A History of Friendship
The order of the words in the title of this chapter, “Hindus and Christians: Celebrating Friendship and Facing Challenges With Hope” is significant. Although the differences between the Hindu and Christian traditions, doctrinal and otherwise, must not be minimized or overlooked and our challenges identified and confronted, we ought not to forget the long history of friendship between Hindus and Christians, and the relationships of mutual enrichment and learning that deserve to be noted and celebrated. To ignore or forget this history is to be unfaithful to our relationship and to deprive us of a precious memory that inspires and offers hope for our common future. The fact is that Hindus and Christians have lived as friends and neighbors on the Indian sub-continent for centuries. Hindus also live peacefully as minorities among Christians in many parts of our world, including Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, the Caribbean and Australia.
A Mutual Affection for Jesus
At the heart of this friendship on the Hindu side is a profound attraction for Jesus of Nazareth and for those who follow his path through discipleship. Quite early, in the history of this encounter, many Hindus made the difficult and problematic effort to distinguish Jesus from the institution of the Church and its doctrines. Hindus felt that the meaning of Jesus could not be limited to the historical institutions that claimed to represent him or the doctrines that sought to interpret the significance of his life.
Ram Mohan Roy
Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), the first Hindu to attempt a systematic study of Christianity, confessed his immense difficulty, “amidst the various doctrines, I found insisted upon in the writings of Christian authors, and in the conversation of those teachers of Christianity with whom I had the honor of holding communication.” In 1820, Roy published a small work entitled The Precepts of Jesus, The Guide to Peace and Happiness. It was a compilation of Roy’s choice of the essential teachings of Jesus.
These precepts separated from the mysterious dogmas and historical records, appear, on the contrary, to the compiler to contain not only the essence of all that is necessary to instruct mankind in their civil duties, but also the best and only means of obtaining forgiveness of sins, the favor of God and strength to overcome our passions and to keep his commandments.
He omitted the historical narratives and references to the miraculous. The historical material, Roy felt, was subject to doubt and the miraculous unlikely to capture Hindu imagination. His selection, he hoped, would have the “desirable effect of improving the hearts and minds of men of different religious persuasions and degrees of understanding.” It is not certain what response Roy expected from his Christian missionary friends. Perhaps he anticipated support for his commendation of Jesus’s teachings to Hindus, or an invitation to continuing dialogue. The response, in any case, was one of condemnation and hostility. At the heart of the Christian response to Roy was the accusation that he focused on the ethical teachings of Jesus to the exclusion of the central claim of these texts: that salvation is possible only through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.
Swami Vivekananda
Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), one of the most influential Hindu teachers in recent times and the first to teach in the west, made a special appeal for attentiveness to the teachings of Jesus. In his introduction to the Bengali translation of The Imitation of Christ, a work attributed to the medieval Catholic monk, Thomas Kempis (ca.1380–1471), Vivekananda cautioned his fellow Hindus not to belittle the text because the author is Christian. This medieval Christian work fascinated Vivekananda and it was the only text, along with the Bhagavadgītā, that he kept with him during his years of traveling around India after the death of his beloved teacher, Ramakrishna. He could understand and identify with the author of this work whose ideals and way of life closely resembled the aspirations and values of a traditional Hindu renunciant. Vivekananda admired the author’s radical renunciation, his thirst for purity and his unceasing spiritual effort. Vivekananda likened The Imitation of Christ to the Bhagavadgītā in its spirit of complete self-surrender and saw the author as embodying the Hindu ideal of devotion to God as a servant to a master.
Vivekananda narrated the story of Jesus for inspiration on the occasion when some of the disciples of his teacher, Sri Ramakrishna, took monastic vows. As described in one account, he told “the story of the Lord Jesus, beginning with the wonderous mystery of his birth through his death on to the resurrection. Through the eloquence of Narendra, the boys were admitted into that apostolic world wherein Paul has preached the gospel of the Arisen Christ and spread Christianity far and wide. Naren made his plea to them to become Christs themselves, to aid in the redemption of the world; to realize God and deny themselves as the Lord Jesus had done.” Years later, Gandhi, like Vivekananda, sought the heart of Christianity and found it in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. These words, wrote Gandhi, “went straight to my heart.”
