The many meanings of ‘mission’
From a Christian theological point of view, the last five decades or so have been marked by intense reflections, both in India and elsewhere, on the theme of ‘inculturating’ the Christian message into indigenous contexts, and this rethinking has also been associated with re-conceptualisations of the very significance of ‘mission’. It is precisely over the point whether the Christian attitudes to the Hindu traditions have undergone a genuine change or whether they have, as it were, merely donned sheep’s clothing to disguise their vulpine nature that controversy continues to rage. For instance, concerning the early ‘indigenising’ endeavours of the seventeenth-century Italian Jesuit Robert de Nobili, S. R. Goel writes: ‘A truly ethical criterion would dismiss him as a plain and simple crook’ (Goel 1989: 14). Goel argues that the Christian belief that Jesus Christ is the only saviour of humanity has remained unchanged while the Christian churches have developed various mission strategies in their approach to Hinduism, such as the theology of fulfilment and the theology of indigenisation which claim that elements of Hindu life can indicate, even if partially, the way to Christian truth (Goel 1989: 327). For Hindu critics, these moves are, in effect, strategic devices through which the churches seek to present their message through the more palatable idioms of inclusivism and indigenisation, while their true end, that of converting Hindus, remains unchanged. As Ram Swarup notes, regarding changes in missiological paradigms:
In good old days, not long ago, Christianity had no qualms in sending to hell the best of the people belonging to other religions and cultures … But now things have changed, the faith of the faithful has changed and hearing such things is jarring to many ears. Therefore the Church has to present its dogmas in a less offensive way.
(Swarup 1995: 53)
However, a Christian assessment of the transformations that the Christian traditions, for instance, Roman Catholicism, have undergone in the last half a century or so with respect to their attitudes to other religions, often points in a different direction. Gavin D’Costa acknowledges that the positive appreciation of Hinduism that Christianity has developed has been possible only recently and still remains a matter of intense debate. However, he adds that ‘[n]one of the above mitigates either the sense that this is an authentic development of the tradition, nor does it mitigate the significance of mission …’ (D’Costa 2000: 134).
We have here a classic example of an insider–outsider debate over the significance of a transformation undergone by a tradition: both an ‘external’ Hindu critic and an ‘internal’ Christian theologian do not regard the transformation as a radical departure, but draw opposed conclusions from this observation. For the former, Christianity remains, as ever, a predatory ‘imperialism’ that has now donned saffron robes to undermine Hinduism from within, whereas for the latter this indigenisation is a consequence of a deeper understanding of the spiritual riches of other traditions which are encompassed by God’s salvific will. According to the latter, therefore, these changes are part of the Church’s ongoing attempts to develop newer visions of the relation of the gospel to the world. For instance, a ‘background paper’ produced by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India in 1994 noted the need for a new ecclesiology suited to the complex Indian contexts of religious diversity, socio-economic exploitation, and poverty, and stated: ‘This search is a sign of the growing maturity of the church and its determination to become a truly local Church’ (Narchison 1996: 216). From an ‘external’ perspective, however, the newly developed sensitivity to and appreciation for other religious streams do not sound sincere enough, and the Church’s involvement in contextualisation, interculturation, and dialogue seem to be desperate moves on its part for survival. Indeed referring to the conciliar document Nostra Aetate from Vatican II Goel notes with heavy irony that it has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to realise that there is indeed in Hinduism and Buddhism a ‘ray of that truth that enlightens all men’ (Goel 1989: iv). An individual who carried out such indigenisation, Bede Griffiths (1906–93), a Benedictine monk, was sharply criticised by Swami Devananda Saraswati who believed that Griffiths was ‘masquerading’ as a Hindu sannyāsin in a Christian ashram, and argued that the very phrase ‘Christian sannyāsin’ was a contradiction in terms. Christianity, he wrote in one reply to Griffiths, has always followed a principle of ‘subvert and conquer’ in its relations with other religions, and Griffiths was engaged in a similar ‘imperial’ activity: ‘By trying to justify your position as it is now, you impugn Hinduism, slur sannyasa, rout reason, ruin meaning, mutilate categories … and generally present an argument that is oxymoronic’ (Quoted in Goel 1989: 357).
One line of response to Saraswati – and other critics of Christian ashrams – would be to question the assumption that Hinduism is a monolithic block, with no internal strands that could resonate with elements of other traditions and no spaces for creative engagement with them. The first attempt to set up a Christian ashram was not by a ‘foreign’ priest but by Brahmabandhab Upadhyay at Jabalpur at the turn of the last century, followed by N. V. Tilak at Satara in 1917, and others (Fernando and Gispert-Sauch 2004: 316). However, in mobilisations of Hindu identity, Hinduism is put forward as a syndicated structure with specific doctrinal beliefs, canonical texts, and styles of worship or meditation, and such ‘inventions of tradition’ amount to nativisms that occlude the exploitative nature of traditional cultural forms (Appiah 1991). The political constructions of Hindutva seek to impart a timeless quality to the Hindu nation by claiming its unbroken cultural continuity from the Vedic past to the modern times, during which its standard-holders are said to have heroically fought and resisted the onslaughts of the Muslim, and later the British, invaders. In fact, though the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh claims that it is rooted in the traditional ethos of Hinduism, the notion of Hindutva, which implies that there is an essence called ‘Hinduness’ or ‘the beingness of a Hindu’ is of fairly recent origin, popularised in the 1890s and then given a canonical form by V. D. Savarkar (Bhatt 2001: 77). These ‘pan-Indian’ notions of Hindu identity are often the result of an over-emphasis on the centralising, Sanskritising forces at work in the Indian subcontinent, and a failure to sufficiently highlight the numerous de-Sanskritising elements operating, for instance, in Tamil Vaiṣṇavism which extols the Tamil Veda as the revelation for those beyond the norms of the Sanskrit Veda, movements in both medieval and contemporary India which are based on vernacular literatures, and so on (Hardy 1995). Consequently, a nostalgia for lost Hindu origins which seeks to recover realms of pristine experience or layers of uncorrupted tradition overlooks the vital fact that such dimensions have already been criss-crossed by the manifold strands of precolonial and colonial power. In contrast to such ‘essentialist’ readings of Hindu unity, social anthropological studies have often noted how individuals have developed their localised definitions of ‘Hinduisms’ in multiple contextualised locations against a wider background that is structured by perceptions of religious otherness. They have emphasised that religious boundaries sometimes intersect or overlap, and when individuals or groups seek to cross them, the dynamics of such interactions can involve various types of encounter such as conflict, polemic, appropriation, assimilation, cooperation, dialogue, and so on. For instance, in a study of Sindhi Hindu communities in Lucknow, Steven Ramey notes that they worshipped ‘Hindu’ deities such as Lakshmi and revered the Vedas, and also venerated Guru Nanak and several Sufi saints, which the ‘dominant definition’ of Sikhism and Islam places outside the official boundaries of Hinduism (Ramey 2007: 10). Because a copy of the Guru Granth Sahib had been installed in the Hindu temple, it looked more like a Sikh gurdwara, and the community faced pressure from the surrounding environment to define more sharply the contours of its ‘Hindu’ identity. In response, the management committee changed the name of the temple to Hari Om Mandir and added a copy of the Bhagavad-gītā to the Guru Granth Sahib.
