Welcome to Liberty Insider.
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This is a program
designed to bring you up-to-date
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on religious liberty
developments around the world,
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not just in the United States,
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and to discuss them in
a way that can tell you
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the underlying dynamic behind
some of these developments.
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My name is Lincoln Steed,
Editor of Liberty Magazine.
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And my guest on
the program is...
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I was going to
call you professor,
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but let's just
call you Elder, pastor.
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Pastor will help, yeah.
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Kingsley Palmer,
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a religious liberty leader
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for the
Seventh-day Adventist Church
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and a good raconteur, to
throw in a little French.
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But let's not go to
France, let's go to India.
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Right.
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You've had an
interesting history
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in England,
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and living for many,
many years in the US,
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but for some time,
you were based in India,
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you taught in India.
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Yeah, we taught
in the '90s in India
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at what is now known
as Spicer University.
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It was Spicer
College at the time.
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And that came about
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because we were doing
graduate studies in England,
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and we had a
three-month project,
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my wife and I,
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and we wanted to do
it overseas in a place
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where we could
get an experience,
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another perception.
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And I'm sure you
got an experience.
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Oh, yes.
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It changed my life
when I visited India first
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as a young person.
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There's really
no country like it.
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I mean, every country
is unique in its own way,
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but India is just
overwhelming to every sense.
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It is.
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And the sense
that I'll start with
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is India is the
country of many gods,
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the different
Hindu deities, a myriad,
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and the whole theology
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and history that
lies behind that.
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And, of course,
there's many Muslims in India.
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There's just subtext
of all religious activity,
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and you can make a
pretty good argument
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that India was a
focus of human development
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in the world, not just,
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what's it, Olduvai
Gorge or whatever in Kenya,
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it was with Louis Leakey,
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but the history of
India goes way, way back.
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In fact,
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some people that
I think are pursuing
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a rather dead end
philosophical religious endeavor
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try to say that
Jesus was trained in India
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in the hidden years and
brought Indian philosophy.
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That's an interesting one.
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But I'm sure it
was overwhelming to you
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when you went to
India from every level,
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but on the religious level,
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how did you relate to that
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as someone from a
Christian background
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going to India?
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Well, again,
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we had an Indian community
in England before I left,
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so we had some
kind of connection
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to that community.
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And when we went there,
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I mean, what we saw was
just absolutely eye-opening
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in terms of being there
and seeing the diversity
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of belief systems
that were in place,
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and how they governed
how people lived separately.
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And each group was
passionately connected
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in defense of their
particular religious persuasion,
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so many...
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Thousands and hundreds of gods
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in the pantheon of Hinduism,
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and then you
had other religions,
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and, of course,
Islam, the Muslim community,
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it was eye-opening,
it was, I would say,
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transformative and
very, very educational,
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although I was teaching
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at a Christian, an
Adventist University.
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Over the years,
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I've mentioned
it on this program,
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but are you
aware of the writings
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of Stanley Jones?
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No, I'm not.
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He was a missionary,
nearly 100 years ago,
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Protestant missionary to India.
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I think he was from the US,
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but I always read it
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as though he had
an English background,
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but I believe he
came from the US.
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A book of his pretty
much changed my thinking
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if not my life.
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He has a book called The
Christ of the Indian Road.
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And he went to
India in several periods.
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And the first time he went,
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I think it was eight,
nine years or whatever,
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no success,
didn't baptize anybody,
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pretty much broke
himself on the system
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that you're talking about,
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the many gods
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and the totally
non-Western way of thinking
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on religious matters.
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And he had a sort of
mental breakdown even.
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And it was the
second time around
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when he was
conducting a discussion
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with some Brahmins.
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And one of them
said to him, he says,
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"I don't want the God
of your Western culture.
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I don't want your Western God."
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And so Jones thought quickly,
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and he described the
Jesus like a holy Man in India
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living among the common people,
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walking down the
street, connecting with them.
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And he says the Brahman thought,
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and he says,
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"I could learn to love the
Christ of the Indian road."
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And I'm sure...
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Yes, and it is true.
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You know, one of the things...
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of the many
things that I learned
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from my time there,
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you have to go to places
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wherever you go
with an open mind.
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You have to...
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In your
engagement, in your discussion,
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and we have a lot of students,
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some were former Hindus,
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Muslims, they
were transitioning.
