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A talk inaugurating the World Council of Churches - United Theological College Consultation on The Church's Mission and Post-Modern Humanism, held  at Bangalore on 17 October. 1995.

I am thankful for the invitation to inaugurate the Consultation on the Quest for Human Community in the context of India’s religious pluralism and its implication for Indian ecclesiology. That is, in view of the common quest of human community with peoples of other religions, how do we understand the being of the Church of Christ and the forms of the life of the congregation in the larger community? Concretely how do Christians structure the priestly and sacramental life and evangelistic mission of their separate religious congregation, within the framework of their participation in the whole nation’s search for a common basis for promoting the politics of democracy and of development with justice for the poor and liberation of the oppressed and for building a common moral social culture to undergird the sense of the larger community based on dignity for all persons and peoples?

I have two sections to this presentation. First what are the common moral and cultural bases to be built through dialogue among religions and ideologies which will make possible an effective joint struggle for human community? Second, what kind of structure of the church will facilitate such dialogue and struggle which will at the same time strengthen the central elements of the church’s being as the sacramental sign and interpreter of God’s universal gift of salvation in Christ?

First, I shall speak on the need of taking into account the religious insights about human being and society in the pluralistic religious and ideological situation today in the struggle for the search for a new paradigm of modernization correcting the lopsidedness of the present one. And then, the implication of it for our understanding of the form of the church most relevant for Christian participation in that search will be discussed.

I

All traditional societies have been religious societies where society and state were integrated with one or other of the religions and controlled by it. Medieval Christendom was an integration of church, community and state. So was medieval Islamic societies. The primal societies, of course, were undifferentiated spiritual unities where religion or state had not emerged as different from society. Modernization has shattered them all because they with their hierarchies and patriarchies sanctified by religion could not comprehend within them the creativities of human individuality and rationality which were emerging. So the modern period is the age of the European Enlightenment, globalised through the political and economic expansion of the West. In one sense, this age is still continuing. But the fact that technological and social revolutions which did have the potential and promise of producing a world community with richer and filler human life for all humanity, resulted in the intensification of mass poverty, social oppression, war and ecological destruction, have led many to consider self-sufficient Secular Humanism as inadequate to understand or deal with the tragic dimensions of the human selfhood and social existence. Therefore there is widespread tendency to return to religion and its sense of spiritual depth, in one form or another. Some of course are for a straight return to the traditional integration of state and society with one or other religion, to Christendom, Hindutva or any other religious fundamentalism or communalism. But religious pluralism with its constant interaction between peoples with religion as a factor in their self-identities, has become too vital a reality in contemporary societies everywhere so that this return is impossible without religious strife; and in any case the fear of such a return bringing back the old hierarchies and patriarchies and destroying the egalitarian human values of modern democratic humanism is rather strong. So one has to find a new pattern of ideologically pluralistic secular humanism and religiously pluralistic spiritual humanism entering into dialogue with each other on anthropology, the nature and meaning of being and becoming human. The goal is to create a Public Philosophy or Civil Culture, in which insights of religions, secular ideologies and social sciences are constantly brought into interaction and are tested for their relevance to humanize the contemporary forces of modernity which have run amok. It is the search for a kind of Open Secularism.

A consultation on Human Rights in the Middle East said, “The challenge and quest therefore in the Middle East is to envisage and establish models of society which are neither radically secular like in the West, nor ethno-centric like in Israel, or religions as in some Islamic countries; in other words, a society that recognizes the values of community, respects religious or ethnic differences, and does not ignore or seeks to eliminate them as was attempted by the French Revolution secularism and Marxism. And here lies the challenge- for such a society also will have to guarantee equality between communities and individuals. All this also requires encounter and dialogue with other religions in the region that aim at discovering through their respective heritages, a common ethical ground for the basis of a new society” (Human Rights: a Global Ecumenical Agenda, WCC 1993 p.44). This approach is relevant for other religiously pluralistic regions like Asia. The only country which consciously put “belief in the Transcendent” as one of the five foundations of the Constitution of the nation-state and recognized religious pluralism and brought the various religions and secular ideologies together for dialogue on the basis of legal equality was Soekarno’s Indonesia.

There are two special contributions to social thought arising from combining religious and secular ideological insights about reality.

First, a more holistic anthropological basis for society. The Newtonian scientific rational insight brought to the forefront the importance of the mechanical materialistic dimension of reality, which could be objectivised and studied, which religion often overlooked in emphasizing the purely spiritual realities. But the danger of science was to interpret the whole world including the humans as parts of a machine, thus denying the spiritual selfhood which gives dignity to human beings. The mechanical attitude to human reality was no doubt corrected by Freud, Marx and Nietzche who emphasized the inter-connection between parts of nature thus bringing out the organic character of reality. The organic interpretation was an advance on the mechanical but still lacked the awareness of the human self. Though conditioned by mechanical and organic necessities of nature, the human self transcends them to determine its purposes and control natural necessities to realize them. This constitutes the essence of human personhood. The religious insight into the spiritual self which is at once both involved in the world and transcends it, is important to provide a spiritual basis for the inalienable rights of personhood.

Secondly, it is from this recognition of transcendent human selfhood that the spiritual source of evil and the tragic dimension of existence are derived. The modern Liberal and Marxist ideologies consider self-alienation of humans as mechanical error or organic maladjustment which could be corrected by the historical process. Such secular hopes have turned to secular despair, because the hope was based on a superficially optimistic understanding of human nature. But where the spiritual self is involved evil is seen as more radical, as based on alienation from God or the ultimate ground of being. Of course, the mystic religions see it as arising from the illusion of the separate self created by the imprisonment of the soul in the material body, and the prophetic religions see the attempt of finite self to attain infinitude as its source; and their concepts of salvation correspond to these different metaphysical versus moral understandings of the problem of the self. There is need of dialogue between these religions to clarify the issue. But the point is that in either case the source of corruption of self is at depth spiritual and cannot be considered accidental and solvable by the self-redemptive forces of history.

These two, a holistic concept of the humanum and the spiritual source of human self-centredness have their implications for the search of the moral basis of the common life. Since human society is essentially persons-in-community, love is the ultimate moral basis of society. But because of the spiritual self-alienation of humans, one has to reckon with a tough human self-centredness which appears as self-righteous moralism on the one hand and crude selfishness on the other. The perfect love-ethic, while it remains the ultimate criterion of ethical judgment, is impossible to fulfill in the natural state. So a second level of morality comes into being which includes checks to self-centredness. The morality of law and the coercive institution of the State to enforce legal justice are expressions of this imperfect morality at the level of self-alienated social existence of human beings.

It may be worth noting that all religions and secular ideologies reckon with the two levels of morality- the perfectionist ethic of love and the imperfect ethic of moral and enforced civil laws. Sometimes, they are quite separated as unrelated to each other, and often the morality of law is absolutised though it is supposed to be a pointer to and shaped to an extent by the ultimate love-ethic. Of course love realized as mutual forgiveness in small spiritually reconciled groups can mitigate the legalism of the ethic of law. Nevertheless the Christian doctrine of the relation between the ethics of Law and Grace, the Hindu concept of paramarthika and vyavaharika realms, the Islamic concept of shariat law versus the transcendent law, and the equivalent ones in secular ideologies like the Marxist idea of the present morality of class-war leading to the necessary love of the class-less society of the future need to be brought into the inter-faith dialogue to build up a common democratic political ethic for maintaining order and freedom with the continued struggle for social justice, and also a common civil morality within which diverse peoples may renew their different traditions of civil codes.

II

What are the implications of such participation by the Church in the search of a holistic humanism and a realistic social ethics for a post-modern society for the form of the life and work of the Church itself?

In a country bedeviled by communalism, can we discover a non-communal form for the life and mission of the Church? Should the church, understood as a separate religious congregation or faith-communion, also set itself as a separate social and political community, or should it consider itself as a ferment in all social communities and the larger pluralistic secular society without itself becoming a communal body? Christians in India unlike the Muslims have learned not to be a separate political community, but be participating in different political parties. A good deal of economic life of Christians are also, thanks to secular technological organizations of production and exchange, outside the specifically Christian communal circle. How far can a similar development take place with respect to their organized social and cultural life? Such non-communal areas of life can still be influenced along Christian moral values by the ministry of the lay Christians involved in these areas of life in their everyday work in cooperation with people of other faiths. In fact the churches which keep the political, economic and social activities of their members under their control have not produced any grater moral or human quality in the social life of their membership.

On the other side, the advantages of an extension of the non-communal secular areas of common life for the self-understanding of the church and its evangelistic witness are many. Bishop Newbigin when he was in India, said some words which are quite relevant to us even today. He said that a right understanding of the Christian doctrine of Creation has a deep concern to “uphold the proper integrity of the secular order”. He continues, “The secular field of politics, economics, science and so forth belong to this created world. They are not ultimately autonomous...but they have a relative autonomy, an autonomy always threatened by demonic forces precisely because God wills to preserve here a sphere for the free decision of faith which is the only kind of victory he wills to have.... the Christian has responsibility to safeguard the real though provisional autonomy of a secular order wherein men of all religions can cooperate in freedom”. Further he points out that this autonomy of the secular is a help to build a proper understanding of the church. He says, that it is “the true antidote to the temptation of the church to absolutise itself... There you have the true God-given reminder to the church that it is still in via and cannot treat itself as the vice-regent of God on earth I do not believe that we shall go back on that insight” (A Faith for this One World, pp. 67-68.83).

Bishop Azariah of Dornakal, in theologically justifying the rejection of the reserved minority communal electorate offered by Britain to the Christian community in India, spoke of how the acceptance of it would be “a direct blow to the nature of the church of Christ” at two points -- one, it would force the church to function “like a religious sect, a community which seeks self-protection for the sake of its own loaves and fishes” which would prevent the fruitful exercise of the calling of the church to permeate the entire society across boundaries of caste, class, language and race, a calling which can be fulfilled only through its members living alongside fellow-Indians sharing in public life with a concern for Christian principles in it; and two, it would put the church’s evangelistic programme in a bad light as “a direct move to transfer so many thousands of voters from the Hindu group to the Indian Christian group” (recorded by John Webster, Dalit Christians- A History).

If we pursue these eccesiological motives, the church will not be an organized closed community marked by rigid boundaries as at present, and competing with religious communities but a congregation of believers meeting for spiritual fellowship around the Word and the Sacraments, meant to equip them for Christian living , struggles of justicefor the people and evangelistic mission in religiously pluralistic or secular social economic and political institutions. Religious conversion to Christ in this setting essentially means a change of faith which involves participation in the local worshipping congregation of Christian believers without transference of community and cultural affiliations, but with a commitment to the ethical transformation of the whole society and culture in which they participate with others of different faiths.

The inter-faith dialogues referred above as a need, should not be considered as purely formal ones among intellectuals. In fact with the Panchayat Raj coming into being all over India, these dialogues have become part of working together with people of other faiths in pluralistic local situations. It may be considered integral to dialogic existence in society. But to make the day to day dialogue meaningful, the church as congregation even in the villages will have to equip the lay members involved with relevant lay theological-anthropological insights. This should be an important part of the teaching ministry in the congregations. In fact, if Christian witness in public life is the goal, this teaching ministry is to be preferred to the clerical leaders of the church controlling the decisions and activities of their lay members by communal dictate which is usually based on communal minority self-interests and rights and not on concern for the total neighbourhood.

It is clear from what has been said above, that the anthropological and moral issues aimed at renewing society and state has to be followed as an end in themselves. But if they are dealt with at depth, the contribution of Christian insights to the discussions will be a more natural preparation for the communication of the gospel of salvation in Christ than the charitable services have been in the past, because it raises issues regarding the nature of self-alienation in human beings and the ultimate ways of reconciliation overcoming it. Therefore the evangelistic mission should not appear a kind of extra black market in the dialogic situation and it should not be forced. And one should expect different levels of positive response to the relevance of an Ethical Christology inherent in the Christian anthropology. How shall we evaluate them in the light of an evolving Indian ecclesiology? Are they less important than responses to a philosophical Christology?

And in an Indian situation where baptism is the legal mark of change of one religious community to another, each with its own civil codes recognized by the Courts, communalisation of church life is imposed by Law and perverts the meaning of baptism as sacrament of faith. We have to change that situation by working for a common civil code in India or opting for the re-codified Hindu Civil Code as Fr. Staffner and others have suggested. But while the legal situation lasts, can we develop an ecclesiology which can invite to the Lord’s Table of the church as congregation of faith, those who acknowledge Jesus Christ as decisive for their lives and are prepared to enter the worshipping congregation and not the communally organized body of Christians? The question of providing spiritual fellowship to those committed to Christ in different religious communities is a peculiarly Indian ecclesiological problem which has been with us for many decades and needs to be faced squarely, for the number involved is large and the stand of many of them based on the distinction between the spiritual fellowship of faith and the Christian communality, have theological justification.

Justice P. Chenchia in his “Religious Toleration- An Essay at Understanding”, said, that the toleration by religions of religious pluralism within the family is the key to the practice of religious freedom for conversion in India. He said, “If on the side of the missionary faiths, the pull against remaining at home ceases and if on the side of the family, a wider toleration of worship is granted, the tragedy of separation need not take place. I do not see why a convert be not allowed to go to church and yet remain in the family. This happens in China, Japan and all other countries except India. We need a little more honest solicitude for the spiritual welfare of the convert on both sides” (Religious Freedom 1956). In the multi-religious secular setting, conversions from one religious faith to another religious faith or to a secularist faith and vice versa should be expected. If the church expects the Hindu family’s toleration of any member converted to Christian faith, the church and Christian families also have to justify theologically and sociologically inter-religious marriages within their circle and deal pastorally with the persons involved.

Paper presented to the Consultation on Higher Education at UCCollege, Aluva on 14 March 1996.

In the history of educational enterprise of the Christian Church in India, there were several articulations and re-articulations of the Christian identity in Higher Education as spiritual responses of the Christian Mission/ Church to changes in the cultural scenario of India. All these were done in the context of the political and cultural impact of the West on India and contained theological interpretations of that impact.