At the same time, as we noted in Chapter 4, the vocabulary of ‘subversion and conquest’ was often utilised also by missionary groups at least till the end of the nineteenth century, when a missionary’s primary task was regarded as bringing, through the proclamation of the gospel to non-European lands, greater numbers into the Church. For instance, in the Catholic traditions during the pre-Vatican II days, conversion was often regarded as a numerical affair, and the numbers of baptisms, confessions, and communions were the indices of evangelisation. Missionaries were the ‘shock troops’ who received their orders from the European centres where mission theology and priorities were decided (Shorter 1972: 21). Not only did this lead to the notions of the ‘Church’ as a heavily organised and institutional structure set over and against the ‘world’, and as a sacred enclave of spirituality marked off from a profane neighbourhood, but also the expansion of the ‘Church’ was largely viewed in numerical terms as the ingathering of greater numbers through the communication of doctrinal truths which demanded intellectual assent. As a consequence, missionary activity often appeared to those to whom the message of Christ was proclaimed as ‘an act of spiritual aggression by an outside agent, a forced imposition of something unwanted, or at best … an act of paternalism and condescension on the part of those who “have” towards the “have-nots”’ (Amalorpavadass 1973: 35).
In the following sections, we shall discuss some of the changing trends in ‘mission’ in the Indian context that were shaped by ongoing theological reflections on three specific themes: the relation between ‘Christ’ and ‘culture’, Christian attitudes to the religions of the world, and the purpose of Christian ‘mission’.
The changing view of mission
Theologians of mission have sometimes been divided into the two groups of the ‘evangelicals’ and the ‘ecumenicals’. The evangelicals believe that the primary, and often the sole, purpose of missionary activity is evangelisation, and are critical of the attempt to bring engagements with social and political institutions under the umbrella of ‘mission’. For them, mission springs from Christ’s commandment (Matthew 28: 19–20) to reach out to those ‘lost’ individuals who, mired in their sinfulness, live under the sway of the ‘prince of this world’ (John 16: 11), and shall perish in hell unless they receive the message of Christ, respond to it, and are gradually weaned away from the ‘world’. Though they are often, as a matter of fact, actively involved in educational and medical enterprises, they believe that social reformation takes place after the individual’s return to Christ. The ecumenicals, on the other hand, claim that the primary focus of God’s concern is not the individual (whether or not she is Christian) but the entirety of the world, so that the Church’s mission lies in the ‘humanisation’ of society through the creation of ‘authentic’ humanity. The Church therefore views the world not as an alien zone to be invaded but as the worldwide field where it becomes God’s co-worker in various types of socio-political movements. These intra-Christian debates over the nature and significance of ‘mission’ recurred throughout the international missionary conferences from Edinburgh 1910 through Jerusalem 1928 to Willingen 1952, and beyond. The Edinburgh conference of 1910 under the guidance of John Mott believed that the ‘Christian world’ was standing in the fullness of time and had received its mandate, through various providential ‘signs of the times’ such as the rapid communications between the countries of the world, an increasing involvement with missions in the European nations, and the birth of the younger churches in Asia and Africa, to move into the ‘non-Christian world’ and incorporate it within the progressive unfolding of the Kingdom of God. Referring to the profusion of military terminology in its documents, David Bosch writes that Edinburgh conceived of the relationship between the Christian and the non-Christian nations as one of apostolic imperialism: ‘the “Christian” world had to subdue the “non-Christian”’ (Bosch 1980: 160). The confidence in the superiority of western civilisation over others was shaken by the experiences of the first world war and the Russian revolution, and this led the delegates at Jerusalem in 1928 to move away from Edinburgh’s utilisation of the symbol of the cross in the Constantinian terms of conquest, and instead view it as a symbol of service to Christ. The ‘younger churches’ were now seen as active participants with the ‘older European churches’, and the former were to be the centres from which missionary enterprise would be be directed. Indeed, at the council in Tambaram (1939: vol. 3, 412), the term ‘foreign mission’ was regarded as outdated, and evangelism was declared to be a task that the entire Church would conduct for the whole world.
By the time of the council at Willingen in 1952, two important themes, especially related to ‘mission’, had emerged. First, it was the triune God who was the source of the ‘great commission’ (Matthew 28: 16–20) to proclaim the message of redemption through Christ (Goodall 1953: 190). Second, the council declared that as the Church carries out its mission in witness to God’s action in the world, it cannot stand detached from it, for Christ identified himself wholly with humanity. Therefore, rejecting any geographical-historical distinctions between ‘the Christian west’ and the ‘non-Christian east’, Willingen called upon all Christians to be ‘God’s ambassadors’ to their neighbours and to participate in the universal task of proclaiming the lordship of Christ. As the Indian Christian theologian P. D. Devanandan put it around this time: ‘the missionary programme … is of God’s initiative and planning, and those who believe in this great news [of salvation in Christ] cannot refrain from sharing this knowledge with others who do not know of it and of its significance for man [sic]’ (Devanandan 1952: 179). The centrality of witnessing to Christ as the purpose of ‘mission’ which is now directed to all individuals was reaffirmed by the International Missionary Council (1962: 85–6) at New Delhi in 1961. The report of the ‘Section on Witness’ declared: ‘It is not we who take Christ to men [and women], but Christ himself who gives us to them as the agents of his own work amongst them’. We shall discuss two primary modes of engaging with the religious others, namely, interreligious dialogue and inculturation, that Christian figures in India have developed in line with these understandings of ‘mission’ as a movement propelled by God to share the gospel.