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Of course, I taught in
the theology department,
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and it was
interesting to sit and listen
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to how they
understood the concept of deity,
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why they served who they served
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or what they served
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and try to introduce
the God of the Jesus,
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the God of the Indian road.
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And that in itself
was transformative for me
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and informative.
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The sad thing about it is,
and I see elements of it here,
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looking back,
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is that we've almost
gone down the same road,
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where you have the caste system,
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the separations of people,
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depending on the social strata,
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and it being
used to separate them,
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okay, and subjugate them.
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Yeah, 'cause the cast
system is more than separation,
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it's to box you in that
you can't move outside that.
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And to suppress.
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Yes.
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In many ways, in the West,
we have a type of caste system,
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we call it class.
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They call it caste.
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And while I was
there, they taught...
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I discovered that
they taught Christianity
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as a philosophy
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and not
necessarily as a religion.
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I had a problem with
that, coming from the West,
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but I had to
adjust my understanding
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and my teaching
methods to encompass
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the different viewpoints.
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And there was always something
to be learned from them
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even if I didn't totally agree.
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I argued that it
was not a philosophy.
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This is a way of life.
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This is equality,
this is fair treatment,
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this is anti-discrimination,
and that's what you get.
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So I taught that,
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and I would ask
some of my students,
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"why did you
become a Christian?"
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And the stories were
very, very informative.
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But I'm sure you came
up against it in India
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as in many other countries
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that there was a
recurring tendency
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of Christian missions
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to offer sort of a
better life here and now,
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and they were tangible positives
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to becoming a Christian.
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And often people
became a Christian
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for here and now reasons,
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and, you know, it was
called you're a rice Christian
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'cause you get more rice.
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Where it seems to me, in
India, they were correct.
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Not so much that
Christianity is a philosophy,
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but it's a
different philosophical view
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of the universe.
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Right.
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I don't think the cosmology
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of the Old Testament
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and Jesus represented
that in the New Testament,
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but that
cosmology is not the same
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or easily integrated
with the Indian view of,
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you know, the
religious Hindu view
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of everything,
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you know, reincarnation,
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and multiple
gods, and the battles.
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Well, it's true,
we have war in heaven.
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But still, it's
just another reality.
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And some of them, as you
move from state to state,
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was so completely different
from what the others did.
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And so you had all
these independent states,
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which were almost
like separate kingdoms
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or separate
governments pushed together,
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forced together.
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As you well know,
India is a continent,
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but it's not a...
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It's subcontinent, yes.
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Yes, it's true,
it's not a continent,
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but I mean, it's a
continental reality,
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the huge landmass there,
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but it's not one
people's, it became one because,
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you know, England
ruled that large area.
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Several hundred years.
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But it's a false
distinction, in some ways,
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but in India and
Pakistan and even Afghanistan,
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and at least,
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that is a
common sort of culture,
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but huge travel
differences, even religions.
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But what we did
discover while we were there
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with these different divergent
belief systems in place,
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and here we are, a
Christian university,
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Protestant, actually trying
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to bridge the
gap and the divide.
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And not only that,
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you had students
from other countries
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that were there,
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who were more in
line with what we teach
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in the West in
terms of religion.
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But in the state of Kerala,
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and it's reported
and it's understood
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that one of the
disciples namely Thomas
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went to Kerala and
introduced Christianity.
00:10:29.96\00:10:33.06
And Kerala, beautiful
place, had high literacy rate,
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upwards of 85%, and
that was several years ago,
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the standard of
living was better,
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and all those other things.
00:10:44.94\00:10:46.27
And it was a demonstration,
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I think, a really
powerful demonstration,
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economically,
socially or what have you
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of what happens
when Christianity,
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rightly applied,
can be transformational.
00:10:55.92\00:11:00.26
Moving around and having
an open mind as a teacher,
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because you go to teach,
but you also have to be taught.
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The sad thing about
it was when we got there,
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that we were not distinctively
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the stereotypical
Anglo missionaries.
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It was a bit of a shock.
00:11:21.18\00:11:23.14
That might have helpful.
00:11:23.18\00:11:24.55
It was very beneficial.
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It was more of a
blank slate, find yourself.
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Yes.
