{ "book_metadata": { "book_name": "History of Christianity in India: Source Materials", "book_author": "M. K. Kuriakose", "publisher": "Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge", "published_on": "2011" }, "chunks": [ { "chunk_index": 1, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 357 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00381-b35ff11ddce0c0f8d040.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Radhakrishnan Examines Christianity", "chunk_data": "173. S. RADHAKRISHNAN ON CHRISTIANITY (1933 A.D.)\nIn lectures given at the Mary Ward Settlement, London, on 18th March 1930, which were published in 1933, S. Radhakrishnan critically examines what he believes to have been the degradation of primitive Christianity under subsequent European influence. These lectures were incorporated in sections VI, VII and VIII of S. Radhakrishnan, East and West in Religion, pp. 57-65.", "time": { "start_year": 1930, "start_month": 3, "start_date": 18, "end_year": 1933, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "18 March 1930; published in 1933" }, "meta": { "people": [ "S. Radhakrishnan" ], "places": [ "Mary Ward Settlement", "London" ], "event": "S. Radhakrishnan delivered lectures examining the degradation of primitive Christianity under European influence.", "tags": [ "Christianity", "Philosophy", "Religion" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 2, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 357 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00381-b35ff11ddce0c0f8d040.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Eastern and Western Religion", "chunk_data": "VI. The Religion of Jesus and Western Christianity\nThe difference between the Eastern and the Western approaches and attitudes to religion becomes evident when we compare the life of Jesus, and His teaching as recorded in the Gospels, with the Nicene Creed. It is the difference between a type of personality and a set of dogmas, between a way of life and a scheme of metaphysics. The characteristics of intuitive realization, non-dogmatic toleration, as well as insistence on the non-aggressive virtues and universalist ethics, mark Jesus out as a typical Eastern seer. On the other hand, the emphasis on definite creeds and absolute dogmatism, with its consequences of intolerance, exclusiveness and confusion of piety with patriotism, are the striking features of Western Christianity.", "time": { "start_year": 325, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 325, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "c. 325 AD" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Jesus" ], "places": [ "East", "West" ], "event": "S. Radhakrishnan contrasts Jesus' Eastern religious approach with Western Christianity and the Nicene Creed.", "tags": [ "Christianity", "Religion", "Philosophy" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 3, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 357 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00381-b35ff11ddce0c0f8d040.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Jesus' Religion of Love", "chunk_data": "Jesus' religion was one of love and sympathy, tolerance and inwardness. He founded no organization but enjoined only private prayer. He was utterly indifferent to labels and creeds. He made no distinction between Jew and Gentile, Roman and Greek. He did not profess to teach a new religion but only deepened spiritual life. He formulated no doctrine and did not sacrifice thinking to believing. He learned and taught in the synagogues of the Jews. He observed their ritual so long as it did not blind men to the inner light. He attached no importance to professions of allegiance.", "time": { "start_year": 27, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 33, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "c. 27-33 AD" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Jesus" ], "places": [ "Synagogues of the Jews" ], "event": "Jesus taught a religion centered on love, tolerance, inwardness, private prayer, and spiritual deepening.", "tags": [ "Jesus", "Religion", "Ethics" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 4, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 357, 358 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00381-b35ff11ddce0c0f8d040.webp", "raw\\pages\\00382-00bb935c9032e7417f51.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Christianity Enters Roman Tradition", "chunk_data": "There is nothing in common between the simple truths taught by Jesus and the Church militant with its hierarchic constitution and external tests of membership, but the change was inevitable when Christianity went to Rome and took over the traditions of Caesar. When the Greek dialecticians and Roman lawyers succeeded to the Jewish divines and the prophets, Christian theology became logical in form and based on law. The spirit was the Jew's but the letter or the dogma was the Greek's, and the policy and the organization were the Roman's. Jesus reveals through His life and commands through His teaching the possibility of a life of a higher quality than that which is normal to man. He does not discuss intricacies of Theology and ritual, but proclaims love of God or insight into the nature of reality, and love of man or oneness with the purpose of the universe, as the central truths of religion. Transplanted into the West, creeds and dogmas took the place of vision and prophecy, and intricate subtleties of scholasticism displaced the simple love of God. The question for the Church is not whether the ideas it represents are spiritually worthy, but what are the ways and means by which the society can be held together. Roman ideas and institutions influenced the ecclesiastical organization.", "time": { "start_year": 64, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 400, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1st-5th centuries AD" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Jesus", "Caesar" ], "places": [ "Rome", "West" ], "event": "Christianity's movement into the Roman world transformed its theology and organization through Greek and Roman influences.", "tags": [ "Christianity", "Rome", "Church" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 5, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 358 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00382-00bb935c9032e7417f51.