositions are clear in the presentation of the Hindu ‘pluralistic’ acceptance of different paths to the divine by V. Raghavan:
According to one’s stage of evolution and background, one can choose one’s deity and continue the worship until, rising rung by rung, one reaches the highest where all forms dissolve into the one formless. Because of this free choice of approach, Hinduism has developed a philosophy of co-existence with other religions and has always been tolerant and hospitable to other faiths like Islam and Christianity.
(Singer 1972: 83)
The ‘toleration’ implied in these comments is based on some distinct metaphysical beliefs relating to time – as repeated over several cosmological cycles – and the ultimate aim of existence – the identification with the transpersonal ultimate which can be realised over these cycles. As Chandrasekharendra Sarasvati, the spiritual head (ācārya) of Kanci in the tradition of Advaita, notes: ‘The frail mind must go from the concrete to the abstract, from the forms of God in images to God without form’ (Sarasvati 1988: 59–60). Therefore he argues that ‘[w]hen it is realised that all paths in religion lead to the same goal [the Advaitic absolute], there will be no need to change the path one is already following’ (Sarasvati 1988: 46). Thus, the saved/unsaved distinction, which is sometimes starkly elaborated within the Abrahamic faiths, is by and large non-existent in Advaitic and theistic Hinduism because of the belief that the ultimate end of life can be attained over more than one life; hence, ‘the cruciality of taking a stand here and now in this life is much less’ (Chatterjee 1984: 59–60). Consequently, the reason why Hinduism has traditionally not been a ‘missionary’ faith is because according to the doctrine of karma and rebirth, the birth of an individual as a Christian, a Hindu or a Muslim is not an accident but a consequence of prior choices in previous births; they must therefore work out their liberation within their specific religious life-worlds.
Introducing ‘toleration’
Hindu toleration, in other words, is grounded in a set of specific criteria for ordering the religious experiences of humanity, and for viewing religious diversity as encompassed by the divine. In short, it is vital not to confuse Hindu toleration with an indifference to competing truth-claims or the relativistic claim that ‘reality’ is what is relative to a particular conceptual scheme. These themes have also been emphasised by recent scholarship on the question of ‘toleration’, understood both as a personal virtue and as a political practice in the socio-political domain. One of the reasons why toleration seems to be, as a collection of essays puts it, an ‘elusive virtue’, is because the borderline between toleration and indifference is a continuously shifting one, so that while, for instance, a hundred years ago it may have been meaningful to speak of Anglicans ‘tolerating’ Roman Catholics, in present-day England people are sometimes indifferent to their neighbour’s religious affiliation (Heyd 1996). Notwithstanding the open-ended nature of toleration, some scholars have argued that it involves minimally an individual’s exercising restraint from intervening, obstructing, or regulating a view or activity that is believed to be incorrect or immoral, by appealing to second-order reasons such as the value of autonomy, respect for persons, the overall value of the worldview which has the belief or action, and so on. Thus the classic argument from John Stuart Mill for toleration speaks of its instrumental or prudential value in leading to the convergence of views in the distant future, or its enabling the flourishing of individuality with human tastes, proclivities, and capacities in innumerable directions. From a neo-Kantian standpoint, persons are regarded as autonomous beings who are worthy of respect; therefore, by respecting the autonomy of the other to pursue values that are necessary for its development, an individual is said to exercise toleration, that is, to restrain the desire to harm or harass the other. The neo-Kantian view is often connected to the vocabulary of ‘rights’ to claim that we may tolerate certain acts deliberately chosen by an individual, even if we happen to disapprove of them, if such choices do not result in an infringement of anyone’s rights (Mendus 1988).
More precisely, an individual is said to tolerate X by exercising self-restraint towards X which is otherwise believed to be deviant, by providing higher-order justifications for this restraint of power. It might seem that there is a contradiction between believing an idea to be false and accepting it, in the minimal sense of not seeking to root it out. As Susan Mendus notes:
Normally we count toleration as a virtue in individuals and a duty in societies. However, when toleration is based on moral disapproval, it implies that the thing tolerated is wrong and ought not to exist. The question which then arises is why … it should be thought good to tolerate.
(Mendus 1989: 18–19)
The air of contradiction can be removed, however, by noting that the virtue of tolerance should be located within a system of ranked priorities: though we may object to X because we believe it to be false, we may nevertheless accept it on the grounds that we have a yet greater objection to eradicating X. For instance, one might strongly dislike a child’s choice of music, and yet accept the harsh sounds that emanate from her room, because one has a stronger opposition to the imposition of one’s personal musical preferences on other people. That is, a ‘tolerant’ person does not indiscriminately accept all opinions, views, or actions as correct but is willing to accept some of the above when she believes that this acceptance can be justified in terms of her ‘higher-order’ ethical or religious ideals. The point that ‘toleration’ is not incompatible with, but indeed requires, the judgement that alternative views can be untruthful, misleading, or incorrect is also affirmed by P. Schmidt-Leukel who notes that even a ‘Christ pluralist theology of religions’ would have to practise ‘toleration’ towards views which are held to be false or deficient. He notes that there ‘are important lessons to be learnt from some features of contemporary Indian politics where at times pluralist ideas are used to justify intolerant means against the presumed absolutist religions of Islam and Christianity’ (Schmidt–Leukel 2008: 100). Or to take a more European example, when a Jew or an atheist exercises ‘toleration’ towards the proposition p, the ultimate reality is the Triune God of the Christian faith, the correct way to describe this act is not to say that it is p itself that she is tolerating (for she claims that p is false) but that she is adopting a certain stance, namely, that of accepting the Christian’s believing of p. Since Jews and Christian heretics have sometimes been prepared to undergo extreme forms of persecution for their rejection of p, it cannot be the case that the truth or the falsity of p was a matter of indifference to them (Newman 1982: 9).
