Chapter Xii — The Indian Interpretation Of Jesus
CHAPTER XII
THE INDIAN INTERPRETATION OF JESUS
THE answer to the question as to what will be the distinctive notes in the interpretation of Christ through Indian genius and bent can be given only tentatively. That answer can only be left with India. But that there will be a distinctive note is certain.
The Christian Church in its sanest and most spiritual times has fixed upon the person of Jesus as the center and real essential of Christianity. But as his teaching and life goes through each national genius it receives a tinge from the life through which it passes. Paul speaks of “my gospel.” It was a gospel that had gone through the thinking and mentality of a man deeply soaked in Judaism. He poured the richness of that gospel through those modes of thinking. Paul could truly say, “It is my gospel,” for no one else could give exactly that same expression of Christianity that Paul could give, since no one else had the same social inheritance through which to express it.
When Christianity went further and touched the brain of Europe in Greece it received another expression. As we look back to Christianity we largely see it through “the binocular of Greek metaphysics and Roman law.” Greece did the thinking for Europe, and it was in this atmosphere that some of our creeds were formed. Someone has said that at Pentecost everyone heard the gospel in his own tongue, but at Nicea the voice was Greek. We are deeply grateful for that voice and for those creeds. They have kept Christianity very often from drifting into a meaningless tolerant theosophy. Carlyle taunted Christendom that it had been divided over a diphthong, but later he acknowledged that the whole of Christianity was probably bound up in the question of that diphthong. This preciseness of Greek intellect has been a mighty steadying force as Christianity has gone on its way. But it has by that very preciseness helped to stereotype Christianity in certain mental forms. As Christianity went through the Romans many of the theories of the atonement were largely taken out of forms found in Roman law. When we read of some of those discussions on the atonement we feel the legal atmosphere—God is the Judge, men are mere subjects, the universe has law written in it and the relationship between God and men is a legal relationship. Certainly, it is a great gain thus to have an orderly universe and the thought of iron law at the center of things. But though it had received this contribution, Christianity found itself cramped in the Roman legal forms, even crippled. God is more than law; he is love expressing himself through law. The world is not a courtroom, but a family; and the relationship between God and man is not a legal one of ruler and subject, but a filial one between Father and son. Our inheritance from both Greek and Roman has helped and yet seriously hindered.
The Anglo-Saxon inheritance has deeply influenced Christianity. MacDougall reminds us that the Norsemen, the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon people, dwelt on the rugged coast-line of Norway. They got most of their living from the sea, but it was not sufficient, so they cultivated those rugged hillsides. It was a precarious existence and could sustain only a limited number. When the sons came on they were compelled to launch out for themselves, for the hillsides could not sustain them. Hence they went to distant lands and conquered and settled. Out of this social inheritance came three great characteristics: self-reliance, aggressiveness, and the love of individual freedom. Each family became self-sufficient through its own self-reliance and depended little on the settled community.
Those three characteristics are among the Anglo-Saxons to-day. Christianity coming in contact with this social inheritance has been expressed largely in terms of self-reliance, aggressiveness, and individual freedom. An Englishman speaking before an audience said, “I trust I am a Christian Englishman, but I cannot help but remember that I am an English Christian and that my life has been molded by the teachings of the New Testament and by contemporaneous English society.” The forms of expression of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon lands have been largely individualistic and aggressive. This is certainly an inheritance that has enriched, but it has also given only a partial expression of Christianity and has lacked those deep social meanings and social expressions which lie at the heart of Christianity. Protestantism with its love of individual liberty flourished in this atmosphere. But as someone has said, “Protestantism in breaking up the idea of a universal church came near losing the idea of our universal humanity.” We are just now trying to counteract that bad effect by the message of the social application of the gospel.