One thinks of three specific historical occasions when it was done. The first was the time of the pioneer educational missionaries Alexander Duff of Calcutta, John Wilson of Bombay and William Miller of Madras. Following on the British government’s decision in favour of promoting English rather than Oriental or Vernacular education in India, and to seek the help of private agencies in the task, the Missions started Christian colleges for imparting education in Western culture and modern science with the teaching of English literature at the centre of secular courses and spiritually interpreted by the teaching of Christian Scripture. Duff spoke of an intellectual and social revolutionary ferment at work among the educated sections of India through the impact of western power and culture and wanted the Missions to enter that revolution to make it serve as an instrument of the civilizing and evangelizing mission of Britain in India. Both Maculay the civil servant and Duff the Christian missionary believed that the religion of Hinduism and indigenous Indian culture would soon be displaced by the Christian religion and western civilization which were more or less identified in their minds. Miller of Madras Christian College said, “Very largely, especially when contrasted with the tendencies which prevail in Hinduism, European thought is Christian thought” and if the Christian institutions of education is able to make that explicit, “there was hope that the whole new movement might be prepared by it to recognize the supply of all its spiritual wants in Him (Christ)”. So, “the Scriptures were to be the spearhead, all other knowledge the well-fitted handle. The Scriptures were to be the healing essence, all other knowledge the congenial medium through which it is conveyed”. Much conversion to the Christian church was not expected though there were a few in Bengal. The hope was that “even when no direct conversion ensues, much of the spirit and influences of Christianity will cleave to the rightly educated youth, whatever may be their future situation in life”. In other words education in Christian colleges would be a force for transformation of society in the light of Christian values and act as a cultural preparation for claims of the gospel.

The Christian colleges therefore sought on the one hand to impart a liberal education relating knowledge of science and technology to knowledge of the humanities as a relation of knowledge as power and means and knowledge as values and ends and reinforcing it with the teaching of Scripture as a way of presenting Jesus as the source of a structure of meaning and values for life, and on the other hand emphasized the residential college community (with a non-denominational worship at its centre) as a forum where scholars could further their process of learning in community and build the nucleus of a society of persons transcending caste and creed. So the knowledge imparted was at different levels, - technical rationality, critical rationality to evaluate ends, universal human values, and the humanism of the person of Jesus - but with search for the unity of their inter-relationship realized in the renewal of personal and community life as the ultimate goal.

The second occasion of rearticulation of the Christian purpose of Missionary institutions of higher learning took place in the first few decades of this century in relation to the movements of religious renaissance and the emergence of political nationalism. By this time Hindu religion and culture instead of disintegrating as many westerners thought it would, survived the shock of western impact, and acquired new strength through the many Neo-Hindu movements of religious renaissance resulting from the impact of the values of western Christianity and secular humanism. The Indian National Congress has also been formed as the political expression of the awakening of the people under the leadership of the class with western-oriented education; and linked to the politics of nationalism was also movements of social reform of family relations and caste structures on the basis of personal liberty and social equality. Of course a revival of traditional religion and culture resisting those values and producing a militant politics of Hindu Nationalism against reform was also alive. Ranade, Tilak and Gandhi represented different trends of Nationalism. But the national awakening was a fact. C.F.Andrews and S.K.Rudra of St.Stephens College Delhi took the lead in re-articulating the Christian identify in higher education in relation to the spiritual and political awakening of the Indian people under the auspices of Hindu religious renaissance and the political ideology of Indian nationalism.

C.F.Andrews said, that the earlier approach of Duff and other educational missionaries needed radical modification. For, Duff “looked forward to the supplanting of one civilization by another, the uprooting of Indian civilization and the substitution of the English. We have learned since his day that the problem is one of assimilation, rather than of substitution....it remains for our age to apply the further truth of Christian assimilation.” He added, that the Christian purpose of education in the new situation was that “the wealth of English literature, science and culture” should be “grafted on to the original stock; it is no longer taught in a kind of vacuum without reference to the background of Indian thought and experience”. Here the basic purpose of college education remains as before, namely humanization of social culture and preparation of Indian cultural soil for the reception of Jesus as the divine source of human renewal. But it is not the Western culture as such but the cultural renaissance and ideology of nationalism, produced by the penetration of the spirit and values of western civilization that humanizes society and prepares the soil for the gospel. Ranade agreed that “the Christian civilization which came to India from the West was the main instrument of renewal” of India which finds expression in the new love of municipal freedom and civil virtues, aptitude for mechanical skill and love of science and research, chivalrous respect of womanhood etc.; and it is interesting that his lecture on his new concept of “Indian Theism” (a redefinition of Visishtadvaita in the light of Protestant Christian thought) as the basis of national renewal of India was delivered in the chapel of the Wilson College Bombay. With Gandhi formulating the political ethic of satyagraha as an application of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and Tagore interpreting the Cross as the symbol of God’s identification with suffering humanity, there was also the growing awareness that not only western humanism but also the religion of Christianity would get creativity and stability only by planting them in the Indian cultural soil and allowing it to put down roots in it. This produced a crop of literature from the Christian colleges on indigenisation of Christianity in India like Farquhar’s Crown of Hinduism and Hogg’s Karma and Redemption.

The third occasion for re-articulation of Christian identity in higher education followed the Lindsay Commission report on Christian Higher Education in India in the thirties. The Commission realized that western culture and science could not destroy the traditional idols but has also introduced into India new gods like Rationalism, Scientism, Individualism and Materialism which had no sense of the sacredness of human persons and was converting technology into a force for exploitation of the industrial workers and dehumanization of peoples’ lives in the cities of India. And Indian nationalism was producing fanatic religious communalism and fear among the outcastes of re-establishment of Brahminic domination. Communalism was stopping the movement towards social reforms aimed at justice for women and the depressed groups. Inter-communal riots were very much in the picture and threatening the unity of India based on common humanity which was fundamental to secular nationalism. In this context, humanization required critical discriminative approach to both technological culture and nationalist ideologies.

Lindsay Commission was very clear that “Western learning in itself” (Miller) or its indigenisation in nationalism in itself (Andrews), could not be the needed emphasis in Christian educational institutions. What are the Christian purposes in higher education which can be the mid-20th century equivalent of those which were effective earlier in contributing to humanization of culture and cultural preparation for the gospel of the Christ’s new humanity?

The Report refers to the book Education of India by Arthur Mayhew, the Director of Public Instruction in Bengal with approval of his personal view that the “moral progress in India depends on the general transformation of education by explicit recognition of the Spirit of Christ”. It also seems to underline Mayhew’s diagnosis that the traditional Hindu religious culture had been revived in a militant and fanatic way as religious communalism in the wake of nationalism because the Anglicized policy of higher education, while concentrating on communicating western culture and its science and humanism to the Indian students, neglected to help them exercise a scientific critical rational evaluation of their deeply rooted indigenous traditions associated with the vernacular languages. Since they were ignored, they existed as an unexamined emotional part of their domestic life and took revenge for being ignored in their being revived in the same unexamined emotional form when the people were awakened by nationalism to their self-identity which meant looking at their past history.

In the same manner, the Report diagnosed that by concentrating on training in technical rationality and skills (which is in the realm of improvement of tools) and neglecting training in critical rationality which alone could expose social purposes and spiritual presuppositions of technological culture, evaluate them and make moral choices among them, the educational system has paved the way for a dehumanizing technocratic culture and for an idolatry of Rationalism which denied the transcendent spiritual dignity of the human person.

If I remember correctly the Lindsay Commission noted the teaching of history as the point at which rational and moral evaluations of traditional and modern cultures could be made most effectively. Religious communities and their traditions have their history. Science and technology as well as the philosophy behind them have their history. Evaluations of these themselves have history.

Thus the Commission called for a Christian concern for Higher Education which helps critical rational and humanist evaluation of both the western and Indian cultures to build a new cultural concept which subordinated religious traditions, technology and politics to personal values according to the principle “Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath”, enunciated by Jesus and illustrated in the idea of Incarnation of God in Christ. Incidentally this task was conceived as more than an intellectual one confined to the class room. Class room is important. But the concept of the personal and personal values can be taught only where they can also be caught in community life where one can “speak the truth in love” and learn and assimilate it in that process. So they gave central place to residential houses as part of the life of the college. They also wanted colleges to help students to relate to the life of people in the villages of India through extensions of research and service. By the way, they also recommended cutting some denominational colleges to set up one or two first rate educational institutions of their conception managed by the Christian missions and churches in unity and the Tambaram version of the Madras Christian College was one result of it.

I have given this rather long history to show that re-articulation of Christian identity in higher education has been done before in situations which have produced our situation in due course, and though it needs doing again in the context of the present, some crucial issues which we now face have been faced and responses formulated which may be relevant to our new re-articulation also.

Our situation today is marked by several new features some of which may be mentioned as follows:

1.The fact of religious pluralism with parity and the threat to secularism which was seen earlier as an instrument for mitigating and transcending religious communalism in that situation. The idea of Secular Nationalism and Secular State were the creation of cooperation between Gandhi’s reformed religion and Nehru’s liberal humanist secularism and they succeeded to establish itself in India against the idea of Hindu and Muslim communalism. The new threats to it is from the revival of religious fundamentalism and communalism and its political expressions, especially in the Hindutva demand for a Hindu Rashtra. Closed Secularism which denies religion any place in public life has produced a religious vacuum which is being filled by the revival of communal religion. The situation calls for the search for a new more holistic humanism and a common public ethic for state and social reform developed through dialogue of religions and secular ideologies. But educational institutions especially in Kerala have taken the opposite direction and become more and more communal in their character. Christian colleges are even denominational in character. How does Christian concern for the larger pluralist national community and for a common anthropology and ethic for it, which has to be evolved through dialogue among religions and ideologies find expression in such a situation?

2. The shift in State commitment from welfare society with socialism as goal to the “ideology” of the global market means that the state withdraws from intervention in the processes of economic and social life in the name of liquidation of mass poverty and unemployment or in the name of social justice or protection of ecology. Hi-tech development under globalisation is further marginalising the poorer sections of traditional society especially the dalits, the tribals, the fisherfolk and the women by destroying their traditional living and community life by alienating them from the land, the forest and the water sources by which they made their living. It also destroys these natural bases of their traditional community of life. Along with health and social welfare, education too has become a commodity in the market with self-financed technical institutions imparting training in technical and managerial skills for employment in Trans-national economic enterprises to those who can afford it. This leads to the negation of the earlier concepts of education as laid down in the Constitution of India which put priority to “promote with special care the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections of the people” and to the development of “scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform” in every citizen. How does the Christian concern for a higher education that prevents the mechanization of life and marginalisation of the weaker people and the destruction of the ecological basis of life by technocracy find expression? How do Christian colleges join the search for an alternate paradigm of human development and technology with a human face in the context of the technocratic momentum of globalisation?

3. The development of a new philosophy of science which radically questions the earlier mechanical-materialistic world-view within which classical modern science worked and also the search for a new philosophy of technological development and struggle for social justice which takes seriously the concern for ecological justice, are very much part of the contemporary situation. Capra’s books like the Tao of Physics, The Turning Point etc. are expressions of the working out of the implications of change in the philosophy of science to social thought. It is significant that they have also become part of the ecumenical Christian social thought as expressed in the World Council of Churches declaring their goals to be “a just participatory and sustainable society” or “justice peace and integrity of creation”. Any new re-articulation of Christian identity in education must assimilate these new insights.

In the period when I went to the World Student Christian Federation as a secretary, in 1947 religious scientists worked within the thesis in Martin Buber’s I and Thou that separated the scientific I-It approach to things and the knowledge of persons through dialogue and mutual love. Later the idea gained ground that we cannot “speak of nature apart from human perception in the historical development of knowledge”, that all knowledge is “a creative interaction between the known and the knower” and that therefore there is no System of scientific knowledge or of technology which does not have the subjective purposes and faith-presuppositions of humans built into it. So a fundamental part of education is to expose such hidden or explicit purposes and presuppositions and critically examine them and transform them to a conscious commitment to a world-view which sees nature, humanity and cosmos within an organic life system working within an ultimate framework of a spiritual movement of self-determining selves towards a community of justice and love. It is the self-determining part in it which also brings the dimension of the spiritual tragedy of self centredness and raises questions of spiritual salvation in that movement.

David Gosling’s A New Earth-Covenanting]or Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation (London 1992) speaks about the general consensus among the scientists who worked with the Church and Society studies to move away from the “mechanical view of life-systems” which is responsible for much that is wrong with science and technology and the way they operate. About the view which is replacing it, the alternatives were between “the organic view” which emphasizes the world as a web of inter-relationships among relational entities with different levels of self-consciousness in dynamic movement advocated by biologist Charles Birch and theologian John Cobb on the basis of Whitehead’s process philosophy and theoretical physicist John Pollkinghome’s idea of seeing the world as “something in between” mechanism and organism which gives the world a “totally non-mechanical openness” in all its natural processes, “a freedom for the whole world to be itself, a freedom for us to act within that universe of which we are part”.

I shall end this collection of fragments of my thought by speaking of what expression Christian identity must necessarily have in Higher Education in the immediate future in India in a summary form. First, a move to negate the communal-denominational approach to educational enterprise and to make intellectual dialogue among concerned teachers and post-graduate students of different religious and secular ideological faiths for exploring a new relevant common anthropology and social ethic in a pluralist India, central to the Christian college. Second, a decision that Christian educational institutions will not surrender themselves to a pure imparting of technical skills or promotion of technical rationality which concentrates on technological tools only but will in all situations be concerned also with developing critical rationality enabling the students to examine the exploitive ends and purposes hidden in all technical situations. Thirdly, Christian education must in some way express their solidarity with the victims of modern globalisation like the dalits, the tribals, the fisherfolk and women and find ways of supporting their struggle for justice and their search for a new paradigm of development which does justice to their peoplehood and to the natural sources to which they are related. Fourthly, the idea of residential houses which brings together teachers and at least post-graduate students as a community of intellectual seekers of truth or some equivalent of it should find a place in the life of a college. Education within some such framework alone can lead to a new culture of moral regeneration of our pluralistic society and provide the cultural preparation for the awareness of the challenging relevance of the gospel of New Humanity in Christ in our modern technological age. Of course the Christian college should have some place in its structure where Jesus and his human-ness can be presented in the Scriptural context with its cultural implications, to those who wish to learn about him.

A talk at the Conference of Biblical scholars at Kottayam on 28th Dec. 1993.

I am grateful to the organizers of this conference for their kind invitation to me to give the opening talk at this conference of Biblical scholars on the mission of the church in India’s pluralistic context. I have been thinking, speaking and writing on this theme for many years, but I find myself a bit intimidated by the fact that I face an audience of Biblical scholars from the different theological seminaries of the country. I have ventured into writing commentaries on the biblical books in Malayalam, approaching the Bible in two senses of the word, layman: namely, inadequate scientific understanding of the text but primarily concerned with response to life-situations. In dealing with the biblically grounded missionary response to pluralism I shall take the same approach this evening.

