The Resistance of Christian Denominationalism
The Resistance of Christian Denominationalism
The unity of the church was threatened not only by conflicts with Anglican missionary societies. The western missionary enterprise had imported multiple denominations to India, so that the Indian Christian church was itself divided into many sections. Some Indian Christians identified themselves with bizarrely inappropriate titles such as British Anglicans, Canadian Baptists, or German Lutherans. These divisions seriously weakened the witness of an already small minority church in a non-Christian land. As Azariah argued at the Lausanne Conference on Faith and Order in 1927,
Azariah tried to shock the western church out of its complacency. Denominationalism was taken for granted in the West, but Indian Christians could ill afford divisions, outnumbered as they already were by nonChristians on the subcontinent. Worse still, Indian converts exploited denominational divisions to preserve former caste divisions, with different caste groups being baptized into different denominations. Azariah identified Christian disunity as a serious problem early in his career, and spent over three decades battling for unity between the Anglican church and other Christian denominations.
Azariah helped to jump-start the twentieth-century ecumenical movement at a meeting between representatives of the Church of England in India and the South India United Church (a united CongregationalPresbyterian church) at Bishop Whitehead's Madras residence in 1910. This meeting sparked a process that led, after many years of painstaking labor and negotiation, to the first reunification of episcopal (Anglican) and non-episcopal (Congregational, Presbyterian, Methodist) Churches since the Reformation, in 1947. Although the new Church of South India came into being two years after Azariah's death, he participated in virtually all of the major interdenominational meetings leading up to its formation.
These negotiations were a different kind of struggle for Azariah, forcing him to defend church teachings on issues such as historic succession against nonconformist challenges to Anglican faith and order. A brief survey44 of Azariah's contribution to the formation of the Church of South India is helpful for understanding not only another dimension of his prolific activity, but also the distinctive contribution which he made to the historic 1947 settlement as the preeminent spokesman for Indian Christians during a quarter century of negotiations.
Azariah was intimately involved with all of the major personalities and organizations who pioneered South Indian ecumenism: the Tinnevelly (mainly Nadar but also Vellalar) church, Madras Christian College, the YMCA, the IMS, the NMS, Sherwood Eddy, John Mott, K. T. Paul, Henry Whitehead, the Joint Committee on Union, and the NCC. His participation at `Edinburgh 1910,' and his outspoken advocacy of unity at the Lambeth Conferences of 1920 and 193045 and the international conferences on Faith and Order in Lausanne (1927) and Edin burgh (1937)46 - all were essential contributions towards building an international consensus in favor of ecumenical cooperation in the early part of this century. The papers of Edwin Palmer, Bishop of Bombay and another central figure in the unity negotiations, reveal Azariah's thorough acquaintance, as a leader, organizer, and publicist, with every aspect of the unity negotiations during the last twenty-five years of his life.47
Azariah began his active involvement in this interdenominational struggle by convincing Henry Whitehead of the importance of organic union for India as early as 19 10.48 The Bishop of Dornakal participated in all of the major interdenominational meetings with an ecumenical thrust during the period between 1910 and 1918 (such as the Edinburgh Continuation meetings of 1910-13 and the meetings related to the Evangelistic Forward Movement during 1910-18), and was the primary organizer and leader of the now famous meeting at Tranquebar in 1919 which initiated the specific negotiations between episcopal and non-episcopal churches that succeeded in 1947.49 Azariah then served as a leading member of the Joint Committee on Union from its inauguration in 1920 to his death in 1945.
Azariah took a strong position from the start on the need to retain an historic episcopate in the united church (by far the most divisive issue at stake) and argued against division along caste, racial, or linguistic lines.50 In this respect, Azariah was in full agreement with the Catholic tradition in the Anglican church; as his conviction regarding this issue strengthened over the years, he came into regular confrontation with his non-Anglican colleagues, especially the Congregationalists.51 But unlike his Anglo-Catholic colleagues, Azariah took a broad position regarding the possibility of intercommunion, a contentious issue by the early 1930s. Azariah stood alone with the Bishop of Tinnevelly, F. J. Western, in defying Anglican Catholic opinion to partake in the elements at Methodist and SIUC communion services during the joint Committee meeting of February 1932 in Madras.52 This constituted one of the more important turning points in the negotiations, creating a new sense of goodwill among participants that was translated later into an agreement on full unification.
