Indian Theology
INDIAN THEOLOGY
ve In January 1950, the National Christian Council in India convened a conference on Indian Theology at the Leonard Theological College, Jabalpur.
Representatives from all the important Theological Colleges in India came there.
The staff and students of Leonard Theological College, Jabalpur, attended our meetings.
Also some of the local people.
Though we were a small group (about thirty) we were quite representative and held many different points of view.
I was asked to be the Chairman of the Conference.
The purpose of the Conference, I explained in my opening address, was to stimulate the growth of Indian Theology.
While the Bible is our main authority, it is interpreted differently by different men according to their social, cultural and religious background.
For instance, Archbishop William Temple was an AngloSaxon, belonged to the Church of England and lived in the twentieth century.
His interpretation of Scripture was considerably influenced by all these facts.
Much of his attraction to people in England is due to these.
In the same way Indian theologians will interpret the Bible with different emphases.
Western theologians are not familiar with Oriental culture.
They are tempted to ignore many of our problems.
We cannot dismiss our age-long religious quest in India as a meaningless groping outside the purpose of God.
We can see the self-disclosure of God in India's religions.
Many devout Christians in India regard the Gospet of St John, Chapters 14 to 17, as the starting point as well as the climax of Christian experience:
If the Christian thinkers of the West would rather begin with the Epistle to the Romans they should remember that the Gospel of St John belongs also to the very heart of the Christian religion and not merely the Epistle to the Romans.
The trend of religious thinking in India to stress. the Gospel of St John need not be traced to Neo-Platonist or Hindu influence.
Some Indian leaders like Mr P. Chenchiah and Dr Surjit Singh were members of the conference.
~ For forty years Mr Chenchiah had been interpreting Christ to India.
Though a lawyer by pro-
INDIAN THEOLOGY
fession he had some valuable qualifications for this work.
A man of deep religious faith and wide study of Religion, Philosophy and Science, he approached the subject from a fresh point of view.
With a quick and alert mind and a background of Hindu contacts, he felt that Christianity had to be rethought in India and he inspired a group of men in Madras with the zeal and industry needed for that work.
They were convinced that the most original contributions to Hindu religious thought were made not by the Hindu priests but by the seers of the Upanishads who were not connected with any organization, who thought boldly and independently and explained clearly the conclusions to which they came, though they were opposed to popular belief.
Chenchiah and the other men in his group were laymen. They did not pass through the discipline of study in theological colleges.
They did not delve deep into Church History and the development of Christian thought in the past nor did they make any attempt to grapple with the difficulties of the different languages in which the books of the Bible were written.
These were their weak points.
Mr Chenchiah stood emphatically for a new interpretation of Christ.
Jesus, he held, was an absolutely new type in the history of mankind.
There is an immense difference between matter and life and again between instinct and reason.
Similarly there is a vast gulf between the ordinary man and Jesus.
Long before Teilhard de Chardin's thought was known, Chenchiah was developing a Christian Theology very much along those lines.
It is an interesting study to see how these two men, living in different environments and subject to different influences, came to a similar understanding and held that the Christification of mankind is the ultimate goal towards which all life is moving.
In Jabalpur Chenchiah spoke frequently in our conference and many sparks flew from the theological debates between him and others.
Dr Surjit Singh wrote an important book entitled A Preface to Personality (Christian Literature Society, Madras).
He devoted half the book to a consideration of Radhakrishnan's philosophy.
He later became a Professor at a Theological Seminary in San Francisco. At the time of the conference, his book was still in manuscript and he read a chapter from it and was warmly commended.
A. J. APPASAMY
Is God personal or impersonal?
Have we separate personalities or is it an illusion to say that we have?
What is the nature of our relationship to God—personal or impersonal?
What happens in the life after death?
Do our personalities survive or da.they become merged in the Absolute?
These are the major problems of Indian religion and so Dr Surjit Singh's careful study of Personality was quite valuable.
Dr Emil Brunner, well-known throughout the Christian world, attended all the sessions and took an active share in the proceedings.
After each paper I suggested that Dr Brunner might make his comments.
Some of us did not agree with him on many points.
But we all felt that we should hear carefully what he had to say.
Some members of the conference believed fully in direct mystical experience of God, but he regarded it as unscriptural and unsound, Many in the conference were of his way of thinking.
My own contribution to the Conference was a paper on Christological Reconstruction and Ramanuja's Philosophy.
