CREEDS AS LOCI OF INTERCULTURAL ENCOUNTER, PART FOUR

The Pohsarang Church in West Java. Public domain.

Editor’s Note: this is the last installment in a four-part series on cultural adaptations of creeds. Review the archives to read the rest of this series!

Intellectual confrontation in colonial India compared with the postmodern West

Finally, creeds can function as springboards for theological speculation. David Bentley Hart calls creeds “invitations to spiritual and theological reasoning and contemplation.”[1]  Karl Barth calls theologians to be “reminded by Nicaea in which direction we have to look… We will now try to go further in this direction, not losing contact with the dogma but again following our own path.”[2]  Creeds call us to imagine an unimaginable future with God, direct us to make some sense of this world that can never quite be contained in language, and shape our communal actions as we do our best to draw nearer to the divine. The call to belief in the creeds is not really an argument, an instruction, or a commitment to a category of opinion, but, as Rowan Williams puts it in his primer of Christian belief that starts off with both Nicene and Apostles’ creeds: “You might even say that it tells us why we can trust each other in the Christian community. We’re looking in the same direction, working with the same hopes and assumptions.”[3]

The intensifying clash of civilisations and the rapid evolution of information technology both can stimulate the accelerationist impulse to reformulate fresh expressions of faith, even as we continue to embrace our religious family throughout time and space by using venerably long-lived professions of faith in traditional or even dead languages. In the ferment of 1960s postmodernism, Karl Rahner has a go at this with “A Brief Theological Creed,”(1972) offered to the “European situation”:

The incomprehensible term of human transcendence, which takes place in man's existentiell [sic] and original being and not only in theoretical or merely conceptual reflection, is called God, and he communicates himself in forgiving love to man both existentielly [sic] and historically as man's own fulfillment. The eschatological climax of God's historical self-communication, in which this self-communication becomes manifest as irreversible and victorious, is called Jesus Christ.

It doesn't quite trip off the tongue, not helped by Rahner’s Teutonic grammar and Heideggerian jargon, not least the use of ‘existentiell’ to refer to everyday lived realities of existence. Rahner wanted to bridge the contemporary philosophical concerns of the limitations of phenomenology and ontology with traditional theological definitions, ending up with an abstruse formulation, at least to non-specialist Anglophone ears. Maddison Jay Reddie-Clifford contextualises this creed as a response to Derridan critiques of propositional truth prominent during Rahner’s late 1960s stint as the Romano Guardini Chair of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Munich: “The climax of the communication of God to man in history is in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and this makes the communication irreversible and victorious. Once more there is nothing here that is necessarily static as per the Derridan objection to truth. Jesus Christ is not a mere concept or a notion: he is a man, and like men, he is a dynamic being with relationships that define and proclaim him. This is the genius of the theological creed. There is not a single proposition here that can truly fall victim to the post-structuralist critique.”[4]

I’ve attempted to English his concerns in a more approachable, if less technically consistent manner:

I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s ultimate dialogue with humanity. The bare fact of human life contains within itself the image of God, that unspeakable divinity, communicated jointly through creation and historical revelation as forgiving love, far beyond what we can think or imagine, as an unshakable reality of what we are to be.

This version brings out all three levels of Lindbeck’s communicative theory of doctrine already inherent in originary creeds and in Rahner’s own version. First, the cognitive propositions around Jesus as God's Word and people as the image of God, the “two books” of nature and revelation. Second, the affective expressions of Jesus as manifesting and calling us to love, the apocalyptic and eschatological wonder of realisation and conversion, and the climactic ultimacy of incarnational reality. Third, the cultural-linguistic reshaping of our reality, in the fourth century by challenging us with the language of substance and person; with Rahner by juxtaposing phenomenological categories of the reduction to bare experience, sometimes called the epoché, and the tension between the existentiell and the transcendent, that is between what makes humanity human as seen in history, and the ineffable otherness of divinity to which we are yet intimately connected to by grace. It captures certain aspects of central Christian doctrine, albeit in a jargon-filled way, though perhaps no more confusing than the notions of persons and substance in the early creeds. It clearly has not taken a major place in the life of the church, or even in the theological academy, however, as the Nicene and Apostles’ creeds have.

Compare this attempt to allow Trinitarian dogma to resonate with Indic cultural worldviews, rather than post-Hegelian thought, the Canticle to the Trinity (1898) by Brahmabandhab Upadhyay:

(Refrain)

I worship the One who is Being, Knowledge, Bliss,

The Highest Goal, whom ascetics yearn for but the worldly dismiss. (Refrain)

The Supreme, Ancient, Higher than the high, Fullness, Wholeness, Beyond yet nigh. The Pure Threesome, unrelated Wisdom, Hard to comprehend.

The Father, Impeller, Highest Lord, Unborn, The Seedless Seed of the tree of being, The universal Cause, who a watched-over creation doth tend.

The Word unsounded, Infinite, The Person begotten, supremely Great, The Substance of the Father, Form of knowledge, our saving Friend.