The grounds of Hindu ‘toleration’
In the light of our discussion so far, we can see that the statement that the Hindu traditions are tolerant because they are based on a ‘pluralistic’ accommodation of internal and external religious diversity should not be confused with the view that they hold all conceptualisations of the divine as equally valid. Classically, Vaiśṇavites and Śaivites, as we have noted, sharply debated each other’s relative positioning of their central deities. Thus, according to Vedānta Deśīka, Nārāyaṇa alone is the ultimate reality, and not other deities such as Brahmā and Śiva who can be seen, according to him, from the Upaniṣadic texts to be finite selves who are subject to the kārmic cycle (Clooney and Nicholson 2001). In response, a standard Śaivite critique of Vaiṣṇavism is the latter’s belief in the avatāras of the Lord, for such descents are supposed to immerse the Lord in empirical defects. Even the neo-Hindu position regarding religious plurality should be properly understood as allowing the possibility of questioning the relative validity of the different religious traditions; because we are speaking here of degrees of validity, toleration must not be wrongly identified with a blanket approval of all religions, but it ‘does mean, however, that the validity of the right of the other person to his or her persuasion is accepted, even while one is debating its value’ (Sharma 1979: 67). Historically, this somewhat relaxed attitude towards the ‘salvation of the neighbour’ has been enabled by the absence in the Hindu traditions of the highly centralised forms of ecclesiastical organisations and creedal confessions which have marked some forms of Christianity, and also the persecution of dissent which has often gone along with the latter. The conglomerate of socio-cultural traditions called ‘Hinduisms’ have accepted a significant diversity of metaphysical and theological views, and because of the absence of centralised ecclesiastical structures there has been no rigorous enforcement of doctrinal orthodoxy in the Christian sense. Therefore, neo-Advaitins could ‘tolerate’ individuals who follow the way of personal theism (whether in the Abrahamic faiths or the streams of devotional Hinduism) on the grounds that they are burdened with kārmic defects which obscure their mental and spiritual horizons, and when these barriers are removed, either in this life-time or in subsequent ones, they too would be set on the path towards the unitary awareness of the transpersonal absolute. As Radhakrishnan argues, regarding a Christian who approaches a Hindu teacher for spiritual guidance, the latter ‘would not ask his Christian pupil to discard his allegiance to Christ but would tell him that his idea of Christ was not adequate, and would lead him to a knowledge of the real Christ, the incorporate Supreme’ (Radhakrishnan 1927: 46). However, Radhakrishnan was forced to admit that a significant proportion of Hindus do not orient their beliefs and practices in accordance with the scale in which non-dualistic conceptions of the ultimate reality are superior to theistic conceptions. He wrote: ‘The cultivated tolerate popular notions as inadequate signs and shadows of the incomprehensible, but the people at large believe them to be justified and authorized … In the name of toleration we have carefully protected superstitious rites and customs’ (Radhakrishnan 1927: 33). In other words, neo-Advaitic ‘toleration’ is based not on a vague relativism but on a hierarchical universalism: Advaitic truth stands at the pinnacle of the religious experiences of humanity, and by reconciling the ‘penultimate’ truths of devotional Hinduism and Christianity it carries them to their ‘ultimate’ summit of a non-dual realisation. As a recent interpreter of Advaita puts it, the personal God is worshipped by people in different forms and names; however, ‘since form, name, qualities, and relations can only belong in the realm of appearances (phenomena), Saguna Brahman (God) is only an appearance, although the highest among appearances, and not reality’ (Puligandla 2002: 89). Therefore, all religions are valid responses to the ultimate, but only because they are always-already ‘encompassed’ by Advaita Vedānta, ‘the Religion’ which is the essence of all ‘the religions’.
In short, for many Hindus, their toleration has been underpinned by the complex of views that individuals can choose their favoured deity (iṣṭadevatā), that the divine can be approached through various forms of religosity, that human existence is a project that can be fulfilled over several lifetimes, and so on. At this stage, we can review Paul Hacker’s influential view that the Hindu approach to religious diversity is a distinctively Indic form of ‘inclusivism’ which, according to him, is opposed to toleration (Halbfass 1995: 12). For Hacker, the Upaniṣadic doctrine ‘thou art that’ (tat tvam asi) represents the Vedic attempt to ground all empirical phenomena in the doctrine of reality (sat), and also provides a scriptural precedent for Hindu ‘inclusivisms’, whether that of Tulsi Das in medieval India who depicts Śiva as a disciple of Rāma or of Hindus in the British empire who postulate Advaitic non-dualism as the essence of all spirituality. Thus regarding Radhakrishnan’s view that the essence of all religions is Advaita Vedānta, Hacker writes: ‘This is the most comprehensive application which the principle of inclusivism has ever found. Incidentally, it would perhaps be more accurate to speak of inclusivism in many cases where we are inclined to see Hindu tolerance’ (Halbfass 1990: 405). However, while Hacker viewed the forms of Hindu ‘inclusivism’ that we have noted in the case of Vaiṣṇavism, Śaivism, and modern Vedānta as opposed to toleration, our discussion has shown that any toleration which is distinct from scepticism, conceptual relativism, or indifferentism is, in fact, of an ‘inclusivist’ nature. The varieties of Hindu toleration that we have surveyed are based on the selection, categorisation, and hierarchisation of the doctrinal statements of the religious others (Hatcher 1999). Further, while Hacker believed that ‘inclusivism’, which involved identifying elements of the home tradition with certain aspects of the alien traditions and placing the latter in a subordinate position, was a distinctive Indian way of thinking, such ‘hierarchical inclusivism’ appears also in European thinkers such as R. Otto, E. Troeltsch and J. N. Farquhar.
Toleration and the ‘true religion’
Our survey of some classical and modern Hindu modes of apprehending religious diversity reveals a wide range of stances from a rejection of doctrines and ways of life not grounded in Vedic revelation, to a hierarchical encompassment of the inter-traditional others by orientating them to a central deity such as Viṣṇu or Śiva, to a positing of the theistic traditions at the ‘penultimate’ level of interreligious cooperation which is to be sublated by the realisation of the ‘ultimate’ neo-Advaitic absolute. This variety should caution us not to take statements such as ‘all religions are true’ or ‘God can be attained through all paths’ as the Hindu perspective on religious diversity. Each of these modes is structured by certain metaphysical presuppositions which provide reasons why the religious others are to be tolerated. The toleration that we have noted in the Hindu theistic and the trans-theistic traditions is not based on the view that all pathways to the ultimate are correct as they stand – rather, they are hierarchically relativised by being placed at various stages of the home tradition’s path that is held to contain the final truth.
The wider point for our discussion is that the statement often made that the Hindu traditions are ‘tolerant’ because they are based on a ‘pluralistic’ accommodation of the different religions – and that, conversely, Christian evangelism is based on an ‘intolerant’ attitude towards non-Christian religions – needs to be carefully qualified. The ‘toleration’ in question is not primarily political toleration – which relates to the ‘privatisation’ of theological beliefs and the associated freedom of conscience that will be discussed in Chapter 8 – but ideational toleration, or the acceptance of views one disagrees with or believes to be incorrect. Given the absence of rigid forms of institutionalisation or creedal complexes, Hindus are relatively free from the ‘Either/Or’ compulsion, and also often display what Margaret Chatterjee (1984: 68) calls ‘multiple allegiance’ to different deities and forms of devotion. However, from a logical point of view, there is no connection between the belief that one has grasped, however fallibly, some elements of the truth revealed through a specific focal point and the belief that one must persecute those who refuse to accept it. While it is historically true that the Christian tradition has often been associated with ‘triumphalist’ proclamations of its superiority over other religions, there is no logical connection between holding that non-Christian individuals are mistaken in some ways and mistreating them. Christians may reflect on the fact of ‘epistemic peer conflict’ among individuals from different religions, and even though they could view this religious diversity as a product of human sinfulness, they may also be led to assess their own beliefs and enter into a careful study of other religions (Basinger 2002). Therefore, it is possible to combine the belief that one has attained elements of truth in one’s religious tradition with a belief in the freedom of conscience of the individual, which as a corollary implies the freedom to err. For instance, the international missionary council at Tambaram (1939: vol. 1, 188) declared that God wishes that human beings, made in the imago Dei, will seek a fellowship both with their creator and with their brothers and sisters on earth, but in the ‘mystery of freedom’ God has allowed human beings to seek other paths when they reject the way that leads to God. More recently, the document Christian Witness in a Multi-Religious World which was issued in 2011 after consultations organised by the World Council of Churches, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and the World Evangelic Alliance argued that:
While everyone has the right to invite others to an understanding of their faith, it should not be exercised by violating others’ rights and religious sensibilities. Freedom of religion enjoins upon all of us the equally non-negotiable responsibility to respect faiths other than our own, and never to denigrate, vilify or misrepresent them for the purpose of affirming the superiority of our faith.