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Greek Theology and Simple Faith", "chunk_data": "VII. The Incarnation and the Trinity\nFor Jesus piety is not a matter of knowledge, nor is ignorance the cause of impiety. His simple faith appealed to the uncultured peasants. Celsus sarcastically declared that the law of admission to the Christian community was: 'Let no educated man enter, no wise man, no prudent man, for such things we deem evil; but whoever is ignorant, whoever is unintelligent, whoever is uneducated, whoever is simple, let him come and be welcome.' Tertullian asked, 'What resemblance is there between a philosopher and a Christian, between a disciple of Greece and a disciple of heaven?' And yet this simple faith, which seems to be so radically opposed to the Greek temperament, when taken over by the Greeks is transformed into a theological scheme.", "time": { "start_year": 170, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 220, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "c. 170-220 AD" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Jesus", "Celsus", "Tertullian" ], "places": [ "Greece" ], "event": "Early Christian simplicity was contrasted with Greek philosophical culture and transformed into theological speculation.", "tags": [ "Christianity", "Theology", "Philosophy" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 6, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 358 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00382-00bb935c9032e7417f51.webp" ], "chunk_title": "The Incarnation as Metaphysics", "chunk_data": "The Greeks and Romans were interested in God as a theoretical explanation of the universe. The relation of the infinite to the finite was the outstanding problem of Greek philosophy, and the solutions offered by Plato and Aristotle were ambiguous and unsatisfactory. The incarnation theory offered a way out. God is no longer separated by a meaningless distance from the human world, but has actually entered into humanity, thus making possible the ultimate unity of the human race with God. In Jesus we have the union of the divine and the human. The spaceless spirit has penetrated the world of sense. The Nicene Creed is an answer to a problem of Greek metaphysics and not of Jewish religion. Since its formulation there have been many doctrinal controversies.", "time": { "start_year": 325, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 325, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "c. 325 AD" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Jesus", "Plato", "Aristotle" ], "places": [ "Greece", "Rome", "Nicaea" ], "event": "The incarnation and the Nicene Creed addressed Greek metaphysical questions about the relation between God and humanity.", "tags": [ "Incarnation", "Theology", "Philosophy" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 7, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 358 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00382-00bb935c9032e7417f51.webp" ], "chunk_title": "From Monotheism to Trinity", "chunk_data": "We notice also the gradual transformation of a rigid monotheism into a trinitarian Godhead. The Greeks worshipped not merely Father Zeus but a whole society of gods and goddesses. In Greco-Latin paganism Zeus was conceived as Jupiter and as the head of all the gods and goddesses who shared his divinity. When pagan polytheism and Jewish monotheism became fused together, the Catholic God, a God who is a society, arose. The Roman emperors, keen on dissolving the distinction between the citizenship of the State and membership of the Church, took up the local deities and converted them into Christian saints.", "time": { "start_year": 300, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 400, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "4th century AD" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Zeus", "Roman emperors" ], "places": [ "Greece", "Rome" ], "event": "Greek and Roman polytheistic traditions were said to have influenced the development of the Christian Trinity and the cult of saints.", "tags": [ "Trinity", "Paganism", "Roman Empire" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 8, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 358, 359 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00382-00bb935c9032e7417f51.webp", "raw\\pages\\00383-99764c0621e1545b5ed6.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Christianity's Victory over Rome", "chunk_data": "The Roman Empire failed to destroy Christianity by persecution, but the hour of her victory over Rome signalized the defeat of the Gospel of Jesus. Christianity became bound up with the civilization under which it grew. The Church became the depository of sacred wisdom, a sort of reservoir of theological secrets and not a spring.", "time": { "start_year": 303, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 380, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "4th century AD" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Jesus" ], "places": [ "Roman Empire", "Rome" ], "event": "Christianity survived Roman persecution but became institutionally bound to Roman civilization after its victory.", "tags": [ "Christianity", "Roman Empire", "Church" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 9, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 359 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00383-99764c0621e1545b5ed6.