Mission and interreligious dialogue
Interreligious dialogue has emerged as a distinctive enterprise within several Christian denominations. In 1983, the World Council of Churches stated that dialogue was not a denial of Christian witness but rather ‘a mutual venture [among people] to bear witness to each other and the world, in relation to different perceptions of ultimate reality’ (Gill 1983: 40). Such dialogue, of course, is marked by a tension because a dialogical approach to the members of other religious traditions requires that one cultivate an attitude of respect towards them even while one affirms the truth of one’s own view. In an ‘ideal dialogic condition’, not marked by any radical power asymmetries, conversations that ensue will be free-ended, and identities will be forged and reformulated (Visvanathan 1998: 11). Such dialogical encounters can simultaneously bridge the distance between the participants and also reveal their otherness to one another, so that in the mutual search for understanding the participants move dialectically across their standpoints, trying to see both the similarities and the differences (Olson 2002: 5). As Paul Mojzes puts it, dialogue is:
A way by which persons or groups of different persuasions respectfully and responsibly relate to one another in order to bring about mutual enrichment without removing essential differences between them. Dialogue is both a verbal and an attitudinal mutual approach which includes listening, sharing ideas, and working together despite the continued existence of real differences and tensions.
(Quoted in Race 2008: 156)
To some extent, the dialogical situation can benefit from the phenomenological attitude which seeks, as far as possible, not to judge the phenomena under observation through any preconceived notions, and rejects both the ‘naturalist’ view that religion is an epiphenomenon of socio-psychological causes and the ‘exclusivist’ claim that truth is associated with only one religion. The phenomenological approach is centred around the notion that the exercise of a suspension (epoché) or bracketing out of (value) judgements would enable its student to grasp the essence (Wesen) of the phenomena under investigation (Kristensen 1960). However, it has been argued that the extension of the phenomenological epoché to interreligious dialogue is, in fact, not appropriate, for dialogue does not require the participants to ‘bracket out’ their ultimate convictions. Indeed, as Raimundo Panikkar notes, regarding an individual who claims she can meet her dialogical partners without spelling out her commitments, ‘Does this not betray an almost pathological attachment to my “faith”, such a fear of losing it that I dare not risk it, but prefer instead to preserve it under lock and key?’ (Panikkar 1978: 49–50). Therefore, in order to enter into dialogue with, say, Hindus or Buddhists, a Christian does not need to abandon her Christology, just as she does not demand Hindus to become Christians or Buddhists to become theists as a prior requirement (Lochhead 1988: 93). Whatever may be the limitations of a phenomenological approach in the field of interreligious dialogue, it correctly notes that a basic prerequisite for dialogue is that the participants have ‘situated’ themselves in each other’s religious traditions (Coward 1996: 108). For instance, Swami Abhishiktananda reports that a Hindu resident in an ashram in south India was surprised to learn that some Christian priests practise meditation, and even more so that Jesuits devote a few hours every day to mental prayer (Swami Abhishiktananda 1971: 17). On the other hand, a nun who had been in India for more than fifty years was surprised on learning that Hindu gurus try to bring their pupils towards the spiritual disciplines of meditating on the divine presence within, and exclaimed, ‘But these are things that we nuns are expected to do only after a long life of penance and meditation!’. Her interlocutor replied, ‘If that is so, Mother, I am sorry to say that Hindus begin just where you Christian nuns end!’ (Quoted in Swami Abhishiktananda 1971: 42).
Such dialogues between Christian and Hindu have been characterised, specifically from a Christian perspective, as forms of spiritual discernment which demand a willingness to listen to the other, not to launch a new assault on the other’s position but to recognise the voice of Christ speaking through the other. The dialogical partner is seen primarily as an individual who is created in the image of God and already in some relationship to God – though, to be sure, this characterisation may not be accepted by the partner herself – and only secondarily as a member of a ‘religion’ or an inhabitant of a ‘culture’ (Wright 1984: 5). In other words, interreligious dialogue in depth, in the view of G. Gispert-Sauch, is not merely a human exchange about religion or religious experiences, but an opening up to the illumining and transforming word of God who is also a dialogical partner in what is, in truth, a triangular conversation (Gispert-Sauch 1973). Nevertheless, the open-endedness of the dialogical process can often get stifled by disputes over the ‘scandal of particularity’, namely, the view that Christ stands as the focus of the history of salvation. Our understanding, developed in Chapter 6, of the analytical connection between the diagnosis of the human condition (as sin) and the ultimate destiny of humanity (as salvation through God in Christ) seems to lead to the doctrine of hell, which implies that a huge proportion of human beings are condemned to perdition. As John Hick notes, if human beings can attain salvation only through a response of faith to Christ, ‘[i]t would follow from this that the large majority of the human race so far have not been saved. But is it credible that the loving God and Father of all men [and women] has decreed that only those born within one particular thread of human history shall be saved?’ (Hick 1977: 180). While certain streams of Christian thought have indeed accepted this implication, current rethinking of the doctrine of hell in terms of everlasting punishment has emphasised that there is no necessary connection between the failure to respond to Christ – whether through ignorance, wilfulness, and so on – and eternal damnation. Indeed, one of the most debated questions in Christian theology has been the destiny of human beings who were born, in a chronological sense, before the Christ-event or who have died after the Christ-event but without an opportunity to come into a direct contact with the gospel. Some influential versions of ‘universalism’ have been developed, which hold that when in post mortem existence the delusions about the Christian God are removed, all human beings will freely choose to respond to the God of love, and accept the offer of salvation (Talbott 2001).
An Augustinian–Calvinist position would affirm that a significant number of human beings will not receive such a gracious offer, but many contemporary theologians reject the doctrine of predestination, which is only one possible conception of divine providence (Hasker 1989). Even on an Augustinian–Calvinist understanding of predestination, however, individuals on earth do not know whether they belong to the company of the elect or the damned, so that even such a theological determinism does not imply that salvation in the Christian understanding is ‘automatic’ in the sense that Ram Swarup believes it is: ‘[t]here is a ready-made God, and a ready-made saviour, a ready-made deputy of him on the earth, and a Church to take care of all your spiritual concerns. You believe and obey and the rest is automatic’ (Swarup 1995: 26–7). In fact, the Christian traditions have been shaped by themes such as the agonised soul-searching of Martin Luther for whom the God revealed on and through the cross is also the hidden God (Deus absconditus) (McGrath 1990); the ‘dark night’ of the soul experienced by many of the Roman Catholic mystics (Turner 1995); and the ‘sickness unto death’ and the ‘fear and trembling’ of the brooding Dane, Soren Kierkegaard. Therefore, Lesslie Newbigin criticises the view that Christians can have access to the divine judgement: ‘I confess that I am astounded at the arrogance of theologians who seem to think that we are authorized, in our capacity as Christians, to inform the rest of the world about who is to be vindicated and who is to be condemned at the last judgment …’ (Newbigin 1989: 177).
