Customer Reviews

Christ in India

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This is a gentle, beautifully written book that should be read by anyone who senses the importance of religious understanding for the future well-being of humanity. It contains many delightful passages in praise of India and her people and her religions. Yet most of the ideas it offers are by now out of date because its basic premise is what interreligious dialoguers call "inclusivism," or the attitude that while non-Christian religions do contain some basic elements of moral truth, they are all just preparations for the coming of Christianity, or Christianity will in a sense "complete" or "perfect" them. That was a quite respectable attitude when Griffiths was writing the articles of which this book is a compilation. He himself was later to arrive at an attitude of complementarity by which he saw each religion as necessary and complementary to the others because each religion is built up around a profound and unitary if culturally conditioned core of truth, and that truth is the love of God for his creation, the universe. Of course not all contemporary Christians share this vision, but not all Christians have had the spiritually enriching experience of living forty years in India among Hindus.

A review focusing more on the social aspects and possibilities of India and the world in light of his views on the similarities of religions. This is not as an entrancing spiritual work in the genre of The Cosmic Revelation or Returning To The Center.