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Christianity as Syncretistic Faith", "chunk_data": "Christianity is a syncretistic faith, a blend of various earlier creeds. The Jew, the Greek and the Roman as well as the races of the Mediterranean basin have contributed to it, with the result that, in spite of anxiety for system, this is lacking. Its ideas about God, to take one example, vary between a loving father, a severe judge, a detective officer, a hard schoolmaster and the head of the clerical profession.", "time": { "start_year": 1, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 500, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1st-5th centuries AD" }, "meta": { "people": [], "places": [ "Mediterranean basin" ], "event": "Christianity developed as a syncretistic faith incorporating Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Mediterranean contributions.", "tags": [ "Christianity", "Religion", "Culture" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 10, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 359 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00383-99764c0621e1545b5ed6.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Early Christian Hospitality", "chunk_data": "VIII. Hospitality of Early Christianity and its Absence in later Christianity\nWhen once religious faith becomes confused with dogmatic creeds, exclusiveness and intolerance become inevitable. Christianity in its early form was quite hospitable to Western thought and beliefs with which it came into contact. The Fourth Gospel adopted the doctrine of the Logos and took up the position that those who worshipped Christ were not setting up a new god. The Fourth Evangelist was not troubled by the fact that the Logos doctrine was Greek in origin and had heathen associations. No canons of orthodoxy bound him to a narrow Jewish faith. Justin Martyr could say: \"The teachings of Plato are not alien to those of Christ, though not in all respects similar. For all the writers were able to have a dim vision of realities by means of the indwelling seed of the implanted word.\"", "time": { "start_year": 90, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 165, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "c. 90-165 AD" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Jesus", "Justin Martyr", "Plato" ], "places": [ "Greece", "West" ], "event": "Early Christianity incorporated Greek ideas such as the Logos and accepted elements of Platonic thought.", "tags": [ "Christianity", "Logos", "Philosophy" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 11, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 359 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00383-99764c0621e1545b5ed6.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Christian Intolerance and Alexandria", "chunk_data": "And yet in the fourth century Christianity developed an attitude of intolerance. The great library at Alexandria founded by the first Ptolemy in the third century B.C. and lavishly endowed by his successors was finally destroyed under the orders of the Christian emperor Theodosius the Great in A.D. 289, because it was known to be a hotbed of paganism.", "time": { "start_year": 300, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 391, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "4th century AD; Alexandria library tradition" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Ptolemy I", "Theodosius the Great" ], "places": [ "Alexandria" ], "event": "Christianity's fourth-century intolerance was associated with the destruction of Alexandria's library under Theodosius.", "tags": [ "Christianity", "Alexandria", "Religious Conflict" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 12, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 359 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00383-99764c0621e1545b5ed6.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Christianity and Islam", "chunk_data": "A few centuries later, when Christianity came into contact with Islam, it did not adopt the liberal attitude of the earlier stage and try to find out the elements of truth in Islam, but fought it bitterly and bigotedly. Even if we admit that Islam is a militant organization, a fighting brotherhood in which a rigorous discipline is imposed on its followers by means of the scripture of the Quran and the organs of interpretation, we cannot deny that the conception of brotherhood in Islam transcends all barriers of race and nationality, a feature which does not characterize many other religions.", "time": { "start_year": 610, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1200, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "7th-12th centuries AD" }, "meta": { "people": [], "places": [ "Islamic world" ], "event": "Christianity responded intolerantly to Islam despite Islam's conception of brotherhood transcending race and nationality.", "tags": [ "Christianity", "Islam", "Religious Conflict" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 13, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 359, 360 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00383-99764c0621e1545b5ed6.webp", "raw\\pages\\00384-f6d08470915a465b4efc.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Christianity Faces India", "chunk_data": "To-day when Christianity is faced by the religion of India, it is adopting an attitude of unbending self-sufficiency. It has lost the features of teachability and tolerance which characterized it in its early days. It has ceased to be a religion of growth and freedom and become one of regimentation.", "time": { "start_year": 1933, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1933, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1933 AD" }, "meta": { "people": [], "places": [ "India" ], "event": "S. Radhakrishnan criticized Christianity's self-sufficient and regimented response to India's religious tradition.", "tags": [ "Christianity", "India", "Religion" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 14, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 360 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00384-f6d08470915a465b4efc.