Debating 'Conversion' in Hinduism and Christianity

Ankur Barua

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317538585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Hindu and Christian debates over the meanings, motivations, and modalities of 'conversion' provide the central connecting theme running through this book. It focuses on the reasons offered by both sides to defend or oppose the possibility of these cross-border movements, and shows how these reasons form part of a wider constellation of ideas, concepts, and practices of the Christian and the Hindu worlds.

The book draws upon several historical case-studies of Christian missionaries and of Hindus who encountered these missionaries. By analysing some of the complex negotiations, intersections, and conflicts between Hindus and Christians over the question of 'conversion', it demonstrates that these encounters revolve around three main contested themes. Firstly, who can properly 'speak for the convert'? Secondly, how is 'tolerating' the religious other connected to an appraisal of the other's viewpoints which may be held to be incorrect, inadequate, or incomplete? Finally, what is, in fact, the 'true Religion'? The book demonstrates that it is necessary to wrestle with these questions for an adequate understanding of the Hindu and Christian debates over 'conversion'.

Questioning what 'conversion' precisely is, and why it has been such a volatile issue on India's political-legal landscape, the book will be a useful contribution to studies of Hinduism, Christianity and Asian Religion and Philosophy.

1 Prologue

DOI: 10.4324/9781315726991-1

Exactly twenty years ago, I took a sheet of paper and started writing down my responses to this question: ‘Is it possible to develop patterns of argument that will demonstrate the cognitive, experiential, and spiritual superiority of Christian discipleship over a life-form centred around devotion to Viṣṇu – or vice versa?’ Though I had thought then that I would be able to answer this question within a few days, I have to report that twenty years down the line I am yet unable to do so in either the affirmative or the negative. However, over the course of these years my thoughts on this question have rambled down the alleys of history, theology, postcolonial theory, sociology of knowledge, and philosophy of religion, and gradually taken the shape of this book. I begin with this glimpse at the audacity of my youthful self partly to provide one token of the type of question that I believe lies at the conceptual heart of Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’ and partly to point to certain topics that I do not directly address in this book.

First, this book is not a fine-grained historical survey of conversion movements in different parts of the Indian subcontinent over the last three hundred years. I seek to bring together several such existing studies with the philosophical literature on the problem of ‘epistemic peer conflict’: given that knowledgeable, sincere, and truth-seeking individuals across religious boundaries disagree over how to conceptualise the human predicament and the ultimate reality, is it possible to demonstrate that one of these is more consistent, coherent, and adequate than the others on cognitive, experiential, and spiritual grounds? Even a brief survey of polemical Hindu responses to Christian conversion shows that a key question that repeatedly turns up is: ‘who got it right, then?’ I show at several places in this book that several Christian and Hindu responses to this problem of epistemic peer conflict both share the following dialectical structure. They propose ‘the Religion’ as the ultimate truth which encompasses, to different degrees, the truths of ‘the religions’, though they sharply disagree, of course, over what ‘the Religion’ is – whether a form of life rooted in Christ for mainstream Christian theology, the transpersonal ultimate for Advaita Vedānta, devotion to Viṣṇu for Vaiṣṇavism, and so on. This structure provides several strands of Christian and Hindu philosophical theology with the conceptual lens through which religious diversity is assessed, classified, and, to different degrees, accommodated. However, whether rational argumentation can settle the most momentous question of what is, in fact, ‘the Religion’, remains an intensely contested matter within Christian theological circles. Some influential strands of contemporary Christian thinking argue that the ‘knowing subject’ cannot settle this question through a ‘spectatorial’ stance because it needs to undergo a volitional transformation through Christ’s ‘cognitive grace’ before it is able to properly assess the evidence (Thiemann 1985; Wainwright 1995; Moser 2010). More concretely, it is claimed that fallen human reason cannot arrive at God through a ‘dispassionate’ investigation of public evidence that is accessible from third person perspectives – it needs to be regenerated by grace so that it can develop the sensitivities to see aspects of the natural world as pointers to the Christian God (Evans 1998). The ‘hermeneutical loop’ within which Christian knowing is dialectically interrelated with Christian faith was already noted by Sydney Cave in 1939 when he argued that these epistemological debates in Hindu–Christian contexts ‘will not be solved by the academic discussion of two alternative world-views. Interesting and illuminating as such discussion can be, it can never be decisive, for the values by which men [sic] judge are dependent on their ideals, and these ideals are created in part by the doctrines they already hold’ (Cave 1939: 236). For a more recent articulation of this view, we may turn to M. A. Rae who argues that the Christian news that in Jesus God has dwelt amongst humanity ‘can only be confessed and proclaimed. It cannot be the subject of rational verification; nor can it be confirmed within the categories of secular historiography’ (Rae 2011: 92). If ‘neutral’ reason is indeed unable to adjudicate these matters (we will encounter some dissenting views in Chapter 6), this cognitive failure can be seen as an instance of the ‘rather depressing general truth’ noted by Peter van Inwagen (2006: 2) that ‘no philosophical [and theological] argument that has ever been devised for any substantive thesis is capable of lending the same sort of support to its conclusion that scientific arguments often lend to theirs’. Fierce debates continue to rage in religious epistemology between, on the one hand, philosophers who seek to develop arguments that would present Christian theism as true over and against other religious systems (Swinburne 1993; Yandell 1993; Taliaferro 2011), and, on the other hand, philosophers who claim that there are no good truth-indicating grounds for establishing the cognitive superiority of one such system over others (Schellenberg 2007; Gellman 2008).