Christian particularity and mission
The debates over ‘universalism’ indicate that the question of how to work out the connection between Jewish particularity – the origins of the Christian faith in a small group of people with a sense of divine election – and the mandate to preach the good news to all human beings, remains one of the most intensely debated matters in Christian theology. Indian Christian theologians have been particularly concerned to develop a Christology that avoids the implication that Christ is a ‘tribal god’ for the Christians who stands over and against the ‘gods’ of the other nations. In the place of such ‘triumphalism’, they have sought to develop theologies for interreligious dialogues which will be marked by a genuine openness towards the vitality of religious experiences within communities that are characterised by distinctive truth-claims (Samartha 1981: 29). Such a Christian dialogical approach to the other religions would steer clear of the twin errors of an ‘uncritical assimilation’ which obliterates their otherness as well as an ‘uncritical imperialism’ which consigns them to the realm of the demoniac. For instance, Gavin D’Costa has tried to utilise certain internal resources of the Christian tradition, especially relating to the doctrine of the Trinity, to hold together in a creative tension two fundamental axioms of mainline Christianity: first, that salvation is God’s gift to humanity through Christ alone, and, second, that the salvific will of God is universal (D’Costa 1986: 136). The doctrine of the Trinity, as D’Costa expounds it, affirms that the transcendent God who seeks the salvation of all humanity has become incarnate in the individual Jesus of Nazareth in a specific historical context, and, moreover, is actively present as the Holy Spirit in the contingencies of the world, sanctifying it on its pilgrimage towards God. Therefore, though Christ’s revelation is definitive in the sense that it is through Christ alone that Christians approach God, the sovereign freedom of the transcendent God that they worship cannot be ‘domesticated’ into their ecclesiastical organisations or doctrinal formulations. Because the Spirit blows where it wills, God is actively present in the entirety of history, searching out human hearts for their responses, and this in turn implies that the Christian discourse must contain hospitable spaces where members of the other religions are actively welcomed and their narratives heard with attentiveness. This implies that interreligious dialogue is not the specialised concern of missionaries or those with specialised training in languages; rather, all Christians are called to loving dialogue with their neighbours (D’Costa 1990: 20). D’Costa seeks to distinguish his position from the view that the elements of truth and goodness in other religions are absorbed into a fully-formed Christianity; instead, he argues that ‘[t]he logic of my argument requires that it is unambiguously acknowledged that … the church itself is fulfilled in its meeting with other religions … It is fulfilled through the process of repentance and purification which may follow the hearing of God’s word from other religions’ (D’Costa 1994: 178). For an instance of how D’Costa’s argument was lived out in the last century in the contexts of Hindu–Christian dialogue, we may turn to two French Benedictines, Jules Monchanin (1895–1957) and Swami Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux) (1910–73) who sought to ‘integrate’ the streams of Advaitic wisdom with Christian spirituality. While Monchanin held the view that D’Costa rejects – that Advaita would be fulfilled by Christianity – Swami Abhishiktananda, according to Catherine Cornille, viewed ‘the values and truths present in the tradition of Advaita Vedānta not merely as partial and provisional, but as prophetic, and ready to transform Christianity’ (Cornille 1991: 79).
Consequently, dialogue and mission, understood as sharing the good news of what God has, according to the Christian account, ‘objectively’ wrought in Christ, need not be seen as mutually opposed. Indeed, from a Christian standpoint, the knowledge that life is graced by the love that God has for humanity is the source of happiness, and ‘to communicate this happiness is to evangelize … What is received freely, should be given freely, as the Gospel says’ (Gutierrez 1999: 32). The material content of these claims might be contested or rejected by Hindus, which again highlights the point that one of the central issues in Hindu–Christian dialogical encounters is the conflict over basic presuppositions over ‘what there is’, and the status and the significance of human existence within this deep reality (Newbigin 1977: 265).
Debating interculturation
If the comparatively recent emphasis on dialogue with ‘people of other faiths’, itself associated with the newer understandings of ‘mission’ outlined above, has led to a rethinking of the status of the other religions in God’s providential economy, the concurrent debates over ‘inculturation’ have produced an enormous literature on the relation between ‘Christ’ and ‘culture’. Inculturation is understood as the process by which the Christian faith which is enclothed in the conceptual elements and the symbolic patterns distinctive to one culture enters into a dynamic dialogue with those of another, so that the Christian message brings about a creative transformation within the latter and itself undergoes a transformation (Shorter 1988: 10–12). As the Vatican document, Gaudium et Spes, declared:
In his self-revelation to his people culminating in the fullness of manifestation in his incarnate Son, God spoke according to the culture proper to each age … Nevertheless, the Church has been sent to all ages and nations and, therefore, is not tied exclusively and indissolubly to any race or nation … The Church is faithful to its tradition and is at the same time conscious of its universal mission; it can, then, enter into communion with different forms of culture, thereby enriching both itself and the cultures themselves.
(quoted in Shorter 1988: 202)
The crucial term here, of course, is ‘culture’, which Clifford Geertz defines as a ‘system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men [and women] communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life’ (Geertz 1975: 89). As we noted in Chapter 4, many early missionaries failed to distinguish properly between the Christian gospel and the European ‘inherited conceptions’, so that the Christianisation and the Europeanisation of the natives were practically indistinguishable for them (Boyd 1974: 59–72). However, it would be mistaken to suppose that by freeing Christianity from its European robes we can have immediate access to a ‘pure Christianity’, if what this means is a Christianity that exists prior to culture or history. This is because the gospel has been communicated through the channels of human interpretation and evaluation, and embedded in diverse cultural forms (Wiles 1992: 30). Jaroslav Pelikan has demonstrated that Christ has been viewed through a number of images down the centuries that have varied with the socio-cultural contexts from within which human beings have sought to approach him. With the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire after Constantine, Christ was worshipped as the ‘King of Kings’, the widespread use of icons in the Byzantine Church spurred an interest in the theology of Christ as the ‘true image of God’, and during the great monastic centuries of the medieval world Christ was the ‘ideal monk who rules the world’. The Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus saw in Christ the ‘Universal Man’ in whom the thought of the classical Platonists had reached a fulfilment, Enlightenment influenced figures such as Thomas Jefferson viewed Christ as the ‘Teacher of common sense’ who had purified the superstitious religion of his times, and the lives of twentieth century figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were significantly shaped by their perceptions of ‘Christ as the Liberator’ of human beings from oppression (Pelikan 1985: 206–19).