The document urged Christians to ‘acknowledge that changing one’s religion is a decisive step that must be accompanied by sufficient time for adequate reflection and preparation, through a process ensuring full personal freedom’ (Quoted in Wingate 2013: 190–91). A theistic Hindu, say Vaiṣṇavite, parallel to these statements could be that while Śaivites, Advaitins, and Christians have erred by going astray from the true object of devotion, namely, Viṣṇu, such choices are still somehow undergirded by the Lord through the divine supervision of the kārmic order. Even neo-Advaitin ‘pluralism’, as we noted in the case of Radhakrishnan, is not boundless but is a version of hierarchical inclusivism which is based on specific criteria. The real debate is therefore not over ‘toleration’ itself but over whether it is Christianity or, say, Advaita which provides an ‘objectively’ correct account of the human condition.
The objectivity of religious claims
We shall approach the question of the ‘objectivity’ of Christian or Hindu truth-claims in the form of a dilemma: either Christianity and Advaitic, Vaiṣṇavite or Śaivite Hinduisms are tightly-knit universes, each offering its distinctive view of reality that is only intra-systematically significant for its adherents or it is possible to offer third-person evidence to establish the ‘objective’ truth of the claims of the Christian faith or a Hindu standpoint, one of which is that salvation or mokṣa respectively is the supreme good for all human beings.
The first horn of the dilemma would seem to be accepted by a standpoint called ‘particularism’ which rejects the understanding of the religions of the world in terms of species of a primordial essence or genus called ‘Religion’, and claims that talk of common elements across them is mistaken. Defending this stance, George Lindbeck argues that:
It is just as hard to think of religions as it is to think of cultures or languages as having a single generic or universal experiential essence of which particular religions – or cultures or languages – are varied manifestations or modifications. One can in this outlook no more be religious in general than one can speak language in general.
(Lindbeck 1984: 23)
Several other contemporary Christian theologians have pointed out that the soteriological goals of the religions are embedded in comprehensive patterns of living, and we should therefore not seek to extract fragments from them and somehow show that they aim at Christian salvation (DiNoia 1992: 61). They have emphasised the ‘thick’ connections between the aims of human existence that the religions project for their adherents, the doctrinal truths that they articulate about the metaphysical conceptions of reality and the patterns of life that must be emulated in order to reach the correct goal. This thesis of the integral relation between conceptions of the ‘human predicament’, the ultimate goals that are projected, and the means proposed in order that individuals may arrive there is highlighted by Alister McGrath specifically in the case of Christianity:
Christianity is the only religion to offer salvation in the Christian sense of that term. This verbally clumsy, yet theologically precise, sentence acknowledges the point, stressed by Wittgenstein, that there is a vital need to make clear associations of a term, and the particular sense in which it is being used.
(McGrath 1996: 236)
Two Hindu parallels to McGrath’s statement would be ‘Advaita Vedānta is the only soteriological system to offer mokṣa in the Advaita sense of that term – the realisation of one’s essential identity with the transpersonal ultimate’ and ‘Vaiṣṇava Vedānta is the only soteriological system to offer mokṣa in the Vaiṣṇavite sense of that term – the realisation of one’s ontological dependence on the personal Lord Viṣṇu’. Consequently statements such as ‘All those who may receive the beatific vision are individuals who have responded to Christ with faith as the Saviour’, ‘Only Buddhists can attain nirvāṇa’, and ‘A life of devotional worship of Viṣṇu is the sole path to the attainment of mokṣa for Vaiṣṇavites’ are to be viewed as analytically true, for it is only within the specific socio-religious bounds of these traditions that the specific needs, namely, for salvation, nirvāṇa, and mokṣa, can be evoked, nurtured, and perhaps fulfilled.
The ‘particularist’ view that the religions are distinctive wholes, each providing its own specific goals and ultimate aims, is articulated by S. R. Goel who claims that Hindus do not object to Christians seeking salvation through Jesus. However, ‘when the Christian missionary apparatus tries doggedly to impose these dogmas on other people that Hindu thinkers are forced to register a protest and have a close look at the Jesus of history’ (Goel 1989: ii). Goel prescribes that the religions of the world co-exist in a condition of benign indifference: ‘Let Catholics tend their own flock as they wish. All the Hindu asks is to be left alone to follow his dharma … He [sic] has never imposed himself in Rome; and he doesn’t want Rome to impose itself in Madras’ (Goel 1988: 21). The view that the religions of the world are distinct self-enclosed wholes – with specific aims and goals unique to them – would satisfy the demand for recognising the ‘alterity’ of each of these religions. Such a demand is also reflected in the rejoinder offered by a Hindu law student to a Christian priest who had suggested that Christianity might provide the true teaching he was searching for: ‘No, Father, do not think, for all that, we shall call on Christians to solve our religious problems. We have in our tradition everything necessary for it’ (Quoted in Swami Abhishiktananda 1971: 70). In other words, by accepting the first horn of the dilemma, we can argue that human beings through their distinctive histories, cultures, and languages ‘constitute’ different divinities, and since these conceptions of the divine are legitimate for their socio-cultural contexts, the question of adjudicating truth-claims across religious boundaries does not arise. Given that the different religions do not conceptualise the ‘human predicament’ in precisely the same way – the Christian understanding is ‘sin’ while the Advaitin is ‘ignorance’ – Christianity, or any other religion, would not claim that it has the solution to all human problems.
However, the view that the ‘religions’ are hermetically sealed units presents a difficult challenge to Christian theology as well as to Hindu thought, because both seek to affirm that their claims are, in a strong realist sense, ‘objectively’ true not just for their adherents but for all individuals. That is, Christian theologians have traditionally accepted the second horn of the dilemma, and argued that the Christian understanding of ‘conversion’ – as an invitation to others to respond to the gospel with faith – is based on the view that all human beings, even those who have not yet heard the gospel, are ‘objectively’ encompassed by the Christian God. Neo-Advaitins such as Radhakrishnan make a parallel move: all individuals who are currently mired in ignorance about the transpersonal ultimate, and mistakenly devoted to the personalistic images of the divine, are ‘objectively’ included within this deep reality.
The reason why Christian theologians as well as Advaitin figures have traditionally not viewed their respective truth-claims as possessing only intra-communitarian validity can be seen by considering the following pairs of statements.
If the Christian message is merely internally coherent for participants in the Christian life-world (C2), the views of religious outsiders such as Hindu Advaitins or Vaiṣṇavites cannot be regarded as false or partially correct. Similarly, the contention that questions of truth must be sharply relativised to world-views would have drastic consequences for Advaitin thinkers (A2) as well – they cannot plausibly argue that Christians who are devoted to a personal God are objectively in the wrong by being subject to a deep metaphysical, cognitive, and experiential error. The difficult questions, therefore, are these: which standpoint – Christian faith (C1) or say Advaita (A1) – is objectively true, how may we argue in its defence, and is it even possible to supply non-circular arguments to demonstrate the cognitive superiority of one of these over its rivals?