My first point is that while plurality has existed in India for centuries, pluralism is a modern reality. Traditional India had been a land in which peoples and communal groups who followed different religions, lived according to different cultural values and social patterns and spoke different languages, coexisted. But the coexistence never demanded anything other than tangential interaction between them because there was no demand on them for unity and unification under a common scheme of technology or of values or of religion. Of course, there were rulers who provided a sort of umbrella of state protection, but their function was very minimal. Whether Rama or Ravana ruled, whatever political authority structures came into being or disappeared, they had but minimum impact on the life of the various village communities; they continued to live in some kind of internal self-sufficiency according to their different traditions, with Custom as the real King. Of course through such coexistence for long periods, there developed symbiotic interpretations of religions and cultural and social values, creating not one but several composite cultures and syncretic religious trends in different regions of the country in different periods of its history, with one or other religious value or cultural system having dominant influence. But there was no imperative demand to interact or unif~’ which is characteristic of the modern situation. Therefore in contrast with the traditional we speak of the modem as a situation of pluralism. It is a situation of dialogic existence arising from the pressures on all from a secular democratic nation-state which has been formed as the result of a common national struggle for independence and has been given the task and powers to work for national integration, national development and build a new welfare society based on liberty, equality and justice. The movement from coexistence to dialogic existence is the movement from plurality to pluralism. This movement from plurality to pluralism is not only national but also local as well as world-wide.

My second point. It is the common historical responsibility of building a genuinely human community that brings peoples of all religions and cultures within the dialogical framework of pluralism. It involves a common movement into a technological culture but it also entails correcting the inhumanities like State totalitarianism, increasing impoverishment and marginalisation of the majority of the people, destruction of the ecological basis of life and above all the general mechanization of human life already brought about by the misdirected technological advance. It also calls for a common search for an alternative paradigm of technological and social development based on a genuine ideology of humanism in the context of a proper relation between nature, human personhood and structures and values of community.

I have emphasized this historical responsibility as the framework of pluralism because it posits humanization and the questions related to the meaning of being human as the central theme of common concern in dialogue and action, for all those who are encountering the common historical responsibility. All religions including Christianity, all cultures and all secular ideologies are in informal and formal dialogues about what is the meaning of our common humanity and about the path of common action-responses to the situation from their respective understanding of the nature and destiny of the human selfhood.

It is interesting to observe that while preparing for the centenary celebrations of the 1893 World Congress of Religions of Chicago, Metropolitan Paulose Mar Gregorios said that Chicago 1993 Global Concourse of Religions must “be committed not just to dialogue with each other but to the future of humanity as a whole”. He explained it thus, “If religions cannot go into the question of the welfare of humanity, those great values to which they bear witness will not make much sense to vast millions of people of this world. On the one hand, all religions have to develop a deep spiritual commitment to the recreation of the deepest levels of meaning for human existence in a personal and communal spirituality. But equally important is the other pole, the commitment to the welfare of humanity, the commitment to justice, the commitment to peace, the commitment to an environment that promotes life rather than threaten to extinguish it, the commitment to eliminate toxic drugs and nuclear weapons” (A Source Book for the Community of Religions ed. Joel Bevers Luis, Chicago, 1993, p.16).

I submit that the Mission of the Church in the pluralistic context must be considered primarily in relation to the common human challenge which pluralism in a technically unified world brings to us all. Of course in its train the consideration of the theme of being human and common human values and goals will bring trans-historical questions of God, salvation and immortality, in a challengingly relevant way, as the transcendent dimension of being human is raised. But these transcendent issues are not the most relevant starting points for communication of any truth in modern pluralistic existence. I presume that it is this awareness that led Pannenburg and other theologians to affirm that anthropology is the primary language of modern theology. It is different from saying that theology is only anthropology as Feuerbach and following him Marxism did.

I hope you will excuse a personal recollection. I expanded this approach in my Carey lectures of 1969, Salvation and Humanization. Later when I was in Selly Oaks, I had a conversation with Prof. John Hicks of the University of Birmingham whose approach was that inter-religious relation should have God as the point of entry, as indicated in his book, God and the Universe of Faiths. I differed from him because I thought that an undefined Umbrella God was not a relevant framework for a situation where the search of all religions as well as secular ideologies was for defining and realizing true humanness in the context of a modern technological society. So I wrote a little-known book, Man and the Universe of Faiths, to develop the idea. I argued that the humanity of the Crucified Jesus as the foretaste and criterion of being truly human, would be a much better and more understandable and acceptable Christian contribution to common inter-religious-ideological search for world community because the movements of renaissance in most religions and rethinking in most secular ideologies were the results of the impact of what we know of the life and death of the historical person of Jesus or of human values from it. I still hold that no dialogue or reconsideration of the humanism in any pluralistic situation can escape Jesus Christ Crucified, though it may sidetrack religious dogmas about him.

Thirdly, what is the gospel for such a pluralistic situation as ours, where the common search is for the path of humanization? One could take several ways of expressing the core of the gospel. It is quite intriguing to note that in the Hindu thinking on the Cross in the Indian setting, it is God’s identification with human suffering rather than Paul’s emphasis on the atonement for human sin that has been crucial. For instance, for Poet Tagore, Cross is “the image of the heavenly Mercy Which makes all human suffering its own” (Universal Man 1961 p.167). I find that many commentators of Psalms of Lamentations follow Westermann in affirming that an overly Pauline-oriented theology in terms only of sin does not take seriously the implication of relating the story of the Passion of Jesus in terms of the lament of Ps. 22 and God’s concern for human suffering has a strong biblical tradition behind it (Patrick Miller Jr. Interpreting the Psalms, p. 110). This is reinforced by Jesus’ understanding of his ministry in Luke 4 and also in the identification of the Son of Man with the least ones in the Parable of the Last Judgment. It has been taken up as the foundation of the Liberation theologies in recent times. One could very well affirm that justice for the oppressed is inherent in the concept of the church as koinonia. I shall not expand on this.

What I have found most relevant is Colossians ch.3 in the light of which it is legitimate to speak of the gospel as the news of the New Man Jesus Christ (“Put on the new self, the new humanity”) ; and more especially it is valid to present the new fellowship of mutual forgiveness created by the Divine Forgiveness in Christ and expressed in the Eucharist and the social koinonia of the church as the foretaste of true human community as the essential gospel (“Forgiving one another as the Lord forgave you”). The nature of this Koinonia in Christ is that it transcends all communities defined by nature, culture and even ideology and religion and opens people for inter-personal communication with each other. It transcends them and takes incarnate form in them as well as between them transforming them from within. In this process, closed communal life based on idolatry of communal self-identity and pursuit of communal self-interest gets broken, opening it to a vision of their common humanity and their relatedness to each other in mutual forgiveness, justice and love. (“There is neither Greek nor Jew ...but Christ is all and in all”). Therefore it can become one potent source of inter-communal community in society outside the church also, a sort of secular koinonia and of the development of the ideology of a genuine secular human community at local, national and world levels in the modern pluralist context of many religions and cultures. The Christian message of Salvation in Christ in its total eschatological framework (with which Col. 3 begins) should be kept in intimate relation to the historical mission of promoting koinonia in both the churchly sacramental and pluralistically secular dimensions of community life in the modern world.

Today most will recognize that the church as the koinonia in Christ transcends different cultures and takes roots in each, redeeming and reinterpreting indigenous cultural thought-forms and life-forms and values to make them the language of communication of Christian faith and ethics. In fact one of the most serious studies undertaken by all schools of theology in the churches whether evangelical or catholic is the relation between the one gospel and many cultures. But the real question to explore today is whether we can equally speak of Christ and koinonia in Christ as transcending all religions and able to take root and form within each religion and to undertake the mission of redeeming it of its idolatries and saving its spiritual treasures and values as vehicles of the gospel and the worship of God through Jesus Christ. If this approach is valid, then we shall have to give greater emphasis in the church’s mission, to conversion of religions to Christ and to urge individuals from other religions converted to Christ to stay within their religious communities and build up Christ-centred fellowships around the Bible and the Lord’s Table within their religious ethos. It is very clear that the conversion of an individual isolated and abstracted from his/her culture or religion, can never be that of the whole person. Such a mission to whole persons, of course, requires some sort of separation of religion from faith and relativisation of Christianity as well other religions in the light of Christ. Karl Barth and Karl Rahner have done it, each in his unique way, one by emphasizing the solidarity of religions in sin with Christ abolishing all religions and the other emphasizing the solidarity of all religions in Grace, with Christ perfecting all prevenient Grace in them. C.F.Andrews’ incarnational theology of religions and P.D.Devanandan’s post-Kraemer theology of religion and Swami Abhishiktananda’s Trinitarian theology of advaitic mysticism (to mention only the names of those who are no more with us) need further exploration in the light of our need to find an Indian ecclesiology for a pluralistic society. Jurgen Moltmann has said, “There were Jewish reasons for believing in Jesus to be the Christ. There were Greek reasons for believing in Jesus as the Logos. There were German reasons for believing in Jesus as the leader of souls. In their own period those reasons were not merely cultural; they were more religious in kind. Culture and religion cannot be separated. Consequently today we shall also have to inquire into Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic reasons for faith in Jesus” (Church in the Power of the Spirit, p.162).

Along this approach may lie the solution of our finding in India, a non-communal form of the church in a situation where religious communalism has become a serious national problem; and the church organized as a minority community separate from the majority and other minority communities, each safeguarding its numerical strength and its own traditional personal law and seeking communal prestige and communal political power in the body-politic, makes conversion of groups and even individuals a problem of inter-communal relations. To me more important is the fact that so long as the church remains a religious community in competition with other religious communities, the church can never say that in Christ it sacramentally represents the destiny of all peoples in the country.

It is interesting to remember that the Constituent Assembly of India included propagation of religion as a fundamental right of the citizen in response to the Indian Christian leadership declaring that they were giving up communal representation as a minority community. They realized that the church as a self-regarding community and the church as the dynamic bearer of universal salvation would not go together. Personally I believe that in forgetting it we have not only reasserted our communal rigidities in our concept and practice of the church and have contributed to the communalisation of Indian politics and to the erosion of the true nature of the church’s mission in the pluralistic society.

I shall conclude my talk by referring to an important essay by Kuncheria Pathil on “A New Vision of the Church in a Religiously Pluralistic Society” (in Communalism in India the report of a Consultation organized by the Indian Christian Theological Association) .It starts by referring to the Vatican II definition of the church as the “sign and sacrament of the unity of all humankind” emphasizing the universalism of the church in Christ. But Pathil thinks that the wording may still appear triumphalist as affirming that the church has the full human unity which she can make effective for the rest of humanity. Pathil says, that the vision of the church as “the herald and servant of the Kingdom of God” would be a much more appealing model, since it contains a two-fold relativisation of church, one in the suffering servant relation to the world and the other in its relation to the Kingdom to come. He adds that the sign character and servant role of the church demand that in the face of the oppressive situation of the people, the church must “organize itself into peoples’ movement for liberation” cutting across the boundaries of religion, caste and culture; and here transparency of the church requires that we have to conceive of an open church with flexible structures, boundaries, rules and rituals making Christian identity vulnerable.

A talk opening the discussion on the subject at the Theological College of Sri Lanka, Pitimatalawa, Sri Lanka on 9 July 1993 in connection with the 30th anniversary of the college.

I must at the outset say that I am not intimately in contact for the last so many years with all-Asian thinking on Mission. So what I say and the issues I raise in this talk, should be considered as having a more restricted horizon than all Asia.

I consider the following issues as crucial for a rethinking on them from the context of Mission in Asia at present.

1. First, the Evangelistic Mission of proclamation and conversion in the new Asian context.

The evangelistic mission of the church has traditionally emphasized proclamation of the gospel of Christ to people of other religions. The message has been that Jesus the Son of God was crucified for the sins of the humanity and that Jesus raised from the dead by God brings Divine Forgiveness and Salvation understood as access to God; as free gifts to all who repent and accept Him as Saviour and join the fellowship of the Church of Christ.

This idea of mission for conversion had been criticized from various points of view. First, that it has been related to the 18th and 19th century expansion of western power in the world accompanied by the hope that all the world would soon come under Christendom. Second, it was based on ignorance of other religions and religious cultures and an unthinking devaluation of them as satanic or idolatrous only and would soon disappear as superstitious and inhuman. Third, the appeal to conversion was confined largely to the marginalised and oppressed sections of other religions and others who saw in it a means of social uplift unconnected with spiritual goals. Fourth, that its understanding of the gospel was too individualistic and partial as it isolated the souls to be saved from the whole persons related to society and culture. These criticisms are true and many of the traditional forms of evangelistic mission will have to change if they are to be accepted. The crucial issue for the mission is whether the cutting edge of proclamation of Christ as Saviour and invitation to those who accept Him to join the Church remain valid or not in the new setting. Do we require a new form of the fellowship of the church, which is different from the religious communities as understood in Asia. For instance, just as the church takes form in different cultures, can Christ-centred fellowships around the Lord’s Table and the Word of God get formed within different religious communities, as in the case of Keshub Chunder Sen of Bengal in the 19th cent and Subba Rao of Andhra Pradesh in the 20th century.

Wesley Ariarajah takes a different line of approach. The recognition of plurality of religions, religious spiritualities and religious cultures is the context. Prof. Chung the young woman theologian from the background of Buddhist spirituality of Korea in her talk at the Canberra Assembly of the W.C.C. on “Come Holy Spirit, Renew Your Creation”, pointed to the need of Christ to be presented, interpreted and lived out in relation to indigenous spirituality. An ecumenical consultation in Switzerland (1982) suggested that perhaps we should consider religious plurality to be within God’s purpose. Wesley Ariarajah in his Mar Athanasius lecture asks what model Christian mission should adopt. The model of the people of Israel was to proclaim God’s law for all nations without converting the other people into Judaism. The model of Buddhist missions was to release the Buddhist message and teachings into the mainstream of the national and cultural life of the peoples and let them remould that life. Says Ariarajah, “We relate to the Hindu not because he or she is not in relationship with God but because we assume such a relationship. The Christian mission then could become the joyful responsibility of bearing witness to what we have come to know about God in and through the life, death and resurrection of Christ. It would be a witness to the values of the Kingdom that would lead peoples to truer life. It would still have to point to that one source of all Christian witness- Jesus Christ. But it is a witness that does not call upon our neighbours to leave their religious culture and people to become part of the church. Rather it would point to Christ as One who has underwritten the promise of God to renew all life...Such a view certainly leaves the possibility open for a person who had been witnessed to, to want to name the Name and become part of the historic community, the church, which is called to be faithful to the Gospel message among the nations. On the other hand, a person who has heard the message may not feel the vocation to become part of the church but to remain a witness within his or her own religious tradition. In still other situations there may be no response whatsoever to the message. The Christian is called not to convert but to witness. The burden of responding to the message is that of the hearers and not of those who proclaim. (Current Trends in Ecumenical Thinking, Kottayam, pp.12-13.)

