Book Review: \u3ci\u3ePentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India\u3c/i\u3e

Book review of Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India. By Chad Bauman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, xiii + 208 pages

The God of Love and the Love of God: Thinking With Rāmānuja About Grace in Augustinian Christianity

‘moments’ of the Lord’s gracious help offered to the devotee and also the active response of the devotee; second, to indicate the contours of an Augustinian Christian resolution of this theological paradox; and third, to offer some reflections on what Christian theologians could learn through an engagement with Rāmānuja’s understanding of the divine presence. As we will see, the doctrine of production of the world and the doctrine of divine favour are mutually interrelated across Vaiṣṇava Hindu and Augustinian universes. For the later Augustine (411–430 CE), the key theological note is the utter incapability of human beings, who have a single lifetime on earth, to initiate even the first turn towards God, and he concludes that for those saints who are timelessly foreordained to receive salvation this initial conversio itself is prepared by God’s grace. In Rāmānuja, on the other hand, we do not encounter such theological anxieties relating to a specific temporally-locatable moment – certain human beings, through the fruition of their beginningless (anādi) stream of karmic merits, are beginning to move in this lifetime towards the Lord Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa who is constantly assisting them in their spiritual endeavours. The Either/Or dichotomy between ‘divine grace’ versus ‘human autonomy’ which appears with sharp contrasts in Augustine and, following him, in the Reformed doctrinal systems of theologians such as Calvin, is largely absent from Rāmānuja’s understanding of how structured human response and divine favour are mutually intertwined in the human spiritual pilgrimage

‘I am the Living Bread’: Ram Mohan Roy’s Critique of the Doctrine of the Atonement

A striking aspect of Vedantic Hindu and Christian devotional universes is the theme of the humanity of God. Jesus and Viṣṇu or Kṛṣṇa, the transcendental source of worldly reality, are also intensely human figures – they live with and amidst human beings, and they (seem to) suffer and, most intriguingly, even (seem to) undergo death. However, as one plumbs the doctrinal depths of these universes, various theological divergences begin to emerge, relating to the nature of the divine, the relation of the divine to the world, and the soteriological dynamics of the spiritual transformation of human beings. From a Christian perspective, somewhere near the heart of this constellation of metaphysical-theological themes lies the doctrine of the atonement, which tries to make sense of how some events, between 1 CE–34 CE, associated with a Jewish man called Jesus crucially configured the shape of salvation. A survey of various theological attempts to explicate the dynamics of salvation indicates a wide range of ‘models’, such as the ransom, the moral exemplar, and the substitutionary. Thus, unlike the Nicene Creed (about the divinity of Christ) or the Chalcedonian Creed (about the incarnation of Christ), there is no dogmatic ecumenical creed about the redemptive work of Christ

Book Review:\u3cem\u3eDivine Self, Human Self: The Philosophy of Being in Two Gītā Commentaries\u3c/em\u3e

Book Review of Divine Self, Human Self: The Philosophy of Being in Two Gītā Commentaries. Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad. NY and London: Bloomsbury, 2013, x + 148pp

Hindu Responses to Religious Diversity and the Nature of Post-Mortem Progress

The last two hundred years of Hindu–Christian encounters have produced distinctive forms of Hindu thought which, while often rooted in the broad philosophical-cultural continuities of Vedic outlooks, grappled with, on the one hand, the colonial pressures of European modernity, and, on the other hand, the numerous critiques by Christian theologians and missionaries on the Hindu life-worlds. Thus, the spectrum of Hindu responses from Raja Rammohun Roy through Swami Vivekananda to S. Radhakrishnan demonstrates attempts to creatively engage with Christian representations of Hindu belief and practice, by accepting their prima facie validity at one level while negating their adequacy at another.This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final version is available at http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs/vol27/iss1/8/

A World Filled With Grace: Conceptualizing the Divine in Hindu Devotionalism and Karl Rahner

In recent decades, a substantial body of scholarly work in the field of Hindu-Christian studies has been produced, which has not only done much to dispel earlier stereotypes of Hindu life-worlds as steeped in \u27pantheism\u27, \u27world-negation\u27 and the like, but also urged Christian thinkers to reflect on their own foundational beliefs through Hindu motifs. A relatively unexplored theme remains that of whether, and in what ways, the divine reality can be conceptualized as \u27gracious\u27 in Hindu devotionalism, especially given that the Christian doctrine of \u27grace is related to a constellation of other notions such as creation out of nothing, justification and so on, which have no clear analogues in the former. In this article, I seek to trace certain parallels to the Christian understanding of \u27grace\u27 in some figures of South Indian Sri-Vaisnavism through a dialogue with the thought of Karl Rahner, and show how they attempt, in their specific theological contexts, to affirm both the divine freedom and the divine accessibility to all human beings. Karl Rahner, one of the most influential Roman Catholic theologians of the last century, emphasized the gratuitousness of grace while denying that grace is offered only to a limited few chosen by the divine will