Negotiating ‘universality’
To see more clearly what is stake between these pairs of statements, let us look at a few specific instances of how Christian theologians have positioned Christian faith vis-à-vis the religious worlds of Hinduism. On the one hand, J. N. Farquhar (1913: 26) took the ‘universalist’ position that ‘the human heart and mind are the same everywhere’, and that we can identify a common set of needs and aspirations which cry out for fulfilment everywhere. The fulfilment theology of Farquhar operates with the model of the religions standing on a continuum leading to Christianity, with the implication that all human beings are seeking for salvation, though it is to be perfectly found only in Christianity. Therefore, Farquhar argued that Christianity alone could satisfy those aspirations of human beings which had found ‘imperfect’ expression in the Hindu religious schools of the Vedānta. This view was widely articulated around the beginning of the last century by missionary figures. For instance, J. G. F. Day argued that Christianity must give up its Anglican trappings and ‘go to India to learn as well as to teach … [H]er wonderful Vedic philosophy is not anti-Christian, nor non-Christian, but … it finds its completion and fulfilment in Christ Jesus our Lord … [T]he Cambridge Mission has always recognized these things’ (Quoted in Maw 1990: 251). While the view that all human beings share a ‘religious sensibility’ can promote sympathetic attitudes to religions such as Hinduism which are regarded as containing presentiments of Christian truth, the underlying claim that these religions are also marred by defects which only Christianity can perfect is often picked out by Hindu thinkers as unduly paternalistic. For instance, referring to the books in the series The Religious Quest of India, centred around the fulfilment theme, Radhakrishnan writes that ‘there is, right through, the imperialistic note that Christianity is the highest manifestation of the religious spirit …’ (Radhakrishnan 1933: 24).
On the other hand, A. G. Hogg, incidentally one of Radhakrishnan’s teachers at Madras Christian College, doubted that it was possible to draw lines of continuity that led from the fragmentary truths of Hinduism to their complete fulfilment in Christianity, for Christianity, he believed, not only replaces certain aspects of the former but also fills in much that was never present in it. He believed that Hindus would come to Christ only when they consciously feel that Christ fulfils their spiritual hunger, and it is only when this hunger is awakened in them that they can receive Christ (Hogg 1914). Human beings become conscious of a need for Christ only through their contact with the gospel, which therefore simultaneously produces it and can satisfy it. Hogg was therefore critical of those theological strands which posited Hinduism as involved in a certain ‘searching’ and projected Christianity as the ‘culmination’ of this quest, pointing out that Hinduism had its intrinsic notions of what the individual is trying to look for as well as its conceptions of the ultimate goal of this journey (Hogg 1947: 30). This criticism finds an even stronger expression in the views of Hendrik Kraemer for whom the Christian ‘Revelation’ of God in Christ is totally different from the ‘religions’. The correct way to understand the relation of the gospel to the religions such as Hinduism was not by placing them as points on a straight line in the manner of Farquhar, but by referring to Christ as the ‘proper criterion’ or axiom. Therefore, Kraemer wrote:
When we try to define the relation of the Christian message … to the spiritual world manifest in the whole range of religious experience and religious striving of [hu]mankind, we cannot account for it by an unqualified conception of “fulfilment” or continuity. We must, out of respect for the proper character of the Christian Faith and other religions, begin by pronouncing emphatically the word “discontinuity” – Totaliter aliter, with emphasis on both words.
(Kraemer 1956: 224)
Kraemer believed that a careful investigation into the distinctive individualities of the religions would demonstrate that they were worlds unto themselves, so that it was not possible to unearth a common denominator or a fundamental core. As Kraemer pointed out in connection with the Christian approach to individuals in Africa: ‘Not the consciousness of sin brings men [sic] to Christ, but the continued contact with Christ brings them to consciousness of sin’ (Kraemer 1938: 345). In other words, it is not the case that human beings universally have a deep awareness of their ‘sinfulness’ from which they seek to be liberated; rather, it is usually after their contact with the word of the Bible that they become conscious of this need.
Religious particularity and the question of exclusivity
Let us highlight the Hogg–Kraemerian standpoint by noting the following implication of its rejection of fulfilment theology. Faith in the Christian God, the conviction of sin, the operation of the Holy Spirit which produces in an individual the need for salvation and the willing response of the individual to Christ as the Saviour – and to use a Hindu example, the awareness mediated through Vedic scriptures of oneself as a devotee of the Lord Viṣṇu–Nārāyaṇa and the response of loving worship (bhakti) of the Lord – are integrally connected within the Christian and the Vaiṣṇavite life-worlds respecively. This was the point already made by a Christian missionary in India, T. E. Slater, more than a hundred years ago: ‘The view we take of sin follows, of [logical] necessity, from the view we take of God’ (Slater 1903: 194–5). Consequently, while the claims ‘Salvation is only for Christians’ and ‘mokṣa is only for Vaiṣṇavites’ could have ‘exclusivist’ connotations, they should simply be read as the ‘grammatical statements’ that it is only within a Christian perspective that the need for salvation, and only within a Vaiṣṇavite perspective that the need for mokṣa, can be experienced.
We return through a different route to the problem noted earlier about the ‘particularist’ approach to religious diversity – it seems to push Christian faith and Hindu standpoints towards the subjectivist position that these are ‘true’ only with the bounds of their socio-cultural and doxastic horizons. The conception of Christ as the criterion of the truest good of human existence and the only saviour raises the difficult question of whether the acceptance of this criterion is an arbitrary choice or whether it can be grounded on bases that will be rationally accessible to those outside the circle of Christian faith. Certain types of ‘unapologetic’ theology hold that it is not possible to offer a defence of Christianity that would be acceptable to all rational human beings; rather, conversation takes place in a specific context and we should therefore begin with the rules and the assumptions of the Christian faith (Placher 1989). Instead of subscribing to universal epistemic principles that would control the rational assent of all human beings, the Church will rather accept a statement such as ‘the Bible is the criterion of belief-worthiness’ as an epistemological rule for ordering its beliefs. For instance, David Kelsey argues that the judgement that the Bible is the authority for Christian communal and ecclesial existence should be understood not as a contingent claim but an analytic statement from within the circle of Christian faith. However, one may raise the question as to why an individual should take the Biblical texts (and not others) as authoritative in this manner. Kelsey argues that given the complexity and the diversity of the reasons for which individuals join a specific Christian community, already modeled on its distinctive understanding of ‘Church’, ‘scripture’, and its ‘authority’, it is not possible to identify the precise reasons: ‘The reasons for adopting just these writings as “authority” are as complex, unsystematic, and idiosyncratic as are the reasons individual persons have for becoming Christians’ (Kelsey 1975: 164). In other words, there are no indubitable foundations that can serve as the common ground from which to convince the sceptic or the adherent of non-Christian religions. In these strands of ‘non-foundational’ theologies we may still speak of epistemic justification, though not to establish the reasonableness of Christianity according to some putative universal norms but to highlight the structure of the Christian discourse. Therefore, we should regard the ontological, cosmological and design ‘proofs’ for the existence of God not as universally persuasive for all rational agents, but as arguments that explicate the grammar of the Christian language-game for those who have already accepted it.