The significance of these somewhat abstract issues for Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’ can be seen by considering the structure of Swami Vivekananda’s (1863–1902) argument: ‘Plainly, if all religions are true, there would be no point in exchanging one true religion for another. Conversion, then, must be vigorously resisted . . . ’ (Quoted in Sharma 2011: 47).

The argument runs as follows:

• Premise 1: If truth-values are equally distributed across the religious matrices of the world, ‘conversions’ across religious boundaries are sociologically and metaphysically futile.
• Premise 2: Truth-values are equally distributed across the religious matrices of the world.
• Conclusion: ‘Conversions’ across religious boundaries are sociologically and metaphysically futile.

However, no major Hindu religious tradition – whether Advaita Vedānta, Vaiṣṇavism, or Śaivism (with its diverse Tantric configurations) – has accepted the ‘epistemic parity’ thesis of Premise 2 (for one example, see Sarma 2005: 15–18). Therefore, the vital questions are whether all religions are true, whether ‘objective’ reason is capable of assessing the cognitive integrity of religious systems, and whether it is possible to adjudicate truth-claims across religious traditions. Through a careful examination of the pronouncements of Hindu apologists such as Swami Vivekananda, we will show that what they, in fact, mean to say is that ‘the religions’ of the world have truth-filled elements to the extent that are they are fragmentary approximations to ‘the Religion’ of Advaita Vedānta. This is the view that is reflected in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s (1888–1975) more cautious remark that while ‘Hinduism . . . affirms that all relevations refer to reality, they are not equally true to it’ (Radhakrishnan 1927: 49). For Radhakrishnan, one of these ‘revelations’, namely, Advaita Vedānta, is ‘the Religion’ which hierarchially encompasses the limited, provisional, and partial truths of ‘the religions’ of the world.

Second, I seek to highlight the point, in a number of chapters in this book, that Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’ sometimes lack conceptual precision. Terms such as ‘exclusivism’, ‘dogmatism’ and ‘conversion’ itself (often regarded as dirty words), on the one hand, and ‘toleration’, ‘inclusivism’ and ‘pluralism’ (often regarded as nice words), on the other, are sometimes bandied about in these debates without an explication of their inner logic. For instance, the term ‘toleration’, as I use it in this book, does not mean merely the practices of ‘being nice’ to the neighbours but also of acknowledging the rights of others to hold views which are believed to be wrong, incorrect, or inadequate. That ‘tolerating’ others does not imply a diffuse sense of ‘respect’ for other life-worlds can be seen by considering whether one would wish to ‘tolerate’ a group that practises genocidal violence. In other words, ‘toleration’ requires clearly articulated conceptual bases (or, at the least, an accepted modus vivendi with its own conceptual presuppositions) which specify what, if any, are the moral limits of ‘toleration’. Therefore, the crucial question involving ‘toleration’ in Hindu and Christian debates is not whether but why, which, and whose ‘toleration’. Some Christian and Hindu responses to this question employ the above dialectical structure: because all human beings are encompassed by the fundamental reality intimated by ‘the Religion’, even if they themselves are not aware of this reality, therefore their ways of life are to be tolerated, in the sense that I have specified. For an initial sample of how this dialectic is worked out in some Christian and Hindu universes (the detailed argument is in Chapters 5, 6 and 7), consider the following examples from an Anglican Christian, a Vaiṣṇavite Hindu and an Advaita Vedānta Hindu perspective respectively. Rowland Williams argued in 1856 that the truths of Hindu universes had to be transcended by Christianity which would meet more completely their religious needs:

For it [Christianity] mediates and harmonizes between them [the non-Christian religions], adding to the strong belief of the Hebrew, something of the largeness of thought of the Hindu and of the heroic humanity of the Greek, while it sobers these with the household virtues of the Roman, and with the deeper sense of truth and right. . . .