This was published in the International Review of Missions in April, 1952.
Here is a summary of the paper.
Ramanuja, the Hindu religious thinker who lived in the twelfth century, is particularly important for us as he realizes with clearness of insight and depth of conviction that God is an ocean of love.
In India there has been an utterly bewildering variety of beliefs about God.
Popular religion has believed in many gods, most or all of them fierce, vindictive and a terror to their worshippers.
In the highly philosophical school of Sankara, God is immersed in His own bliss and has nothing whatever to do with the struggles and sufferings of mankind.
In contrast, Ramanuja holds to the conviction that God is full of love and goodness and forgives the sins of those who surrender themselves completely to Him.
Ramanuja is equally clear in his conviction that out of love for mankind God becomes incarnate.
The special object of His incarnations is to satisfy the deep-rooted longing of the human soul for the vision of God.
Many devotees are strongly moved by a desire to have a clear and vivid realization of His presence.
Ramanuja teaches that God becomes incarnate in order to satisfy this longing of the human soul for. God.
There is one other conviction of Ramanuja which has an
INDIAN THEOLOGY
important bearing on this subject.
He holds that God is not a distant and remote reality dwelling in the far-off heavens, but is the inner ruler.
His favourite picture for the intimate relationship between God' and the world is drawn from the body and the soul.
Just as the soul is within the body, controlling it and directing it, so God is within the world of nature and of human beings, ruling over it from its inner depths.
These, then, are some of the central convictions of Ramanuja.
God is an ocean of love and forgives the sins of all those who surrender themselves to Him.
He becomes incarnate in the world to meet the ardent longing of His devotees for a vision of God.
His intimate contact with the world is not confined to those points in time and space at which His incarnation takes place.
It is a continuous and intimate relationship of immanence.
We would do well to emphasise these doctrines in India. They are entirely scriptural and make an unfailing appeal to the heart of India.
We are taught in the Word of God that we should abide in Christ and that He would abide in us. Who is this Christ who thus abides in us?
He is the One who lived on this earth twenty centuries ago, wrought and suffered for us, rose from the dead and is now ascended to the heavenly regions.
As the living and eternal Christ, He now dweils in our hearts and purifies us with His mighty power of love.
Any doctrine of Christ which develops in India would lay considerable stress on the living Christ, who was also the Jesus of history.
Dr Emil Brunner made some stimulating comments on my paper.
He said that at first he thought that the link with Indian thought might lead to the separation of Christ as transcendent, creative and indwelling from Christ as Mediator.
That would be a false theological development.
Brunner agreed that in modern Protestant Theology Christ as transcendent, creative and indwelling, has not been clearly stressed.
That again is a false development. All these four aspects must be considered together. Brunner felt sure that such treatment would lead to a more accurate understanding of the Gospel.
But he gave us the advice that less conscious attention should be paid to Ramanuja.
A united service for all the Christians in the city had been arranged for Sunday.
At that time an old Garrison Church just
A. J. APPASAMY
outside the city was going a-begging; the British army with a large contingent in Jabalpur had been withdrawn from India; the Indian
Government offered the Garrison Church building to any Indian Church which was willing to maintain it and use it. No Church in Jabalpur came forward to do this because it was such -a large building and not centrally situated.
But it proved to be an excellent building for this united service.
Christians belonging to all the churches in the city came there in large numbers.
Dr Emil "Brunner was the preacher.
He wore a Geneva gown.
We saw another aspect of his personality in the pulpit—not the learned scholar, not the bold thinker, not the keen debater but the devout preacher who served a large congregation of ordinary Christian people with the nourishing food of the Word of God.
The Conference was over.
We were leaving for our various places.
Dr Brunner was walking in the college garden, absorbed in thought.
He shook hands with me, warmly and said, "One thing I have certainly learnt from India—the importance of the Living Christ.
I expect to write about it in my future books.'
BIRTH OF THE CHURCH OF SOUTH INDIA
Along with others Bishop V. S. Azariah had seen in 1919 a vision of the Church of South India and had begun negotiations with relevant church councils.
I knew Azariah intimately.
He had been a friend of the family for many years.
When I was a boy attending a camp at Courtallam he gave a moving address on the need for Christian workers and there I had dedicated myself for Christian ministry.
I did not understand what confirmation stood for and had delayed taking it.
Azariah prepared me for confirmation and also confirmed me.
I was then studying in the B.A. class.
