The “Incarnational” Dimensions: Asian Christian Writings

(This is Neil.) Again, I’ve been rather busy, which explain my relative silence on the blog. I do want to very quickly and briefly attract your attention to an interesting recent article in the Asian Journal of Theology on a subject about which I know embarrassingly little. Dr John C. England of the Programme for Theology and Cultures in Asia (based in Auckland) writes on “Bamboo Groves in Winds from the West: Indigenous Faith and Westernization in Asian Christian Writings of 16^th and 18^th Centuries.”

After examining case studies from Japan, India, China, and the Phillippines, Dr England tells us to note the “incarnational” dimensions of these writings. He writes (the emphasis is mine):

The conclusion cannot be avoided that … the response of local Christians is not shaped primarily by their assessment of particular missionary teachings or practices. It is rather their aspirations for a quality of human life in community – shaped both by the classical and folk traditions of their people and by the present socio-political context – which determines the questions they address to the western Christianity of their time and which also determines the creative response they make to it.

So, for instance, in the “neo-Confucian-Christian Orthodoxy” of Yang Tingyun, we see a process of mutual enrichment as Christian faith amplifies and intensifies neo-Confucian teaching as Yang attempts to discover “the practicality – which is a real learning he declares – of moral value and active compassion in both personal and political life.”

I was most interested to read Dr England’s description of “Early Church Sanskrit” in India. I think that at least one of its intentions will be quite clear:

“Early Church Sanskrit” is a body of didactic and devotional writings in classical Sanskrit, from the 17^th to 19^th centuries, in which Christian meaning was discerned in the religious insights of the Hindu texts. It is thus an early example of contextualizing. Any precise dating for origins are impossible, but the earliest examples may come from the mid 17^th century, being known also in Europe early in the following century, in Sanskrit and French. The anonymous authors seem to have included Indian Sanskrit scholars along with French Jesuits, from both north and south India, as the Sanskrit reflects both Bengali and Tamil influence.

Two of the earliest and most notable of the manuscripts are the dialogues Ezour Vedam (Jesus Veda) and Chamo Bedo (Final Rest [?] Veda), in which Vedic sages present on the one hand the monotheistic beliefs of pristine (proto) Hinduism, in contrast to the corruptions of contemporary Hinduism on the other. The texts are wholly in Hindu language and idiom; in particular in the terms used for God (Deva, Prabhu), in choice of the divine attributes (sat, cit, anada) and in the literary form of the dialogues themselves.

The authors clearly believed – on the basis both of classical Hindu insights and a “Thomist harmony” of nature and grace – that the central truths of Hinduism were “wholly congruent with the Christian faith.” To them the Veda presented the Sanskrit equivalent of Mosaic teachings, showing that uncorrupted “Hinduism” already contained the basis for Christian faith. But reading some of the verses in Chamo Bedo, for example, verses praising “the most high God,” go further. Placed in the mouths of historical figures that are depicted as recovering the knowledge of early sages, the one God is addressed as “Creator,” “sustainer,” “pure spirit,” “source of all knowledge,” “merciful deliverer,” “the only source of salvation.” This is to claim that distinctively biblical and Christian truths are embedded in ancient proto-Hindu beliefs and this constituted a major reshaping of missionary teaching from the west.

Other expatriate writers such as Jean Calmette (1693-1740), William Carey (1761-1837), W.H. Mill (1792-1853), and John Muir (1810-1882) continued the tradition of Church Sanskrit in many forms including prayers, biblical paraphrases and meditations. But a number of important contextualizations of belief, for example the uses of sat, cit, and ananda for divine attributes and even the Trinity itself, became central to the work of such nineteenth century Indian theologians as Keshub Chunder Sen, Bramabandhav Upadhyay and their successors.