(Hedges 2001: 84)

On the Hindu side, Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977), the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), argues that ‘[a] directly Kṛṣṇa conscious person is the topmost transcendentalist because such a devotee knows what is meant by Brahman or Paramātmā. His knowledge of the Absolute Truth is perfect, whereas the [Advaitin] impersonalist and the meditative yogī are imperfectly Kṛṣṇa conscious’ (1972: 318). Prabhupada was drawing on the medieval theologian Jīva Gosvāmī who noted, in his commentary on the Brahma-sūtras, that the supreme object of meditation is Viṣṇu alone and not others gods such as Śiva (śivādayaś ca vyāvṛttāḥ) (Gupta 2007: 139). In contrast, Swami Sivananda argues that ‘[n]on-dualism is the highest realisation . . . The [theistic] Dvaitin and the Visistadvaitin eventually reach the Advaitic goal or Vedantic realisation of Oneness’ (Quoted in Miller 1986: 178). Or one can, in place of the ‘ladder’ metaphor, choose the planar one of the ‘circle’, and argue, as does Swami Nikhilananda, that just as numerous radii converge upon the centre of a circle, so too the religious streams of the world converge into the Advaitic non-dual Brahman (Swami Nikhilananda 1963: 126–30). In other words, the imperfect truths of ‘the religions’ are somehow elevated to the fullness, the ultimacy, and the perfection of ‘the Religion’ – whether the latter is Christian discipleship for Williams, Kṛṣṇa consciousness for Swami Prabhupada, or Advaitic insight for Swami Sivananda and Swami Nikhilananda.

More schematically, the argument can be laid out as follows:

• Premise 1: All humanity is rooted in the Fundamental Reality = X.
• Premise 2: Not all the religious traditions of the world are centred around a conscious recognition of or an orientation towards X.
• Premise 3: To be directed towards X one must minimally cultivate a conscious recognition of or an orientation towards X.
• Conclusion 1: Therefore, not all the religious traditions of the world are directing their adherents towards X.
• Conclusion 2: Regarding the religious traditions noted in Conclusion 1, it may be possible to place them on a scale such that their location on it would indicate whether they are more X-directed or less X-directed.

This argument is the conceptual core of Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’. Both Christian thought and the major Hindu soteriological systems such as Advaita Vedānta, Vaṣṇavism, and Śaivism accept Premises 1, 2 and 3. They differ, of course, over what they take X to be: a covenantal fellowship between God and humanity that is centred in Jesus Christ, the transpersonal ultimate (nirguṇa Brahman), Viṣṇu, and Śiva respectively. On the Christian side of these debates, theologians have employed different formulations of this argument to ‘comprehend’ religious diversity through the conceptual lens of what might be called Karl’s Kaleidoscope: those who use this kaleidoscope with the slant of Karl Barth (1886–1968) accept Conclusion 1 but usually reject Conclusion 2, while those who look through it from the perspective of Karl Rahner (1904–84) accept both Conclusions 1 and 2. On the Hindu side, while the classical Vedāntic traditions emphasise Conclusion 1, some medieval and most modern forms of Hinduism have affirmed Conclusion 1 as well as Conclusion 2.

The reason for spelling out this argument in such detail is as follows. The Chri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Prologue
• 2 Locating the debates
• 3 The ideologies of empire: Christian missionaries in a Victorian age
• 4 The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’: Christian missionaries and the edifice of ‘Hinduism’
• 5 Preaching the kingdom: ‘caste’ and ‘conversion’
• 6 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality: ‘particularity’ versus ‘universalism’?
• 7 Donning the saffron robe: the many meanings of ‘mission’
• 8 The political bounds of ‘toleration’: Hindus and Christians in ‘secular’ India
• 9 Conclusion
• Index