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Witness to Hindu Neighbors
By S. Wesley Ariarjah

Dear Ranjith:

You have asked me to give some advice on bearing witness to Christ among your Hindu neighbors. The Hindus believe that anyone who has an experience of the spiritual truth has the right to share it with others. They, therefore, do not object to authentic witness. It is important that this trust and openness to witness should not be used for manipulation of one religion by another, but for a genuine sharing of religious experience and truth as we have come to perceive it. It is in this spirit that I put down some of my own thoughts on this matter.

I am pleased to know that your interest in witness arises from deep convictions about Christ which have actually fashioned your own life. Why do I make a special note of this? There are some Christians who would argue that evangelism is based on the "command" to preach the Gospel. They would say that the validity of the Gospel message is not dependent on the preacher and that the message has its own effectiveness.

This is not the place to argue the theological validity or otherwise of such a position. But I am aware that the Hindus will not separate the preacher and the message, the evangelist and the gospel, the truth and its manifestation. Thi's arises from a long-established Indian tradition that only a person who has undergone a spiritual experience can have authority to impart it to others. "Can anyone recommend to others what has not been profoundly true to oneself?", they would ask, "And how can we believe what is said, unless we see its effects on the one who says it?"

This is why doctrinal claims about Christ, or belief statements on what God has done in Christ leave the Hindus unimpressed, even though they have a great respect for Christ as a spiritual leader. Anyone who wishes to witness to the Hindus should not ignore the long-established Indian tradition that the person and the message he or she gives cannot be separated. This is a simple but profound rule of thumb used in

S. Wesley Ariarjah is a Methodist minister from Sri Lanka, at present on the staff of the WCC sub-unit on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies.
Johannes Aagaard is a member of the Theological Faculty, the University of Aarhus, Denmark.
Anselm Rosario is a member of the All India Catholic Union and is associated with Xavier Layout in Bangalore.
These items are reprinted, with the permission of the editor, from the International Review of Mission (Vol. LXXII, No. 285: January 1983; pp. 86-99).

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India-If it is a good message, it must be both heard and seen! I know that many Christians have problems with this attitude. They would want to separate the message from the messenger and want to preserve the integrity of the message itself. But this is not a "selective treatment" that the Hindus give to the Christian preachers. In their own history they have always applied this principle to distinguish truth from error. This is how Hinduism functions as a living religion without a centralized authority to lay down the essentials and the limits of what they should believe. Instead of adopting this attitude too quickly, you should ponder very deeply about this, relating it to our own Christian history. Perhaps we must also meditate on Christ's invitation to the disciples, "You shall be my witness."

For the same reason, witness to the Hindus can also never be based on any prior absolute claims about Christ. Such claims hinder rather than help Christian witness. Let me give an example: A preacher stands in front of a Hindu and proclaims, "Christ is the Only Way; there is no salvation except through him." However sincere and well-meaning the preacher may be, the Hindu will consider this to be both intolerant and arrogant. Why? Hindus see such a statement as implicit refusal to consider any other way. This they consider as intolerance. More seriously, such a statement or such claims preclude and deny anything others may have to say on this subject without even giving it a hearing. Nothing hurts the Hindus more. They cannot even understand why Christians have to say such a thing. This does not mean that the Hindus deny the witness of the preacher. They would admit that this may be profoundly true for the preacher. Christ for him or her may have become the "Only Way." But they would' argue that such a statement has no validity outside the preacher's own experience and conviction. It becomes true once again only when another person comes to the same conviction, and is able to experience and see Christ as The Way. This may appear to some Christians to be an artificial distinction. But this has a very important bearing on witness to the Hindus. They believe that the hearer should recognize the truth and should not be forced to accept it….

Some evangelists behave as though they are bringing God for the first time to the Hindus. The Hindus are amazed at such an idea. To begin with, how can God be "taken" anywhere? The whole creation lives and moves in God. God's own witness has never been absent at any time or in any place. More importantly, the Hindus have a spiritual tradition reaching back over four thousand years of seeking to understand the mystery of life and its relation to God. Within it there is every shade of theological opinion, and a variety of philosophical reflection on God, ranging from atheism to strict monotheism. Many modes of relating to God have been tested over centuries-meditation, good works, yoga, the way of devotion, the way of love. Much more importantly, there have been within the Hindu tradition great spiritual giants whose experience

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of God, spiritual excellence, and life totally devoted to God's service can neither be denied nor ignored. To know Hinduism and the Hindus at their best is a humbling experience for any Christian. Here we are confronted with a living spiritual tradition tested and tried over centuries and within which there is undeniable experiencing of God's grace and love.

