Is Christianity Hinduistic?
Ommmmmmmamen
Increasingly, we are living in a smaller and smaller world and cultures from all over the world are being brought closer and closer together. If one had considered Hinduism 50 years ago, most people would not have been very aware of what you were talking about. Indeed, despite the more multi-cultural make up of the country today — most people are unaware of what it means, and the main ideas behind its philosophy. However, most people know of Hinduism, usually from a prejudiced position (of varying degrees whether admitted or not) and often nervousness.
In this article I don’t expect to explain the ins-and-outs of either Christianity or Hinduism, I’m not in a position to do this for either (although I do consider myself to be a Christian, for those who may be interested); instead, I would like to share an experience of seeing Hinduism and Christianity in situations where it was impossible to separate out acts into the two categories. Over the summer, for the small duration of a month, I formed part of a group of people from the Student Christian Movement (SCM) of Britain which visited India. As you can imagine, it is difficult to visit India in a month, so I suppose the above sentence is something of a white lie, we visited a little of India! My story is as yet incomplete, since we envisage 12 members of SCM of India coming to Britain in the summer of next year. My story is also far from unique, it could be told by many who live in the areas of large numbers of ethnic minorities where there is understanding and dialogue between people of both faiths.
Many people, and indeed, many Christians would find it difficult to perceive of any similarity, of aspect of Hinduism to which they could relate, after all, it is a religion of many Gods, re-incarnation and above all, legend. This is of course, to some extent true — but Hinduism has interpretations not dissimilar from Christianity.
One of the central themes of Hinduism is the trinitarian aspect of God, creator, preserver and destroyer (of evil). The personification of God as Krishna (Vishnu) is very similar indeed. In First Century Christianity, many accounts of the Gospel events have firm beliefs in re-incarnation, but of course, these were not elected to be included in the compilated Bible. And to complete the three examples I gave above, Christianity is full of legend, Biblical and otherwise — few people believe in the Garden of Eden and Noah’s ark as being absolute accounts, rather of poetic stories to enrich the learning of Jews in Old Testament times. The closer one examines Hinduism, the more inextricably linked it becomes towards our own ideas as Christians.
The beauties of India are wide and varied, but none more so than the forms of worship. I was fortunate enough to visit the National Biblical Catechetical and Liturgical Centre (sensibly referred to as the NBCLC) in Bangalore — a Catholic institute which undertakes research into introducing traditionally Indian forms of worship into the Christian churches. Small examples of this include burning lamps of oil to provide light rather than candles, using incense of an Indian nature from a large plate rather than ? which is exclusively European and even using Indian images of Christ; the blue eyed, blonde hair of the ‘Sacred Heart’ is still very common in Indian churches.
Not unsuprisingly perhaps, the NBCLC had found its job increasingly difficult. The Vatican, especially after Vatican II, has moved the goalposts and is unwilling to accept new changes reflecting Indian life since they claim that the ideas are Hindu and not Indo-Christian. To make Indianization even more difficult, the worldwide trend towards fundamentalism has caused frictions between the churches themselves.
So where does one draw the line between culture and religion? Personally, I find the religious music of Hinduism and the fascinating tales of the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata in general and the stories of Krishna helpful interpretations of the nature of God. In particular, some things make sense in India, sitting on the floor is much more sensible than standing to sing or pray in a country where the temperature is regularly 40 degrees Celsius, and fainting from heat exhaustion. In Britain, sitting on a cold church floor is likely to cause considerable back pains from the cold. (That is if the ice has not permanently fixed you to the floor.) Hence, in our culture and context it is out of place.
Much of the imagery we use as Christians has non-Christian traditions — God the father, from a particular form of Jewish monks who referred to the closeness of their relationship with God as “Abba”. It is even likely that Christ died not on a cross, but was crucified differently, the cross being introduced as a method of converting pagans since the four sides of a cross could be represented as the four seasons. Therefore, if Christianity is to remain a vibrant, dynamic and challenging religion, we must allow this process to continue, allowing not only Indianization, but also endogenization from every part of the world.
I think that I have made my point anyway — that it is not possible to differentiate between religion and culture. Instead we learn to integrate the two together, just as we ought to with a God that we think of as being Omnipresent. To prevent this is not only dogmatic but also myopic on our part as Christians.
This leads me to another point that I wish to explore. As our cultures are brought closer together, and Hinduism meets Western Christianity more frequently, we can increasingly see the benefits of learning from each other. This does not mean that we have to take on board all aspects of Hinduism (or any other faith), but there is much we can at least consider, even if we end up dismissing the ideas. Christianity would be nothing without debate.
The aspect where Hinduism has probably the greatest potential for our understanding is religious erotica. Christianity has major problems in coming to terms with anything of a sexual nature, due to its cultural background,which was not the background that Hinduism had, hence its more open approach to the subject. There are many others, use of legend, colour, imagery, just as there are aspects of Christianity which may be helpful for a fuller understanding of Hinduism, for example the Beatitudes, miracles, and Old Testament legends.
In unity there is strength, divided religions fall (to use a cliché) maybe because in unity we are able to talk, discuss ideas which help to formulate more clearly our ideas of the nature of our religion and God.
To summarise therefore, there are many difficult decisions facing people of all religions as societies become increasingly multi-cultural. Although bringing societies together in dialogue may not be easy, it is the only way forward. And besides, the effect of Hinduism upon our culture will in turn find its way into Christianity. I personally believe that this can only be a good thing.