The One who from the union of Being and Knowledge doth flow, The Sacred Breath and Cloud of Joy, Who Cleanses, Moves swiftly, Speaks the Message and life intends.[5]

Upadhyay was born Bandhopadyay, from a traditional Bengali Brahmin family in 1861 and active in the Brahmo Samaj which advocated for the reform of Hinduism in his youth. At 30 years of age, he converted to Roman Catholicism, in humility removing the prefix “Bandho-” meaning “venerable” from his name leaving “teacher”, and thereafter pursued the development of Hindu-Catholicism, founding various periodicals and organizations. The Archbishop of Calcutta gave him a recommendation before his 1902 lecture tour of Europe: "By means of this statement we declare Brahmabandhav (Theophilus) Upadhyay, a Calcutta Brahmin, to be a Catholic of sound morals, burning with zeal for the conversion of his compatriots,"[6] but he fell foul of the Apostolic Nuncio who did not appreciate his attempts at indigenization.

Steeped in the language and imagery of traditional religious literature in the Vedas and Upanisads, informed by Upadhyay’s concern with juxtaposing monistic Sankaran Advaita with neoscholastic Thomism, this hymn was used in the Bombay 1964 Eucharistic Congress, an international Roman Catholic gathering held every three to five years. However, it was adapted by changing “govindanam” (the epithet “watcher of cattle” used particularly by Krishna devotees) to “vishvesham” (“lord of all”), and “sumukundam” (giver of freedom, used as an epithet of Vishnu) to “Jishu-Kristam” (a transliteration of Jesus Christ), likely to moderate potential accusations of pagan syncretism.[7]

This hymn is still widely used, for example in Saccidananda Ashram Shanthivanam, a Camaldolese house in Tamil Nadu. One of its cofounders, Henri le Saux, who later adopted the name Abhishiktananda, wrote a book titled Saccidananda: A Christian Approach to Advatic Experience, with an appendix analysing this hymn albeit in a Christianising fashion, where Indic philosophy was seen to be perfected in Trinitarian doctrine.[8] This contrasted with Upadhyay who attempted a more mutually informing understanding between Advaitic thought and neo-Thomism, both metaphysically sophisticated scholastic paradigms. This work has continued to be influential particularly through Indian Jesuit scholarship to Francis X. Clooney today. In his Theology after Vedanta, he continues experimenting with different ways of reading Vedanta and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica alongside each other, using “i. the Advaita practices of ‘coordination’ (upasamhara) and ii. ‘superimposition’ (adhydsa); iii. the notion of ‘a comparative theological conversation;’ iv. Philip Wheelwright’s understanding of metaphor; v. Jacques Derrida’s practice of ‘collage.’”[9]

Aside from that particular Jesuit tradition, and away from the Indian cultural context where the resonances may have missiological impact, David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian has used “Being, Consciousness, Bliss” as the subtitle of his 2013 attempt at a definition of God, The Experience of God. He qualifies his use of the Sanskrit ternion sat, chit, and ananda as in line with early Christian reflection on the absolute transcendence of God at the phenomenological vertices of human experience in such seminal theologians as Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo, as well as descriptions of the divine in diverse religions from the Sufic Islam of Ibn Arabi to the Advaitic Vedanta of Adi Sankara.[10] Refreshing the symbols we use to point towards the divine is part of our tradition, epitomised by the still-challenging reconception of Trinitarian persons and essences in the fourth century.

This brief comparative survey has attempted to juxtapose credal experiments to showcase what is at play, given a framework where creeds have distinct sociological functions and carry different levels of cognitive significance, let alone metaphysical content. The creeds themselves involved the interaction of a Semitic narrative and epistolary textual tradition in the context of Hellenistic philosophical categories. How might we continue to listen and act on the Spirit’s prompting in our ever more diverse world, with different words, feelings and cultures encountering each other in endlessly complex contexts?

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[1] Pete Enns, David Bentley Hart - What’s the Deal with the Creeds?, episode 18, Faith for Normal People, June 12, 2023, https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/episode-18-david-bentley-hart-whats-the-deal-with-the-creeds/.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:1 (T & T Clark, 2010), 200.

[3] Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 6.

[4] Maddison Jay Reddie-Clifford, “Rahner’s Last Gambit,” in 1968-Culture and Counterculture: A Catholic Critique, ed. Thomas V. Gourlay and Daniel Matthys (Pickwick Publications, 2020), 216–17.

[5] Julius J. Lipner, Brahmabandhab Upadhyay: The Life and Thought of a Revolutionary (Oxford University Press, 2001), 201.

[6] Lipner, Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, 294.

[7] Theodore A. Pereira, ed., 38th International Eucharistic Congress, Bombay, 1964 (Examiner Press, 1964), 2:45.

[8] Abhishiktananda, Saccidānanda: A Christian Approach to Advaitic Experience (I.S.P.C.K, 1984), 203–14.

[9] Francis X. Clooney, Theology after Vedānta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology (SUNY Press, 1993), 168.

[10] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2014), 42–43.