Faced with this reality, what can an evangelist do? Some simply deny that this spiritual tradition has any validity at all. They would say that the whole matter is a "human" attempt and that Hindus can never have the actual knowledge of God until they know God through Christ. Others choose simply to ignore the whole thing. They pretend that the Hindus have had no spiritual history behind them, and behave as though the world were born only yesterday….

In the Bible, the human predicament and alienation from God is depicted in the framework of "sin-fall and alienation from God." Many of the ways we understand the significance of Christ speak to this framework. A good example is the understanding of Jesus as the Christ-the Messiah. The concept and all that it means is well understood within Judaism and the church that was evolving out of it.

But the Hindus understand the human predicament in an entirely different framework, using such concepts as Karma, rebirth, cycles of life-processes, etc. How do they perceive the human condition? In what way can the good news become incarnate within this tradition? These are points worth pondering. There are some who feel that this is an unnecessary preoccupation. "All people are alienated from God; they are in sin; and what is needed is the direct presentation of the Gospel," they would say. You should consider whether this is really so. The Hindu religion, culture, and belief are so entrenched in the Indian heart and mind that it is difficult to imagine a Hindu who does not operate on the above thought-forms consciously or otherwise. This is a matter on which you should reflect further…

Let me conclude with a word on our attitude to the act of witnessing itself. The most important lesson I have learned from the ministry of Christ is the great integrity with which he approached people. The Hindu is not an object for conversion. He or she is a fellow pilgrim with whom we share the decisive impact Christ has had on our own lives. Even as we do so, we should be prepared to listen to any witness they may have to offer to us. Their lives may be greatly enriched by our witness. Similarly, we may be enabled to see the unsearchable riches of God through their witness to us.

In such a witness situation, the Hindus may recognize a challenge to discipleship to Christ which they may want to accept openly in freedom. On the other hand, they may see no reason why they have to make such an open commitment of discipleship to Christ.

Can you, in both circumstances, accept the Hindu as your brother or sister who stands, like you, under the unfathomable love and grace of

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God? If you can, then you have achieved the spiritual maturity to be a witness of Christ to the Hindu.

Much love,

Wesley.

From Johannes Aagaard, Denmark

Dear Wesley:

I appreciate your letter to Ranjith and I shall express my gratitude for the letter by offering some critical questions and statements:

(1) During my many excursions to India I have been impressed by the pluriformity of Hinduism. But at the same time this fact has put a full-stop to most of my generalizations about "Hinduism" and thus made life more difficult. I should like to make your life more difficult, too, for I am not sure that your generalization "Hinduism" holds water. In fact it is my impression that your "Hinduism" simply means that limited part of neo-Hinduism that took off from Ramakrishna/Vivekananda and similar synthesizers.

(2) I am somewhat worried because of the tendency in your letter to emphasize knowledge and not faith. Does this represent a terminological trend only? Or does it reveal a certain one-sidedness? You speak about knowledge as a counterpart to experience, while the counterpart to faith is obedience. I would not exclude your dimension, but I do think that it is a biblical trend only if and insofar as knowledge is part of faith and experience is part of obedience. I know well that this terminology is not at all as easy as yours in relation to my Hindu-friends, but it may still be necessary.

(3) You underline that "God" cannot be "taken" anywhere. But this fact does not exclude-I hope-that the good news and its affirmation of life and of God's love to humankind can and must be taken everywhere. It has to be taken to all humankind, not as a package deal, that is right, but still as something which has to be sent off and received.

Neither Nordic people nor Indian people have been able to find the truth by themselves. Nor have the Jewish people been able to. No one can experience or see Truth. It has to be revealed "from outside." We cannot escape that hard fact. Faith can only be shared when it has been accepted as a gift which is and remains in a way foreign to all of us.

(4) The reason for this foreignness is not imperialism or colonalism or other isms. The reason is our sin and our alienation from God. The concepts do not matter, but the fact matters. The human condition is fundamentally determined by the fact that we do not know who we are ourselves and definitely not who God is….

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God's name is Christ, for Christ reveals the face of God, creates the love of God, gives the faith in God. God always spoke to humankind in Christ, and there is no other road from God to us than this revelation. But from that revelation there are many roads to humankind in all its religious diversity. All these roads can be used by the Holy Spirit who, however, always speaks out of the wisdom of the Truth which Christ manifested.