He taught me the meaning of Confirmation and gave me some books on the subject to read.
At that time he was in charge of the diocese of Tirunelveli for a few months.
Though we lived in different parts of India I met him frequently in conferences and committees.
I knew with what great fegard the Christian Church in the world held him.
His addresses
BIRTH
OF THE CHURCH' OF SOUTH INDIA
were clear, practical, interesting and to the point.
He did splendid work in the Dornakal Diocese where from the year 1912, under the guidance of the Spirit of God, the Church steadily grew from strength to strength.
Every year 10,000 people joined the Church in Dornakal.
He took great trouble to see that these large numbers who came into the Church were carefully prepared for baptism and then effectively shepherded.
He was keen on Indianization and gave many key-posts in his diocese to Indians.
He introduced Indian music in almost all the churches in his diocese.
The _Telugus are gifted in music and the services are beautifully sung.
The Cathedral which he built was an attempt, and a successful attempt, to design a Christian place of worship suited to the genius and tradition of India.
When I visited Dornakal to take a Retreat for his clergy I was impressed by his long and remarkable record of service.
He had showed how well an Indian bishop could run his diocese.
In addition to his genius for practical work he was a student to the end of his days.
He kept abreast of the latest theological literature and was prepared to discuss wherever one met him a recent book on Christian Theology.
He had an alert and open mind and was always trying out new methods (for instance in Rural
Reconstruction and the removal of illiteracy).
He was a member of the Tamil Bible Revision Committee for several years and had always apt and stimulating comments to make on the Tamil translation of the Bible, his knowledge of the Bible being both wide and deep.
He was keen on Church Union and made every possible effort to bring together the Anglican Church, the South Indian United
Church and the Methodist Church.
He took an active share in ecumenical activities throughout the world.
He died two years before the Church of South India came into being.
A Joint Committee on Church Union in South India was appointed with forty-five members—fifteen from the Church of India, Burma and Ceylon, fifteen from the South India United
Church and fifteen from the Methodist Church.
About half of the delegates were Europeans and the other half were Indians, though there was no rule regarding the proportion of Europeans and Indians.
In 1929 I was appointed a member of the Joint Committee on Church Union and continued to serve on it until 1947.
A. J. APPASAMY
met at least once every year for three days of gruelling committee: work.
Azariah's powerful plea, oft repeated, was always this: Church.
Union in the West may be of academic interest but it is a matter of life and death with us here in India, living as we do in the midst of a vast non-Christian population.
In 1936, there was a crisis in our negotiations.
We did not seem to go forward.
At that time Azariah called together all the Indian members of the Committee and said to us: 'Our European friends are not going to help us.
'These subtle points of doctrine and practice which they raise have little or no meaning for us here in India.
We must force the pace.'
This was an unusual thing for Azariah to say or do. He was always patient and tactful, though he never yielded on the main issues.
At that time I had resigned from Bishop's College, Calcutta, and did not hold any particular appointment.
He said to me: 'You have more time now than the rest of us.
Why don't you organize and do some publicity work for the Indian point of view?'
This I agreed to do.
We drew up a memorandum on the subject and got it signed by many representative Indians and sent it to all church councils, missionary societies and religious papers which were interested in the subject.
This trouble, however, blew over and eleven years later in 1947 the Church of South India was inaugurated.
For eighteen years I served on the Joint Committee for Church Union in South India.
What were my ideals and dreams during those years for the Church of South India?
How many of them have been realised?
How many more still remain to be fulfilled?
The churches in South India had been founded by the Older Churches in Europe and America.
The methods of church government and public worship were exactly the same as in the West.
Some of us wanted to have an Indian Church embodying the best traditions and ideals in the religious life of India.
Of course, only such Indian ideals as conformed to the standard of Jesus Christ should be permitted in the Indian Church.
There did not seem to be much possibility of the Indian Church being given an opportunity to work out its own patterns of doctrine, worship and Church government.
Missionaries were firmly convinced that church life as they knew it from their childhood in their own denominational set-up in the West conformed
BIRTH
OF THE CHURCH OF SOUTH INDIA
best to the New Testament.
Most of our own Indian leaders, both pastors and laymen, were loyal to the traditions of church life on which they had been brought up, even more loyal than their missionary teachers.
In the Anglican Church in South India, for instance, many of our Indian people were not ready to give up the Prayer Book or to depart even an inch from the rules and regulations of the Anglican Church as they had been introduced. into India from England.