The unity movement was one of the primary means by which Azariah became a world-renowned churchman. The Indian efforts were watched with great interest by Anglicans and nonconformists around the world who recognized their historical importance. At both the Lambeth Conferences of 1920 and 1930 and the Faith and Order Conferences of 1927 and 1937, Azariah publicized and promoted the South Indian scheme of union, and he fearlessly upbraided western churches for not taking denominational divisions seriously enough.
The bishop's dedication to the cause of unity was prompted by several interrelated factors. First and foremost was his commitment to evangelism and his recognition that denominationalism weakened the effectiveness of missionaries in India. Jesus Christ's prayer for unity in the Gospel of John - that all of them may be one.... so that the world may believe that you have sent me"'- made it clear to him that unity was essential for successful missions. Azariah's experience as an evangelist bore out the truth of this biblical passage. Interdenominational disputes were not a rare occurrence in his diocese and `sheep stealing' by other Christian denominations was a vexing problem. His missionary work at the grassroots level in Dornakal provided him with both his rationale for and his undisputed authority in the ecumenical dialogue.
Secondly, Azariah's quest for a united church of India expressed his concern for the development of an authentically indigenous church. Azariah argued that a unified church would be a more genuine expression of a native Indian Christianity than one divided into ecclesiastical compartments formed by western controversies dating back to the Reformation. Denominationalism was an alien export from Europe that offended Indian Christian sensibilities very much like English cloth exported from Lancashire offended Indian nationalist sensibili- ties.54 Indian Christians had not participated historically in the sectarian conflicts from which denominational divisions emerged, Azariah argued, nor had they shared in the `social discriminations, political partisanships, or racial characteristics' which perpetuated sectarian cleavages in the West. To Indian Christians, western denominational boundaries were `totally meaningless' and destructive of their unity as a community.55
Worst of all to Azariah, denominationalism inhibited Indian Christians from overcoming their own prejudices of `race, language, caste and social status.'56 Initially meaningless sectarian divisions inherited from the West were being reinterpreted, Azariah warned, to reinforce India's indigenous sociological divisions. Denominationalism permitted Indian converts of different castes to preserve and even strengthen their social separations by joining churches of different denominations. Thus, Azariah claimed, `separate castes merge into separate denominations and once more continue their unholy warfare of generations.'57
Azariah viewed the problem of denominationalism in much the same way as his contemporary, H. Richard Niebuhr, who identified various sociological determinants of ecclesiastical sectarianism as the accommodation of Christianity to the caste-system of human society.' To Niebuhr, `the evil of denominationalism' lay in `the failure of the churches to transcend the social conditions which fashion them into caste organi- zations.'58 Both men regarded church divisiveness as a moral failure falling short of the ideal of Christian brotherhood as presented in the Bible. Both believed that the ecumenical movement was rediscovering what they regarded as the church's true vocation of transcending the divisions of the `world' (class, race, nation) to create an international fellowship of love. This idealistic mandate provided the foundation for the World Council of Churches, whose inauguration in Amsterdam in 1948 represented a worldwide extension of the ecumenical vision to which Azariah and his colleagues had given local expression in India.
The South Indian ecumenical movement never drew its inspiration, however, from the type of secular political vision that became associated in the postwar period with the World Council of Churches; its inspiration came, rather, from the more traditional missionary objective of converting India to Christianity. The many westerners and Indians who joined Azariah in the quest for Indian ecclesiastical unity were, for the most part, ardent evangelists who recognized that denominationalism was a barrier to the effective propagation of the gospel. Men such as J. J. Banninga, J. H. Maclean, V. Santiago, J. S. M. Hooper, H. A. Popley, and Rajaiah D. Paul joined Azariah and other Anglican bishops in believing that the realm of the spirit' (later to become the preserve mainly of evangelicals) was `integrally related to a new vision of the Church as one body' (later to become the realm primarily of ecumenicals).59 After the Second World War, these two tendencies bifurcated into the acrimonious `ecumenical-evangelical standoff' that reached its climax during the 1960s and continues today.60 Conservative evangelicals rarely see ecumenism as a necessary part of evangelism; and liberal ecumenists tend to regard traditional evangelism as a divisive rather than a unifying force. From the perspective of the late twentieth century it is therefore difficult to imagine that, in Azariah's day, ecumenism was regarded as the very key to South Indian evangelism.