However, the crucial question is whether, and to what extent, the implication that the Christian faith ‘becomes true’ only for those who are reformed by divine grace can be reconciled with the claim that the Christ-event brought about a decisive change in the world, a claim that is usually regarded as having ‘objective’ validity not simply for those who share the Christian faith-stance but also for others. Most Christian theologians would reject the claim that the Christian God exists only within the Christian conceptual scheme, and that questions about the existence of God and the nature of God’s interaction with human history cannot be meaningfully raised outside the Christian language-game. That is, Christian thinkers have usually rejected the anti-realist position which holds that religious statements are not to be read as fact-assertive claims about reality but are rather woven in a specific religious language-game of finding ways of coping with the human condition (Alston 1995). Therefore, while one may accept the Biblical narrative as foundational for Christian living, if one wishes to argue that it is more than ‘just another story’, one will have to move into the sphere of rational argumentation, which, as Gary Comstock has noted, involves ‘making a claim, explaining its grounds and warrants, and allowing it to be critically scrutinized’ (Comstock 1986: 130). If the narrative is regarded as self-referential in that it refers to its own world and its meaning is accessible only to believers, this perspectivism does free the Christian theologian from the need to ‘apologetically’ offer reasons for Christian belief, for she can now claim that the believer and the unbeliever, or the Christian and, say, the Advaitin Hindu, see the world as two different configurations. However, this Wittgenstein-inspired move implies that the Christian form of life cannot be put forward as more ‘true’ than its competitors, so that when Christians affirm to one another, ‘Christ is risen’, this statement would be unintelligible to non-believers, and it would, in fact, be impossible for the two groups to disagree about the resurrection (Tilley 1989). In contrast to these anti-realist theological views, it has often been argued that the Christ-event is constitutive of a salvation which reaches out to every point in space and time, even if many human beings remain unaware of God’s reconciling act in Christ. As O. V. Jathanna notes, ‘For Christianity salvation is not merely an epistemological issue, but has to do with reality itself. It has a strong extra nos character … The human response of faith is first made possible by what God has wrought “ob-jectively” in, through, and around Jesus Christ’ (Jathanna 1981: 448). To be sure, ‘religious truth’ must be regarded in terms not of static properties of statements but of personal relationships among human beings and their attempts to existentially appropriate and actualise in their own lives what is said to be true, but Christianity can be said to become true in this personal sense only because it is true in another, more realist sense (Hick 1974). The claim that all humanity is immersed in a state of sinfulness and is therefore in need of salvation implies that the gospel is not merely existentially meaningful for those who respond to Christ with faith but in some sense ‘objectively’ true also for those who have not yet heard of Christ.
Our aim here is not to settle the metaphysical and epistemological debates over whether a rational defence can be presented of the Christian worldview, but to point out, by examining the neo-Advaita of Radhakrishnan, that an analogous version of this question appears in Hindu thought. Radhakrishnan argued that religions that are based on the theistic conception of the absolute as a personal God who is the creator and the sustainer of the universe emerge from minds that are not perfectly enlightened. Consequently, Radhakrishnan affirmed that there is a graduated scale of interpreting the religious experiences of humanity with the theistic notions of religions such as Christianity at a lower level than the transpersonal: ‘The assumption of a personal God as the ground of being and creator of the universe is the first stage of the obscuring and restriction of the vision which immediately perceives the great illumination of Reality’ (Radhakrishnan 1967: 122). However, given that Radhakrishnan accepted the sovereignty of the self-existent ineffable spirit, which is beyond all human formulations, it has been argued that it is at least logically possible that the real is essentially personal rather than transpersonal, so that personalist conceptions of the real are, in fact, closer to the truth than transpersonalist ones. This possibility has been articulated by Michael Stoeber (1994) who argues that there is an experiential core underlying the different religious traditions of the world and this centre is structured by a ‘theo-monistic’ hierarchy. According to this hierarchy, the mystic is required to undergo, in order to become capable of the higher theistic experiences, an initial stage of ‘monistic’ experiences which involve a radical abandonment of the self in the divine. However, within the teleological framework of this hierarchy, this initial self-surrender and union with the divine at the basic level is followed by the experiences of the real as ultimately personal. Therefore, if the transpersonal ultimate could be regarded as an aspect of the personal ultimate – and not the personal as a falsifying distortion of the transpersonal, as Advaita holds – this hypothesis, according to Julius Lipner, shows ‘that there seem to be plausible alternatives to Radhakrishnan’s explanation of what passes for experience of the Real and to emphasise that at the end of the day, his own stance remains a faith-response, a sustained attempt to interpret the evidence. It is none the worse for that; rival points of view are in the same boat’ (Lipner 1989: 149).
Therefore if Radhakrishnan’s reconstruction of Advaita is seen as an attempt, in part, to ‘comprehend’ religious diversity, he too would seem to have a problem similar to the one we sketched above for Christian theology. If we accept the first horn of the dilemma, we would not be able to regard the foundational claims of Advaita Vedānta as ‘objectively’ true for all individuals. However, the attempt to establish the ‘objective’ truth of these claims will have to carefully negotiate a path through the fields of metaphysics and religious epistemology, and respond to the various criticisms that have been levelled at the project of neo-Advaita. First, it has been argued that Radhakrishnan’s claim that there is ultimately one kind of religious experience is dubious, given the differences in phenomenological content across its different types. Some experiences classified as religious have a subject/consciousness/object structure, whereas others do not seem to be experiences of anything existing independently of the experiencing subject, and all these experiences have their specific doctrinal settings. Therefore Radhakrishnan’s formulation of the ultimate end of life as the Advaitic intuitive experience of non-duality with the ultimate can be questioned on the ground of the possibility of such a ‘pure consciousness’ which he believed was trans-contextually accessible (Radhakrishnan 1933: 51). Further, while Radhakrishnan’s view that the spiritual ‘experience’ intimated by Advaita lies at the core of all the religious traditions of the world seems to be a ‘catholic’ one, it has been argued that he inflicted interpretive violence on them by focusing specifically on those strands that seem to fit into his vision of a non-dualistic realisation as the vital core of religion (Yandell 1993: 18–21). Third, though Radhakrishnan suggests that all human beings can have access, unmediated by their cultural backgrounds, to the liberating experience of Advaita, classical figures such as Śaṇkara located the possibility of liberating knowledge within a specific culture that was constituted by scripture, reliable authorities, performance of one’s caste-duties, and so on. It is this interwoven texture of teacher, tradition, and text that provides the ‘external circuitry’ for mental cultivation which is a necessary antecedent to enlightenment. Modern Advaitins sometimes invert this order of priority by suggesting that there is a pre-linguistic ‘religious experience’ which is universally accessible to all individuals and is not inflected by any cultural moorings (Forsthoefel 2002). More generally, figures of modern Hinduism have often employed criteria such as intuitive knowledge, purity of heart, morality and so on to accept or reject certain aspects of the Vedic revelation, and viewed the sacred scriptures as a record of the ‘experiments’ carried out by the ancient seers which had to be re-actualised by spiritual aspirants. Fourth, Radhakrishnan’s selective appropriation of texts in which he discerns glimmerings of Advaitic thought has also been critiqued from the neo-Kantianism of Stephen Katz, which is based on the epistemological principle that all experience is conditioned by cultural and mental patterns so that the process of differentiating patterns of experience into their various symbolic and institutional forms takes place not after but during the experience itself (King 1988). However, in spite of Katz’s intention of being faithful to the experiential data in question, it has been argued that his primary assumption that there can be no nonconceptual ‘pure experience’ denies the particularity of the truth-claims of a number of Indic traditions such as Hindu yoga and Buddhism. Without trying to settle this debate, it is important to note in this context that while Radhakrishnan in one sense does accept the Kantian dichotomy between the ineffable noumenal reality and its phenomenal manifestations, the difference between Radhakrishnan and Kant emerges when he goes on to affirm that the ‘prepossessions’ that lead certain individuals to interpret this experience through theistic categories are ultimately distortive of the nature of noumenal reality, which, unlike Kant, he held to be accessible to the enlightened seers of humanity (Radhakrishnan 1932: 169). In short, Radhakrishnan’s claim that spiritual ‘experience’ can establish the ‘objective’ truth of Advaita Vedānta – which is sometimes repeated, as we will note, in Hindu criticisms of Christianity as based on ‘blind faith’ – is grounded in some debatable hermeneutical moves and contested philosophical presuppositions.