For the first time in the life of the Church in India we began asking questions.
What is the meaning of Holy Communion?
Who can celebrate it?
Should we have Bishops?
Should they necessarily ordain all ministers?
Should they alone take confirmations?
Why should we recite the Creeds?
We debated these and other questions fully and frankly.
Though we had been drawn from various churches, we sought to be candid and open about the way in which doctrines and practices worked in our own churches.
This was a great advantage indeed.
A Methodist, for instance, would be loyal to his own church tradition but was always willing to admit 'where the shoe pinched'.
He would also be ready to hear how other churches worked and whether they worked better or worse than his own.
In an unexpected way the freedom which some of us had sought for the Indian Church was being given to us.
We were told that we need not necessarily conform to the doctrine and practice of the Mother Churches which had established us.
We could have our own Prayer Book, not necessarily the Prayer Book of the Anglican Church.
We could have extempore prayers.
We could have a form of Episcopacy suited to the spiritual needs of India.
We could have a Church Constitution fitted to Indian conditions.
The Church of South India during the last twenty-two years of its existence has made a beginning in these directions.
Several new services of worship—Holy Communion, Confirmation, Baptism, and Ordination—have been drawn up.
Our services are not just services of worship followed in England and America and translated into the regional languages of India.
I hope that the indigenisation of Christian worship in the Church of South India will continue steadily.
I must confess that very few of out Indian Presbyters and Bishops (including myself) and Indian laymen have made a careful study of the liturgies of the Christian:
A. J. APPASAMY
Church all over the world.
Nor have we made a sympathetic research into the methods of worship in India, though we realise that Hinduism, while rich in private devotional life, has not much to contribute to public worship.
The Nicene Creed was written against the background _ of Greck philosophy.
In the Indian Church the problems of Greek thought have little or no meaning.
But there are many problems of Hindu philosophy.
Is God one or many?
What is His relationship to the world?
Does He rule it as a transcendent or as an immanent Being?
If God the Spirit dwells in all beings, what 1s His relation to the Supreme God on the one hand and to the Incarnate Christ on the other?
Is our personality merged in the Divine or does it continue to exist even in the state of final bliss?
To realize our unity with the rest of Christendom we decided to say the Creeds in all our services but we acknowledged the need to think afresh our Christian Theology.
We put it on record that the time may come for the formulation of supplementary Creeds dealing with Indian problems.
YEAR OF PRAYER
The Brough Memorial Church at Erode stands where four roads meet and is quite a landmark.
Its two domed towers on the front and the turrets on either side are very striking in their simple beauty.
Inside the church the high roof of the nave rests on strong stone pillars, with lotus flowers carved on them.
The floor is of polished stone, black and white.
There is intricate fretwork of teak wood on the windows. A large stone pulpit on the left near the chancel is for the ministry of the Word.
Beyond the choir stalls on the right stands the Communion Table for the ministry of the Sacrament.
The Rey. E. W. Brough, a Congregationalist missionary who laboured long and faithfully in the Erode area, planned a church really characteristic of the East, and built it in the Saracenic style so familiar in North India.
This large and beautiful church was filled to its utmost capacity on September 27, 1950.
YEAR OF PRAYER
It was the inauguration Service of the Diocese of Coimbatore, which included the districts of Coimbatore, Nilgiri and Salem in South India.
Delegates from all parts of the Diocese had come— Indians and Europeans, representatives from comparatively prosperous and well-educated town congregations as well as. members from simple, mostly illiterate, village churches.
There. were also numerous representatives from the Church of South India which had come into existence three years earlier on the same date.
A spirit of subdued enthusiasm prevailed among the congregation.
For three years the Congregationalists in that area had not come into the Church of South India, fearful that their Free Church traditions might be in peril, and now they had come in, expecting great things, hoping for new life.
I had been appointed Bishop in Coimbatore.
This area was quite unknown to me.
I had to preach the Installation Sermon.
I was much in prayer that God would give me a message for that important occasion.
At that time I was reading The Second Evangelical Awakening in Britain by Dr Edwin. Orr.
I was led— I am now convinced by the Spirit of God—to preach on the text, Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you (Luke 11:9).
I urged that the new Diocese should plan to hold evangelistic missions in every parish and pray earnestly to God that He might bring about a great spiritual awakening.
