Similarities between Hinduism and Christianity

Learning Interreligiously: In the Text, in the World is a fascinating series of about one hundred blog posts written from November 2008 to December 2016 by Francis X. Clooney, a global scholar known for his work in the field of Comparative Theology. Clooney was invited to write on interfaith dialogue for “In All Things," a blog hosted by America, a Jesuit journal of opinion (xi). The blog posts include a wide range of topics such as “interreligious happenings in the Catholic Church,” “Vatican documents and related controversies involving theologians,” “reports on occasional travels,” “provocative news items related to religion appearing in the American press,” “items related to teaching and programming at Harvard,” and a “few personal posts” (xi). Such is Clooney's commitment to interfaith learning that, although he is not an expert in Islamic or Mormon studies, he engages the Qur'an and the Book of the Mormon.

Madhvācārya, the 13 th century propounder of dualism, exemplifies a prophet whose prophetic witness was enacted in a kairos, which demanded his dualist response. The school of Vedānta that he founded was a radical corrective that urged the return to a theistic conception of the universe that was in accordance with the prescriptions of the śruti (the revealed canonical texts). I offer stipulative definitions of three terms and one phrase used in Catholicism, namely kairos, prophet, witness, and the combined, prophetic witness. I use these to show that he is a prophet, and a prophetic witness who acted during a kairos.

For the past 2000 years, Christians have been using terms such as "Messiah," "Christ," and "Son of God," to reflect on the nature of the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, the first-century prophet, healer, and foundational focus of Christianity. However, these terms are ancient and ambiguous for a global context, and it can be argued that, in different cultural contexts, different conceptions of Jesus may be necessary so that the signifier renders Jesus intelligible in various settings without the need for constant explanation and reinterpretation. Can Jesus' divinity be viewed through a cultural lens other than those that arose in the ancient Greco-Roman classical world? I would suggest that it is indeed imperative to do so if we are to confer respect on cultures other than the ones in which ancient Christianity arose. It is all the more urgent for Christians to seek new ways of envisioning Jesus in the face of the emergent new hermeneutics based on the call by decolonial studies scholars to use critical indigenous epistemologies. As an answer to this need, I propose Jesus as a Tantric vīra. By observing Jesus from a Tantric lens, I re-envision the image of Jesus for a South Asian context while perceiving certain aspects of his divinity that a normative Christian reading may have possibly neglected.

Some decades ago Raimundo Panikkar joined the burgeoning list of 20th century theologians attempting to write a contemporary reconstruction of trinitarian theology.  Panikkar's trinitarian writings are informed by his long-standing interest in inter-religious dialogue with Hinduism and Buddhism.  This presentation intends to delve behind the unfinished product of his trinitarian theology, focusing on his work from the 1960s and early 1970s.  The question that it poses is the following: How does Panikkar's experience with the non-theistic Hindu and Buddhist ideas of Ultimate Reality and Nirvana inform his trinitarian theology?  Its answer is that Panikkar's explorations of Hinduism and Buddhism provoked him to recognize a radically trans-personal understanding of divinity.  This is not meant to say that Panikkar merely recognized the limitations inherent in the Western idea of a human person and responded by simply positing that divinity could be related to this idea through analogical language.  That would still locate him well within the boundaries of classical Christian theology.  Trans-personal in this presentation means non-theistic (not atheistic or anti-theistic), and its presence in Panikkar's trinitarian theology cannot be explained away by claiming that Panikkar drew on Eastern ideas that could find ready-made parallels in Western religion should one choose to look there.

What is fascinating about Panikkar's prolegomena to trinitarian theology is that he approaches his reconstruction from two different directions—the Hindu and the Buddhist—in such a way that these two channels stand relatively independent of each other.  In many ways they mark alternative understandings of the Ultimately Real that Panikkar nevertheless chooses to draw into a trinitarian orbit.

The Hindu contribution to Panikkar’s trinitarian theology is formulated in terms of a kataphatic via positiva, in which he attempts to formulate a relationship between Hindu conceptions of Isvara, the so-called “unknown Christ,” and the Christ preached by Christianity.  This involves elevating a mythical Christology over a historical Christology, while preserving the incarnational aspect of Christianity.  Panikkar interprets Brahman, Isvara, and their mutual relationship as Hindu analogues to the Christian understanding of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Buddhist contribution to Panikkar’s trinitarian theology is conceived in apophatic terms, a via negativa.  Rather than addressing reality as an object, Buddhism focuses on the contingent immanence of the subject.  Rather than divinizing being, Buddhists deontologize the being of God.  While this sounds impossible to reconcile with the Christian Trinity, Panikkar claims that the Trinity offers a non-substantialist understanding of God that can be reconciled with Buddhism.

This presentation will conclude by demonstrating that Panikkar’s trinitarian theology calls upon Christianity to abandon its preoccupation with the idea of personhood as ego and instead to learn from these two Eastern traditions, which understood personhood as relationship, providing a more viable trinitarian understanding in a religious milieu which has witnessed the demise of substance metaphysics and ontology.