The rational justification of religious truths
Once again, our aim is not to settle the question of the validity of Advaita’s presuppositions but to highlight certain parallels between Christian theology and neo-Advaita so far as the attempts to establish the ‘objectivity’ of their truth-claims is concerned. If reason is capable of demonstrating this ‘objectivity’ – either for Christian theism or for a Hindu standpoint such as Advaita or Śaivism – such a demonstration would, in effect, signal the end of all Hindu-Christian debates over ‘conversion’, for the truth will be perspicaciously clear to all parties to these debates. However, even if reason is incapable of supplying such ‘neutral’ evidence, it might still attempt to exhibit the internal coherence, consistency, and adequacy of the ‘particular’ horizons within which it operates. In other words, reason and ‘faith’ would be dialectically interconnected in a hermeneutic circle where reason would be empowered by revelation to discern reality truly, correctly, and adequately. Reason can work in this manner within revelational boundaries in the type of ‘committed pluralism’ that has been developed by Trevor Hart in his discussion of Karl Barth’s approach to the world religions (Hart 1997). This shares with other forms of pluralism the conviction that human beings view the world from within a multiplicity of contexts and that there are no trans-contextual criteria that can be applied to demonstrate conclusively that one of these is cognitively superior to the others. However, it also affirms that reality makes itself known more clearly or focally in one definite location than in another – whether Christianity, Advaita Vedānta, Vaiṣṇavism or Śaivism – and it invites others to accept this commitment without arguing that its truth-claims are universally demonstrable in a logically coercive manner.
Therefore, a Christian theologian who is a ‘committed pluralist’ can argue that salvation, that is, communion with the triune God, is the deepest need for all human beings, but these truth-claims cannot be rationally demonstrated to the ‘neutral’ bystander, for only those who have been graciously drawn into the sphere of the Christian revelation can experience this need and seek its fulfilment as they learn to ‘see’ the world through Biblical spectacles. Similarly, a ‘committed pluralist’ Vaiṣṇava theologian could claim that liberation, that is, communion with Viṣṇu, is the deepest need for all embodied selves, but this is not a truth that can be demonstrated by a ‘universal reason’ – rather, our rational capacities must be purified through means such as scriptural reading, contacts with fellow-devotees, journeys to pilgrimage centres, and so on before the ‘heart’ warms up to this need and seeks its fulfilment. From the former perspective, one may argue, in this line, that Christ brings forth from human beings certain aspirations which they have not yet consciously experienced. For instance, in response to the argument that missionaries should not carry the gospel to people who did not wish to hear it and believed that their own faiths were sufficient for their purposes, the missionary John Jones replied that missionaries should consider the spiritual need and not the desire of a people (Jones 1903: 219). Therefore, Christ as the ‘inner teacher’ could be seen as calling individuals, through their everyday lives, to revise self-understandings which conflict with the Christian view of the human as a creature called to loving worship of God. As Hogg put it: ‘God can make a positive revelation of himself only to him [sic] who asks questions that are pertinent … So, if God is to be the Self-revealer, He has also to be the Teacher whose constant aim it is to evoke in the human soul the right kind of seeking’ (Hogg 1939: 120).
On such an understanding of how an individual begins to indwell the Christian world, Christ’s grace removes the ‘blindness’ to the way things are, and orders the dispositions, needs, and inclinations of the heart so that she learns to assess the evidence in the proper way and apprehend that it points towards Christ himself (Wainwright 1995a). One example of how such a movement towards Christ might proceed comes from a letter that M. C. Ghose wrote to Alexander Duff where he stated that he was proceeding ‘step by step’ towards Christianity, and that with every progressive move the ‘evidence’ of Christianity was becoming more overpowering. After his baptism in 1832, he wrote: ‘And to last my heart was opposed. In spite of myself I became a Christian … Surely this must be what the Bible calls “grace”, free grace, sovereign grace, and if ever there was an election of grace, surely I am one’ (Quoted in Neill 1985: 310). From Advaitin Hindu perspectives, these statements might seem highly presumptuous, but it is crucial to note that claims about the true need of human beings are not free-floating subjectivist opinions but are enmeshed in networks of metaphysical views about the nature of reality, human personhood, and human agency. An Advaitin Hindu who argues as a ‘committed pluralist’ could claim, on the one hand, that the true need of human beings is not to worship a personal Lord, for this need is ultimately based on an delusory view of the nature of ultimate reality, and, on the other, that the need that all human beings should have, namely, to realise their non-duality with the transpersonal ultimate, can be evoked only in specific circumstances through the study with a guru of the Upaniṣads. Therefore, we may make a case for reading Radhakrishnan as a ‘committed pluralist’ in the sense that, while at one level he affirms the provisional value of the theistic religious traditions, this affirmation is rooted at the ultimate level to his commitment to Advaitic thought.
The form of ‘committed pluralism’ that we have outlined also helps us to see why the mere fact of religious diversity does not undercut the rationality of one’s religious tradition. Alvin Plantinga argues that belief in the Christian God does not need evidential inferential support from other beliefs, for Christian belief is ‘properly basic’ and therefore a Christian can be epistemically entitled to it. Plantinga is aware that many atheists and agnostics – and, we could add, Advaitin Hindus – do not count belief in the Christian God as a properly basic belief, and he seeks to respond to this objection with his notion of a ‘warranted belief’, that is, a belief produced by God-given epistemic faculties when they are functioning according to the way God had designed them to. Therefore, the crucial debate in this context is a metaphysical one, because what is regarded as ‘rational’ is ultimately connected to one’s metaphysics: ‘[T]he dispute as to whether theistic belief is rational (or warranted) can’t be settled just by attending to epistemological considerations; it is at bottom not merely an epistemological dispute, but an ontological or theological dispute’ (Plantinga 2000: 190). Consequently, a Christian, as a ‘committed pluralist’, can claim that that the views of an atheist who rejects the existence of any supra-sensible entity or a Buddhist who accepts the metaphysics of impermanence or an Advaitin Hindu who holds that the personal God is ultimately an illusion are not at epistemic par with a Christian, for she has received the instigation of the Holy Spirit who protects her from error in ontological matters. However, just as Plantinga argues that God’s grace activates a sensus divinitatis in sinful human beings and enables them to ‘perceive’ God in the world, Advaitins too, as ‘committed pluralists’, could argue that mundane reality is rooted in the transpersonal ultimate, and meditational praxis guided by scriptural teachings would train the initiate to realise the non-duality between the empirical and the transcendent.