2. Secondly, the Church’s prophetic mission of humanization of the mechanisms of our corporate life. It is the mission of the church to our religiously pluralistic society and the world of technological development and modernization in the name of justice to the whole human person, of social justice to the poor and the marginalised and justice to the organic natural basis of production and reproduction of life on earth. Here the mission is primarily that of the theologically informed laity supported by the fellowship of the whole church. Here I indicate three specific aspects of it.

A. The need of a New Humanism. Today secular humanism underlying the ideologies of technological development has become a kind of secularist fundamentalism which reduces human society to the mechanical-materialist dimensions, and consequently aggressively denying the organic dimension of humanity’s relation to the natural environment as well as the transcendent spiritual dimension of human selfhood. So technology has become destructive of ecology and exploitive of human persons thus mechanizing life. In one sense, today’s revival of religious fundamentalism and aggressive religious communalism as well as the call to a return to the worship of nature are inevitable reactions to such self-sufficient secularism. But in many ways, religious fundamentalism and communalism are also very inhuman and destroy the faith-dimension which humanizes. So a new holistic humanism integrating the mechanical-materialistic, the organic ecological and the spiritual personal dimensions of human being has to emerge through dialogue between religions and secular ideologies and between religions. That is the only path open for religion to assimilate secular values of material development, rational freedom and equality, and for secularism to get integrated with the organic and spiritual dimensions of the humanum. Today scientific secularism is a bit more humble than before, but religion has given up renewal, opting for aggressive revivalism. But a new wholesome anthropology is needed as the basis of a more healthy process of development and modernization. This must be the goal of inter-religious and secular-religious dialogues in our time.

B. The traditional societies of Asia have marginalised the dalits, the tribals, the fisherfolk and women and have denied them any part in the decision-making processes of society and they have reinforced it by getting religions to declare them ritually impure because they live close to organic nature and deal with its wastes. Actually these marginalised people lived by nature’s bounties- the dalits through agricultural labour on land, the tribals by the resources of the forests, the fisherfolk of the sea and other water sources and the women by the organic functions of family life. Modernity has awakened them to their rights of participation in the structures of power, but the modern technological developments and commercialism have increased the power of their traditional oppressors by alienating land, forests, water sources and femininity from them for exploiting them for purposes of profit and have destroyed their livelihood and pattern of life. Now, the new concern for ecology needs to be expressed, not in isolation but in relation to the traditional rights of these people for their livelihood and rights. Eco-justice and social justice to the people engaged in unorganized labour should go together. It will also correct the mechanical individualism of modernity by the community values of traditional societies. The social activists involved in the welfare of these people need to explore further the relation between modernity and tradition in the development of peoples.

C. In fact the modern pattern of development has left over 50 percent of the Third World peoples to live under the poverty line. By 2000 A.D. it is estimated that a billion people will suffer absolute poverty. Now that the protest of Socialism has had its set-back, the new economic liberalization accepted as norm all over the world will cut most welfare measures and-create more poverty and unemployment because it subserves everything to the goal of economic growth by which ten percent will become very rich. In this situation, the church has to exercise a “divine option for the poor” based on Luke 4 Nazareth Manifesto and Matt. 25 Parable of the Last Judgement and other liberation motives in the Bible, and engage in a prophetic mission of speaking truth to collective power of economy and State. In 1968 WCC/CCPD reversed the normal order of economic priorities from economic growth, self-reliance and social justice to the order social justice, self-reliance and economic growth. Today eco-justice must also be brought into the goals of the economy. And the church must be prepared to stand by the people when they struggle for an economy that gives priority to eco-justice and social justice rather than economic growth through trans-national high technology.

A talk at the United Theological College, Bangalore on 19 August 1993.

There are several crucial issues related to evangelistic mission which are not related particularly to the Indian context, but to the general context of the modern world. They are also relevant for our consideration in the Indian context. I choose a few:

1. What is the Evangel, the gospel, which the Church is called upon to communicate to the people of the modern world?

The central issue in the early debates between Fundamentalists and Modernists was on the question whether the gospel should emphasize as the essence of the gospel, deliverance of the humans from sinfulness or affirmation of the human vocation to creativity and cooperation with God in recreating nature and society according to the purpose of God. The alternative contained in the question is no more valid. The modernists have become conscious of sin as the spirit of destructivity present in all human creativity so that even secular evolutionary and revolutionary ideologies of reshaping the world have now come to recognize that all human creativity and creations need deliverance from the spirit of perversity working within them; and Christian theology of modernity today emphasizes the social and cosmic dimensions of sin and atonement. On the other side, the fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals have begun to see that Christian atonement and redemption are not merely for individual appropriation in isolation but also take into account the whole person with his/her involvement in society and culture.

John I, Col. I and Heb. I emphasize that it is through Christ that all things have been created and that therefore all things come under the redemption of Christ. Col. 2.14-15 speaks of the Cross of Christ as the source of the Forgiveness of sins as well as Victory over all principalities and powers. Rom. 8 sees the subhuman creation, humanity and the Holy Spirit of God as “groaning” together for the End, the final manifestation of the Family of God on earth.

A theology of redemption combines affirmation of human creativity in the purpose of God and deliverance from human sinfulness to release humans for their vocation of cooperation with God in continuous new creativity. P.Chenchiah used to say that a return to the original creation and to the innocence of Adam before the fall cannot be the goal of the Christian gospel. In fact the new Adam Jesus Christ according to I Cor. 15 is of a higher order than the original Adam. I have found H.Berkhof’s theology combining Karl Barth and Tiehard de Chardin quite helpful in this connection. In his paper on “God in Nature and History”, Berkhof says that the dynamic of the gospel is “a great movement from lower to higher, going through estrangement and crises, but also through atonement and salvation, and so directed towards its ultimate goal, a glorified humanity, in full communion with God, of which goal the Risen Christ is the guarantee and first fruits”

When one thus takes seriously creativity and atonement in history in its movement towards the eschatological goal of the Kingdom and recognizes what Devanandan has called “the personal, social and cosmic” dimensions of the Gospel of the Kingdom, evangelism becomes witness to the Crucified and Risen Jesus Christ as the bearer of the coming Kingdom in all areas of life of the world in the immediate present. Here the covenant of the preservation of the fallen world through justice and judgment (indicated by the covenant of God with Noah in which God calls all humanity to create and maintain an order of society based on reverence for life, and the Divine ordinance through which the political order that uses power and legal justice for the liberation and protection of the weak from self-aggrandizement of the strong in a sinful world- Moses, David and Rom. 13) as well as the covenant of Grace through Israel and the Church are both signs and foretastes of the End, the Kingdom of Love and Righteousness.

2. Secondly, modern missionary movement which became dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries have been emphasizing proclamation of the gospel to people of other religions and cultures making clear that they were called to decide for or against Christ and that their decision for Christ involved joining the fellowship of Christians in one of the denominational churches as representing the Church, the Body of Christ. The book Colonialism and Christian Missions. Post-colonial Reflections by Jacob Dharmaraj (1993) raises the question whether a good part of the missionary idea and practice in India was not controlled by the colonial climate of thought which did not belong to the essence of the gospel. For instance, that climate was shaped by the expansion of western power and knowledge in the world accompanied by the certainty that all the world would soon become Christendom displacing all other religions and cultures. There was a devaluation of these other religions and cultures and a total identification of the gospel with western Christianity and western culture. The point is that there was not an adequate idea of the transcendence of the gospel over religions and cultures, and therefore the idea of the Church of Christ as a ferment transforming all religions and cultures and taking new incarnations within them did not find expression in missionary practice. This critique is fairly old now. But the crucial question for evangelistic mission today is how in a changed post-colonial situation the forms of the church and its evangelistic proclamation and the call to conversion and the invitation to join the fellowship of the church may take place within the context of the recognition of religious and cultural plurality and common participation in building a new just society and state. With every religion, culture and ethnos seeking self-identity, parity and justice in mutual relations in society, inter-religious and inter-personal dialogues are a necessary setting for redefining the form of any evangelistic mission. As D.T.Niles used to say, the essential scandalon of the gospel should not be mixed too much with other scandals extraneous to the gospel.

Wesley Ariarajah who was Director of the Dialogue Unit of the WCC for many years, in his Thomas Athanasius lecture given in Kerala (Current Trends in Ecumenical Thinking 1992) deals with the topic “Interpreting the Missionary Mandate” in the present context of religious and cultural pluralism. He quotes the findings of an ecumenical consultation in Switzerland to say that Christians “should consider religious plurality to be within God’s purpose” and discuses Buddhist and Judaic models. The Buddhist message and teachings were ‘released’ into the mainstream of the national religious and cultural life without any demand that any person becoming Buddhist had to ‘leave’ his or her cultural and religious heritage behind. The people of Israel did not seek to make Jews of all nations, though they discharged their voation of proclaiming Yahve as the God of all nations. The nations had the right to exist as nations and were not expected in one way or another to be incorporated into Israel. Ariarajah in this light defines the Christian missionary mandate: The Christian mission then could become the joyful responsibility of bearing witness to what we have come to know about God in and through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, to the values of the Kingdom that would lead peoples to truer life. It would be a witness that does not call upon our neighbours to leave their religious culture and people to become part of the church, but point to “Christ as One who has underwritten the promise of God to renew all life”. He adds that it would however leave the possibility open for a person who had been witnessed to, to want to name the Name and become part of the historic community, the church which is called to be faithful to the Gospel message among the nations. “The Christian is called not to convert but to witness. The burden of responding to the message is that of the hearers and not of those who proclaim”.

I have discussed Ariarajah’s approach to the missionary mandate at such length because it is one which takes the pluralistic situation seriously. His main point that the Christian task is to witness and not to convert is important. But there is nothing wrong in inviting those who respond positively to the Person of Christ without leaving their religious and cultural community to form fellowships around the Lord’s Table and the Word of God as “part of the Church” within their religious and cultural community-settings themselves and those who respond to the Christian values to consider acknowledging their source in Christ.

3. Thirdly, evangelistic witness cannot be isolated from the total life of the church. The proclamation of the kerygma is integrally related to the didache, the church’s interpretation of the gospel in terms of the self—understanding of the hearers, to the church’s diakonia, its service and social action and above all to the church’s koinonia, the quality of its fellowship. Hromadka of Czechoslovakia used to speak of the credibility of the evangelistic mission of the church as dependent upon the total life of the church, that is to say, it depends upon the way in which the church makes its prophetic mission of defence of human personhood and peoplehood in society and state and the ability of the church to reconcile diversity within its fellowship of divine forgiveness and become a source of reconciled diversity in the larger society. Here specifically the Christian contribution to overcoming Communalism and strengthening Secularism is of the greatest importance in the Indian context. This involves countering Closed Secularism which creates spiritual vacuum and Religious Fundamentalism which creates intolerance of the other. Open Secularism and Renascent Religion should reinforce each other.

Historically it was the decision of the Indian Christian community to give up communal representation and other safeguards that made possible the inclusion of the right to propagate religion as a fundamental right of every citizen in the Indian Constitution. This decision was taken by the leaders of the Indian Christian community because they did not want to remain a static communality but wanted to be a missionary community. They got the support of the secular politicians because freedom to propagate religion was considered by them as part of the freedom to propagate cultural and political ideas. The assurance that increase of numbers through evangelism and conversion would not be used to augment communal self-interest continues to be necessary to preserve that right. It is also necessary to show that religious freedom is the guardian and condition of all other fundamental freedoms of the human person. One could say therefore that the witnessing and serving vocation of the Christian community as well as the fundamental rights of all the citizens are best served by Christians giving up any self-centred communal approach in India.

We must remember that not only the Hindutva of the RSS-VHP-BJP parivar but also the more liberal Neo-Hinduism of the Gandhian line consider the missionary propagation and the conversion resulting from it as religious imperialism and destructive of inter-religious harmony.

Though other religions may not have developed a theological justification of caste as in traditional Hinduism, conversion to other religions has not proved as effective as was promised. Here the indictment of the Christian churches of India with respect to the church’s failure to overcome the spirit of caste within its fellowship is to be specially noted. So there is a good deal of truth in the argument that conversion to other religions has lost its social logic. It is clear that the Indian situation calls for deeper mutual understanding among religions and for the development of a consensus about parameters of religious practices in a democracy, where there is co-existence of non-missionary and missionary types of religions.

A paper presented at an inter-faith Consultation on Religion, State and Communalism” held at Madras from Sept. 21-24 under the auspices of the CCA and several religious and secular organizations in India, at a session chaired by Swami Agnivesh.

The topic of Inter-religious Conversion has many dimensions. But I suppose it has to be dealt with in this consultation from the point of view of its relevance and relation to the problems raised by the threat of Religious Communalism to the Secular Democratic character of Indian polity and the democratic struggle of the people for an egalitarian community.

Clearly many aspects of religious activities must have been dealt with in their relation to India’s secular democratic polity by the time this presentation comes before the consultation. So I expect some of the basic issues I shall be dealing with in respect of conversion will at many points be a repetition of those which have already been considered. Nevertheless the agenda worked out by the organizers of the consultation seems to have its rationale and I am happy to introduce the topic for your discussion.

My presentation has three parts. The first part deals with why the individual’s right of freedom to “profess practice and propagate religion”, and to convert to another faith and religion inherent in it, is a condition and guardian of all other democratic freedoms and fundamental human rights in State, society and culture. In the second part, we shall point to the specific conditions in India which has made inter-religious conversion an issue of communal politics and shall also look at some aspects of the history of the controversy whether the solution lies in depoliticising religious conversion or in outlawing it. And in the third part, I shall discuss a non-communal form of religious existence and some Christian theological reasons for promoting a non-communal expression of the Christian faith and fellowship.