To ‘inculturate’ the gospel in an Indian context, therefore, would mean that just as Christ has been viewed and appropriated through numerous European perspectives, so too can Christ be presented through the indigenous resources of the Indian traditions. Over the last century, Christ has been viewed through such resources as an avatāra, a yogi, a sādhu, and so on (Boyd 1975). An early attempt can be observed in Keshab Chunder Sen’s remark that Jesus Christ and his disciples were in fact ‘Asiatics’, a call was later picked up by Indian Christians. His contemporary K. M. Banerjea famously argued that the Vedic notion of a ‘saving sacrifice’, in which the sacrificer is both the priest and the victim (prajāpati), was a presentiment of the Christian doctrine of the atonement. Referring to Christ as the ‘true Prajāpati’, he asked: ‘On what grounds can a Hindu advocate demand the ostracism of those who, by accepting Christianity, are only accepting a Vedic doctrine in its legitimately developed form?’ (Philip 1982: 200). Another early example is that of Samuel Stokes who arrived in India in 1904 and was initially engaged in educational work in the foothills of the Himalayas, before a vision in 1906 of Christ trudging barefoot on an Indian road led him to imitate, in the style of St Francis, the humanity of Christ. He began to live as a Franciscan friar, as a ‘brother of his fellow-men’, with the conviction that his task was to aspire towards the Franciscan ideals of poverty and service to those suffering from cholera, leprosy, and smallpox. After negotiations with the Church Missionary Society, Stokes was accepted as a missionary in 1908, and in 1910, his Franciscan brotherhood within the Anglican communion was inaugurated in Lahore with five brothers, including Sundar Singh who lived as a Christian sādhu. Nevertheless, in August 1911, he announced that he would leave the brotherhood, marry an Indian woman, and if he had children bring them up ‘absolutely as Indians in their manner of life, language, dress and education’ (Emilsen 1998: 104). The reasons he gave for this decision were, firstly, that the brotherhood’s work could perpetuate the mistaken understanding that true religious existence required the rejection of familial and social connections; secondly, since Christianity was the religion of the God who became incarnate in humanity, Christians are urged to find the divine in and through their humanity; and, thirdly, not only did he take his own marriage as symbolic of his repudiation of racism but also he believed that other Christian missionaries should be open to intermarriages with Indians which would be a sign of their condemnation of both caste and racism.
With James Long, we see a similar set of themes centred around inculturation: an emphasis on dissolving the British hauteur of being ‘the dominant race’ and the view that Christianity had to be preached not merely through doctrinal formulations but also through deeds. In 1860, he provoked a storm of protest with the publication of an address where he made some scathing criticisms of the European indigo planters in Bengal. The editor of the Bengal Hurkaru in particular was dismayed that Long had praised ‘every writer not English’, had declared the Bible to be an Oriental book and Akbar to have been more enlightened than most sovereigns of Britain, and had repeated the native opinion that 200 million people were being ruled not for their welfare but for the benefit of a handful of Europeans (Oddie 1999: 96). In his response in the Calcutta Christian Intelligencer in August 1860, Long tried to refute the charge that he had lost sight of his specifically Christian task of spreading the gospel. He claimed that through his engagement in secular activities, he was trying to foster relationships of friendship between the missionaries and the Hindus, and it was only after the prejudices that the latter might harbour against the former were removed that they would become responsive to the Christian message. The oppositional stances that Long developed to the dominant missionary orthodoxy in these early attempts at inculturation can also be seen in Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, who declared that though in matters concerning social manners, customs, modes of perception and practices he was a genuine Hindu, he had become a Roman Catholic through baptism, and that in the sphere of his universal Christian faith, which embraced all nations, races, and truths, he was neither Hindu, nor Chinese, nor European. He believed that Roman Catholicism should discard its European clothes and should put on garments more acceptable to the Hindus of his time. To bring about this transformation groups of Indian missionaries should preach the Christian faith in Vedāntic language and live a life of holy poverty along the lines of Hindu asceticism: ‘In short, we are Hindus so far as our physical and mental constitution is concerned, but in regard to our immortal souls we are Catholic. We are Hindu Catholic’ (Lipner and Gispert-Sauch 1991–2002: vol. 1, 24–5).
Therefore, while the emphasis on inculturation has received official approval at the highest reaches of the Roman Catholic Church only fairly recently, the moves to indigenise the gospel have significant Indian antecedents that date back to the late nineteenth century. The word ‘inculturation’, however, seems to imply a one-directional flow of Christianity from one cultural form to another, and for this reason some theologians prefer to use the term ‘interculturation’ to emphasise the mutuality through which the inhabitants of the two cultures seek to develop local cultural expressions of the Christian faith (Shorter 1988: 13–15). However, the specific details of how this interculturation is to be carried out will, of course, remain a matter of intense contestation, given that Christian theologians have sharply disagreed over the question of whether nature has been so thoroughly effaced by the effects of sin that there is no ‘point of contact’ between God and humanity outside the sphere of the Christian revelation, or whether unregenerated nature nevertheless has some minimal capacities to respond to divine grace. By and large, the Protestant traditions, on the basis of the Reformed doctrine of sola gratia, tend to reject the notion of a general revelation in terms of divine redemptive action in the human heart as long as it is not graced by Christ. In contrast, Roman Catholic theologians have often argued that the realm of nature, though it contains varying degrees of error because of original sin, encompasses certain grace-filled elements (Cairns 1973). As a representative of the former, we can consider H. Netland who writes that though we may find elements of goodness, beauty, and truth in other religions, a Christian position cannot regard the latter as a part of God’s providence because this diversity is, in fact, an effect of the fall and sin (Netland 2001: 345–6). For a representative of the second group, we may turn to Karl Rahner who argues that we should dissolve the either/or dilemma that a Christian must view the non-Christian religions either as absolutely corresponding in all its elements to God’s saving will or as nothing but a construction of human perversity. According to Rahner, these religions should be regarded as legitimate to the extent that they help to bring their members into a correct relationship with God within the providential plan of salvation (Rahner 1966: 125). As for the British missionaries in India, though in their self-understanding they were ‘Protestants’, they sometimes veered towards views with a ‘Catholic’ tinge. B. F. Westcott was deeply influenced by the Johannine strand of Christianity, which emphasised that the transcendent God was at the same time immanently present in the innermost core of all beings, enlivening and sanctifying the material realm. Westcott, whose vision was later translated into the Cambridge Mission to Delhi, believed that there were traces of the divine word throughout the creation, and as Christianity would move eastwards it would discover more of these signs and add new elements to help Christians to arrive at a more complete apprehension of divine truth (Maw 1990: 177).
