Christianity and Life

In 1965 when Audrey and I returned from India, our break with the mission and with the Baptist Church was the culmination of growing unease with the task we were being asked to do. 

Certainly there was a sense of aimlessness in the background: the school was operating well with an Indian Principal and I was therefore superfluous. In spite of efforts to find a way to continue working in the educational world in Tripura, no openings appeared. 

And our marriage had been through some rough passages, which added to the unsettlement. 

But central to my disillusionment with the mission work and the church were two areas of practical and theological concern.

 

 

First I was unhappy with the pressure to carry on evangelism among the school children. In effect we were expected to try to influence the non-Christian children towards Christianity in spite of their parents’ wishes. I was increasingly feeling that such an aim was unethical. 

I had no problem with the general welfare work of Christians or other foreigners in Inida: economic development, education, health programmes and so on were a greatv way of helping less fortunate people. But the linking of that with evangelism was a problem. Conversions to Christianity were very suspect in my mind, because of the great wealth and prestige of Europeans in India in general, and our missionaries in particular. Compared with the simplicity of life-style of, for instance, the American Peace Corps workers, we were affluent in the extreme. And there seemed no way of turning off the stream of money coming from New Zealand, which I suspected was to some extent a way of salving New Zealand consciences. 

Many of the Hindus I knew were better people than many of my Christian colleagues, or my friends in New Zealand, or than me. So how could I conscientiously point to Christianity as a better way of life? 

Much of what I had grown up thinking of as part of Christian life turned out to be merely culturally different and not necessarily better.

 

Secondly my theological ideas, under the influence of the Indian experience and Indian philosophies, and, again, after much discussion with my friend Brian Smith, underwent change. 

Central to this was a feeling that our conservative evangelical version of Christianity put too much emphasis on individual salvation, when in India for instance, decisions were made by the village or by the extended family. Individualism was and still is a Western way of living; communal living was, and is, and Asian (and Polynesian) way. 

One of the most vivid experiences of my time in India was attendance at a Hindu festival which included animal sacrifice. While the bagpipes played, drums rolled, and bombs went off, animals were sacrificed at a ceremony at the Assam Rifles camp when a Hindu festival was being celebrated and several from the mission were invited. (They would have celebrated Christmas or Easter just as enthusiastically, or the Eid festival)

 

They started the proceedings with small animals like ducks and chickens, and moved on to kids and goats, and eventually to a half-grown buffalo calf. Each time the animal was tied to the base of the altar, and a big Gurkha with a kukri (curved knife), bigger each time, cut off the head at one blow. Each time the music and the explosions got louder, and the cheers of the crowd.  It was a physically exciting spectacle. 

This, along with visits to sacrificial temples, with their drains to lead away the river of blood, gave me an insight into what “sacrifice” really meant. And I came to be repelled by the whole idea, as most educated orthodox Hindus are, and by the idea that Christianity taught, that the death of Jesus on the first Good Friday was a similar sacrifice for the sins of the world. 

Even more, since 1965, as I have thought about all this I have rejected entirely this crude legalistic and violently bloodthirsty myth as having any relevance for life in the modern world.