The idea of the secular democratic nation-state emerged in Europe in the context of the secular humanist Renaissance and the rationalist Enlightenment which followed it on the one hand and of the Protestant Reformation and free-church movements following it on the other. The emphasis on the right of the individual to pursue and obey one’s “reason and conscience” even against the dictate of church, community and/or the State whether in the realm of scientific or religious truth was a basic principle affirmed by them in common. And the religious denominational plurality along with strong middle class and later working class groups committed to atheism destroyed any possibility of return to Christendom, and the only option for national unity was to secularize the state with equality under law for all religious and secular thought and groups. The religious denominational pluralism and the puritan desire to prevent the state from interfering with their religious freedom along with the forces of secular liberal thought brought into being the secular democratic polity with its clear separation between religion and state in the USA. However, the doctrine that humans as rational and/or spiritual beings “have ends and loyalties beyond the state”, community and nation to which they belong, became part of the “civil religion” or civil culture, which gave moral reinforcement to this whole process of democratization and secularization.

In fact the characteristic of State totalitarianism whether under Hitler or under Stalin was the rejection of this doctrine about human being as having ends and loyalties beyond the state”, it turned the citizens from being spiritual persons into functions of the state and social planning machines. The one point at which totalitarianism made this evident was in cutting the freedom of religion. The Confessing Church in Germany in resisting it, both at the level of doctrine and practice in their relation to the Jews, became the source of renewal of democratic politics in Germany after the War. Of course, the freedom to practice religion was there in Russia and China, along with freedom of atheistic propaganda. It is significant that in all situations of democratization, freedom of religion including propagation of religion and atheism equally was restored. In this context it is worth mentioning that the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights clearly affirms religious freedom and freedom from discrimination on the basis of religion as integral to it. But religious people would maintain that the inalienability of fundamental rights depend on the doctrine that they are not gifts of the state or even of the people who constitute the state, but the gift of the Creator as the US Constitution puts it or the Spirit as we would say in India, and that therefore these rights cannot be taken away by the state or the people.

I am not unaware of the difference in approach regarding propagation of religion and inter-religious conversion, between religions with a dominant “mystic” spirituality and “unitive” vision, and religions with a dominant “prophetic” spirituality and “messianic” approach. Religions which consider the mystic experience as the ultimate point of spiritual self-realization, consider history with its plurality as of no ultimate significance, and consider the many religions in history with their emphasis on nama and rupa as ultimately so relative and insignificant, that they are tolerated as equally true or untrue. On the other hand, religions which believe that God has revealed himself and his purpose in a concrete historical event or a tradition of such unique events with fixed name and form and as continually acting in history, see spiritual self-fulfillment as consisting in propagation of the news of the unique event and in building up a fellowship of people who acknowledges the revelatory event, which will also be a sacramental sign and instrument for bringing God’s Kingdom on earth. Of course, these are two types of spirituality and every religion has both types in it, because of interpenetration. But Hinduism, Taoism and religions of the mystic family are predominantly mystic oriented and Judaism, Christianity and Islam are predominantly prophetic-messianic in character. The former would naturally emphasize the sameness or equality of religions and the necessity to negate them all in the ultimate spiritual experience, while the latter would emphasize the essential difference between them and their historical mission in the pluralistic situation.

It is necessary to add that the modern secular ideologies like Liberalism and Marxism as well as Nationalism and Statism which have arisen in prophetically oriented western religious culture, have a secularized messianic spiritual approach to history and human self-fulfillment. Ram Manohar Lahia, a secular ideologist, has written on the essential difference between what he called the western and traditional Indian spirits. The traditional spirit bases mutual toleration of historical differences on the idea that they are parts of the same truth, while the modern spirit of democratic toleration of differences is on the basis that though they are essentially different, reverence for each other as persons requires respect for each other’s freedom to differ. It is this difference between the two types of religious spirituality that needs to be understood in the debates on the question of the freedom of propagation of religion and conversion, as a fundamental right of the human person. It also clarifies why secular ideologists among Hindus are generally more supportive of freedom of conversion than the religious. Because as they can see, on it depends the right of ideological propagation and conversion which is basic to the multi­party system of political democracy.

Of course as Lohia sees clearly in his Fragments of a World Mind, the messianic historical spirituality has produced more “strife” in society than the mystic, while the latter has produced “stagnation”. Given the choice between the two, he would choose to die in strife than stagnate. The point is that Semitic religions have produced more missions of humanitarian service but also more crusades of conquest than the mystically oriented religions in the past; and now that the traditionally mystic religions like Hinduism are also converting itself to Semitic messianic historical spirituality, it is also producing missions of service as well as power-crusades of conquest. Dostoevskey in his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor has shown how the spirit of Jesus the Crucified Messiah has itself been turned into the spirit of the Inquisition to serve a Jesus turned Conquering King. Dostoevskey was of course thinking of the same mutation in modern secular ideological messianisms. The same spirit in modernization has, along with missions of service to universal humanity making human life richer and fuller, produced also a good deal of power-crusades for conquest which has found expression in technology being used in the service of colonialism and transnational and national economic exploitation, totalitarian statism and destruction of nature. The question is, whether in religion or in secular modernity, these perversions of the messianic spirit can be redeemed by the spirit of genuine humanism within it and/or controlled by the rule of law from outside it, without suppressing the basic spirit of democratic freedom. At the level of spirituality, the role of the cosmic primal as well as the mystic unitive spiritualities in checking the messianism of conquest underlying modernization has also come up for universal consideration.

Sorry for the time taken for this digression into the spirit of modernity and its relation to messianic spirituality. It is necessary for a consultation like ours to see that religious ethos and political ethos are connected. Now back directly to our topic. It is necessary to ask what the conditions in India are which make for aggressive communalism more than in other countries.

S. Gopal in his recent talk at Bangalore on A Historical Perspective of Secularism in India (1993) has pointed out how communalism was introduced by colonialism. Whether we take the popular culture or the culture of the rulers, “what you had in India was not a sectarian Hindu culture or a Muslim culture but a composite Indian culture” . The British who colonized India had accepted the European concept of nationhood as constituted by unity in blood and language, “ethnic purity and a single language”; therefore, they said, that “India is not and can never be a nation...India is a collection of religious communities...But the unfortunate tragic element was that this British interpretation of Indian history was also accepted by many of our national leaders...So British interpretation plus the shortsightedness of our own leaders, not excluding the Mahatma, together resulted in this dreadful phenomenon of communalism”. In such a setting, religious communalities came to be political units to be wooed by Imperialism and Nationalism. The numerical strength of the communities came to acquire political significance. It was in this context that majority and minority communalism became strong and Akhanda Hindustan and Pakistan became religious/political goals.

And even Gandhi had to develop a secular nationalism by conceiving cooperation between religious communities rather than transcending the religious divisions. The desire of the Hindu leadership including Gandhi to build up a “single Hindu community” was a natural outcome of the pressure of the political situation. But it came to be associated not only with religious but also with caste political overtones, and came into conflict with the anti-Brahmin movements of depressed castes who were organizing separately for separate political strength to bring about cultural and social change aimed at elevating their status in the body politic; it also made the conversion into other religious communities, of the depressed sections of Hinduism as well as of the Tribals partially Hinduised and moving more fully in that direction, to be seen as a weakening of the Hindu community and a strengthening of other religious communities as political entities.

In this process the mystic spirituality of Hinduism was also changing in the direction of the messianic spirituality. So far as Gandhi was concerned, it was towards a syncretism of mystic Hindu spirituality with the self-giving and suffering love of Jesus the Crucified Messiah producing the politics of nonviolence aimed at a secular nation-state based more or less on inter-religious understanding and the decentralized socialism of Sarvodaya. But the Hindutva of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS parivar, as Ashish Nandy points out, was a semiticisation of Hinduism converting Hinduism as “faith” into Hinduism as “ideology”(Ashish Nandy, Hindutrva;  I. Secularism’s Disowned Double, II. The Poor man’s Statism in the Indian Express Feb 1991). It was a conversion of Hinduism into the messianism of power-crusade and conquest, which as Sebastian Kappen has said (in Understanding Communalism 1993) was not unlike that of the medieval theories of Christianity and Islam.

The British also solidified the separation between religious communities by making the personal law (civil code) of each community legal. And when Christian missions made converts and created Christian communities they imposed an English law as the personal law of the Indian Christian community and separated them from other religious communities legally. Therefore religious conversion also became a transference form one legal religious community to another. I am told that India is the only country where Christians have separate civil law like this. Of course as Mundaden has clarified in his History of Christianity in India Vol. I., it was the Portuguese Catholic mission that emphasized the religious and communal exclusiveness of the Christian fellowship of faith in the Kerala situation where traditionally there was much syncretic interaction between Syrian Christians and Hindus at all cultural and social levels. They also openly identified conversion to Christianity as an extension, not only of western culture but also of western Christendom i.e. the pattern of integration of church, community and politics of medieval Europe. In the 19th century, the Protestant Christian missions identified Christianity almost totally with western culture and made religious conversion to Christianity a transference from Indian culture to an alien culture. Thanks to the oppressiveness of the Hindu caste culture, the Christian converts from the depressed and low castes saw conversion as a liberation from caste oppression. Thanks to intolerance of caste structure, converts especially in the North had to be organized in Mission Compounds where the cultural ethos of community life was that of the western missionaries. Only when conversion became a group movement among the dalits and tribals that the social and cultural structures and values of the converts’ traditional life came to be kept intact. But that made conversion more suspect as politically motivated and materially influenced.

I have repeatedly related the story of how the Constituent Assembly came to accept the inclusion of freedom of religious propagation in the clause on fundamental rights of religious freedom in response to the Indian Christian community voluntarily giving up the communal representation proposed by Britain as safeguard for the Christian minority. George Thomas in his book Christian Indians and Indian Nationalism, gives the story of how K.T.Paul and S.K.Datta of the Indian YMCA who represented Protestants at the Round Table Conference in London, took a determined stand against turning Indian Christians into a communal political entity by Britain imposing on them communal representation, communal electorate and other communal safeguards. The All-India Christian Council in 1930 said that “the place of a minority in a nation is its value to the whole nation and not merely to itself” and it depended on the genuineness with which it sought the common weal.

Azariah who later became Bishop of Dornakal argued that the church in accepting the position of a communal political minority with special protection would become a static community and it would negate its self-understanding as standing for mission and service to the whole national community, that in any case the Indian church is not a single social or cultural community since it consists of people of diverse background, each of whom would have its own political struggle to wage in cooperation with the people of similar background in other religions; and therefore theologically and politically Christians should ask only for religious freedom for its mission and service to all people, not as a minority right, but as a human right (ref. John Webster, Dalit Christians-A History). H.C.Mukherji and Jerome D’Sousa were the spokesman for this secular nationalist cum Christian approach in the Constituent Assembly. “The immediate outcome was an offer by Sardar Patel and accepted by the Assembly that religious freedom in its full sense including the right to propagate religion should be written into the Constitution, not as a minority right but as a fundamental right of human person”( MMT, Social Reform amongst Indian Christians. P.16). It was a sort of covenant between Christians and the nation- on the part of Christians that they will not use their numerical strength for the purpose of their communal interest in politics and on the part of the state that it would not restrict their evangelistic freedom and the growth of the Christian fellowship through inter-religious conversion undertaken through genuine conviction. That covenant has been sought to be violated on both sides. The Orissa and Arunachel Pradesh laws and the lapsed OP. Tyagi Bill supported by the Prime Minister Desai restricting religious conversion and also the discrimination of scheduled caste converts to Christianity in the special benefits to people of the scheduled caste background, may be mentioned as violations of the covenant on the part of the State; and the Christian people have been unhappy at giving up minority communal safeguards and many efforts to organize Christian political parties off and on have been made in several states especially in the South by Christians.

This is an issue that continues to agitate both majority and minority religious communities. Religion has not yet become a matter of personal choice, and politics still remains a matter of bargaining among religious communities. Of course the right to the propagation is not the right to convert. The former is the right of persuasion only. The right to convert is that of the hearer. And it is necessary that no kind of inducement or coercion is present to violate the moral and spiritual integrity of the person or group propagating or deciding to convert. But any law in this matter is difficult to implement and is likely to be misused. Public opinion is the best moral safeguard. Of course Law provides that any fundamental right can be exercised only with due regard to morality and public order. But the issue is far from being closed.

In a paper on “Proselytisation -a Causal Factor for Communalism” at the Nehru Centenary Seminar at Trivandrum on “Minorities and Secularism”, N.V.Krishna Warner opposes the above convenant and the freedom of conversion given as fundamental right (Minorities and Secularism- A Symposium 1991). His argument is that it is conversion from Hinduism to other religions that has been a serious cause of Hindu Communalism. He says, “Hinduism as such does not favour the idea of proselytisation. . .Hinduism did not object to this so long as political power depended not on numbers but on other factors. Now that democracy has come to stay, Hindus have belatedly realized that numbers do count and only numbers do count ultimately”. Further they see that there is “high concentration of non-Hindu communities in several states of India many of them on the borders”, which places national security of India at risk. Therefore he asks whether it is not time that the law stops the movement of proselytisation which is “a form of aggression”, and take a decision that “propagating one’s own religion is different from proselytisation and that while the former is every Indian’s birthright, the latter is a punishable offence”(pp. 223-9). Here there is a mixture of religious and political motivations and the assumption that the security of the Indian nation lies primarily on Hindus on the border, because others are supposed to have extra-territorial loyalties. This is of course the Hindutva approach.

A different moderate approach is given in “Communal Strife Linked to Conversions” the report of an interview with AP Governor Krishna Kanth (Indian Express 20 Oct. 91). At a meeting of the National Council of Churches he asked, not for any legal restriction but a “a voluntary agreement among religious leaders of all faiths that from now on they would not resort to conversions because the social logic of conversions is not valid now”, that the promise of liberation from caste structure has not been fulfilled as proved by the fact that it persists in all religious communities; and any attempt to organize Hinduism as a religious community like others of the prophetic tradition has been a failure. So it is argued that “caste is not just a Hindu phenomenon, that Hinduism is not a religion, and that both Gandhi and Dr. Ambedkar were victims of this false perception”. Hindus are trying to become a religious community in the image of religions each of which has a book and a prophet because such a community has more unity. But “what Hinduism is not it cannot become”.

From the Christian side, the thinking has gone on the line that the Christian church as fellowship of faith in Christ should cease to be a religious community in the common communal sense. A conference of the NCC of India, on renewal in mission, came to the finding that conversion to Christ is “not moving from one culture to another or from one community to another community as it is understood in the communal sense in India today” (Renewal in Mission p.220). In the Christian Institute for the Study-of Religion and Society there was an open discussion about a proposal that since Christ transcended not only cultures but also religions and ideologies, the fellowship of confessors of faith in Jesus as the Messiah should not separate from their original religious or secular ideological community but should form fellowships of Christian faith in those communities themselves, and that so long as the Law sees baptism as transference from one community to another it should not be made the condition of entry into the fellowship of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper but made a sacramental privilege for a later time( Ref. Religion and Society March 1972).

