DamayanthiNiles, Worshipping at the Feet of Our Ancestors: Hendrik Kraemer and the Making of Contextual Theology in South Asia. Berlin and Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2012. 128 pp.

Abstract

Damayanthi Niles, Worshipping at the Feet of Our Ancestors: Hendrik Kraemer and the Making of Contextual Theology in South Asia. Berlin and Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2012.128 pp. One of the major turning points within the Protestant theological tradition was the challenge the two world wars and the atrocities related to them brought to the emerging liberal theological tradition of the late 19m century. The liberal movement had been attempting to move away from some of the central themes of the classical theological traditions by bringing the historical Jesus into focus and by insisting that human beings, in responding to the challenge of discipleship, would be able to build through their own efforts a stable world based on peace and justice. When this confidence in human ability to usher in the kingdom of God was in shambles, Karl Barth came to the rescue by re-introducing, albeit from a new angle, the classical themes of the absolute transcendence of God, the sinfulness of the human condition and the Gospel message as the only hope for the fallen While the significance and impact of neo-orthodoxy introduced by Barth and his followers is very widely acknowledged, Christian theology has not given equal attention to the way neo-orthodoxy was translated and applied to Protestant missiology and the impact this has had on Christian attitudes to other religions and the practice of mission in the world. At the centre of the interpretation of neo-orthodoxy for mission stands the Dutch missiologist Hendrik Kraemer. The role Kraemer played at the third World Missionary Conference in in 1938 and the Tambaram controversy that followed are essential to understanding 19th and 20th century theology of missions and the Asian theological responses to it. Damayanthi Niles has done a valuable service in the search for authentic Asian theology today by re-visiting the debate in and especially by exploring the way some of the South Asian theologians dealt with it in the course of their own struggle to do theology in the context of resurgent religions in the post-independent South Asian nations like India and Sri Lanka. Having given a clear and concise statement of the issues at stake and the foci of the chapters to follow in her Introduction, Niles devotes her first two chapters to giving an account of Kraemer's positions in his preparatory volume for the conference, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, and the animated and divisive debate that followed it. She puts her finger correctly on the three main pillars on which Kraemer built his argument, namely, his understanding of religion, his affirmation of the sinfulness of human beings that deprives them of having any saving knowledge of God by their own efforts and the elevation of the Gospel message above all religions, including Christianity as a religious phenomenon. She gives some insightful perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of the positions taken by the respondents to Kraemer, including Pandippedi Chenchiah, Alfred George Hogg, David G. Moses and Karl Hartenstein. In the subsequent chapters Niles examines the theology of four of the leading post-Tambaram theologians in South Asia, M. M. Thomas, Lynn A. de Silva, Aloysius Pieris and Lakshman Wickremasinghe, taking their approach to religion and their responses to the neo-orthodox separation of the gospel from religions as the hermeneutical keys for her assessment. While recognizing the contributions made by M. M. Thomas and Lynn de Silva, Niles rightly points out how their approaches to other religions were curtailed by their commitment to the neo-orthodox insistence on elevating the gospel above all religions. She shows that Pieris and Wickremasinghe were able to find more adequate ways of relating to religious plurality by moving away from neo-orthodoxy and Kraemer's highly contested understanding of religions. In the limited pages allotted to M. …