Azariah's greatest contribution to the unity debates may well have been his promotion of an Indian Christian identity that was both national and transnational in character.61 The bishop often described church unification as part of a larger program of church indigenization: We must have one Church. We want a Church of India, a Church which can be our spiritual home, a Church where the Indian religious genius can find natural expression,' he argued in 1927. However, he also stressed that the Indian church was `a living branch of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church,' whose emerging ecumenical character would provide `a visible symbol of unity in that divided land (India).'62 Because Azariah always tempered nationalism with universalism, he regarded reunification less as an act of national self-assertion than as an `act of atonement and reparation ... of penitence and sorrow ... for the sad condition of divisions in which we find ourselves.'63
The bishop paid a heavy price toward the end of his life for defending a universal ecumenical vision against the growing nationalist demand for freedom from the West. Indian Christian liberals of the `Christo Samaj' attacked the joint Committee negotiations for being too western in their composition and approach.64 `The religious ethic of India was not compatible with one centralized structure,' the Indian layman, P. Chenchiah, claimed in 1938. `Hinduism is a federation of different Hindu temples and charitable institutions.'65 But, to Azariah, a centralized episcopal system was essential in India to block caste divisions and to maintain Christian sacramental worship and community life.
Azariah opposed many efforts of this more radical group to liberate the Indian church from its western `captivity.' As the bishop's youngest son recalled to this author: `Church of England Christianity has in it an ingredient of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and, if this element is removed and in its place Ramayana, Sankaracharya and Yoga introduced, the end product will be a very different type of Christianity; and Father was totally opposed to it.'66 The bishop's concern for building a united Indian church upon the historical foundations of the Judeo-Graeco- Roman tradition as introduced to India by western parent churches (and by the ancient Thomas Christians) frustrated more impatient advocates of thorough indigenization. But Azariah's solution was not to turn his back on traditions inherited from the West, but to improve and build upon them.
By the opening of the 1938 International Missionary Council conference at Tambaram, the now elderly Azariah felt isolated among a new generation of Indian clergy and laity whose criticisms of western missions ap peared to Azariah as essentially unjust and narrow-minded.67 Although the bishop promoted structural and cultural indigenization in his diocese, he remained faithful to a vast majority of the traditions associated with Christianity's western (and, to a lesser extent, Eastern Orthodox) incarnations, and was distressed that many younger Indian Christians felt more resentment than gratitude towards the work of western missionaries.
At Tambaram, Azariah also defended the unpopular minority position articulated by Hendrik Kraemer which asserted the uniqueness and superiority of the Christian revelation against a growing spirit of religious relativism.68 M. K. Gandhi's focus on Jesus Christ as a'supreme model of passive resistance and satyagraha,' and on the Sermon on the Mount as one of the highest moral standards of conduct,' had greatly enhanced India's appreciation ofJesus `as a great Prophet, aNabi, as a World-Teacher, a jagatguru,' Azariah had written in 1932. But, he continued, Gandhi had failed to communicate to India that Christianity also `stands for proclaiming a salvation from sin by faith' and joining a community fellowship `which is the source of the Christian life.'69
Azariah faced a new generation at Tambaram content to preach Gandhi's ethical Christ of the Sermon on the Mount and to engage in Christian charitable projects but increasingly doubtful about preaching the supernatural Christ of the cross (i.e., atonement for sin), the resurrection, and pentecost. A desacralized church for social reform rather than evangelism was the goal and symbol of this new attitude. But doubts about Christianity's claim to be the only `true' religion would, Azariah argued, eventually undermine the success of any missionary enterprise. Gandhi and many liberal Christians who expected missionaries to engage in charitable service without seeking conversions did not understand the importance of `the spirit of the religion of Jesus Christ' in mission work, the bishop wrote shortly before the conference:
Azariah's struggle to unite different denominations was ultimately successful, although he did not live to see the institutional fruits of his labor. As he worked to heal divisions within Christendom, the ground shifted under his feet so that what began as a dynamic effort to free the Indian church from western denominationalism was regarded, by the end of his life, as a conservative move to preserve the church's western character. Azariah's successful solution to the rifts in post-Reformation Christendom had been overtaken by the power of a more xenophobic nationalism.
