A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Distinctivism in practice

I spent the weekend in Boston attending the wedding of some good friends. The ceremony itself was a Hindu-Christian fusion, certainly a first for me–Hindu and Christian prayers, blessings, readings, and rituals were interspersed throughout. There was also a joyfulness in parts of the service that seems all too absent from much mainstream Christian worship, though I can hardly say whether or not that’s typical of Hindu worship.

While the service was beautiful and moving, I’m not entirely sure what to make of it theologically. On the face of things, Hinduism can probably incorporate elements of Christianity more comfortably than the reverse. It seems to me anyway that Jesus could be absorbed into the Hindu pantheon more readily than Christianity can make peace with, say, prayers to Ganesh.

On the other hand, at least as I understand it, some schools of Hinduism see the various deities as manifestations of an underlying divine reality. Could Christianity affirm the same? Parts of the Bible do portray angels as intermediaries of sorts between God and humanity, and the saints have often functioned kind of like demigods who mediate divine power (in practice if not theory).

So, is there room in Christian cosmology for seeing Hindu deities as manifestations of the divine to a particular people, alongside God’s self-manifestation to Israel? Or maybe they could be viewed as archetypal imaginative responses to divine revelation, and not necessarily entities with an independent existence. I certainly can’t dismiss a tradition as wide and deep and ancient as Hinduism. But how does that fit with the belief that God’s definitive revelation was in Jesus?

I think, as Christians, the best approach is not to start out assuming we know how other religions fit into God’s will for the world, but to be willing to learn from them, and even open to the possibility of being by transformed by them.

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5 responses to “Distinctivism in practice”

  1. Camassia

    Offhand, Hinduism does not seem vastly different from the classical paganism that the early Christians lived around — sort of a blend of folk polytheism and sophisticated, largely monist philosophical schools. The general response of Christians seemed to be to condemn the folk piety as idolatry but absorb some of the philosophy. I don’t know, though, if this meant that the pagan gods were all non-existent or just that they shouldn’t be worshipped. The reference to the Nephilim in Genesis seems to be accounting for all those stories of gods breeding with human women, and the Apostles battled “worship of angels” in their epistles. I don’t know exactly what the latter refers to but it does make it sound like angels had more personality in those days, and perhaps were treated something like minor deities/avatars/bodhisattvas.

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  2. Kevin Carson

    Being an agnostic, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. But I get the impression that, as C. S. Lewis saw it, the primary objection to “polytheistic” pagan religions in the Old Testament was not the number of gods, but rather a magical approach to manipulating reality. Lewis pointed out that most “polytheistic” religions really aren’t, to the extent that they see all their gods but one as created beings whose creator or source is some absolute and eternal metaphysical ground. Lewis recounted examples of supposedly “primitive” people warning each other not to tell the foreigner about the “High God” who created everything else.

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  3. Dave

    Lee,

    Have you ever read anything by Lesslie Newbigin? He’s got a pretty thought-provoking approach to topics like this–and as a missionary in India he dealt extensively with Hinduism. ‘the Gospel in a Pluralist Society’ is pretty incredible.

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  4. Lee

    Hi Dave,

    People keep telling me, in various contexts, to read Newbigin, so I guess I’m gonna have to break down and do so one of these days. 🙂

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  5. Camassia

    Kevin is right that many cosmologies, including Hindu and classical ones, envisioned a hierarchy of beings rather than a polarity between divine and human. (Although to speak of a single Hindu view on the point is probably misleading; the word encompasses several different theories.) In fact, my professor of Caribbean music rejected the use of the word god to describe the entities called on in voodoo and other African-derived religions, since they believe these are lesser spirits to a single high God. However, it’s interesting that the translators of Scripture used the Greek word theos, and its Latin counterpart deus, which had described the Olympian gods and similar beings, to describe Yahweh. This may have been for lack of better options, or to identify Yahweh as an object of worship, but it may also have been to emphasize his personalism. Both the high gods of voodoo and of Greek paganism don’t involve themselves in human affairs, so they are not worth, say, petitioning with prayer. I recall this was an early point of argument between Christians and Platonists.

    Hinduism is a little different that way because of its concept of avatars. If anything, this makes divine incarnation too ordinary for Jesus to be remarkable.

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