T.M. Philip in his historical survey of Baptismal practices and theologies (Debate on Mission, ed. Hoefer 1979) says that the “rite has become a legal condition for the entry into the church which functions as a religious communal group; in this context it fails to convey its full meaning and purpose as the expression of or solidarity with the new humanity in Christ which transcends all communal or caste solidarities”; he also refers to the conclusion of Joseph Belcastro’s book A New Testament Doctrine of Baptism for Today, that “the N.T. does not teach that baptism was a condition of salvation or church membership, but baptism was to be available for the disciples of the coming church.... that faith in and acceptance of Jesus as the Christ was the basis of membership in the church”(pp. 321).

In the late eighties the Indian Theological Association explored the pattern of the church in a secular mode as herald of the Kingdom and servant of the world in a pluralist society like India. Kuncheria Pathil asks for “the Open Church with flexible structures boundaries rules and rituals” in dialectical and dialogical relationship with religions and ideologies and cultures and in solidarity with peoples’ movements for justice . George Lobo says that while the visibility of Christianity is needed for the sacramental role, the fellowship of faith, if true to itself “has to be essentially charismatic and not a power structure or rigid institution seeking to safeguard its own interests”. Also that “there is nothing in authentic Christianity that would demand that one who receives baptism should abandon his original socio-cultural group and join another” (Communalism in India- A Challenge to Theologizing 1988).

The present Indian legal system of separate civil law for different religious communities imposes separateness between communities of faith. It is necessary to have a common civil code so that conversion at the level of faith may not have the effect of a communal transference. If that is not possible, Fr. H. Staffner has brought forward the proposal which the late E.D. Devadason mooted, namely that the Christian community should accept the recodified Hindu law as their own civil law in the place of the present quite outdated Indian Christian Law which, as already stated, was an imposition of an English law on Christian converts in India. Staffner says, “People may find it strange that Christians should be asked to agitate that a so called Hindu law be made applicable to them. E.D. Devadason points out that the law worked out by Pandit Nehru and Dr. Ambedkar in 1956 is not really a Hindu law. The mere fact that this law is applicable also to Jams, Buddhists and Sikhs clearly shows that from the beginning it should have been called Civil Code rather than Hindu Code” He adds, that it is not based on any Hindu Scriptures but on “modern concepts and progressive values and is applicable to all citizens irrespective of religion”. Staffner sees it as one way to give baptism its true sacramental sense rather than the communal” (“A Better Civil Law or a Communal Personal Law for Christians” in Peoples’ Reporter, 1 - 15 Aug 1994).

Recently there was a Court judgment in Madras which granted the contention of a person who affirmed that he was a Christian by faith without change of community by conversion and therefore entitled to benefits ofthe scheduled castes of the Hindu community. I thought it was an interesting judgment which distinguishes faith and communal affiliation.

We have to move in the direction of decommunalising politics and fellowships of religious faith if politics and faith are to find their genuine democratic or human character.

Based on a talk given at a Consultation on Christian Contribution to Indian Philosophy held at the Catholic Seminary in Madras in 1994 under the joint auspices of the Seminary and the Indian Philosophic Association. Published in Christian Contribution to Indian Philosophy, ed. Anand Amaladass SJ, Madras 1995.

The process of modernization of religious traditions is a contemporary social reality in India. The Christian contribution in this context should be in relation to the struggle of India to develop, through dialogue among the many religions, cultures and philosophies, a body of common insights about being and becoming human, that is, a common framework of humanism which will humanize the spirit of modernity and the process of modernization.

Modernity is represented by three forces- first, the revolution in the relation of humanity to nature, signified by science and technology; second, the revolutionary changes in the concept of justice in the social relations between fellow human beings indicated by the self-awakening of all oppressed and suppressed humans to their fundamental human rights of personhood and peoplehood, especially to the values of liberty and equality of participation in power and society; thirdly, the break-up of the traditional integration of state and society with religion, in response to religious pluralism on the one hand and the affirmation of the autonomy of the secular realm from the control of religion on the other’.

These forces of modernity have enhanced human creativity in many directions. But since they have been interpreted onesidely in the context of a mechanical materialist world-view, they have also become sources of destructivity and dehumanization. Technology has produced technocracy and totalitarian planning destructive of personhood and ecology. Revolutions devour their own children and produce new oppression. Secularization becomes closed secularism. And so on. Now that the destructive aspects of modernization have become pronounced in the world of the second half of the 20th century, questions regarding a more holistic philosophy and an alternative paradigm of modernization have been universally raised. It is with a view to humanize technology and social revolt as well as religious pluralism and secularism in the modem world. It is in relation to this contemporary historical challenge faced by all religions, all metaphysics and philosophies, and all secular ideologies, dialogue among them has relevance. And it is in relation to the ensuing dialogue about a genuine Indian Humanism that does justice to the mechanical, organic and spiritual dimensions of humanness and social history, that a Christian contribution to Indian philosophy acquires importance.

The basis of the Christian contribution is the faith that the crucified Jesus Christ by mediating divine forgiveness to all humans in the solidarity of their sinfulness, has made possible mutual forgiveness between persons and peoples and has brought into being in history a new human communion (Koinonia), transcending all religious, cultural and natural diversities and divisions. “Have put on the new humanity...where there is neither Greek nor Jew, neither circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, sythian, slave nor free (neither male nor female- Gal. 3.28)...Forgiving one another as the Lord forgave you(Col. 3.10-13.).

The communion/community is symbolized sacramentally by the fellowship of the Church of Christ at the Lord’s Table. But it is not bound by the organized church. It is a ferment universally present for the renewal of all communities, opening them to each other before God, in a mutuality of forgiveness and justice. This will enable them to build the common framework of a genuine Secular Humanism and an open secular culture of mutual dialogue, about building a richer and fuller humanness in community life.

It is significant that Vatican II (and also the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches) defines the church as the sacramental sign of the unity of all humanity, and also speaks of the presence of the Paschal Mystery among all peoples (see Decree on the Church, and the document on the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World) This approach assumes that in Christianity, acknowledgment of Salvation (understood as the transcendent ultimate destiny of human beings) finds expression and witness in the universal struggle for Humanization (understood as the penultimate human destiny) in world history which is shaped not only by the forces of goodness and life, but also by the forces of evil and death. In fact, the nature of the penultimate historical goal of humanization within the hope of ultimate salvation, is the theme of moral philosophy in the Christian religion. Christianity in its more pietist, fundamentalist and conventional expressions, has confined its attention largely to the ultimate spiritual salvation forgetting its temporal witness in charitable social service and more than that, in social action to bring about justice in social structures. On the other hand, traditional Christian moral philosophies have been reluctant to recognize the creative positive aspects of the forces of modern technology and social change under the auspices of Secular Humanism. Both these have resulted in Christianity leaving the field of ethics of modernization to secularistic ideologies which reject the very idea of the transcendent spiritual dimension of human existence and pursue a reductionist interpretation of reality.

It is this situation that is sought to be remedied by Christian Ecumenism by its emphasis on Humanization as an essential aspect of Salvation (see M.M. Thomas, Salvation and Humanization 1971)

Neo-Hinduism has been involved in a similar endeavour of relating the Historical and the Ultimate in the context of the impact of modernity. In traditional Hinduism artha, kama, dharma and moksha are recognized as purusharthas, goals of life. But traditional Hindu metaphysics, as P.T. Raju points out, has been preoccupied with moksha, the ultimate realization of oneness and equality of all in the Spirit, mostly forgetting that it is necessary to bring witness of oneness and equality within the social structures created for the human pursuit of wealth (artha), temporal happiness (kama) and duty (dharma). The equality at the paramarthika level of moksha was allowed to coexist with rigid inequality of the caste-structure in the vyavaharika levels of artha, kama and dharma, without even a tension between the two levels.

It is this compartmentalization of the ultimate spiritual and the historical social which Swami Vivekananda condemned as Pharisaic. In fact the whole history of the Neo-Hindu movements from Raja Rammohan Roy to Gandhi, Tagore and Radhakrishnan may be seen as an attempt to relate paramarthika level of salvation with the vyvahariaka level of social structures and goals (see M.M.T. Acknowledged Christ of the Indian Renaissance 1969).

The secularist ideologies of history like Liberalism and Marxism in their attempt to deal with the destructiveness which appeared in the process of modernization under their auspices, have been forced to give up something of their closed character and to open themselves to recognize, not only the conditional character of rationality but also the tragic contradiction in the spirit of human self-transcendence itself. For instance, Neo-Marxism became aware, after Stalinism, of sources of self-alienation beyond class, in the State, bureaucracy and technology, and beyond them in some cases in the human spirit itself. This was clear in the thought of Ernest Bloch and others of Eastern Europe even before the disintegration of the socialist regimes of the region.

All these show that ours is a historical context conducive, not only to inter-religious but also to religion-ideology dialogues on building a common body of insights about being and becoming human - a dialogue in which Christianity can make a contribution from its idea of reconciliation of humanity and the creation of a Secular Koinonia across religions, cultures and ideologies.  Christian contribution to Indian Anthropology may be marginal, but it need not be insignificant. In the reverse, the ways in which other religions and secular ideologies grapple with the truth and meaning of the humanity of Jesus Christ can help in developing a truly indigenous Indian Christology and Christianity (M.M.T. The Secular Ideologies of India and the Secular Meaning of Christ 1976).

Actually, it was the leaders of the 19th century Indian Renaissance and the political thinkers in the ideological leadership of the 20th centary Indian Nationalism who grappled with the person and teachings of Jesus Christ and assimilated the essence of Christian humanism into the religious and secular thought of modern India. Natarajan in A Century of Social Reform points out that the fear of Christianity has been the beginning of social wisdom in Hinduism. But certainly it was not merely the fear of Christian proselytism but also the intrinsic love and appeal of the person of Jesus Christ and Christian values, especially the Cross of Christ as the symbol of God’s identification with suffering and oppressed humanity, that led to the redefinition of the traditional Hindu spirituality, philosophy and social ethics. And it was in this setting that Indian Christians and Churches began to get concerned about a relevant Christian contribution to Indian philosophical and theological thought through inter-faith dialogue.

Of course, it is not merely professional thinkers. Hindu, Secular and Christian who have contributed to the Christianization/Humanization of Indian religion, ideology and philosophy in the light of the Crucified Christ, but also the local Christian congregations which in their worship and sacramental life, demonstrated a pattern of corporate life of fellowship, transcending traditional caste division impelled by their new sense of being made brethren through the death of Christ on the Cross. The Lord’s Table open to people of different castes and tribes and sexes challenged the traditional spirituality that divided peoples into the ritually pure and impure and thereby supported social structures of caste, sex and other discriminations. It does not mean that the church congregations did not make compromises with such structures themselves. They did. But they also promoted a spiritual vision and practice and challenged them, thereby acting as a transforming ferment in the larger society. In fact, the vision of Peter that God in Christ had destroyed purity-impurity divide between Jew and Gentile (Acts 10) was a turning point in the early church to build a new koinonia transcending religions. It is the extension of it in India in the idea and practice of the churches in the Indian village and city that challenged absolutising the traditional casteist, sexist and other structures of Indian society as divinely ordained. It had tremendous appeal not only to the outcaste, the tribal and the woman, but also to the nationally awakened Indian intellectual who saw in Christ the source of a new universal humanism.

I must hasten to add that Christianity has also introduced into Indian religious and secular philosophy the idea of Messianism that is, the idea of a Messiah who would bring history to fulfillment. Such Messianism, if interpreted outside the framework of the idea of the suffering crucified Servant, would naturally develop a historical dynamism with the idea of Messiah as Conquering King seeking power through aggression. In fact Christianity itself has often in its history succumbed to the Messianism of the Conquering King rather than of the crucified servant Christ. Christian communalism is an expression of it in India. The dangerous consequence of the impact of the Messianism of conquest introduced into India by the Semitic religions is that Hinduism has absorbed it and produced Hindutva, with its idea of Hindu communalism and Hindu Rashtra threatening secularism which is the foundation of national unity in our context of religious pluralism. Unless the Crucified Jesus is emphasized as the central symbol of Christian messianism, the contribution of Christianity to Indian philosophy may be the intensification of a philosophy of history which posits totalitarian statism of a religious or secularist kind as its goal (MMT. Man and the universe of Faiths, 1975).

A paper presented at a Seminar organized in Delhi by the Delhi Forum on the topic.

“A global economic system does not just fade out. It will have to be replaced. But at the present a feasible global alternative does not exist. But then alternatives have to be contextually evolved rather than taken out of any ready made blue-print” (C.T.Kurien, Global Capitalism and Indian Economy p.84) Alternatives should be based on forces present in the existing situation. This is required by Realism as different from projecting Utopian blue-prints and imposing it on reality. Utopian vision is necessary but cannot be imposed without taking the contemporary social reality into account. In fact we have to grapple with the contemporary reality to realize a short-term alternative which will open a path to the long-term alternative.

The present international situation is marked by the domination of the “ideology” of the free-market economy. The ideologisation is seen in that the market with its sole criterion of economic growth is made to determine policies regarding other economic goals like liquidation of mass poverty, economic welfare and eco-justice, but also policies regarding directions in social educational and cultural life. Such ideologisation happened much later than the emergence of the market-mechanism in early capitalism for the limited purpose of maximizing production in the context of scarce resources. It is the ideology of the market that has been revived and enforced globally through the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization by the economic Powers in the uni-polar world. After the disintegration of socialist regimes in 1989, this ideology dominates the world and the Third World countries have fallen in line.

We have to reckon with the middle class who form the political community of the Third World countries increasingly supporting it, because it is in their class interests. Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) drawn from the middle class and even the organized working class have imbibed the consumer culture and have fallen in line. They may also be believing the media’s pressurized propaganda that any present impoverishment of the weaker sections will be corrected in due course through economic growth or that in the present it is the price we pay for economic progress of the nation for the future.

Therefore it is quite unrealistic to build our hope on the expectation that market economy is moving to any inevitable doom or that we can count on the permanence of the democratic polity in India continuing to permit agitation of peoples’ movements against the present pattern of development. Capitalism has shown its resilience before; and if India’s ruling class feels seriously threatened by peoples’ movements or if the BJP comes to power, there is real possibility of democratic freedoms being restricted.

