Theological Study in America
A. J. APPASAMY
culture of their country.
For long years these verses continued to help them in a life of much sunshine and many dark clouds.
Like other Indian Christians, they loved the Psalms of the Hebrews and the Hymns of the English people but that was an shored taste.
K. T. Paul says:
'Blessed indeed are a people who do have a deep fundamental heritage.
Blessed, thrice blessed, indeed are they when a rare soul enone them comes into a new experience and voices such experience.'
'K. T.' went to London along with Mahatma Gandhi and other national leaders of India to discuss with the British authorities how best political responsibility could be transferred from England to India.
'K. T.' took with him Krishna Pillai's Rakshanya Yatrikam for his study and meditation during that long journey by sea and back.
K. T. Paul was wholly dedicated to the service of Christ.
He loved India and had a vision of its important place in the larger life of the world.
He was eager to work with men of all races in a spirit of brotherhood and love.
He did not make any claim to extraordinary intellectual gifts, but was alert and kept himself informed of the best thought of his time by constant study.
The Y.M.C.A., the most progressive Christian organisation in India at that time, recognised his real worth and gave him a responsible post.
THEOLOGICAL STUDY IN AMERICA
I had dedicated myself to the Christian ministry.
It was essential to get the necessary training.
I felt convinced that this training should be first-rate.
God requires the very best from us.
I was keen to study theology in Oxford which has been the fountainhead of Christian theology in Europe for the past eight centuries.
Education in Oxford is expensive and my father was not willing to provide the necessary funds; but a way had now opened for me to study theology:in America.
In August 1915 I sailed for the United States.
I was then twenty-four years of age.
THEOLOGICAL STUDY IN AMERICA
At that time Hartford had a population of one' hundred thousand people.
It was a pretty city with many parks and gardens, and my teachers and fellow students received me warmly.
When I entered the Seminary building, a tall, well-built, Swedish janitor who was sweeping the corridor shook hands with me and bade me welcome.
This was my first taste of American democracy.
Men and women of many social classes mingle together and regard themselves as of equal rank.
There were forty-five students in the Seminary and we were divided into three classes.
We had ten Professors and Lecturers.
I was impressed by the high standard of their lectures. The teachers were specialists; one had devoted his whole life to the New Testament, another to the Old, another to Systematic Theology and yet another to Church History.
Some of them had international reputation. The President of the Seminary, Dr Douglas Mackenzie,
Was a man of great learning and deep piety.
He contributed the long and important article on Jesus Christ in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.
'The Dean, Dr M. W. Jacobus, had published a commentary on the Gospel of St Mark.
He came to the Seminary in a fine Limousine driven by a chauffeur in uniform.
We knew that Jacobus was a wealthy man, and served the Seminary diligently because of his sense of vocation.
Dr L. B.
Paton was an Old Testament specialist.
He was a somewhat radical scholar. He contributed several articles to the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.
Dr D. B. Macdonald was widely known as a great Semitic scholar.
There was much difference between the work I had. done in the Madras Christian College and the work I now did in Hartford.
For every course we had to do some home work.
We had to go to the library, read up the books recommended by the teachers and write papers.
We were not spoon-fed as in India.
We had to dig up information for ourselves.
We had to think and express our thoughts.
On one occasion Dr Geer, the Professor of Church History, said that he would like us during the whole term to read up the life of a Saint and to write a paper on him.
The Saint chosen was St Francis of Assisi.
He suggested various books, one or more of which we could study.
It was a wonderful experience to live in the company of this man of God for several weeks.
This research enabled me to get a far better idea of St Francis and his times than a formal course of lectures with a test at the end.
A. J. APPASAMY
At Hartford I realized that the study of theology is not primarily an intellectual pursuit which consists in understanding the arguments of learned theologians and deciding whether they are correct or wrong.
It is not a question of linguistic ability and the interpretation of difficult biblical texts.
Theological study is really listening to the voice of God, being ready to receive light from above, being open to divine guidance.
For this purpose a theological student must learn to carry on his studies in a spirit of prayer; he must never read in a hurry; he must allow himself considerable time to grasp the spiritual significance of the teaching given by the sacred writers in the Bible and by the great theologians of the past and the present in their books.
He must not get into the habit of reading hurriedly the lessons which may be assigned to him or of putting down in a perfunctory way the thoughts which come into his mind. Our teachers in the Seminary impressed upon us the profound truth that Christian Theology grows out of life and experience.
It is not an intellectual exercise meant to sharpen our minds.
During the years I spent in America, I learnt to appreciate in a new way the culture and heritage of India.
I saw the vast efforts which were made to instil in American children a love of their motherland.
How often they were taught to think of their country as the best country in the world!
'This stirred in me a deep devotion to India, its culture and its beauty.