The Diocesan Council, the Standing Committees and the leaders in the Coimbatore Diocese co-operated fully with me in implementing the proposal which I had made in my sermon during the Service of Installation.
No one raised any difficulty whatsoever—that the time was not ripe for such a Mission or that such a mission would not serve any useful purpose.
Our resources were very limited.
We did not know where we would find the numerous evangelists who would be needed to reach all our three hundred congregations.
And we certainly did not have the funds to meet the expenses we might have to meet.
Only one thing was clear.
We should spend the year 1951 in prayer, Bible study and spiritual preparation.
On this we were all agreed.
It was suggested that I might write a pastoral letter to be read in all the churches of the Diocese on Sunday, 14th January, 1951.
In the course of the letter I said: Why do we need a year of ? prayer!
A. J. APPASAMY
St Paul gives us a fitting answer.
"But this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus' Serasiaibe
3:13, 14).
All through his life St Paul had steadily grown in aaritiel stature.
We need only compare the Epistles to the Thessalonians of his earlier years with the Epistles to the Romans and Philippians written towards the end of his life.
How much fuller and richer his understanding of the religion of Christ had become!
To take only one instance, his friendships had become wider and their intimacy had become deeper.
There is delicate tact in his Epistle to Philemon written in the last years of his life.
We need to remember how nearly everybody referred to in this letter had ' originally been alien to St Paul in race, in social status and in intellectual and religious outlook.
On the claims of Christ he was as uncompromising at the end of his career as he was in the beginning.
But he took more and more trouble to understand men, to sympathise with them and, by sheer friendship, to win them over for Christ.
The aged Paul forgot the things which were behind him—successes as well as failures—and reached forth unto the things which were before him.
He did not allow his failures to depress him nor his successes to elate him but he endeavoured steadily to reach a higher standard of devotion to Christ and of love for Him.
In her autobiography I Follow After, the widow of Narayan Vaman Tilak, the distinguished Mahratta poet, describes with vivid detail and rare candour her husband's steady spiritual growth.
Ten years after his baptism he had his second conversion.
His: natural pride disappeared and a spirit of utter dependence on God took its place.
At that time he wrote a hymn in which he sang about this change which had been wrought in him and his eyes: filled with tears whenever he sang it.
Here is the hymn:
At last my Lord and King, to Thy dear feet I cling.
All lost, this life of mine without the light of Thine.
I saw my own self stand the first at Christ's right hand, In pride of strength and grace.
Ah, now before Thy face, That pride is low as dust.
No more myself I trust.
(p. 255)
YEAR OF PRAYER
In that pastoral letter I made various suggestions as to how we could spend the year of preparation.
The most important one was that people might gather together in various places to study the Bible and spend time in prayer for a spiritual awakening.
Bishop Pakenham-Walsh had founded an Ashram at Tadagam, only nine miles from Coimbatore.
His long, rich and varied Christian experience was always available to us.
His presence in our midst was certainly a rare blessing God had given us.
The Bishop at our request prepared a small book on Prayer for use by our study groups.
The burden of my preaching during the year 1951 was the need for Revival.
I visited every large congregation and some of the smaller congregations and urged people to pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
Some years ago I wanted to plant some trees in a garden.
The saplings were brought from a distance of twenty miles at some expense. I told the gardener, 'You must plant these saplings and water them regularly.'
Then after some time I asked him whether he was watering them as I had asked him to do.
He said to me, 'Sir, what is the use of watering them?
Some of the plants are quite dead.'
I am afraid in our congregations and Sunday Schools we often keep on watering plants which have not taken root and which have no life.
We speak of giving regular spiritual nourishment to our people. Such nourishment is only useful to men and women who have committed their lives to Christ, who have become rooted in Him and are seeking to grow in grace and in knowledge.
Ina Revival we are convicted of our sins.
We pray for forgiveness through the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ and we accept Him as our Saviour.
That was why we needed a Revival in the Christian Church so that all its members might be Christians in reality and not in name only.
What was the response in the Diocese to this call for prayer?
One of our women said to me: 'I am no good at organization.
I cannot take services.
I cannot give addresses.
But I am feeling an urge within me to devote myself more and more to prayer.'
Another woman said to me: 'I read in a religious paper how a remarkable spiritual movement began in the Lutheran Church in Hungary through the prayer of a devout woman.
Since then I have been praying earnestly and regularly for a revival of the Christian Church in our country.
For many years when my husband was at work and the children were growing up, I had