The Indianization of Christianity

Abstract

In Christianizing the Hellenic world of the first few Christian centuries, Christianity became pretty largely Hellenized, especially in its apologetic and dogmatic formulas. Fortunately for the Christians of Graeco-Roman culture, those who introduced them to Christianity did not introduce the new faith in the form of creeds and dogmas. The missionaries to that world were men of contagious faith and heroic adventure, whose lives were joined by vital links to Jesus Christ. Their contribution to the Hellenic world was a living religion of redemption, and not a system of theology. But the Christianity that emerged from the Mediterranean world of the Graeco-Roman age was quite a different religion. Dr. Hatch in his Hibbert Lectures on the influence of Greek ideas on Christianity has lucidly unfolded the tremendous change between the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount and the Christianity of the Nicene Creed. This difference is explicable in terms of the Hellenic social environment into which the new faith came, early in its history. It was only to be expected that the Greeks would interpret Jesus and the religion of Jesus through the media of their current religious and philosophical imagery. And it is to the everlasting credit of the Greek Fathers that their critical work was so constructive that it met the needs of the day. The question remains: Do we do them justice or do we deal justice to the constructive Christian thinking of the subsequent centuries if we attempt to make their formulations normative for all time ? There is always constructive Christian thought in process. It is psychologically necessary that such thinking be in terms of the imagery of the environment, chronological and social.