Colonial era mindset has reduced scholars from Asian countries into lower class members of the Church hierarchy, says NS Rajaram
RS Sugirtharajah is a Sri lankan Christian scholar who until recently was professor of Biblical Hermeneutics at the University of Birmingham in England. This probably makes him a hermeneutician — something like a beautician or better still a politician. For those unused to hair-splitting exercises of Biblical hermeneutics, exegeses and exegetes, it is easier to think of him as a theologian engaged in analysing interpretations of the Bible with reference to history and philosophy.
Theology is the distinctive contribution and concern of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In Christianity, it has been taken to such stratospheric heights that for an outsider at least it is hard to see what it is that keeps it afloat. In the currently fashionable interfaith dialogues, Christian scholars often begin by telling Hindus that theology is to Christianity what Vedanta is to Hinduism. Nothing could be further from the truth though gullible Hindu intellectuals are easily flattered by the comparison. Vedanta is an open-ended exploration of the meaning of the universe and existence that acknowledges only the universal truth contained in the Vedas. Theology, on the other hand, is a closed system which is bounded by the text of the Bible and the dogmas of Christianity. All the resources of logic and sophistry are used to justify Christianity as the only truth. One challenges theology at one’s peril as Galileo and Giordano Bruno found out. The freedom of Vedanta often brings it close to metaphysics which explains why great physicists like Opperheimer, Schroedinger and David Bohm were drawn to it. Theology may be hermeneutics, but it certainly has no metaphysics.
This background is necessary to understand what Sugirtharajah is trying to achieve in his recent book, The Bible and Asia. As he correctly points out, Christianity is Asiatic in origin, more specifically West Asian, but “its influence in Europe and the Americas has received far more attention than its complex career in the East”. Even in India it has a longer history than in Europe beginning in the fourth century or later with the arrival of the merchant Thomas of Cana — not the mythical St Thomas who supposedly came to Kerala in 58 AD when neither Christianity nor the Christian Bible existed. Fortunately the author is a serious scholar and does not peddle this nonsense. Add to this the fact, which the author does not stress, the decline of Christianity in the West amounting almost to a collapse in Europe, leading the churches to recruit Asians to fill its emptying seminaries, churches and mission hospitals. These could not exist without massive infusion from countries like India and the Philippines. For all practical purposes Christianity today is a Third World religion. The Catholic Church at least has recognised this in electing the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the latest Pope.
For all this Christian institutions have failed to treat Asian theologians as equals. They may be useful and even indispensable, but as the author points out they are repeatedly told “only the West matters”, meaning they should toe the line set by their Western masters. This is a carryover from colonial days during which Asian and African converts and missionaries wholeheartedly cooperated with the ruling Christian powers. They are being repaid for this loyalty with contempt and ingratitude. As the author observes, in pre-colonial days the Bible was receptive to Asian sources like the Upanishads and the lao Tzu, but European colonisation of Asia and Africa changed all that.
“With the emergence of modern colonialism, the Bible was introduced as an artifact of modernity in the form of the King James Bible, the ‘national Bible’ of the English people. In this incarnation, the Bible became a very European book, lost all its oriental traits, and became less Asiatic... The imported ‘White man’s book’ was seen as a strange instruments, an entrapment to lure them away from their own traditions.” As a result, an Asian reading of the Bible is always a contrived one and not as natural as a Hindu reading of the Bhagavad Gita or a Buddhist reading of the Dhammapada. As a result, all that Asian servants of Christianity have earned for their decades of loyalty is life in limbo with no independent identity except as courtiers and camp followers in a colonial institution in the postcolonial world. It is to these lost souls that The Bible and Asia is addressed; this is what makes it sad reading.
The author’s advice to his fellow Asian theologians is to reclaim Christianity for Asians by going back to its Hindu and Buddhist sources. Curiously he makes no mention of Gnostic sources that had at least as great an influence on the growth of Christianity as Hindu and Buddhist thought. Perhaps as an Asiatic, the author finds Gnosticism to be alien while finding Hindu and Buddhist thought more congenial. Perhaps he believes other Asian Christians will be the same.
How sound is his advice to claim Christianity as their own by invoking their ancestral Asian sourcesIJ Here is a pointer. For at least a century, Western Indologists have been telling Indians, Hindus in particular, how to read and interpret their history and tradition by creating interpretations based on the Aryan invasion bringing Vedic ideas from Europe. When Hindu scholars contested this by pointing out contradictions from the Saraswati river to the Harappan archaeology, Western scholars fought a fierce academic and propaganda battle until they could no longer sustain them against mounting evidence. Will such people yield control of their Bible to AsiansIJ
Here is a more practical option. Instead of using Hindu and Buddhist scripture to gain control of Biblical theology, make them — Gita, Upanishads and Dhammapada — your own. There will be no opposition for they belong to everyone. Who needs theology and dogma in this day and age anywayIJ Why be satisfied as someone else’s courtiers and camp followersIJ