Rajan Gurukkal of the Social Sciences department of the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala gives his reasons why the leaders of counter-culture who are anticipating “a total breakdown of the market-friendly dimension of development in the wake of micro-movements which they see as part of the process of global transformation” are too optimistic and are likely to be disappointed. For, “political systems incapable of counter-balancing unusually swollen middle class, myriads of white collar jobs, non-local means of subsistence, irresistible passion for consumer goods and a social life making sense only in the idiom of science and technology hardly grant an easy walk-over for anti-development movements. Uprooted subjects colonized to the core, thinking and acting according to the rules of modern science, the larger public fails to recognize the myth of development that has been tantalizing over the decades. The capitalist enclave operating through the agency of the state bureaucracy combine goes on increasing middle class incentives through privatization and commercialization. A large majority of the educated commons are depending on the subsistence niches of supra-local economy of commercial interests. More and more of the rural populace are being drawn to urban complexes for non-traditional labour, making rural subsistence systems irrelevant. This is weakening the side of the marginal communities in the conflicts between commercial interests and survival needs”(”Ecological Perspective of Development” in Development and Politics of Survival, pp. 71 f).

The question is, will at least a good minority of the politically conscious community of India commit themselves to preserve democratic freedoms and identify, themselves with the cause of the victims of globalization and opt to oppose the policy in the name of the Nehru legacy of the welfare state? Not that Nehru’s concept of the socialist pattern had done much good in practice to the poor sections, but it provided room for it. Will there be a demand in the year of the General Elections that the State be democratic enough to respond to the peoples’ movements and discipline the market and the market-mechanism so that they may be de-ideologised so as to make room for objectives like social welfare and justice as well as national self-reliance and eco-justice. This is the short-tern political objective.

Among the movements opposed to the policy of globalization, the strongest are those aimed at protecting the ecological-biological structure of nature. Where these movements of eco-justice stand in isolation from the struggle against “capitalist infringements of communal rights to natural resources”, that is, from the struggle for social justice, they are likely to be of a purely middle class character and tend to get coopted by the ideology of market economy. But where they are so related they are a power for change. In fact the local struggles of the organized movements of dalits, tribals, fisherfolk and women, for living and for survival (some of which have been partly or temporarily successful), against specific expressions of market-directed pattern of development, have been a potent force to educate the middle class regarding the inhuman reality of the present development paradigm; such education is necessary to achieve even our short-term objective. However these movements are politically marginal until they get more power-political support from the organized working class and/or the political parties.

Ajit Roy the editor of the independent Marxist Review from Calcutta thinks that Marxist thought has still great potential for defining the long-term alternative based on the power of the organized working class. He estimates that the organized working class will soon feel the pinch of a hi-tech development under TNC auspices which increasingly excludes them from sharing in the scheme of economic production and distribution. This potential needs to be explored.

On the whole however in the Third World in general and in India in particular, the leaders searching for alternative paradigms take a more neo-Gandhian approach emphasizing decentralization of political and economic power. This envisages microlevel sovereign communities of some sort, controlling their resources and shaping appropriate/indigenous technologies, and socially liberating themselves from traditional patriarchies and hierarchies, redefining without destroying their traditional community structures and values. This too is a form of modern development, only more humane than the present one under globalization.

S.L.Parmar an Indian economist who made a significant contribution to the thinking of the World Council of Churches on development issues, once spoke of the kind of technology that would help social development of people and protect nature. He said, “Since modern technology appears to be ecologically unsatisfactory, it needs to be replaced by a more appropriate technology that is in harmony with nature. Since it manifests inequalities and reduces participation and control.. .the need is to evolve technologies that are labour-using, capital-and energy-saving, small-scale and amenable to decentralization. These conditions can be largely met if technology is built primarily on natural human and renewable local resources, if it can be linked to traditional skills, crafts and techniques, and if it is geared to production that will meet the basic needs of the poor” (Faith Science and the Future. Geneva p.196).

It is significant that even Fukuyama who put forward the thesis that democratic capitalism may be the End of History, has recently said in a Press interview that modern institutions need the support of “pre-modern social structures like the community, religion and the family” and that with these structures disintegrating, “modern institutions were facing a crisis in the West” (quoted by Ajit Roy in the Marxist Review July 1995).

So the new alternative should be conceived not as a return to the traditional society as some would have it, but as going forward affirming both discontinuity with the oppressive ethos and continuity with the liberating culture of mutuality in the traditional society. It is not an anti-development paradigm but an alternative development paradigm.

We have in India the traditions of Gandhi-Vinoba-led Sarvodaya, Lohite Socialism, Jai Prakash’s Total Revolution and Ambedkar’s pattern of dalit struggle which can become resources for the new alternative. Many of our academics like Rajni Kothari, Ashish Nandy and Vandana Shiva have sought to formulate the new direction. They themselves recognize that the base of this alternative paradigm has to be the movements of peoples who are the victims of globalization. Elements of the new discourse have begun to “acquire forms of struggle and movements fast opening up avenues of integration for the teased and frustrated millions in the southern nations”. “Rooted in local cultures and directed to local problems, these are microlevel resistances with signs of world-wide solidarity”, says Gurukkal. In this context the large number of net-works of Social Action groups in India have a very important function in the discourse provided they have what Gramcie has called an “organic” relation to such peoples’ movements.

In this light, the new National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements in India has significance as having the potentiality to become the base of the long-term alternative in our country. It is too early to say. But the Alliance seems to have had a good beginning in their Bombay meeting under the leadership of Medha Patkar, Tom Kocheri and Banvari Lal Sarma. Bastian Wielenga of the Centre for Social Analysis says, “In peoples’ movements such as the National Fish-workers’ Forum (NFF), the Narmada Bachan Andolan, the Socialist Front, Jan Vikas Andolan, Chilika Bachao Andolan and the National Federation of Construction Labour which are cooperating in the NAPM, the victims of the dominant development politics are raising their voice and begin to project alternatives. Huge dams are affecting water cycle and bio-regions, pursseine trawlers are affecting marine food chains, both are destroying livelihood of people based on community control of resources. This type of development displaces people. Against that, the displaced people claim the right to life (Art 21 of the Constitution)...One of the aims of the struggle is to protect the material base for creative life-centred life-sustaining activities. The slogans, ‘protect water- protect life’ and ‘protect bio-diversity’ highlight what has to be done already now for the sake of a new society in the future. This is in the spirit of Shankar Guha Niyogi who emphasized that the agenda of peoples’ movement has to include simultaneously struggle and creative efforts”: (Life-centred Production-Practical Steps Towards a Feminist Eco-Socialism. Resource Centre for Peoples’ Education and Development).

In the midst of a largely gloomy Indian political scenario, there are many rays of hope.

A talk at the Fr. Kappen Memorial Seminar on 3 January 1994 on the topic at Bangalore.

I

It is in the fitness of things that the various Christian and other voluntary organizations in Bangalore have jointly convened this Seminar on the 70th birthday of the late Fr. Sebastian Kappen, to reflect on the theme, An Alternative Paradigm. This theme was very much a central concern of Kappen’ s thinking and teaching over the years. The Seminar is an expression of our deep gratitude and appreciation of the life and thought of one who was friend, philosopher and guide to a lot of young people as well as social activists in their search for a holistic pattern of social renewal injustice and of cultural creativity in support of it, in our time.

I express my thanks to David Selvaraj and his colleagues for their kind invitation to me to participate in the Seminar. I consider myself, along with many others of my generation, as a “friend and intellectual companion” of Kappen. I remember the many private and public occasions in Bangalore. Trivandrum and Thiruvalla, of our relaxed conversations on the theme and its related theological issues. Many years ago, probably in the late fifties or the early sixties, I remember him taking me to a Bangalore slum to meet a group of AICUF students including a much younger Rajen Chandy, who were in the search of a new paradigm of socially relevant higher education as an alternative to the existing University structure. Kappen was with them inspiring their search. It was last October that I met him last. He came to see me in the UTCollege Annex where I was staying for a few days, some time before he was going to lecture to the theological college students on an alternative cultural paradigm and we talked about it and other matters. Many of us gathered here have similar perhaps more intimate personal remembrances. We seek today to celebrate the spiritual and intellectual inspiration Kappen gave us and others through his life and teachings, and to resolve together to continue the work of the renewal of religion, culture and society in India to which cause he was committed.

In this presentation my aim is to outline the thought of Kappen on the theme as I understand it. I have not done any systematic study of Kappen’s writings, but I have kept touch with them in a general way. So I hope I have not totally misunderstood him, but I apologize for the inadequacy of my attempt.

II

Kappen wrote a great deal on the development of a counter-culture as a necessary path towards the transformation of society with justice to the people. By culture I suppose he meant the structure of meaning and sacredness, of values and world-view expressed in symbols myths metaphors and artistic images and legendary stories and rituals and liturgies within which a people creates and utilizes technology to earn their living from nature and organizes their social institutions relating men and women to one another within the community and builds communication with other peoples. What lie wanted was the development of a counter-culture which would subvert the existing culture of modernization, because the latter is too lopsided to understand what he called the Total Man, that is, the pluralistic dimensions of the being and becoming of the humans. Because of this lopsidedness, it produces a one-dimensional technocratic approach which increasingly becomes depersonalizing to all humans involved, oppressive to the people at the bottom and destructive of the ecological basis of life itself on earth. Its ultimate inhuman character is symbolized by the “technology of genocide” characteristic of Fascism, communal riots and modern war. The culture and the social process it gives support, have to be totally negated. The quarterly which he edited for some years was called The Negations. The present has to be negated in the name of the future in such a way that the negation has in it the presence of the future now.

Of course the basic central elements in the making of the counter-culture and the germ of the future society are the forces released by the self-awakening and the struggle for self-identity and justice of the traditionally oppressed peoples of India. He has stated categorically, “The forces that can recreate Indian society can emerge from the repressed cultures of the lower castes, outcastes and the tribals”(Jesus and Cultural Revolution p.51). But there are traditional elements in the past history of the Indian peoples which have the potential to strengthen the counter-forces. He specially notes the great significance of three movements expressing the Indian tradition of dissent- “first voiced by the Buddha, later taken over by the social radicals of the medieval bhakti movement and finally re-echoing the messianic movements of the low-castes, outcastes and tribals in colonial and post-colonial times”. And he adds, “Any future cultural revolution will have to maintain continuity with this tradition of contestation. This forms the basis for a counter-cultural movement and a subversive creative practice” (Religion Ideology and Counter-culture p. 31).

At the same time he points out that these movements have to be saved from the forces which have smothered them. For instance, the Buddhist protest tradition, was “sucked into the whirlpool of cosmic religiosity of the Tantric-Saivite version” and needs to be liberated from that whirlpool to regain its prophetic ethical character. Perhaps the same is true for the protest character of bhakti. As for the dalit-tribal messianic movements of colonial and post-colonial times they emerged within the framework of Indian nationalism which has three strands, namely the Communitarian, the Secular and the Hegemonic. of which the Hegemonic ie. Communalism, Hindu Nationalism in particular, seeks to suppress them or coopt them and make them toothless. Communitarian and Secular ideologies of Indian nationalism provide the only framework within which religious and cultural pluralism and movements of weaker sections within the nation are permitted to contribute to radical counter-culture and social change: therefore they need strengthening so that the messianism and the project of hope inherent in the search for self-identity of India’s oppressed groups may be saved from Hegemonic communalism.

Kappen has given a good deal of thought to the contribution of the Marxist tradition and what he calls the Jesus-Tradition to the emergence of counter-culture and alternative society in India. For he was spiritually committed to the essence of both, severally and in their synthesis as sources of his prophetic faith, ultimate hope, ethical social humanism and aid in his faith’s search to understand religious cultural and social realities and the revolutionary responsibility in relation to them. But here too, Kappen maintained that they had to be redeemed from the Communist and Christian Fundamentalisms respectively, if they are to serve the project of the liberation of peoples.

Regarding the Marxist tradition, Kappen says, “it must be borne in mind that over a century has elapsed since Marx gave us the classical formulations of the Socialist idea. It therefore needs to be rethought in the contemporary world context” (Future of Socialism p.10). He acknowledges the prophetic ethical spirit and the scientific rationality which led Marx to his critique of Capitalism as “exploitive. tendencially imperialist and dehumanizing”; and adds, This criticism remains “by and large valid even today”. For, the exploitive neo-imperialist and alienating nature of capitalism is very much part of our contemporary experiences” (p.13).

It is the attitude of Marx to science and technology that needs radical correction, in the light of modern developments. Says Kappen, “Marx was a child of the Scientism of the 19th century when it was widely believed that modern science would solve all human problems and herald a new age of plenty”(p.14). This “soteriological view of science and technology” has become problematic in the light of the ecological disequilibrium it has brought about and the mechanization of life technocracy has produced. Modern science and technology have revealed their “instinctively violative nature” in that they have, by refusing to recognize the organic relation between humanity and nature, have tended to “reduce everything -beauty, art, interpersonal relations, psychism etc- to the measurable and the calculable; their end-result is a one-dimensional technocratic society from which all mystery dimension will have fled”(p.15). In such a cultural framework, technocracy without humanism takes over the State marginalizing the people and their participation; and nationalization of means of economic production instead of socializing economic power tends to achieve the opposite.

Further, universal suffrage and increasing participation of organized labour in the political process have made the modern State more than the executive of the bourgeois class, which Marx opposed. Also, many problems of human estrangement like ecological destruction, technocracy and absence of democratic checks to power have turned out to be the concern of all classes and can be tackled only through “trans-class struggle”. The emergence of such trans-class realities limits the role of proletarian struggle which now has to be subordinated to “broad-based peoples’ struggles” in the construction of an alternative to the present society (pp. 26-27).

Stalinism has deviations from original Marxism, but it cannot be said that its anti-human trends are totally discontinuous with Marxism, for the reasons stated above. But Marxism redeemed and redefined in terms of social democracy, is a very important contribution to the peoples for the transformation of culture and society.

In his approach to the Jesus-tradition and its relevance for the search for an alternative paradigm, Kappen sees Jesus of History as “the revelation par excellence of ethical prophetic religiosity”. Jesus has introduced a new humanism into the main stream of Indian history affirming equality of persons a religious value and changing the cyclic view of history inherent in Gnostic and Cosmic religiosities which were traditionally dominant bringing an Orientation to the new and the future. He says, “Cross becomes the most telling symbol of man’s refusal to be enslaved and his resolve to march forward to fuller life. The dialectic of negativity governing universal history finds its concreted concentrated expression in the personal life and death of Jesus of Nazareth” (p 56).

