An Example of Local Theology in India from Panikkar

For examples of inculturation of the church in India it is necessary to look beyond Newbigin, as this is not a focus in his writing. Perhaps one of the most notable examples of doing theology in relation to the philosophical texts of Hinduism, that is roughly contemporaneous with Newbigin‟s own time in India, can be found in the main chapter of Raymond Panikkar‟s The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, entitled „God and the World According to Brahma-Sutra I, I, 2.‟517

Newbigin acknowledged this chapter as a “brilliant exposition of a sloga of the Brahma Sutra,” but didn‟t gave

515 _{L. Newbigin, The Good Shepherd, 21.} 516

L. Newbigin, The Good Shepherd, 30f.

517 _{Raymond Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism (London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd.,}

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any indication of his sense of its usefulness to the church in India, and instead focused his brief consideration of this book on the preceding chapter in which Panikkar emphasizes the connection between Christ and Hinduism.518 Yet, Panikkar‟s study can give some indication of what it might mean to do theology in relation to the Hindu philosophical tradition.519 Panikkar‟s main point of reflection is on the Brahma sutra, „Whence the origin etc. of this,‟ which Panikkar paraphrases as „Brahman is that whence the origination, sustentation and transformation of this world comes.‟520

Panikkar points out that Hindu thought has never been able to resolve the tension between god as absolute and the world as contingent. The divine figure of Isvara has been posited within Hindu thought as the point of connection between the Absolute Brahman, and the contingent world, “the two apparently irreconcilable poles: the absolute and the relative.”521

Yet, it has proven impossible to adequately maintain the tension between the two in Isvara, leading either to an overemphasis on the relative character of Isvara that makes it hard to see the absolute (Sankara), or to collapsing the tension in Isvara between the absolute and the relative (Ramanuja), and making the relative continuous with Brahman: “the one complete Brahman.”522

Panikkar sees the answer to this tension in classical Nicene and Chalcedonian Christology according to which Christ holds in His own person the absolute nature of God and the relative of human nature yet without any intermingling of the two natures: “he [Christ] fulfils the requirements of the text [the sutra] and gives an answer to all the antinomies that the history of Indian philosophy has found in this mediator between Brahman and the world.”523

This leads Panikkar to identify Christ as “our Isvara.”

Panikkar‟s arguments for this approach of speaking of Christ as Isvara are persuasive. He points to the communicative power of identifying Christ as Isvara, in that it can serve as a beginning for making Christ “intelligible” to Indian

518 _{L. Newbigin, The Finality of Christ, 41ff.}

519 _{In the course of the chapter Panikkar deals with various issues such as whether knowledge of the}

world as contingent has priority to the knowledge of God, and the role of revelation in our knowledge of God. He explains the difference of Indian epistemology from a Western post Cartesian

epistemology in terms of an emphasis on non-rational elements: the desire to know that is engendered by reading the Scripture; the inter-relationship between faith and reason; the place of the moral and spiritual life; and the fact of God as the beginning of knowledge (The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, 84f, 96f, 99f).

520 _{R. Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, 75. The Brahma Sutras are a commentary on the}

Upanishads, attributed to Badarayana, a philosopher who is considered to have lived around the 2nd century A.D.

521

R. Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, 120.

522 _{R. Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, 128.} 523 _{R. Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, 130.}

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Philosophy.524 He points to the authoritative precedent for this approach with Thomas Aquinas who used the philosophical framework of Aristotle in order to effectively communicate Christ: “he was performing a theological mission of assimilation and of explaining the Christian truths . . .”525 This sense of theological mission associates Panikkar‟s approach not only with Aquinas, but also with the pre-Nicene church fathers such as Clement and Tertullian. Panikkar gives a suggestive interpretation of the implications of this that Christ is “more than a mediator” and rather the one through whom God will be “all in all and nothing else beyond, or behind or besides.”526

A second related point that Panikkar refers to in this regard is that in taking this approach, one objective is bringing all things into obedience to Christ, or to quote his reference to Ephesians 1:10, “gathering up of all things in Christ.”527

There appears to be some continuity between Panikkar‟s approach and

Newbigin‟s sense of reinterpreting the various aspects of culture in the light of Christ in that Panikkar is, in effect, reading elements of Indian philosophy in the light of Christ as the God-man. Panikkar points to the importance of beginning Christology, in the Indian context, with Christ as the Word made flesh. He suggests that in terms of the Indian philosophical tradition it is necessary to begin Christology with the fact of the Word made flesh, rather than with the historical Christ. The reason which is implied, is that Christian philosophy and understanding of the historical Christ, and of history itself, began with an apprehension that Christ is the eternal Word incarnate, and accordingly this should also be the starting place in discussion with someone working within the Indian philosophical tradition.528 Panikkar believes that taking this as a starting point would greatly improve communication and clear up many misunderstandings.

Panikkar‟s study points to the need for clarification about what it means to reinterpret aspects of culture in the light of Christ. For Panikkar, at this point in his writing, Christ is the light as completing, or fulfilling, unresolved aspects of Indian philosophy. But for Newbigin, Christ as the light may involve a fundamental reordering, bringing into centre stage and giving priority to issues such as social justice, that have been considered peripheral to the dominant tradition. There is an

524 _{R. Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, 133.} 525 _{R. Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, 135.} 526

R. Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, 129.

527 _{R. Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, 136.} 528 _{R. Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, 133.}

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element of disturbance involved. There is the possibility that, in the light of Christ, marginal aspects of culture are given a place of prominence and importance.

An early text, in which there can be found brief suggestions of this reorientation, was J. N. Farquhar‟s The Crown of Hinduism (1913). This is a seminal text in the fulfilment approach to other religions, and as a study of the social and religious practices of Hinduism it has something of the character of an ethnographic study. Farquhar tries to explain the rationale for various practices in order to develop a more sympathetic understanding of them. For example, although Farquhar clearly

repudiates the use of idols he points to how “the making of images is a response to the eager human desire to know God's nature and character,” and that it is symptomatic of a desire for proximity to god in our daily affairs.529 He also distinguishes between the underlying desire or need and the practice to which it is attached. So, again with reference to idolatry he states that, “It is thus evident that idolatry ministers to some of the most powerful and most valuable of our religious instincts.” The missiological significance of this is that Christ is then to be shown as the one who “satisfies” these underlying needs and instincts.530 Of significance for our present discussion is that Farquhar considers Hinduism in relation to Christ‟s teaching on a just society.

Farquhar pointed to the sacredness to traditional Hindu thought of a social order based on caste which had a legitimacy, not as an end in itself, but in terms of the

achievement of the transmigration of the soul.531 Having articulated the rationale for caste, Farquhar rejected this as at odds with a Christian social order. But Farquhar points to the aspiration, then present within elements of Indian society, for a just and equitable social order, which Farquhar attributed to the influence of the gospel and not something that had arisen from within the religion itself.532 The presence within the culture of aspiration for a just society is rightly given prominence and significance by Farquhar, although it may not be particularly significant within the wider cultural tradition and may even be a cultural import.