I often visited churches to give missionary addresses.
I was frequently asked:
Have you been to the Himalayas?
Have you seen the Taj Mahal?
At that time I had to say 'No' as the extreme south of India is my home and the Himalayas are 2,000 miles away and the Taj
Mahal also is quite far away.
But I felt proud that the Himalayas were a part of my country and that the Taj was in India.
When I returned to India I visited the Himalayas and the Taj Mahal and feasted my eyes on their glory.
In 1916 it was announced that Rabindranath Tagore would give readings from his books in a theatre in New York.
I was keen to hear him.
When I asked the Dean 'Could I go?' he immediately said, 'Certainly.
If I had as distinguished a countryman as you have, I would want to hear him.'
So I travelled 120 miles and attended the readings.
The theatre was not full that afternoon but there was a large audience.
The poet, clad in his long flowing robe, with his venerable beard, was an impressive
THEOLOGICAL STUDY IN AMERICA
personality.
We were kept spellbound as he read many selections in his musical voice.
He read from Gitanjali which had been recently published and had won for him the Nobel prize.
His readings from The Crescent Moon about little children and their innocent ways caused much merriment.
He read the story of Kabuliwallah, which was received with considerable applause.
It was good to see how warmly this cultured Indian was received.
We are apt to admire the unusual aspects of nature—the broad tiver, heaving in its majestic course, the sky torn with lightning, the expanse of spotless snow.
But the little things of nature escape our attention.
To Tagore, a sunbeam floating in through a window, a dark midnight, a leaf fluttering idly in the wind, have all a new meaning.
Friendship and love seem to us to be nothing but incidents connected with the fact of life. But Tagore sees something more in them.
Speaking of the Indian idea that young men should attend to the affairs of life and give old men leisure to think and pray, he reverses the old-world values and says 'that old men should take charge of account books and do other mundane things in order to give young people time to pass through the 'severe discipline of courtship.'
What impressed me most about Tagore was his joyous, boundless, optimism that discovered beauty in a world which to many of us seems so familiar and bereft of romance.
We have in India millions of people who are illiterate, unable even to sign their names.
The education of the masses is a problem of signal importance.
I visited the Hampton Institute in Virginia and studied in detail the excellent work which had been done there among emancipated Negroes by General
Armstrong.
He had an original mind and tackled the problem boldly.
I wrote four articles in the Young Men of India with the rather high-sounding title, 4 Challenge to India's Educators.
At the end of three years of study Dr Douglas Mackenzie sent for me and said to me: 'We have elected you a travelling fellow.'
I said, 'What exactly does that mean?'
He said, 'For two years you may study theology in any part of the world and we shall pay you a fellowship to cover your expenses.
We expect you to write to us every term and tell us what you are doing.'
This, of course, was very good news.
.I knew in a general way that the best student of a three-year class was appointed a travelling fellow like this.
I had prayed earnestly that I might be chosen.
I had
A. J. APPASAMY
also worked hard.
But according to a rule of the Seminary, we were not told the marks in our various examinations.
'The idea was that we must not pay too much attention to the examinations.
So no one knew who would be chosen for the travelling fellowship.
I now decided to study at Oxford with the help of this fellowship and thus fulfil a longing of many years.
But before leaving the United States I spent a year at Harvard University making a special study of the religions of the world, such as Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism.
One particular seminar stands out in my memory.
Dr George Foot Moore was a great scholar and was held in much respect by the University as well as the outside world.
He offered a seminar on the attitude of educated men in the Roman Empire to Christianity.
After the evening meal we went to his home once every fortnight and spent a couple of hours with him in his study when he suggested the different books we could read on that subject and discussed them and the papers we wrote, informally with us.
He was a genuine scholar interested in the pursuit of knowledge; he believed in the utmost accuracy; every statement we made had to be proved from some ancient document.
He did not believe ingeneralizations, brilliant or otherwise.
He emphasized the historical background of every idea.
I understood once again the problems and difficulties of Christian work among educated men and at the same time its supreme importance.
At the end of a year of study in Harvard I was given the Master of Arts degree.
There were about a hundred Indian Christian young men studying in America.
We formed ourselves into an organization and published a mimeographed paper every month called The Indian Patrika.
1 was asked to be its editor.
A considerable amount of my spare time was devoted to this work.
We gave news of our students, the work we were doing in the various colleges and our ideals and hopes.
Though we lived in America and made many friends and learnt much about the American way of life, we were keen to treasure the spiritual and moral heritage of India and to see that our fellow Christians in India and in the West did the same.
Dr B. P. Hivale, one of our number, returned to India and founded the Ahmadnagar Christian College.
Dr S. J. Theodore became a professor in the Madras Christian College.
Mr K. K.