the centre, implicitly rejecting Hindutva as an ideology.
A book by M. M. Thomas, The Acknowledged Christ of the Indian Renaissance,21 is an important record of Hindus who remained Hindus but were deeply influenced by Jesus. Examples include Ram Mohan Roy (from Bengal), Keshab Sen (from Maharashtra) and Gandhi himself.
Apart from exclusivism, other theologies of religion developed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The impact of working closely with Hindus was to lead to awareness that this faith could not just be written off as all bad. There were so many aspects to Hindus, and to Hindu practice. How could these be seen as bad in a world God created as good? The World Mission Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 was a watershed in some ways. It reaffirmed the necessity of evangelizing the world in one generation. At the same time, it studied in detail, with a vast amount of evidence, what was happening in mission around various themes. Commission IV was on Christianity and Other Faiths. Sixty missionaries working predominantly among Hindus in India responded to a detailed questionnaire.
These responses have been studied in detail by a range of modern theologians – Wesley Ariarajah, Kenneth Cracknell, Brian Stanley, among others. This shows the quality of the responses. Kenneth Cracknell’s book is entitled, Justice, Courtesy and Love,22 and he shows how missionaries, particularly to India, came up with this description of how to commend the gospel. The predominant theology revealed is that which became known as Fulfilment Theology. Christ can fulfil the longings and spiritual quest found in Hindu traditions. We see the beginnings of a theology of dialogue. To summarize the 70 pages of analysis of the 1910 missionary responses, Cracknell found here answers which reaffirm both a commitment to the finality of the Christian revelation, and the centrality of Christ, with a generous and humble attitude to other religious traditions as encountered in India. This theology was articulated most prominently in J. Farquhar’s work The Crown of Hinduism.23 There were two major deficiencies in the work of this commission, as I see it. The movement seen from exclusivism to inclusivism is very selective. The responses are in relationship to the so-called ‘higher’ Hinduism, particularly Vedanta, and this could later be dismissed as Brahminic. And these were the answers of missionaries. The commission never asked for responses from Indian Christians. Four Indian Christians were present, most notably the future Bishop V. S. Azariah. But they did not give written evidence on their attitude to Hinduism.
However, as the twentieth century advanced, there were further developments in the theology of religions. The major mission conference at Tambaram, Madras, in 1938 moved in an exclusive direction, led by Hendrik Kraemer, whose theology of religions followed from his Barthian background and was published as Christian Message in a Non-Christian World.24 Here there can be no bridge between a human religion like Hinduism and the revelation of the Word of God in Christ.
At the same time, a group of Tamil Christians had been meeting in the same city, and they produced an important study, entitled Rethinking Christianity. They were higher-caste converts, usually lay people, and they were looking for bridges between their former faith and Christianity. Examples were P. Chenchaiah and P. Chakkarai. Chenchaiah (1886–1959) was blunt in his stance:
Christianity took a wrong gradient when it left the Kingdom of God for the Church. Christianity is a failure because we have made a new religion of it instead of a new creation . . . The Hindu will slowly and in different degrees come under the influence of the Spirit of Christ, without change of labels or nomenclature.25
Chakkarai (1880–1958) writes memorably, ‘What moves a person is not that his old country is bad, but that he has to obey the heavenly call . . . the Church is not just to be for cultus, but communion with the Living Lord, for social action.’
In the post-Vatican II period (after the epoch-making Vatican II document Nostra Aetate (1965)), there developed the idea, from Karl Rahner, of ‘anonymous Christianity’, to explain the evident goodness and spirituality found in people of other faiths, and this could be recognized as salvific. We are here wrestling with a theology that needs people to be part of the Church to be saved, and this must therefore be so anonymously. This was highly relevant to India. Most creatively in India, there was the inclusive theology of Raymond Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism.26 Having mixed Catholic and Hindu parents, he finds here a depth of truth in Hindu scriptures that he can only attribute to Christ the Word. Also from the Roman Catholic tradition came the beautiful book by K. Klostermaier, about in-depth encounter in the birthplace of Krishna, Hindu and Christian in Vrindaban.27
From the Protestant point of view, Stanley Samartha, who wrote from Bangalore when working with the World Council of Churches (WCC), produced a number of very significant books.28 An evaluation of his contribution to dialogue comes perceptibly from Israel Selvanayagam, in a chapter in Christian Theology in Asia where he focuses on Samartha’s defining of dialogue as being about the Spirit, and about love and respect for neighbour. Samartha believes it is about mood and lifestyle, about partners as persons and not statistics.
A steady stream of articles relating theology to praxis came out of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Society (CISRS), established in Bangalore by P. D. Devanandan, with M. M. Thomas as his successor as director. From the beginning, they took seriously the need to engage with the faiths of India, as well as the society around. They took seriously the diversity of Hinduism, and also the imperative to hold mission and dialogue together. In the end, they got overtaken by an imperative to be seen to be active, rather than just reflective, and rather lost their way academically. But the contribution of CISRS, through its journal and its publications, has been immense, and paralleled in few other countries.
It should be noted that Hinduism itself has a variety of theologies of religions, though not defined systematically. There are implicit strands of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism. There is the easy pluralism that is traditionally associated with Hinduism: let each find his or her own way – that is the way that is right for each. There is the assumption of superiority in Advaita, that this is the only true way of finding truth and unity with God. And there is the kind of inclusivism found in the slogan ‘One truth, many religions’. Some of this has come out of encounter with Christianity.
It is perhaps strange that while India was the cradle of the multi-religious world, and much was achieved historically, nevertheless at the present time many of the most dynamic contributions to interfaith relations and dialogue are taking place elsewhere. This is partly because religion has become more and more political in India, and minorities have been tempted to withdraw into themselves. It is partly because of the growing success of evangelical movements, and of Pentecostalism in India, as elsewhere, where the barriers between truth and falsehood are emphasized, and the need to ‘save’ has become the imperative. It is partly because of deficiencies within the priorities of the leadership in the Indian mainline Churches. It is noteworthy that while every diocese in the Church of England has an Inter Faith Adviser, if mainly on a part-time basis, there are no such appointments in the Church of South India or the Church of North India. An exception was when Bishop Selvamony of Kanyakumari initiated a Department of Inter Faith Dialogue about 30 years ago, but this did not last. The Roman Catholic dioceses, on the other hand, usually have such an officer in each diocese. Another factor is the dearth of outstanding teachers of theology of religions in Indian theological institutions. This is partly because outstanding persons in this field are serving in the West. It may also be partly because this field of study is not as valued as it used to be.
Nevertheless, as we wrote at the beginning of this chapter, day to day, Indian Christians are living out their lives in faithfulness to their Lord, just as they ever were. Such a minority witness will never be easy. But it remains the greatest inspiration for us from more tired so-called Christian countries, when we visit, or live for periods with, Indian Christians. For such Christians, interfaith relations are never just academic, or detached; they are a matter of life and