America is also giving us a type of Christianity that loves such words as “pep,” “snappiness,” and “accomplishment.” The Negro question has also determined some of the forms that Christianity has taken in America. In a certain place in America the Negroes and the white people had a union service. At the close a lady on her return home said, “It was all very nice and all very Christian, but if we are to be Christian in our churches what is it going to lead to?” Here was Christianity trying to break through a social inheritance and express itself in universal terms, but caught and cramped by a social inheritance that practically forbade universality.
The religious genius of India is the richest in the world, the forms that it has taken have often been the most extravagant, sometimes degrading and cruel. These forms are falling away, or will fall away, but the spirit persists and will be poured through other forms. As that genius pours itself through Christian molds it will enrich the collective expression of Christianity. But in order to do that the Indian must remain Indian. He must stand in the stream of India’s culture and life and let the force of that stream go through his soul so that the expression of his Christianity will be essentially Eastern and not Western. This does not mean that Indian Christianity will be denied what is best in Western thought and life, for when firmly planted on its own soil it can then lift its antennæ to the heavens and catch the voices of the world. But it must be particular before it can be universal. Only thus will it be creative—a voice, not an echo.
Someone writing to me on the subject said, “The first thing necessary is to create a live Indian”—a man alive to his past, his possibilities, his religious genius. Given that spirit Indian Christianity will find its own forms as the day follows the night.
The reason that the Indian Christian has not made any real contribution to Christian theology is because he has been trying, on the whole, to think through Western forms and here he is like a fish out of water. But now that India is awakened and self-conscious and the process of denationalization is probably over, we may expect that genius to work. We must be willing to trust the Indian to make his contribution.
It is no more fair to say that we cannot trust Indian genius to interpret Christianity because of the extravagances of the past than to have said that the Western mind could not be trusted because the Druids in England used to perform human sacrifices in their religion and the Scots practiced cannibalism.
Every nation has its peculiar contribution to make to the interpretation of Christianity. The Son of man is too great to be expressed by any one portion of humanity. Those that differ from us most will probably contribute most to our expression of Christianity.
Here is the inward feeling of a patriotic Slav as to the contribution of his race. In a personal letter written to Professor H. A. Miller more than a year before the war by a Bohemian who for thirty years had been a professor of German in a German Gymnasium, he unbosoms his hopes for his people thus: “I am not pessimistic enough to give up all hopes that Providence may have some good things in store for the Slavs. What keeps me up is a certain hazy impression that human development may some time be in want of a new formula, and then our time may come. I conceive ourselves under the sway of the German watchword which spells ‘force,’ and as watchwords come and go, like everything else human, perhaps the Slavs may some time be called on to introduce another which I would like to see spelled ‘charity’ ” (Quoted in Races, Nations, and Classes , Miller, p. 80.)
India too hopes that the world may some day be in need of a new formula. She too has her word ready. It will be spelled “Atma”— spirit . That word “Atma” runs like a refrain through everything in India. The followers of the Christ of the Indian Road will show us the real meaning of a spiritual life. They will sit lightly to earthly things and abandon themselves to the spirit.
Along with that will come the sense of the unity and harmony running through things. “Don’t you think atonement would mean attunement?” said a Hindu to me one day. He felt his life was “like sweet bells jangled out of tune” by sin and evil, and to his mind, craving inward peace and harmony, atonement would bring attunement to the nature of God—music instead of a discord. No wonder peace has been the great thought and craving of India. Anything like losing one’s temper is thought to be utterly incompatible with the truly religious life. “I know I haven’t salvation yet” said a villager to me one day, “for while I have conquered everything else anger still remains, I haven’t got it yet.” The followers of the Christ of the Indian Road will be harmonized and peaceful. Meditation to them will be real. Religion will mean quiet realization. God will be the harmonizing bond of all.
Finally the followers of the Christ of the Indian Road will know the meaning of the cross, for India stands for the cost of being religious. Renunciation will be a reality, for India instinctively grasps the meaning of Jesus when he says that the way to realize life is to renounce it—to lose it is to find it. In the footprints of many of his followers as they walk along the Indian Road will be blood stains, for they will be Apostles of the Bleeding Feet. They will know the meaning of being crucified followers of a crucified Lord.