Vedantic variations in the presence of Europe: establishing the Hindu dharma in late nineteenth century Bengal

Abstract We will offer in this essay an analytic overview of four texts from the second half of the nineteenth century which elaborated different variations on the Hindu dharma. These are Rajnarayan Basu’s Hindu Dharmera Sresthata (‘The Superiority of the Hindu dharma’, 1879), Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Dharmatattva (1888, ‘Principles of Dharma’), Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay’s Sāmājika Prabandha (‘Essays on Society’, 1892), and Chandranath Basu’s Hindutva (‘Hinduness’, 1892). These textual constructions of Hindu identity sometimes have different argumentative goals, employ different rhetorical strategies, and draw upon different scriptural resources. Notwithstanding these distinctive variations relating to aims, methods, and styles, they seek to engage Europe as the Other both as a conceptual toolbox whose instruments can be appropriated for reconfiguring the Hindu dharmaand as a dialectical foil which highlights the superiority of the Hindu dharma to its diverse critics. For Rajnarayan Basu, Chatterjee, Mukhopadhyay, and Chandranath Basu, the Hindu dharma is the hermeneutic site for evaluating specific aspects of European modernities and for re-asserting Vedic norms, ideas, and practices through a critical engagement with European modernities. These texts are multi-faceted vignettes into the Bengali Hindu appropriations of European concepts in late nineteenth century Bengal, and also the anxieties about the stability of the Hindu dharma in an age of rapid socio-cultural transformations

INVESTIGATING THE “SCIENCE” IN “EASTERN RELIGIONS”: A METHODOLOGICAL INQUIRY

© 2017 by the Joint Publication Board of Zygon This article explores some of the understandings of “science” that are often employed in the literature on “science and Eastern religions.” These understandings crucially shape the raging debates between the avid proponents and the keen detractors of the thesis that Eastern forms of spirituality are uniquely able to subsume the sciences into their metaphysical–axiological horizons. More specifically, the author discusses some of the proposed relations between “science” and “Eastern religions” by highlighting three themes: (a) the relation between science and metaphysics, (b) the relation between science and experience, and (c) the European origins of science. The analysis of these relations requires a methodological inquiry into some of the culturally freighted valences of “science,” “metaphysics,” and “experience.”

The Agonistic Poetics of Dāsya - bhāva: the Soteriological Confrontation Between Deity and Devotee

Funder: University of CambridgeAbstract: The devotional literatures across the Hindu bhakti traditions of medieval India are shaped by distinctive styles of affective responses to the divine reality. A theme which recurs in several layers of their songs is a theological dialectic between divine majesty and divine accessibility; the divine is not only simply transcendent in the sense of being a distant deity but is also immanently present in and through a range of human sensitivities, emotions, and affectivities. We will highlight the dialectic in the devotional songs of three medieval figures, Tulsīdās (c. 1600), Sūrdās (c. 1600), and Mādhavadeva (1489–1596), which are structured primarily by the devotional attitude of a servant (dāsa) towards the Lord. As we will see, this theological servitude is not to be understood as a form of abject servility, for the three poets, in their somewhat distinctive ways, can not only speak of the Lord as a friend and as a lover, but can even level various kinds of complaints, challenges, and accusations at the Lord. Thus, if the Lord’s transcendental sovereignty is emphasised by the devotee through the modes of self-censure, the Lord’s immanent availability is also highlighted through the protests that the devotee fervently makes to the seemingly uncaring Lord

Vedantic variations in the presence of Europe: establishing the Hindu dharma in late nineteenth century Bengal

Abstract We will offer in this essay an analytic overview of four texts from the second half of the nineteenth century which elaborated different variations on the Hindu dharma. These are Rajnarayan Basu’s Hindu Dharmera Sresthata (‘The Superiority of the Hindu dharma’, 1879), Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Dharmatattva (1888, ‘Principles of Dharma’), Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay’s Sāmājika Prabandha (‘Essays on Society’, 1892), and Chandranath Basu’s Hindutva (‘Hinduness’, 1892). These textual constructions of Hindu identity sometimes have different argumentative goals, employ different rhetorical strategies, and draw upon different scriptural resources. Notwithstanding these distinctive variations relating to aims, methods, and styles, they seek to engage Europe as the Other both as a conceptual toolbox whose instruments can be appropriated for reconfiguring the Hindu dharmaand as a dialectical foil which highlights the superiority of the Hindu dharma to its diverse critics. For Rajnarayan Basu, Chatterjee, Mukhopadhyay, and Chandranath Basu, the Hindu dharma is the hermeneutic site for evaluating specific aspects of European modernities and for re-asserting Vedic norms, ideas, and practices through a critical engagement with European modernities. These texts are multi-faceted vignettes into the Bengali Hindu appropriations of European concepts in late nineteenth century Bengal, and also the anxieties about the stability of the Hindu dharma in an age of rapid socio-cultural transformations