The first time I travelled to India, I experienced severe culture shock. Even though I had travelled cross-culturally before, I’d never experienced anything like India. Maybe it was because I am Midwestern white boy, or maybe it was because I was travelling alone, but I found India to be absolutely overwhelming, in every sense of the word. The smells, the crowds, the colors, the culture-India is like no place on earth. But what really surprised me was India’s religion. I don’t think obsession is strong enough a word. Religion pervades every aspect of life in India; it is utterly inseparable from the moments that make up the life of this nation. My time there was limited to a month and a half, so of course my observations were anything but complete. I barely scratched the surface; but it was enough; by the time I left I had fallen in love with India.
But I remember thinking, as I walked the streets of this strange land, that Christianity as I knew and understood it could never work in India. I’m not sure I could articulate it exactly like this at the time, but my impression was that Jesus was a person that India could fall in love with, but as long as He came packaged in our western “Churchianity,” with all its baggage, He could never make it through the front door. This was the start of an important process in my life; the process of trying to understand who Jesus really is, what the gospel is in its essence, and how the person of Christ and this gospel can translate and become established across cultures.
When I returned home I came across a book by E. Stanley Jones called The Christ of the Indian Road.
This book was like a revelation to me; it helped me to understand the difference between the structures and institutions that we build on the truth of Christ, which are often reflections of our culture, and the person of Christ himself; a person that has universal appeal. Since then I’ve read a lot more on this subject, and these days the importance of contextualization in mission is more widely understood than it was when Jones was working and writing. But this book is still one of my favorites. I started to read it again just before we left for Amsterdam, but only made it about halfway through before I ran out of time. So here are some of my favorite quotes from the first half of the book:
I saw that the gospel lies in the person of Jesus, that he himself is the Good News; that my one task was to live and to present him. My task was simplified. (12)
As Boussuet says, “Whenever Christianity has struck out a new path in her journey it has been because of the personality of Jesus has again become living, and a ray form his being has once more illuminated the world.” (19)
A friend of mine was talking to a Brahman gentleman when the Brahman turned to him and said, “I don’t like the Christ of your creeds and the Christ of your churches.” My friend quietly replied, “Then how would you like the Christ of the Indian Road?” The Brahman thought a moment, mentally picturing the Christ of the Indian Road-he saw him dressed in Sadhus’ garments, seated by the wayside with the crowds about him, healing blind men who felt their way to him, putting his hands upon the heads of poor, unclean lepers who fell at his feet, announcing the good tidings of the Kingdom to stricken folks, staggering up a lone hill with a broken heart and dying upon a wayside cross for men, out rising triumphantly and walking on that road again. He suddenly turned to the friend and earnestly said, “I could love and follow the Christ of the Indian Road.” (32)
“Mahatma Gandhi I am very anxious to see Christianity naturalized in India so that it shall no longer be a foreign thing identified with a foreign people and a foreign government, but a part of the national life of India and contributing its power to India’s uplift and redemption. What would you suggest we do to make that possible?” He very gravely and thoughtfully replied, “I would suggest first of all that all of you Christians, missionaries and all begin to live more like Jesus Christ”. He needn’t have said any more - that was quite enough. I knew that looking through his eyes were the three hundred millions of India and speaking through his voice the millions of the East saying to me, a representative of the West itself “If you will come to us in the spirit of your master we will not be able to resist you”.
Again, we are not there to give its people a blocked-off, rigid, ecclesiastical and theological system, saying to them, “Take that in its entirety or nothing.” Jesus is the gospel-he himself is the good news. Men went out in those early days and preached Jesus and the resurrection-a risen Jesus. But just as a stream takes on the coloring of the soil over which it flows, so Christianity in its flowing through the soils of the different racial and national outlooks took on coloring from them. We have added a good deal to the central message-Jesus. Some of it is worth surviving, for it has come out of reality. Some of it will not stand the shock of transplantation. It is a ’shock to any organism to be transplanted. I have seen a good many star preachers visit the East and have their messages translated. The result has often been disastrous. After the rhetoric and fine periods had been eliminated as untranslatable there was not enough basis of ideas to go over to be reclothed in another language. Some of our ecclesiastical systems built upon a controversy lose meaning when they pass over into a totally different atmosphere. But Jesus is universal. He can stand the shock of transplantation. He appeals to the universal heart. (38-39)
… But standing among the shadows of Western civilization India has seen a figure who has greatly attracted her. She has hesitated in regard to any allegiance to him, for India has thought that if she took one she would have to take both - Christ and Western civilization went together. Now it is dawning upon the mind of India that she can have one without the other - Christ without Western civilization. That revelation is of tremendous significance to them - and to us. “Do you mean to say” said a Hindu lawyer “that you are not here to wipe out our civilization and replace it with your own? Do you mean that your message is Christ without any implications that we must accept Western civilization? I have hated Christianity, but if Christianity is Christ, I do not see how Indians can hate it”. (p17)
If Christ is in this, I do not see how we can be out of it. (58)