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Revelation Above Church Dogma", "chunk_data": "The Church is the bearer of the revelation and only the revelation, not the Church, is authoritative. The prophetic element is authoritative and not its formulations. The Church formulates dogma in terms of the current thought, but she cannot claim absolute intellectual finality for any dogma or formula. The thinking of the past in no way renders unnecessary the thinking of the present.", "time": { "start_year": 1933, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1933, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1933 AD" }, "meta": { "people": [], "places": [], "event": "S. Radhakrishnan argued that revelation and prophetic insight are authoritative, while church formulations remain historically conditioned.", "tags": [ "Theology", "Church", "Revelation" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 15, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 360 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00384-f6d08470915a465b4efc.webp" ], "chunk_title": "The Grand Inquisitor's Critique", "chunk_data": "The contrast between the free and simple religion of Jesus, and the dogmatic system of the Church, is brought out in the Chapter on 'The Grand Inquisitor' in Dostoevsky's book The Brothers Karamzov. The Grand Inquisitor explains to Jesus that the Church has undone his work, corrected it and refounded it on the basis of authority. The souls of men were indeed like sheep and could not endure the terrible gift of freedom which Jesus brought. The Church has been merciful in keeping man from knowledge and free inquiry. It has made mental slaves of its members. Belief is heaven and heresy hell.", "time": { "start_year": 1880, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1880, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1880 AD" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Jesus", "Fyodor Dostoevsky" ], "places": [], "event": "Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor presents the Church as replacing Jesus' freedom with authority, control, and dogma.", "tags": [ "Jesus", "Church", "Literature" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 16, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 360 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00384-f6d08470915a465b4efc.webp" ], "chunk_title": "History of Religious Repression", "chunk_data": "Consider the repressive legislation of Theodosius, which by heavy penalties forbade the practice of any other religion than Christianity, the closing of the schools of philosophy at Athens by Justinian, the Albigensian Crusades, the Dominican Inquisitions, the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity in Elizabethan England, the religious wars of the seventeenth century and the cruelties perpetrated upon the anabaptists.", "time": { "start_year": 380, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1700, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "4th-17th centuries AD" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Theodosius", "Justinian", "Elizabeth I" ], "places": [ "Athens", "England" ], "event": "S. Radhakrishnan cited legislation, inquisitions, crusades, religious wars, and persecution of Anabaptists as examples of Christian repression.", "tags": [ "Religious Conflict", "Church", "Politics" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 17, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 360 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00384-f6d08470915a465b4efc.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Pius IX and Absolute Truth", "chunk_data": "Pius IX declared, Let us most firmly hold that according to Catholic doctrine, there is one God, one faith, one baptism, and to go further (in an enquiry as to the fate of souls) were sin. Even those philosophers who profess to be devotees of truth are unable to shake themselves free from the absolutism characteristic of intellectual religions. While they admit that the Christian religion is not the only one, they believe that it is the absolute expression of absolute truth. In it we have the thrusting of the eternal into the temporal. As Hegel says: 'It is the Christian religion which is the perfect religion, the religion which represents the Being of Spirit in a realized form or for itself, the religion in which religion has itself become objective in relation to itself.'", "time": { "start_year": 1864, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1864, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1864 AD" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Pius IX", "Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel" ], "places": [], "event": "Pius IX and Hegel were cited as expressing forms of Christian doctrinal and philosophical absolutism.", "tags": [ "Catholicism", "Philosophy", "Theology" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 18, "chapter_name": "1933. S. Radhakrishnan on Christianity", "page_numbers": [ 360 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00384-f6d08470915a465b4efc.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Truth Beyond Creeds", "chunk_data": "But if we are true to the teaching of Jesus, we shall know that absolute truth goes beyond all forms and creeds, all historic revelations and institutions.", "time": { "start_year": 27, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 33, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "c. 27-33 AD" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Jesus" ], "places": [], "event": "The teaching attributed to Jesus is presented as directing believers beyond forms, creeds, revelations, and institutions.", "tags": [ "Jesus", "Religion", "Philosophy" ] } } ] }