Mission and the products of interculturation
The internal diversity of Christian positions on the theological significance of religious plurality – whether the non-Christian religions are merely natural constructs or whether they have some grace-filled elements – is integrally connected to the diversity of Christian views on the precise relation between ‘Christ’ and ‘culture’. Indeed, as Reinhold Niebuhr notes, various types of associations, polarisations, oppositions, affirmations, and denials are possible as Christians seek to relate themselves to the world of ‘culture’. He outlines five fundamental responses to this problem that have played a crucial role in the history of Christianity: Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ the transformer of culture (Niebuhr 1952: 190–229). This diversity of views partly explains why an ‘official’ answer to the question of whether the religions of the world, with the different cultural formations within which they are located, are salvifically efficacious has been avoided. Arun Shourie reads Vatican II as acknowledging the possibility that non-Christians may attain salvation through their religions, and asks: ‘if salvation is possible in each religion, what is the ground for conversion?’ (Shourie 1994: 213). However, in his reading of some Vatican II documents such as Nostra Aetate, D’Costa concludes that they are silent on the question as to whether the non-Christian religions per se are channels for supernatural revelation. He argues that this silence is intentionally maintained to avoid any a priori pronouncements on these religions. On the one hand, Nostra Aetate declared that the truths (vera) in the non-Christian religions are ‘a ray of that truth (Veritas) which enlightens all men [and women]’, but, on the other, it states that the fullness of life is to be found in the truth which is Christ himself (Flannery 1975: 739). The silence has been construed by theologians in two divergent ways depending on their presuppositions concerning the relationship between nature and grace: those who emphasise a close relationship between the two are usually of the opinion that the documents affirm the possibility that non-Christian religions could be salvific structures, while those who envisage a sharper distinction between the two reject the former opinion (D’Costa 2000: 102).
Given the interstitial position of the churches, engaged in the difficult task of negotiating the relation between ‘Christ’ and ‘culture’, it is not surprising that a number of social anthropological studies of Christian communities in India have brought out both the continuities with the non-Christian environments that linger on in the lives of the converts as well as the discontinuities that emerge gradually in their new practices through the appropriation of Christian religious symbols. The processes of interculturation, where the terms of the ‘alien’ language are translated into those of the receiving language, are fraught with the possibilities of distortion and miscommunication since both the terms are embedded in distinct systems of meanings. Therefore, interculturation is an ongoing and never-completed process where the terms are expanded, altered, and put to new uses. For instance, in a sociological study of ‘lived Christianity’ carried out among a number of Roman Catholic households in a village in southern Goa, Rowena Robinson has highlighted a series of creative ‘Christianisations’ of the life-cycle rituals of birth, marriage, and death, and argued that Roman Catholicism exists in relationships of accommodation of as well as resistance to the indigenous locale in matters such as kinship patterns, festal calendars, caste taboos, and social stratification (Robinson 1998: 181). Similarly, in a study carried out among Christians from the Wadiaram Pastorate of the Medak diocese in the Church of South India, it was discovered that many Christians had a Hindu and a (baptismal) Christian name, kept images of household goddesses, enacted stories from the Purāṇas, often had spouses from a Hindu background, and participated in a variety of Hindu and Muslim religious festivals (Luke and Carman 1968: 165–89). Such studies highlight the point that Indian Christianity is spread over a ‘messy terrain’ where religious identities and borders are not always sharply defined but are subject to negotiation. Indian Christians in different parts of the country have adopted and assimilated rituals that are usually labelled ‘Hindu’, struggled with class and caste inequalities, and blended their local Christianities with the ‘orthodox’ doctrines of the churches. For instance, both Hindu and Christian pilgrims to the shrine of the Portuguese missionary John de Britto (d. 1696) refer to the saint as their family deity, and the hair-shaving rituals and the goat sacrifices at the shrine are similar to the practices at some Hindu temples (Raj 2002). Similarly, in the village of Avur in Tamil Nadu, an image of the risen Christ is carried on a wooden chariot along the streets in a procession similar to Hindu chariot festivals. However, while the Avur chariot is virtually identical to its Hindu counterpart, and its construction draws upon layers of shared Hindu–Christian symbolism, the differences between the Christian festival and the Hindu procession are marked subtly – the colours for the cloth and the paint are ‘Christian’ colours, the images are draped with roses and marigolds but not the ‘Hindu’ lotus, and the top of the chariot carries a cross (Waghorne 2002).
To reiterate a theme that we discussed in Chapter 5, conversions are dynamic transactions between older identities and newer reconfigurations, and conversions to Indian Christianities too are not usually marked by a ‘total break’. Rather they involve various processes located on a continuum between oscillation between the new and the old identities, consolidation of the new faith, and even retroversion to some elements of the past. In the case of some Dalit Christians in Bihar, on the one hand, propitiations of spirits and ghosts have been replaced by prayers to the Christian God, and marriage customs which conflicted with Christian beliefs have been discarded, and, on the other, certain traditions such as playing the drum, dancing, and performance of the Chhat puja have been partially retained. Likewise among the Dalit Christians in Jharkhand, ‘religious’ practices opposed to the Christian faith have been rejected while ‘cultural’ forms which do not conflict with Christian understandings have been retained. Sometimes non-Christian Sarna beliefs have been partially replaced by Christian analogues, and in some cases there have been re-evaluations of previously eliminated beliefs which have been re-adopted. One such case of retroversion is the use of (‘Hindu’) vermillion which was earlier rejected as being associated with Sarna religiosity, but has now been revived as it is not held to be in conflict with Christianity (Kalapura 2010).
Mission and Hindu inclusivism
Once again, an ‘external’ versus an ‘internal’ perspective on these sociological findings will tend to diverge. From some Christian standpoints, they reflect the dangers of interculturation as the Church, while seeking to remain faithful to its traditions, enters into different forms of culture. From a Hindu perspective, however, which does not accept the Christian claim that Christ is the central axis around which salvation history revolves, the ‘Vatican II–shift’ might still seem to retain vestiges of a religious imperialism. In his comments on Hans Küng’s Freedom Today (1966) Bibhuti Yadav notes the shift from the earlier condemnations of non-Christian religions as expressions of human self-seeking to the affirmation that they too are located within a supernatural order so that they possess elements of the truth. However, Yadav detects in such talk about a ‘special revelation’ or a ‘special covenant’ not only a projection of a community’s collective wish to assert its uniqueness, but also the ‘naively ridiculous’ conception of a God who has established, on the one hand, the equality of all human beings, but who has, on the other, revealed Godself more conclusively to the dwellers of Bethlehem than to those of, say, Benares. Yadav believes that the imperious claims that Küng announces concerning uniqueness, speciality, and so forth can be traced to Christianity’s ‘redemptive universalism’, that is, its conviction that all human beings are involved in a quest for redemption (Yadav 1990).
In terms of our discussion in Chapter 6, we can see that Yadav touches on a ‘raw nerve’ of the Christian message – how to make sense of the supposed special revelation of the God with a universal purpose for all humanity. Already in 1844, an article in the Tattvabodhini Patrika, published by the Brahmo Samaj, referred to Christians who ‘profess to believe that they alone are the select and beloved children of our common Almighty Father’, and commented:
We thank the great Architect of the universe that such are not our own doctrines, – that it is, on the contrary, our chiefest source of comfort and happiness, firmly to believe, and zealously to inculcate, that all [hu]mankind are morally and spiritually equal in the eye of a beneficent, an impartial, and an eternal Deity.