I know well that this double dimension is not easy to express in a factual dialogue, but it is necessary, I hope, that we never forget this dialectic and attempt to communicate it. The church is itself more of humankind than of God, as are all religions in the world. The church is not the presence of God or Christ. It is, when it is at its best, a pointer to God beyond all gods and divinities. It is fundamentally very necessary never to forget this distance between us and God. This unites us with all of humankind. We are all in the same dilemma.

I fear that some of my friends may sneer: European theology. If so, what then? I am a European theologian, and I speak or write as such. If not, I would cheat. We have a lot of escapism in modern theology, which makes people behave as if they were someone else. Let us not join this farce which threatens to empty the theological task of its seriousness.

From Anselm Rosario, Karnataka, India

Although I am a Christian by faith, many years of my life have been spent among the Hindus in their ashrams, learning, and sharing my personal experience of God with them. What led me to embark upon this journey was a deep experience of Christ in my life, and I wanted genuinely to share this experience with others. As an Indian brought up in a Roman Catholic atmosphere, I had my own prejudices and modes of perception as regards other religions. Nevertheless, what baffled me was the reverential attitude a Hindu shows when the name of God is uttered. There is something genuine in the closing of their eyes and other gestures. What is that which moves these people? I wanted to know. Hence, setting aside my prejudices and holding on to the pattern of Jesus as he lived among the people of his times, I began to search for people, competent teachers, who could share the knowledge of this particular belief that the majority of my countrymen seems to share!

First of all, I should say that the Hindu way of life, especially their prayer life, meditations, contemplation techniques, enriched my Christian life. Even though I did not openly preach the Gospel as such, the people in the ashram knew I was a Christian. Often many of them would come to my room for discussion on spiritual matters. Eventually, this led us to other areas-namely, they wanted to know something about Christ. During the Bible sessions I frequently organized, I would explain to them, with a brief sketch of Jesus' life, the milieu in which he lived,

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the options he had, the choices he made, how the disciples discovered him, how the crowd understood him, and my own personal experience of Jesus as living God/Man, I also used to explain the Gospel to them, its origin as good news, its prophetic value relating it to the Indian situation, the original message of Jesus (Luke 4: 18-22), and the Sermon on the Mount. In my talk I always avoided the doctrinal aspects. Most of the time the reaction was: "We never knew this was Christianity … we thought …" I never had difficulty in this community because I was their friend and one with them in their life. Sometimes I had also to face some hostility from others who were less friendly, but my prime intention was not only to give but also to receive. This attitude helped me to manage the most difficult situations.

As Christians living in India, we have a long way to go before we start evangelization. We must become more and more sensitive to the feelings, anxieties, and aspirations of the majority of our countrymen. In our zeal to proclaim the Gospel, we have unconsciously committed many blunders. In spite of 2,000 years of evangelization and organized effort, we have made little headway in India.

We still have to pass from a notion of the church that is sectarian and parochial, territorial and static, imported and introverted, to a notion that is open and universal, experiential and dynamic, authentic and outreaching. Christian experience is a faith experience, an experience of God in Christ, in the midst of our life, in the world and history. Hence Christ's mission should be understood as an all-round ever-ready presence, and one of humble and loving service, losing, so to say, one's identity, in order to live in a new way, and to make others live. A genuine apostolate springs from one's personal and vital experience of the Risen Lord, and it is a dynamic process of sharing one's Christian experience with one's contemporaries, in the context of the world and history, fully integrated in their socio-cultural-religious milieu. It is essential that Christianity be presented not as opposed to non-Christian religious values but as their flowering and fulfillment. The church in India should feel at home in India. Despite centuries of implantation, the church is still looked upon as a foreign institution.

In a survey recently made among the non-Christians in South India, they appreciated many points in our liturgical worship, the order and discipline in our churches, our prayer life, the quietness in our churches, Sunday obligations, etc., yet there were many points which were offensive to them. Though Christians are Indians, they identify themselves with Britishers in their language and dress, in the way they behave and then look down upon others. The non-Christians also felt that Christians did not need to be so fashionable in churches as to sit on chairs and put on shoes. They also blamed Christians for going to church without taking a bath first and dressing immodestly.

We feel that Indianization of the church is essential. Our preaching and religious instruction should reflect the soul of India. Communica-

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tion of the Gospel would be greatly strengthened if it is clothed in ways of thinking familiar to the Indian mind. If the answers of faith are to be related to the ultimate quest for truth among the people of India, then Indian metaphysical intuition needs to be taken seriously. Until the Gospel is related to Indian "darshans," the incarnation of Christ in India will not take place.