Conversion and the objectivity of religious claims
Our discussion so far helps us to appreciate the logical structure of Hindu–Christian debates over ‘conversion’ – they are rooted ultimately in deep metaphysical controversies about the nature of human rationality, the structure of human personhood, the shape of ultimate reality and so on. Consequently, the presence of deep-seated conflicts of truth-claims across such religious systems, each with its specific background beliefs and internal resources to ‘defeat’ the claims put forward by others, cannot be whittled away if one takes these truth-claims in a realist manner. As David Fergusson has pointed out, while we may have to participate in specific liturgical contexts to learn the meaning of the Biblical statement ‘God is our refuge and strength’, its truth or falsity is ultimately dependent not on how it is used but on how things are independently of the speaker. Therefore, on this understanding of the doctrine-expressing statements of religious traditions as having cognitive content, so that they are capable of being true or false and conveying information about extra-linguistic entities, we need something like the principle of the ‘necessity of interreligious apologetics’ which has been proposed by Paul Griffiths. According to this principle, when the doctrinal statements of one religious tradition are incompatible with those of another, its representative intellectuals should engage in both negative and positive apologetics with those representing the other. That is, they should try to show, negatively, the failure of a critique of its central truth-claims about the nature of things or the value of certain courses of action, and, positively, the cognitive superiority of its set of doctrinal statements to that of other traditions (Griffiths 1991: 15). While ‘Christian philosophers’ often acknowledge, along the lines of a ‘committed pluralism’, that the truths of the Christian faith cannot be demonstrated in some logically coercive manner by starting from universally accepted self-evident axioms but are explicated within the circle of faith, they usually also emphasise that this circle is not entirely quarantined from rational scrutiny, for it is underpinned by a set of metaphysical conceptions about reality which can be assessed on the grounds of consistency, plausibility, and so on (Yandell 2007). Similarly, the Advaitic statement of foundational being (Brahman) as the sole reality can be analysed for its consistency, adequacy, and plausibility, as it was throughout medieval India by the theistic critics of Advaita.
To begin with Radhakrishnan, he argued that spiritual experience does not look towards any external standards for justification, for it is self-evidential (svasaṁvedya), self-established (svatassiddha), and self-luminous (svayam-prakāśa) (Radhakrishnan 1932: 92). The important point here is that the Advaitic unitary ‘experience’ is based on a set of metaphysical conceptions of the nature of the absolute, the human self, and the empirical world. First, there is the doctrine that underlying the empirical ego and its manifold experiences is an inner core that is deathless, timeless, and absolutely real (Radhakrishnan 1940: 83). Second, the conceptualisation of ultimate reality as formless explains why creedal formulations and systems of beliefs are provisional and have only instrumental value. Third, the process of moral perfection and growth towards the realisation of one’s non-duality with the spirit is guided by the law of karma and rebirth (Radhakrishnan 1932: 288). Radhakrishnan’s appeal to a trans-empirical ‘experience’ is therefore undergirded by a particular set of truth-claims on the basis of which he could assert that when theists such as Christians, Vaiṣṇavites, and others speak of the supreme reality as a personal Lord, these are at best interpretations from the human perspective which do not properly intimate the transpersonal ultimate.
Second, a Christian theologian can claim that the views of an Advaitin Hindu who holds that the personal God is ultimately an illusion are not at epistemic par with Christian belief, for the Hindu’s epistemic vision, clouded because of original sin, is unregenerated by grace. Once again, such a response presupposes a number of truth-claims about a nonphysical mode of reality, the existence of a personal God, the status of finite reality as imperfect and yet enveloped by a divine purpose, and so on. Though the relation between Christian theology and ‘metaphysics’ has been intensely debated over the last century, Christian theologians have often grappled with issues such as the relation between God and the world, the human knowledge of God, and so on with metaphysical categories. They have tried to develop a cumulative case for Christian theism, not because they suppose that Christian faith is based on arguments but because they seek to reflect, in light of this faith, on different areas of human experience and argue that their truest fulfilment lies in the Christian God (Hebblethwaite 1988). There is, therefore, a strong element of metaphysical thinking in these cumulative appeals, first, to human experience and the general features of the world and, second, to specific strands in human history, in order to develop a Christian worldview that will both illuminate the value of the dimensions of art, morality, consciousness, and freedom, and point out their true orientation towards the Christian God (Swinburne 1977).
Therefore the claim made by a Hindu critic that ‘Christianity is based on a theology which does not appeal to reason … Christianity, unlike Hinduism, is not founded on argument’ (Indian Bibliographic Centre 1999: 97) is somewhat misplaced, for both Christianity and (Advaitic and other forms of) Hinduism employ rich patterns of reasoning in support of their claims, though such reasons may not always be accessible to the ‘dispassionate’ observer. In the red heat of anti-missionary diatribe, provoked partly by the belligerent terms of the missionary offensive itself, Hindu figures have sometimes claimed that the rational superiority of Hindu thought can be readily demonstrated. In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, Krishna Shastri claimed that he had forty reasons for not believing in Christianity, while the missionaries had only eighteen arguments against Hinduism. A common argument that was used by Hindu critics of the missionaries was that the Hindu religion was true because of its antiquity, whereas Christianity was a recent upstart which was founded on the shifting sands of time (Young 2002: 45). However, figures who had a greater acquaintance with the Vedāntic conception of the relation between ‘reason’ and ‘faith’ knew that the traditional view on such a ‘natural theology’ was far more complex. One of the crucial issues in the Mataparīks.ā (‘Test of doctrines’) controversy, centred around a treatise of this name written by a Scotsman, John Muir (1810–82), was whether reason could act as an impartial judge by providing certain criteria which could adjudicate truth-claims across religions or whether scripture was self-validating and reason was but a tool for understanding it. Muir claimed that the true Religion had three criteria – the ability of its founder to work miracles attested by good witnesses, the greater holiness of its scriptures, and its universal reach, and proceeded to demonstrate that Christianity passed the test and that Hinduism was false. In one Hindu response to Muir, Nilakantha Goreh claimed that the existence and the nature of the divine cannot be demonstrated through reason but has to be based on scriptural, that is, Vedic authority. Indeed, in stark opposition to Muir’s view that the mark of a true religion is its conformability to reason, Goreh retorted that this is a mark of its falsity. In fact, he saw in Muir’s subordination of faith to reason an extension of the tactics of the Buddhists, materialists, and other classical adversaries of the Vedas, and denounced Christianity as a religion of delusion. As another respondent Haracandra argued in his Mataparīkṣottara: ‘If there is to be faith in a book, let it be in the Vedas since it has prevailed on earth from the time of creation onward!’ (Young 1981: 149). Therefore, the claim that ‘Genesis, the concept of sin, crucifixion, resurrection etc., do not convince any rational human being. An Indian … may be illiterate but he [sic] is not a fool’ (Indian Bibliographic Centre 1999: 75) inaccurately projects a diametrical opposition between ‘reason’ and ‘faith’ as the Christian standpoint on the relation between the two. To be sure, there are Christian ‘fideist’ standpoints which hold that the very ‘absurdity’ of the Christian message is a mark of its truth, but the bland statement of the irrationality of Christian theism ignores the long tradition of credo ut intelligam associated with figures such as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas (Zagzebski 1993). In the light of our discussion, it would be more accurate to say that the Christian and the Hindu traditions have both developed distinctive patterns of argumentation, where reason is subject to different forms of revelational control, even when reason tries to argue its case against its competitors across religious boundaries. However, given that a Christian and say an Advaitin Hindu start from different scriptural, doxastic, and existential standpoints, which are not always amenable to reasoned disputation, it remains a moot point whether either group can demonstrate in a rationally persuasive manner the coherence, plausibility, and adequacy of its own position to the other. That is, the vital philosophical–theological debate that we leave unsettled in this book is what kinds of evidential bases can be supplied for demonstrating the cognitive superiority of the Christian account over, say, the neo-Advaita one, or vice versa (Basinger 2002).