(Hatcher 2008: 95)
More recently, this ‘particularity’ has been read by Arun Shourie as a demonstration of the ‘self-obsession’ of the Christian God which is passed on to the Son and the Church (Shourie 2000: 360–70). However, as we have pointed out in Chapter 6, the crucial debate here is not so much over religious imperialism – all major world religions, Hindu or otherwise, are based on certain truth-claims which can have ‘exclusivist’ implications – as over whether the version of ‘committed pluralism’ which is rooted in the Christ-event is compatible with a recognition that the other religious traditions represent valid, even if partially so, responses to the self-disclosure of the ultimate reality. For instance, while arguing that the term ‘absoluteness’ must be dropped in connection with Christianity for it applies only to the ultimate reality, Jacques Dupuis emphasises at the same time that in order to be faithful to the New Testament witness, the ‘constitutive uniqueness’ of Christ must rest on his personal identity as the Son of God. Therefore, the simultaneity of ‘universality’ and ‘particularity’ must be maintained, according to him, by affirming that Christ continues to be actively present in the ‘saving figures’ of other religions, enlightening and inspiring them, so that they may become ‘pointers to salvation for their followers, in accordance with God’s overall design for humankind’ (Dupuis 1997: 298). Yadav would probably object that Dupuis has universalised his perception of the human predicament in such a manner that only the Church can resolve it, and has subtly incorporated the ‘saving figures’ from elsewhere into the Christian scheme. From a non-Christian perspective which does not view the religious world as revolving around the axis of Christ, Yadav’s criticism would indeed be to the point. However, this perception – of all human beings as entangled in ‘sinfulness’ and of all instances of ‘saving power’ in other religions as somehow mediated through the focus of Christ – is not, so to speak, a subjectivist projection of Dupuis but is rooted in the foundational claim of Christianity, namely, the central event of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the fundamental debate between Yadav and Kung is not over spiritual arrogance but the ‘objectivity’ of the Christian claim that at the centre of ‘salvation history’ stands the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The vital question now is what sort of objective ‘evidence’ one might offer for establishing such a claim, failing which the assertion that the religious experiences of humanity revolve around Christ would indeed seem to be a species of spiritual imperialism sanctified by Shourie’s ‘self-obsessed’ God. However, it is precisely at this point, as we have noted in Chapter 6, that Christian theologians sharply diverge – some adopt the ‘unapologetic’ stance of defending the internal coherence of the Christian position without appealing to any ‘external’ reasons, while others attempt to identify positive reasons for holding their Christian standpoint to be cognitively superior to that of others. Notwithstanding this crucial difference, they usually agree that the centrality of Christ in salvation history cannot be perceived by the untrained eye; indeed, it is only with the ‘eye of faith’ that a believer is able to see the history of Israel as leading up to God’s revelation in Christ and the redemption of the whole world (Cullmann 1952).
Once again, therefore, we have an insider–outsider debate, this time over the precise significance of the centrality of Christ in the Christian understanding of history. A neo-Hindu standpoint which does not accept this centrality often regards Christian claims emanating from it as ‘imperialistic’ or ‘paternalistic’, and promoting violence towards other religions. Historically speaking, of course, the claim of ‘Christ at the centre’ has often led to religious violence in the form of numerous inquisitions, wars, and crusades perpetrated on heretics, dissenters, pagans, and infidels. Christian theologians, especially after the Holocaust, have sought to excise these ‘triumphalistic’ elements from the ways in which the Christian message has been presented. The crucial theological challenge, therefore, is to explain how on the one hand, the Christian message revolves around certain events connected with the historical individual called Jesus of Nazareth, but on the other hand, this Jesus the Christ is also the trans-historical centre and the saviour of all humanity (Lowith 1949: 182). From a Hindu perspective such as neo-Advaita, of course, the ‘trans-historical centre’ is not Christ but the intuitive awareness of one’s identity with the transpersonal ultimate, and Dupuis’s claims may be criticised as an ‘imperialistic’ re-construction of the other religions as oriented towards an eschatological fulfilment in Christ. Such a criticism, however, would ignore the vital point that neo-Advaita too is based on its own distinctive reconstruction of these religions – it is able to celebrate their multiplicity only because they are believed to be encompassed by the one transpersonal reality. For instance, Swami Vivekananda believed that Advaita Vedānta was the ‘universal religion’ because ‘it teaches principles and not persons. No religion built upon a person can be taken up as a type by all the races of [hu]mankind’ (1972: vol. 3, 250). Swami Vivekananda’s claim is rooted in the Advaitic metaphysical scheme, and its ‘universality’ too is therefore grounded in a ‘particular’ focus, namely, the Advaitic principle of the transpersonal ultimate.
Mission and intercultural dialogue
The ongoing debates over processes of interculturation lead us to one of the central questions in Hindu–Christian debates over ‘conversion’: whether any evaluation of the norms and practices embedded in one cultural context is possible which is not perceived by those who inhabit this milieu as an external imposition of alien values. For instance, India is often characterised as a land permeated by an ‘essentially’ mystical ethos, so that the introduction of technology and scientific values is perceived to be a frontal assault on ‘traditional’ Indian values. However, as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum point out, such presentations ignore or marginalise the presence of a multiplicity of not specifically spiritual strands in the Indian traditions. Not only the vigorous arguments between Hindu and Buddhist philosophers over the issues of scepticism and realism, but also the contributions of the classical Indians to mathematics, grammar, medicine, and political analysis, the presence of ‘practical’ concerns in various streams of epic poetry such as the Mahābhārata, the Buddha’s agnostic stance towards metaphysical speculation, and the atheism of the classical Lokāyatas need to be highlighted in greater detail to counter the popular perception of India as a land of ‘unrelieved spirituality’ (Nussbaum and Sen 1989: 305). Even the claim that the Indian philosophical traditions are ‘spiritual’, in the sense that they hold the spiritual dimension alone to be ultimately real, should be properly qualified, for the Jains, the Vaiśeṣikas, the Śāṁkhyas, and also the followers of the Rāmānuja and the Mādhva schools of Vedānta affirm the ontological reality of the material world (Krishna 1991: 3–15).