There is a term and conception that sums up these ideas and gives them vital expression—a term that is deeply imbedded in India’s thought and practice, namely, “Bhakti.” It means faith, and yet more than faith, it means devotion, and yet is deeper than devotion; it expresses following another, and yet is richer than that. It means Self committed to Another—an utter self-abandonment, until that Other becomes the life of our life, the very center of our being. The lesser life is transformed into the moral and spiritual image of the Object of the Bhakti and draws its very life from the Other. I say “Object,” but that sounds too distant for this relation, for here Subject and Object almost cease to be, for Life follows into life, Being into being.
This was doubtless Paul’s conception of faith, but the word has lost some of its deep original meanings and has become more or less identified with belief or trust. Self-committal is not its principal content. India will restore this through Bhakti.
But in taking Bhakti from India Christianity will broaden and enrich it. With India Bhakti has had its center in the emotions. In Christ it will be in the whole man. For Christ brings life to the whole of life.
Now, we believe God to be personal—not corporeal, but personal. In personality there are at least three things, grounded in a fourth—intellect, feeling and will—these grounded in self-consciousness. We too are personal—we have those four things. Now, religion is the response of my personality to the personality of God. Religion means, then, that I would think God’s thoughts after him, feel his feelings after him, will his purposes after him and become his being after him. But apart from Jesus I know little of God, so religion means to me to think Christ’s thoughts, feel his feelings, will his purposes, and become his being.
Christianity uses ritual, but it is not ritual; it has beliefs, but it is not a belief; it has institutions, but it is not an institution. In its deepest meaning it is person giving itself to Person, life to Life.
Jesus said that Bhakti was to be of the whole man: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart [the feeling nature], with all thy mind [the intellectual nature], with all thy soul [the volitional nature], and with all thy strength [the physical nature]. The whole man, including the physical, is to be brought under the sway of God. But with all thy strength would go further than the strength of the physical—it would mean the strength of the mind, the strength of the feeling, the strength of the will. Many are loving God in an unbalanced and unsymmetrical way and, therefore, weak way. They love him with the strength of the feeling and the weakness of the mind—that makes the emotionalist in religion; some love him with the strength of the emotions and the weakness of the will—that makes the sentimentalist in religion; others love him with the strength of the mind and the weakness of the emotions—the mere intellectualist in religion; others love him with the strength of the will and the weakness of the emotions—this produces the man of iron, very moral, but unlovely and unlovable. The really strong Christian is one that loves with the strength of the mind, the strength of the emotions, the strength of the will—the strength of the whole personality—the entire being caught up in a passion of love and self-surrender to Christ. As Christ gives all, he claims all.
So the Christian Bhakta or devotee will practice neither the asceticism of the mind, nor of the feeling, nor of the will—not asceticism but consecration; not drying up but development; self-renunciation in order to self-development. The soul thus becomes like a well-directed sailboat—a directing mind guiding the rudder (the will) and with the sails (the emotions) filled with the winds of heaven. The whole of life will go ahead and progress.
“Bhakti” is a beautiful and rich term and broadened by the original Christian conception should enrich our expression of Christianity.
When I think of the type that sums up these realities and gives us a sample of a really Indian expression of Christianity, I think of Sadhu Sundar Singh. In his besandalled feet, his long flowing yellow robe, in his lack of earthly possessions, in the quiet calm and joy of his face, he looks as though he had just stepped out of the pages of the New Testament. Here is Christianity going through a truly Indian spirit and the world bends over to catch the music of it. When he goes to Europe there are no halls or churches large enough to hold the crowds in large university centers. As they listen they catch the accents that amid the complexity of our civilization sound new-life that has caught the meaning of the supremacy and reality of the spirit, that knows harmony and peace and is utterly abandoned to the Christ of the Indian Road.
As someone has said, “The final commentary on the Gospels cannot be written until India has been Christianized.”