Relativism, toleration, and conversion
To sum up the discussion in this chapter, a crucial point in Hindu–Christian debates over ‘conversion’ is whether, and for what reasons, members of these traditions are willing to accept the propagation of views which they hold to be partially correct or sometimes even false. For instance, from a Christian perspective, Stephen Neill writes that for the ‘human sickness’ there is only one remedy, namely, the gospel, which is why, according to him, it must be proclaimed to the ends of the earth (Neill 1961: 17). Therefore, he argues that the missionary will attempt to enable the Hindu to see that the answers that the latter has given to the basic questions of life are unsatisfactory, and point these questions to Christ who can provide a sufficient answer to them (Neill 1961: 98). To be sure, an Advaitin would contest this theological interpretation of the existential facts, but it would be misleading to view the Christian reading of the situation as intolerant, for the deep disagreement is not over toleration but over who is, in fact, in touch with reality, and to what extent this disagreement can be settled through rational argumentation. The Christian argues that the truth of the matter is that human beings are sinful, having broken away from their personal creator, while the Advaitin holds that they are essentially rooted in the ultimate reality which is transpersonal, so that it is in fact Christians who need to be properly attuned to reality. The vital question here is why Advaitins, and in general Hindus from other standpoints, do not usually exhibit ‘evangelical’ zeal in bringing Christians around to what they think is the correct view of the nature of ultimate reality. This absence, as we have noted, should be explained in terms of the neo-Hindu view, undergirded by specific metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions, that individuals in other religious streams too, over several lifetimes, can find their way to the ultimate destination of the transpersonal absolute.
Our discussion also shows that the toleration of the Hindu traditions should not be confused with relativism, understood as the doctrine that there are no universal standards, whether in rationality, morality and so on. Now one reason for the contemporary appeal, in some circles, of the relativist claim that ethical norms or rational standards are intertwined with the metaphysical assumptions of specific world-views is because earlier generations of European observers of Indian cultural formations, whether British administrators or Christian missionaries, often ethnocentrically labelled them as irrational and immoral. From a strong relativist perspective, these norms and standards, however irrational or objectionable they may appear to be from within ‘our’ ethical systems, are rational and consistent within ‘their’ systems (Matilal 1989: 339–40). However, used as an argument for the toleration of other world-views, strong relativism is not without its own dilemmas. First, a consistent relativist would have no reasons to offer to other people who support intoleration and no justifiable grounds on which to oppose institutionalised forms of the same (Wainwright 1995b: 78–9). Second, as we noted in Chapter 3, a form of relativism that was popular among ‘liberal’ British colonialists was that each culture possesses its own localised standards of moral adjudication so that no external criticism of its practices is possible. This often led to the claim that these indigenous cultures must be left undisturbed and their moral values not subjected to any critique, and though this stance might appear as a plea for toleration, it disguised the perception of the colonialists that the natives were fundamentally different from themselves. Such relativism, B. K. Matilal (1991: 158) points out, can become a potent tool in the hands of those colonialists who might, on the basis of the argument that the other cultures must be left in their irreducible and static ‘otherness’, resist forces within the latter which might challenge the dominant voices therein.
Therefore, while the shift from ‘identity’ to ‘conceptual irreducibility’ is a welcome move to the extent that it alerts us to the excesses of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, it can, however, also lead to an alterist emphasis on pure otherness which can, in the manner of some colonial narratives, relegate what is different to the category of the exotic. Instead, Matilal (1989: 359) describes his position on the question of whether ethical norms apply across cultures as one which accepts that local norms are culture-relative and that moral conflicts often cannot be resolved entirely through rational means, but rejects the notion that any ideal of human flourishing is as good as the others. Matilal’s position is similar to the weak cultural relativism defended by Jack Donnelly in the area of human rights which steers through the extremes of ‘radical relativism’ and ‘radical universalism’: the former holds that moral norms are completely internal to each distinct cultural formation, and the latter argues that there is a clearly defined set of moral values that apply universally without cultural variations (Donnelly 1984). Therefore, even while we reject the ‘ethnocentric’ universalisms that have sometimes been proposed from specifically European visions of human nature, we should not deny the presence of some common human denominators across cross-cultural boundaries by overlooking the themes, concepts, and practices that recur across them (Hedges 2008). Rather, given that cultural norms, expectations, preferences, and modes of evaluation often play a vital role in encouraging or prohibiting the expression of specific patterns of behaviour and personality types, we should view such variations, operating within psychobiological limits, as leading to the development of a human nature which is both a ‘natural’ and a ‘cultural’ product.
The key debate between a Hindu and a Christian position, then, is how to ‘read’ these human needs, experiences, and problems underlying the dense specificities of diverse cultural patterns. While religions, acting as conceptual frameworks organise a wide variety of intellectual, emotional, and moral experiences, it would be incorrect to view them as carving out incommensurable ‘worlds’ whose inhabitants stare at one another with mutual incomprehension. An important line of argumentation against radical conceptual relativism has pointed out that disagreement becomes possible only against a background of shared truths. Our very ability to identify an ‘alien’ belief presupposes areas of wider agreement within which we can place it with reference to other true beliefs (Godlove 1984). To take just one example, a question such as ‘what is the remedy for the restlessness of the human heart?’ is one that both an Advaitin Hindu and a Roman Catholic can make sense of in terms of an anxiety that individuals across religious schemes share – even if the answers they provide are divergent in some respects. As we have noted, a Christian theologian such as Kraemer and an a neo-Advaitin such as Radhakrishnan can be regarded, in this manner, as offering two different forms of ‘committed pluralism’ which propose two interpretations of the human condition centred on two distinct ‘foundational’ pivots. They affirm the multiplicity of human perspectives that are significantly shaped by our social and historical locations but deny that they are restricted to these margins. Further, both reject the epistemic parity of all religious traditions and hold that their core beliefs have better epistemic support than those of the alternative schemes (Ward 1994). If Christian theologians such as Kraemer took Christ as the criterion for evaluating the category of ‘religion’ as mixed with human self-assertion against the creator God, Radhakrishnan’s approach was based on the criterion of Advaita Vedānta as the essence and the goal of all religious traditions. However, there is a crucial difference between their ‘committed pluralisms’ regarding the question of whether and how their specific visions of reality can be communicated to others: Radhakrishnan’s neo-Advaita claims that human beings across different socio-cultural traditions can have spiritual ‘experiences’ of non-duality with the transpersonal ultimate, whereas Kraemer believed that the judgement that Christ is the saviour is possible only from within the circle of Christian faith. This divergence leads to certain strains on their individual positions: in the case of Radhakrishnan, the major issue remains whether the concept of a ‘mystical core’ across the world religions is coherent, while Kraemer’s position has to deal with the critical question of how the Christian message can be communicated to those who are not within the horizons of Christian faith. As we shall note in the next chapter, the dialectic of the ‘particularity’ of the Christian origins and the ‘universality’ of the Christian message remains a major concern for Christian theologians.
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