Keeping Up with the Joneses
Keeping Up with the Joneses
E. Stanley Jones was born near Baltimore, Maryland, in 1884. After studying both theology and law and holding a professorship in the United States, he became a missionary to India. He dearly loved the Indian people and became a close personal friend of Mahatma Gandhi. His conversations with Gandhi, recorded in one of his books, became an inspiration to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Jones is considered a trailblazer in India for his enormous effort to give Christianity an Eastern face; not to make it Eastern as much as to return it to its Eastern roots without distorting it. It seems that once anything is seen as being “Americanized,” it is castigated by those who don’t like America or think America philosophically sophomoric. To reverse the process and remove the prejudice is very difficult to do.
In Europe, Christianity was abused when it was used for political power; in America it has been abused by using it for economic power. And today it is abused by its detractors who deny its power and remove it from any position of moral authority. These detractors live under the illusion that it is the only belief that claims absolutes. The price paid for these distortions has been enormous. Gandhi roundly criticized the Christianity he saw practiced around him and advised E. Stanley Jones that if the message of Christianity were to make any inroads into India, it would have to look more like Jesus than like his followers. That is, I am afraid, a very legitimate criticism to this very day, and not only in India. I would be very curious to have heard his thoughts on how Eastern spirituality has been marketed and demonstrated in the West. What many “consumers” of Eastern spirituality in the West have missed is that many of the same methods of distortion that were used to promote Western spirituality are being used to peddle Eastern spirituality.
The list of massage treatments and the offerings in Chopra’s center makes the faith healers in “the old country” look like novices. As a skeptical friend of mine used to say, “There are big bucks in the God racket.” Check out Chopra’s wellness center and ask yourself honestly whether or not this is commercialization at its height, all in the name of wellness and consciousness. Pardon the pun, but the emperor has no clothes, and few are willing to expose it for what it is. These may be strong words, but that is the legitimate response to claims that are empirically so extreme.
The challenge to E. Stanley Jones was immense as he faced a religious culture whose views of the gospel had become so distorted from the reality of Jesus and his teachings. But Jones succeeded. His gentle personality, his life, and his lifestyle won the admiration of all. The challenge, as I said, was immense because he did not have the advantage of mass visual communication. However, I strongly suspect that if he had, the dangers would have been proportionate. His appeal was both to the outcasts and, because he was from the West and well learned, to the Indian intellectual as well.
I had the privilege of hearing E. Stanley Jones address an audience shortly before he died. He spoke for nearly an hour and a half, without a single note in front of him, while Indian intellectuals and government leaders listened in rapt attention. The mystical and spiritual side of the Christian faith was beginning to take root in India because it appealed to the Indian mind-set. Some of the more famous Christian mystics in India were actually two Sikh converts to Christianity and contemporaries of E. Stanley Jones, Sadhu Sundar Singh and Bakht Singh. Converts from Sikhism are rare. But both Sundar Singh and Bakht Singh had made a profound commitment to Jesus after their earlier years of hostility to the Christian message.
Christianity first came to India under the teaching of the apostle Thomas. Numerous Indian scholars support the view that Thomas first landed on the southwestern shores of Kerala, India, and that he had a powerful impact on the priests of India. Kerala is often considered the intellectual bastion of India’s Vedic teaching. The best-known Indian philosopher, Shankaracharya, came from Kerala. Ayurvedic medicine is at its best in Kerala. I strongly suspect that the oils that Deepak Chopra uses in his wellness centers are brought from there. It was to Kerala that Thomas first went and then to Tamil Nadu on the southeastern coast.
After the conversion of seven priests in that region and of a woman of nobility, Thomas was assassinated while he was praying. How ironic that the man who would not put his trust in Christ until he had seen and felt the nail holes in his hands and the spear hole in his side was ultimately speared to death himself! A fascinating history of Thomas’s activities in India is chronicled by several writers. Ancient historians such as the Venerable Bede, Clement of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nazianzus, as well as several Indian historians, all make reference to Thomas in India. The oldest Christian denomination in India today is named after Thomas, the Marthoma Church.
The Christ of the Indian road that E. Stanley Jones presented to India demonstrated that the values and patterns of Jesus’ teaching had been forgotten in the Westernizing of Christianity. Christian ideas like meditating on the goodness and grace of God, solitude in prayer, and commitment to community and family are all part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jones also penned a remarkable book called Christ at the Round Table; he called it such because he wanted to encourage dialogue and open discussion. Jones began several “ashrams,” or retreats, in India, places conducive to meditation and prayer where the gospel was the message and Jesus the focus. He did everything to retain the “Indianness” of the expression of faith in Christ without losing the substance of the message.
This is important to note. There were already strands of theism within the wide embrace of Hinduism. The Gita talks more of devotion, worship, the need of a sacrifice, and so on. The famed Indian philosopher Radhakrishnan said, “You can be a Christian, a Muslim, an atheist, and still be a Hindu.” Needless to say, he equivocated on the other terms but clearly meant that strands of other faiths could be found in Hinduism. So the message of a supreme, transcendent, personal God was not completely foreign to Indian thought.
By contrast, when Vivekananda and Yogananda brought their teachings to the West, it was to bring a worldview completely different from what America was founded on, a worldview that if taken seriously would completely uproot the basic beliefs of the West about the nature of God, humanity, and human destiny.
If you were to go to India today and ask an average person what India’s biggest problem is, the chances are you would be told “corruption.” If you were to ask what brings many of them to the West, the chances are you would be told, “To be given a fair chance to succeed.” It is not accidental or unconnected that the two major types of institutions started by Christian missionaries in India were schools and hospitals. I am writing this portion of the book in India. It is interesting to see the hospitals and dispensaries crowded with patients who are being treated with Western medicines by doctors who are Western-trained.
Chopra himself studied in a school started by missionaries. This is true of most of the prominent philosophers in India. In fact, the Statesman, which was India’s first newspaper and is still in existence today, was started by the British missionary William Carey (1761–1834) as a voice for the Indian people in British India. The fight to eradicate the practice of suttee, in which a widow was expected to commit suicide by throwing herself on the funeral pyre of her husband, was spearheaded by William Carey in partnership with a famous Indian by the name of Raja Ram Mohan Roy.
I have often wondered if people like Chopra and Shukla who talk so much about the Vedic quest and argue over whether to credit Hinduism or something that preceded it for their beliefs ever pause to realize that the belief in the equal value of every life is a bequest only of the Christian faith. The accepted inequality of life and the lifelong struggle over power in the East is a bequest of the stratified caste system that haunts Eastern worldviews either explicitly or implicitly. This is why Gandhi himself took issue with some Vedic teachings. I know Hindu apologists don’t like to bring up things like this. This is the kind of doctrine that I suspect Chopra is avoiding having to defend by giving his belief a name other than Hinduism. Shukla, just by the stroke of a pen—referring to the “perceived social ills” of Hinduism—likes to do away with the critique rather than seeing it for what it is, instead criticizing those who have criticized any negative aspects of Hinduism.
But when millions live under the heel of this belief, what does he expect? Why have millions of members of the “lower caste” left Hinduism to find value in another faith? Maybe, Vedic apologists have forgotten that Gautama Buddha also rejected Vedic authority and the caste system, leaving his palace and his place of privilege in search of another truth. Tragically, I cannot help but wonder if we have now abandoned truth to return to the palace, and rather than sitting alone under a tree waiting for enlightenment, we gravitate to mass entertainment under lights that cater to mass ignorance.