Therefore, given that civilisations such as the Indian are multi-stranded, when they encounter civilisational values from another context, the engagements should be seen as creating both points of contact and locales of contestation. During such engagements, some members belonging to the first may conclude that the latter does succeed in describing reality more adequately and comprehensively. Such a judgement from an ‘internal’ perspective may be made especially when a tradition arrives at a stage when, by its own standards of rational justification, it fails to make progress in overcoming an ever-increasing number of anomalies and undergoes an epistemological crisis (MacIntyre 1988: 355–64). From within such hermeneutical spaces we can speak of a method of critical evaluation which will be internal because it utilises the resources present within that culture for the purpose of criticism; it is developed through an experienced immersion in the values, perceptions, and practices of that culture; and it is also a genuinely critical stance, subjecting the above to a critical examination (Nussbaum and Sen 1989: 308).
Since the indigenisation of the gospel is not a mere conformity to local patterns or structures, but an attempt to bring about a ‘critical evaluation’ of indigenous forms of life, the claim of the churches to effect such modifications in ‘autochthonous’ forms of religiosity has been strongly contested. More specifically, missionaries, because they point to the possibility of another identity grounded in an alternative vision, can often arouse strong opposition from people whom they challenge to undergo a metanoia from native socio-religious practices and beliefs which they suggest are not immutable. Whether rudely or gently, missionaries stand in the way, and through a relationship of tension with indigenous forms of life, they can variously stir and awaken or exasperate and vex those whom they encounter (Burridge 1991). If ‘culture’, which encompasses various aspects of social and individual existence, is a somewhat nebulous term, ‘religion’ is perhaps even more so, so that sifting the ‘religious’ aspects of Hinduism – which are to be transformed – from the ‘cultural’ ones – which may or may not be retained – becomes a disputed matter between the missionaries themselves and their possible converts. According to G. Larson, while religion is closely interrelated with the social and the cultural aspects of existence, it is to be understood also in terms of the development of comprehensive interpretive frameworks that make human life significant and practically workable. More specifically, ‘religionisation’ is the process through which human beings acquire cultural norms and signs which are handed down the generations (enculturation), are socialised into various types of communities (socialisation) and develop some degree of reflexive awareness of the systems of meaning or sacred universes that are provided by one’s culture and social group (Larson 1997: 165–70). Consequently, while conversion is usually associated with a re-orientation of the individual, the question of whether the ‘interculturated’ life the convert enters into involves a ‘religious’ transformation or only a ‘cultural’ change becomes a disputed one.
Since the transformations associated with conversion and interculturation concern changes in values, beliefs, and identities towards newer ones, it is precisely the non-indigeneity of the latter that often becomes the point of attack for the critics of these processes. However, as we have noted earlier in our criticisms of nativism, cultures are marked simultaneously by deep continuities over the longe durée and by intensely contested vortices within the wider stream, so that the rejection of an ‘alien’ product merely on grounds of its foreign origin would be too hasty without noting how its alienity has been appropriated. For instance, though the specific vocabulary of ‘human rights’ is new not only to non-European traditions but also to the (post-Reformation) western world itself, the values that it seeks to enshrine, such as life, prohibition of degrading treatment, and equitable sharing of resources, have important cross-cultural resonances. Again, while it is currently fashionable in some academic circles to argue that the nation-state was an alien transplant onto Indian soil, this view sidelines the manifold ways in which figures from the ‘lower’ castes such as Jyotirao Phule creatively appropriated certain elements of post-Enlightenment rationalism in order to mobilise their identities against oppression (Sarkar 2005: 292–93). On their part, Asian Christian theologians have become sensitised to the need to develop modes of reading the Bible which would be responsive to the vocabulary of rights and identities within the south Asian context where millions of decolonised people continue to grapple with manifold complexities, solidarities, and ambiguities. For instance, R. S. Sugirtharajah argues for a mode of biblical interpretation that will go beyond the customary accusations that missionaries have colluded with imperial powers, but will also search out the presence of colonial codes and imperialist assumptions in the very text of the Bible (Sugirtharajah 1999: 4–20). A postcolonial exegesis of this sort will be oriented towards developing strategic solidarities which, though fractured along the lines of language, faith, ethnicity, race, and class, are able to acknowledge these heterogeneities while restraining them from moving towards a pure otherness.
Therefore, the vital challenge is to negotiate a path between, on the one hand, rejecting the ethnocentric universalisms propagated by Europe that fail to highlight how people in the ‘third world’ contexts possess multiple identities structured by class, ethnicity, and so on, and, on the other hand, accepting certain forms of nativism that elide the traditional patterns of oppression. As some feminist scholars have pointed out, the proposals of postmodernist figures such as J.-F. Lyotard, that we must wage war against universal reason and instead engage in localised social criticism, are not of much help to those who seek to understand the globalised structures of exploitation. Groups, races, or classes who have been dominated in the past need to know why they have been marginalised and what sorts of systematic transformations are called for if such domination is to be opposed and ultimately overcome (Hartsock 1990: 159–60). Echoing this ‘universalist’ note, most traditions of Christian theology have emphasised that the eschatological community, which will not be split along linguistic, ethnic, or national boundaries, is slowly being built up with the ingathering of people in the Church. In this sense, one may speak of a ‘collective self’ of ecclesial existence, especially given that the biblical narrative of God’s people seeking liberation from bondage is shot through with questions of identity and ethnicity. For instance, in their struggles for identity, Dalit Christian theologians have often spoken of the ‘Dalitness’ of Israel’s condition and the Holy Spirit as the life-giver who empowers the Dalits for their historical struggles (Nirmal 1998: 229). On the other hand, given that this ‘collective self’ looks forward to a supra-historical destiny where these oppressive structures dividing humanity will be broken down, Indian Christian theologians have also proposed visions and enacted modes of engagement whose ultimate goal is not only to free subjugated groups but also to be a pointer towards the fullness of salvation (Walls 1996).
However, these questions about ‘identity’ lead us, in the final chapter, to the contested topic of the location of Christianity in ‘secular’ India. The secular Indian nation-state has been attacked not only by proponents of Hindutva, who argue for a civilisational unity which is circumscribed by certain markers of Hindu identity and is antagonistic to ‘foreign’ religions such as Islam and Christianity, but also sometimes by non–Hindutva intellectuals who have alleged that secularism is a European construct foisted upon the masses by a group of deracinated Anglicised elites. Any Christian intervention into these debates is bound to be complex, given that, on the one hand, Indian Christianity has by now shed its European trappings and become significantly Indianised, but, on the other hand, Indian Christianity (or any other historical form of Christianity) cannot pledge its ultimate allegiance to the nation–state, for such obedience, according to Christian faith, is due to God alone. The Christian commitment to conversion, understood as the spreading of the gospel and building up of the Kingdom, can be seen as rooted in this theological priority of allegiance to the divine over the temporal. The crucial question, therefore, is whether such a priority can be accommodated within the bounds of political secularism, and it will be argued, partly by drawing on the work of certain theorists of multiculturalism, that there is no inherent conflict between the two.
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