Roy, Vivekananda, Gandhi and others, we must note, were commending Jesus and his teachings in a historical context where Christianity was virtually inseparable from colonialism and in which missionaries denounced Hinduism as superstitious, idolatrous and polytheistic. They all labored to correct these stereotypes. The negative institutionalized Christian response to Hinduism, however, did not elicit a similar Hindu rejoinder to Jesus. All three interpreters were speaking from a Hindu perspective, in which commitment to a specific understanding of God did not rule out openness to and learning from other ways of understanding or, as Hindus say, other darśanas (ways of seeing). Hindus do not limit God’s revelation and experience to Hindu sacred texts, places of worship and community. There is a deeply held Hindu insight that divine self-disclosure adapts itself to the diversity of human understanding. As Krishna states in the Bhagavadgītā (4:11), “the paths people take from every side are Mine (mama vartmānuvartante manuṣyāh partha sarvaśāḥ).”
Hindus have noted the similarity with Hinduism in the symbols and images, examples and parables used by Jesus in speaking about the religious life. They commend his freedom from greed, his transparent nonpossessiveness, and generous self-giving. Hindus have always understood renunciation of greed as a fundamental expression of the genuine religious life and the Hindu respect for Jesus does not surprise. Vivekananda advised his Christian listeners in the United States that they should be “ready to live in rags with Christ, than to live in palaces without him.” I venture to say that the Hindu response to Jesus is exceptional historically; no central figure in one religion has been commended with such enthusiasm by seminal figures in another.
Acknowledging and Respecting Differences
The Hindu understanding and enthusiasm for Jesus as a teacher and exemplar of the religious life differ in significant ways from the mainstream Christian theological claims about Jesus’s significance. Hindus must acknowledge and not reduce these differences to semantics. Christians are often frustrated by the scant regard among some Hindus for differences of doctrine. The famous Ṛg Veda text (I.164.46), “The One Being the wise speak of in many ways –Ekam sad viprahāḥ bahudā vadanti,” articulates an important Hindu teaching—that the oneness of God is not compromised by the many human ways of speaking. Its purpose is to help us know persons of other traditions, not as strangers with alien, false or rival deities, but as fellow beings whose God is our God. This powerful text, however, is used too often in interreligious dialogue to minimize the significance of differences within and among religions and to explain away these as entirely inconsequential or relegate differences to the nonessential aspects of religion.
Having said this, I must add also that a theocentric tradition like Hinduism, is too often cursorily dismissed by those advocating the necessity for faith in Jesus as an exclusive savior. Jesus is used to minimize the value of the understanding and experience of God in Hinduism. Jesus-centeredness is made the litmus test of religious authenticity. Representing Jesus in a manner that is dismissive of Hinduism, not only overlooks the unique Hindu embrace of Jesus, but makes it more difficult for us to be challenged and enriched by what his life and death teaches about the nature of God and the meaning of human existence. The face of Jesus will be identified with those who triumphantly denounce Hinduism in his name. This face will not be attractive or inviting.
The time has come for us to acknowledge our differences in understanding Jesus’s identity, take note of distinctive Hindu Christologies, learn in humility from each other, and deepen the friendship that our mutual interest in Jesus and our appreciation of his significance make possible. Good relationships do not require sameness of vision or the abandonment of distinctive self-understanding. The beauty of a good relationship is often found in the creative encounter of difference. Our relationship, as Hindus and Christians, requires, like any good human relationship, attentive nurturing and nourishment. We must not be indifferent to or take our friendship for granted.
The Controversy Over Conversion
I want to turn now to one of the principal sources of contemporary tension and contention in Hindu-Christian relationships. This is the debate in India and elsewhere, centered on the issue of conversion and evangelization. On the Hindu side, we hear repeated calls for the enactment of laws to prohibit conversion from one religion to another and, in some cases, we have seen the implementation of legislation. In 2006, for example, the Rajasthan Assembly passed the Rajasthan Dharma Swantantraya Bill, stating that, “No person shall convert or attempt to convert directly or otherwise any person from one religion to another by the use of force, or by allurement or by any fraudulent means nor shall any person abet such conversion.” Although this Bill, and others like it, do not make the act of converting from one religion to another illegal, consensus on the meaning of terms like “force,” “allurement,” and “fraudulent,” is problematic, if not nearly impossible. Many of the responses, on the Christian side, present the issue as one of religious freedom and argue for the liberty of religious choice and the right to convert. Like proverbial ships in the night, passing each other without engagement, these representative arguments seem to provide no common basis from which the issue of conversion may be satisfactorily addressed. Conversion is a prime example of a challenge that we can face together with hope.
Despising the Convert
Although conversion from one religion to another is a complex phenomenon and oft...