zariah's second major challenge was to overcome the constant friction between local Andhra culture and the transformative agenda of Christianity. The differences between the Christian and non-Christian cultures in his diocese widened over time and were at least as critical to Azariah as the internal rifts within Christendom. The mass movements to Christianity demanded radical adjustments to Andhra village life, particularly in outcaste and low-caste sections. Azariah encouraged the reinterpretation of Christianity within the Telugu context, but could not always predict the outcome. There were many surprises: some good and some bad. Azariah's church was never totally successful in realizing desired change. However, Azariah did successfully resolve many of the cultural disputes in his diocese through a pragmatic balancing of change and continuity, of innovation and accommodation. His solutions were neither purely western nor purely indigenous, but a creative adaptation of grassroots cultural expressions to universalized Christian values.
Azariah's central challenge as a church builder in rural Andhra was to distinguish between those local cultural elements that were compatible with Christian social ethics and those that were not. As Niebuhr reminds us, this task has always been one of the most difficult duties of the church.' Azariah drew upon indigenous traditions of architecture, liturgy, music, and drama in an attempt to forge an authentically Indian expression of Christianity. At the same time, he believed that many values and practices of Indian and Telugu culture - particularly those connected with untouchability - were incompatible with the new faith; and he aimed to establish, not just a new body of worshippers, but a new type of `community' animated by radically different social principles.
Azariah wanted this new society to resist the pressure experienced by other `introduced' religions in India (Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism) to adopt the prevailing social order by participating in India's established system of jati (Telugu: kulam) relations. If the beliefs and policies behind his Christianization of the Dornakal Diocese had complex social results that did not altogether fulfil his dream, the bishop's dual advocacy of change and continuity in cultural standards and customs provided guidelines for the new community to define a double identity as both `Indian' and `Christian.' This is a useful starting point for exploring Christianity's impact on local culture in Andhra, where, during this brief period in the twentieth century, Anglicanism made a dramatic mark.
The relationship between `Christ and culture' was a central problem of Bishop Azariah's life. Its solution required the daily disassociation of the essentials of the Christian faith (so-called `substantive' Christianity) from the western cultural accretions imported to India by missionaries (`adjective' Christianity),3 and the evaluation of every aspect of Indian culture in the light of fundamental Christian principles. Azariah did not write a systematic theoretical treatise on the subject of separating acceptable from unacceptable Indian traditions, but defined his position in practice during three decades of managing diocesan affairs.
The records of Azariah's episcopal career and the various references to Christianity's relation to culture in his writings suggest that he rejected both extremist positions: that Christ and culture are fundamentally in opposition or in agreement. He favored instead an intermediate position whereby Christianity was both the `fulfillment' and `transformer' of culture.
Azariah saw a close, almost indistinguishable link between culture and religion and, especially, between Indian culture and the Hindu reli- gion.4 He did not believe, like Tillich, that religion and culture were insep- arable,5 but he did consider religion to be the most important factor in the character of his own culture and the key to any meaningful reform:
Purposeless, partial, and powerless are all enterprises to redeem and reconstruct society that are not vitally related to God. The social and economic evils of society have at bottom moral and spiritual causes. Moral regeneration to be permanent must be based on religion. God is the source and power of all moral regeneration.6
Azariah therefore regarded evangelism as the single most important instrument of cultural change. He stressed the importance of Christian social service, particularly in response to the otherworldly, Indian `ascetic temperament,' where `the highest religious ideal has been absorption in the Infinite rigorously leaving the present world with its moral, social and political problems to their fate.'? But Azariah never wavered in his bedrock belief that the church's primary vocation was to share the gospel and that the type of charity advocated by the `social gospel' movement, which influenced churches and student organizations like the YMCA during the interwar period, would never succeed in India in the absence of more fundamental religious conversion.