But Kappen sees that the picture of Jesus of the Church dogma is one which is distorted and “recast in the cosmic mould of magic myth and cyclic time” with his spirit of ethical prophecy lost (Religion Ideology and Counter-culture p.26). By the end of the third century, Jesus’ message of the Kingdom was spiritualized and Christianity was reduced to “subserve and legitimize Roman power” (p.32); and Christian Mission since then aimed merely at extending the boundary and communal power of the Church (p.130). The social message and historical and eschatological hope of the Kingdom were preserved by dissenting and/or heretical Christian communities. In fact, Kappen interprets Hindutva and its theocratic and hegemonic communalism as Semiticisation, even a sort of Christianization, of brahminic Hinduism under the impact of medieval theocratic Christianity (Understanding Communalism p.90).

The Jesus-tradition must be saved from this distorting complex and be made alive by letting it enter into dialogue, not so much with the Hindu deities in their present form or with the Brahminic Sanskritic tradition of Hinduism but with what he calls “the primordial matrix of the collective unconscious” whence they emerged. I suppose he means the religiosity of the village communities of the dalits, the tribals and other weaker sections now struggling for justice. He adds, “The waters of the unconscious need to be churned with the tree of the Cross in order to separate out the poison and distill the new age. This can be achieved only through a revolutionary praxis. Only from a total revolution will be born an ethical prophetic Hinduism and a cosmic Jesus movement” (p.28).

If the church is to take the Jesus-tradition seriously and become Jesus-communities, its mission should be to build religiously pluralistic communities for concerted action for a better world in the common hope of the Kingdom of God to come. Kappen tells the churches, “The primary mission of the ecclesial community is to create basielic (Kingdom) communities” (p.25). “Jesus’ blood must mingle with the blood of the sudras, the outcastes, the tribals and the dissenters of today” (p.27).

In this process, we shall build a composite culture “characterized by the tensional unity of the different religious-cultural traditions” within the framework of the struggle for a new society. He envisages that, eventually a time would come when every religious tradition itself would “become composite incorporating elements from other religious traditions”. This might become true of individual religious experience as well. And he adds. “I for one am weary of being called a Christian. I see myself as a disciple of Jesus who has been profoundly influenced by the teachings of the Buddha and in theology at least by the Siva-Sakti concept of the Divine going back to the pre-Aryan culture” (Understanding Communalism p.96).

Kappen has this word regarding the evolution of religions in the struggle for an alternative culture and society. According to him, Jesus stands for “the supersession of all religions including Christianity and heralds a future when human beings will worship God not in man­made temples but in spirit and truth. That future is also the future of India”. But it is far off. Meanwhile says Kappen, “what I claim is not the superiority of Christianity over the Indian religious tradition but the superiority of the religiosity of the Buddha, the radical bhaktas and Jesus over the magico-ritualistic religiosity of orthodox Hinduism and deprophetized religiosity of tradition-bound Christianity. Jesuan prophecy must appropriate Indian religiosity’s sense of oneness of the cosmic, the human and the divine while India makes her own the Galiliean dream of the Total Man”(Jesus and Cultural Revolution p.71).

I think on this day of celebrating Kappen’s thought on India’s march towards an alternative paradigm, it is appropriate that we seek to understand and appreciate his teaching. Certainly critical evaluation of it is necessary to appropriate its truths by us in our life and action in the future. But I must say that I find Kappen’s line of thinking on religion, culture and society in India most challenging. I leave it at that.

Address to the Get-together of Social Activists of the a Programme for Social Action at Chilika 1993 expanded from notes taken at the time and published in the PSA Report: Strike a New Note: Student Power. 1994. An edited version is given below.

What I have been asked to do as a silent observer and listener of all what you have been saying through song, dance and comments, is to make a presentation on the subject of our Consultation, as given to you by K.M.Thomas on the first day. It was Ecology, Human Rights and Student Initiative in search of alternatives. We are all from social action groups which are working in different fields with different techniques. Some are with the dalits, some with the tribals, some with the women’s movement and some work for the preservation of ecology. So also we may have different ideological approaches. But we are all concerned with both Ecology and Human Rights and we are all concerned with the search for an alternative to the present pattern of development.

Though we have different work, different programmes, different techniques, the question is whether we can have a common ideological approach. And what are some of the elements of that approach? Now, we all have been involved in the struggle for human rights for several years. There are two types of human rights- one is the peoples’ rights, the rights of tribal peoples, rights of dalits, of women, the fisherfolk i.e. the rights of peoplehood of certain sections of society; and two, within each people, the rights of each person. In this latter, we are concerned with the fundamental rights of the human person for freedom and equality irrespective of gender, language, culture, race, caste, creed or anything else. The relation between man and woman on the basis of equality of personhood comes within it. So rights of peoplehood and rights of personhood are our main concern.

In the more recent past, we have also become conscious of the rights of nature. So we have eco-justice, i.e. justice to nature. Nature also must be given its due if you want to live properly. The ecological basis of life, rights of people and persons, of peoplehood and personhood are the concerns which have brought us to fight against the present pattern of development because it exploits and destroys nature and does injustice to nature and human’s organic relation to nature. And we are looking for an alternative pattern of development, a more healthy pattern which will do justice to ecology, justice to peoplehood and to persons within the people.

But does our fight against the modern pattern of development mean that we want to go back to the traditional pattern of society? No, because yesterday in the group discussion, women complained that all traditional societies were patriarchal in character and were oppressive of their personhood. The dalits said the same thing; the traditional caste culture has not been doing justice to their personhood or peoplehood. So, we have to have an alternative, not only to the modern pattern of development but also to the traditional structures which have not done justice to these rights. Or, we need a new pattern which takes the good community values of the tradition and good values of modernity, like freedom of human persons and equality between them. So we have to take from the traditions as well as from modern developments certain values which do justice to the wholeness of human existence and find a new way of going forward fighting against both the traditional and modern injustices. So what is asked for is a new, completely new pattern transcending both traditionalism and modernism.

Here we are also emphasizing the role of the students, the intellectuals who have a vision of the future. Not only in the Chilika movement but also in many of the movements we are involved, students and other intellectuals have a place.

Social justice was very much the emphasis of the Socialist movement of India in its opposition to capitalism. But now, socialism has broken down in one fire. We have to find a new socialist ideology emphasizing social justice and along with it justice to nature. For this we have to ask why socialism failed in the past. We have also to take into account the ecological factor which socialists or capitalists never took seriously.

In yesterday’s dramatic presentation of the Chilika movement. the role of the woman was quite impressive. It was not really a woman but the representative of the feminist principle drawing the people, the male of the species from surrendering to Tata. It was the feminist principle that was in a way protecting the environment in the drama. I think it is very interesting to see who are the protectors of the environment today. The protectors of the environment are people who live by nature. For instance, the fisherfolk who live by the sea, the rivers and the lakes, the tribals who live by the forests and their produce. the dalits and the peasants who live by the land, and women who are in a sense the creators and sustainers of life are protectors of ecology. One may say, the natural basis of life was protected in the traditional societies by the fisherfolk, the tribals, the women and the feminist principle of their living by nature. As these people are the protectors of ecology, justice to ecology is best realized through doing justice to them as people. That is the new starting point for considering the new pattern of development, the new idea of socialism.

The old socialism considered the industrial working class as the bearers of the new society. There may be some truth in that approach even now. The general feeling at present is that with the breakdown of socialist regimes of Eastern Europe the industrial working class has lost their nerve. And of course that class has imbibed the values of the capitalist consumerist society too much to bring about a new society embodying values of personal freedom, social justice and ecological wholeness by themselves any more. Now the dynamism for the struggle for the new society has to come from the people who are victims of the pattern of modern development and who have the nearness to nature and therefore able to protect it and do justice to it. They are against the traditional society in some respects and also against modernity which has treated them badly. So they may be the people who are the bearers, mediators, of the new pattern of development.

I would say that Lohia, Ambedkar and others saw the need of renewing tradition on the one hand and protecting the humanist principles of modernity on the other. In other words, they saw clearly that along with the struggle for justice for the industrial working class, we must simultaneously go forward with the liberation of dalits, tribals and women if we have to realize an Indian socialism. They saw that there was a common point of justice towards which all these movements were moving and emphasized also the interaction among them. Though each group may be concerned with struggle for justice for itself, interaction between them, between the movements for women’s justice, dalit justice and tribal justice would produce a new common ideology for the struggle for justice. No single movement of liberation can solve the whole problem of injustice, only an interaction between struggles simultaneously pursued; and the one common ideology developing through this process can solve the general inter-related problem before us.

The present Indian government is committed to a pattern of development which is destructive of ecology and destructive of social justice and it has to be fought. Manmohanomics, the economic policy which Manmohan represents is purely a free market economy which has only one criterion, namely profit. With the profit criterion anybody can go anywhere, any part of the world, and destroy nature for profit, destroy people for profit. The kind of capitalist development which has been globally accepted has only one principle viz, profit in the transactions in the free market leading to economic growth. Which means it can destroy rights of peoplehood and personhood as long as it brings profit. We have to oppose it.

Nehruism had at least paid lip-service to social justice. It had welfare ideals and some welfare measures to realize them. But now, Manmohan economics has taken all of that away. Even food rations for the poor are no more subsidized. Prime Minister Rao speaks of helping the poorest of the poor. One does not know whom he means. Kerala Chief Minister Karunakaran says that he cannot distinguish between the poor and the poorest of the poor and therefore he will cut all subsidies. So, that is the way it is going. In other words, the State has no concern for the people and is therefore withdrawing from the economic field in favour of the dictates of the market.

Does it mean that the State always has an anti-people character and has to be fought? Some people think that way. But I do not think along those lines. The present anti-people State with its policy of globalisation giving itself up to the profit-oriented market economy and to the ideology of high-technology development under the auspices of the multinational corporations from outside and inside which are free to exploit nature and people, has to be fought. But we should work for a people-oriented state while doing so.

When I was in Nagaland for two years as governor, one thing I noticed was that the modern pattern of development destroyed all the forest timber. Outside agencies started a large number of timber industries, and after all the big trees have been cut and deforestation has taken place they closed them. With deforestation water sources also dried up. So from December to February no water is available even in the capital Kohima. In other words modern development was very destructive in Nagaland. In Kerala, the fisherfolk know how fishing by modern boats destroys not only the livelihood of the fisherfolk but also the fish in the sea since unlike the traditional fishing community the boat fishing has no sensitivity to the natural cycle of fish life. The same is with the tribals and dalits. They all got increasingly alienated from forest and land which gave them their living. So the pattern of high-tech development has increased the oppression of these people-the tribals, the dalits, the fisherfolk and women.

Their oppression of course did not start in the modern period. The traditional religion had divided the people into those who were ritually pure and those ritually impure. The dalits were impure because they had to deal with land, and with organic nature and its wastes. It also made women impure because women had to deal with blood every month. After child delivery they were considered impure. The purity-impurity divide within the traditional society had excluded the dalits and women from its power structure and its decision-making processes. Now the new pattern of development alienates them still further.

Tradition cannot be fully destroyed. Therefore it should be renewed. Yesterday somebody said that if all traditions were destroyed we would be in chaos. In fact, there is a whole tradition of renewal of the Hindu tradition from Raja Rammohan Roy through Swami Vivekananda to Gandhi and others. Sri Narayana Guru in Kerala and Ambedkar in Maharashtra have been renewing tradition. Both cultural and religious traditions are involved in the renewal. Religion and culture always go together. They need renewal so that new traditions may be created which will help the process of justice. More especially I would emphasize embodying the principle of equality in the tradition through renewal of culture and religion- equality between man and woman and equality between castes and peoples. Equality is the one most important principle which has to be absorbed by the traditional cultures of India. Many young people rightly feel that religion has only been a source of injustice. For instance, from the women’s point of view, all religions have been built on patriarchy to a large extent, and therefore women were never given justice properly. So naturally women feel they should go against religion for their liberation. But even they have to see that there cannot be a total religious vacuum. Therefore they have to work for renewal of religion through religion assimilating gender equality and feminist principles and values. The same is true of the dalits. Religion has been a very anti-dalit force and for this reason many dalits would reject religion. But they cannot go on without some kind of spirituality. They too have to work for renewal of religion, for a new spirituality and tradition, for a spiritual vacuum cannot exist in the world.

I would even say that there can be a secular spirituality. Nehru was never religious, but he always said that we should have not only material development but also a structure of meaning for life. He meant a spiritual and not a religious pursuit. That is also possible. Some kind of spiritual dimension is necessary to sustain the self in devotion to justice. Since traditional dharma has supported a lot of injustice we want a renewed dharma for supporting the struggle for justice. Manu dharma has been no good, but a new secular democratic dharma may help. It may be an open secularism with insights form secular humanism and from religions. Perhaps we shall work for a kind of humanism with technology on the one hand and spirituality on the other, bringing these together so that we have a new tradition and also a new pattern of technological development.

Science and technology themselves have been interpreted in purely materialist and mechanical terms. Capra raises the question in his books, why modernization has tended to destroy people of their humanity. He sees the reason in the mechanical materialist interpretation of science and technology. The organic and the spiritual dimensions have been forgotten. Therefore technology has to be reinterpreted in more holistic terms. Gandhi was not against technology, but he wanted technology which was appropriate to the organic character of society and the spiritual character of the human person. We are not against technology as such but we want a technology which will preserve eco-justice and social justice. We need a science and technology reinterpreted within a new framework which takes the organic and spiritual dimensions of reality seriously along with the mechanical. It is only then that technological development will promote eco-justice, preserve human personhood and peoplehood. It is an alternative technology that we are seeking.

Books like Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive consider the present technology as purely masculine, without any feminist principle in it. Hence it is seen as exploitive of women and nature. Here I would see the students’ role. As students of science and technology they have to reconceive them in relation to this search for alternatives, by renewing traditions as well as transforming technology, make them human. Traditions and technologies have to be humanized so that they support eco-justice and social justice.

Student participation is a reality in many movements of social change. For instance in Nagaland, tribal students are in the forefront in the agitation for Naga selfhood. It is the same with dalit movements, I am sure. What we need is not sectarian student participation but student participation with the whole complex of movements consciously, without self-interest but with self-surrender to justice. I know that students have played a large part in the national movement for political independence. Students can now play a similar role in the struggle for justice, provided as Gramcie said, they have an organic relation with the peoples’ movements.

In the search for alternative patterns of development we are not starting from scratch in India. We have Gandhi, Lohia. Ambedkar and others who have been on the trail before. We certainly have new challenges calling for new responses.