00:11:27.32\00:11:29.18
Yeah, and so we discovered that,
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from the standpoint
of our own experience,
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you know, having to experience
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the societal
inequities that we suffered,
00:11:36.96\00:11:41.23
we were able to
engage with the community.
00:11:41.26\00:11:45.87
We always had
children at the house
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every single weekend.
00:11:48.64\00:11:51.11
Muslims, we had
Eritreans, and we had Somalians,
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we had Christians,
we had all kinds of...
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And they came
together for the time
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that we were there,
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and we still have,
all these years later,
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remarkable and
memorable experiences.
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And the kids are in
touch with us, but yes.
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You were talking about
what happened in Kerala.
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And it is worth remembering
in the Christian context,
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Seventh-day
Adventist, correctly,
00:12:14.46\00:12:16.03
are committed to
proclaiming the gospel,
00:12:16.06\00:12:18.50
and we see an endpoint,
00:12:18.53\00:12:20.40
you know, the
gospel to all the world.
00:12:20.44\00:12:22.47
But it's worth remembering
00:12:22.50\00:12:23.84
that it went to all the world
pretty much in one generation.
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Thomas, and then we know in
the British Isles and so on.
00:12:27.18\00:12:31.31
So the end of all
things is not dependent
00:12:31.35\00:12:34.52
upon some checklist of countries
00:12:34.55\00:12:36.12
that we're
taking Christianity to.
00:12:36.15\00:12:38.09
It was taken very quickly.
00:12:38.12\00:12:39.75
And it did make a
difference in some countries.
00:12:39.79\00:12:42.69
But you're talking
about spiritual change.
00:12:42.72\00:12:46.23
Again, with Stanley Jones,
00:12:46.26\00:12:47.60
I'm reminded of
another one of his books.
00:12:47.63\00:12:51.50
He tells spending time
with Gandhi at his ashram,
00:12:51.53\00:12:55.54
and they
discussed spiritual matters
00:12:55.57\00:12:57.27
and Gandhi famously...
00:12:57.31\00:12:59.67
Many people know
the quote he said that,
00:12:59.71\00:13:01.14
you know, Christianity was fine,
00:13:01.18\00:13:02.51
but he didn't like Christians.
00:13:02.54\00:13:04.31
You know, they weren't
exemplifying the principle.
00:13:04.35\00:13:06.58
But when they
spoke about finding god,
00:13:06.61\00:13:08.65
which is a
spiritual quest everywhere,
00:13:08.68\00:13:11.25
whether you're Christian,
Muslim, Hindu, whatever,
00:13:11.29\00:13:13.52
people try to find god.
00:13:13.56\00:13:16.36
And Gandhi says,
"Yes, you can find god."
00:13:16.39\00:13:18.76
But he says,
"No, it may take ages,
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and no miracles
are to be expected."
00:13:21.83\00:13:24.73
And Jones said
00:13:24.77\00:13:26.27
that he went back
to his room that night,
00:13:26.30\00:13:27.87
got down, and prayed
fervently, and he says,
00:13:27.90\00:13:30.54
I don't know about what he says,
00:13:30.57\00:13:31.91
but he says, "All I
know is I need to find God,
00:13:31.94\00:13:34.24
and I need a
miracle in my life."
00:13:34.28\00:13:36.34
It's interesting
that you mentioned Gandhi
00:13:36.38\00:13:38.01
because Gandhi also said
00:13:38.05\00:13:41.68
when it comes to the way
00:13:41.72\00:13:43.55
that religion was
taught through missionaries,
00:13:43.59\00:13:48.16
and
intentionally, unintentionally,
00:13:48.19\00:13:50.23
one doesn't know.
00:13:50.26\00:13:51.59
But he said, "I like your Jesus,
00:13:51.63\00:13:54.03
it's the
application of your religion
00:13:54.06\00:13:55.46
that I don't like."
00:13:55.50\00:13:56.83
It's the variation of
the same quote, didn't...
00:13:56.87\00:13:58.70
Christians were not
exemplifying Christ.
00:13:58.73\00:14:00.30
Exactly, and we
did see some of that,
00:14:00.34\00:14:04.54
you know, in terms
of how they perceived us
00:14:04.57\00:14:08.91
coming from the west,
00:14:08.94\00:14:10.65
you know, they
considered their civilizations
00:14:10.68\00:14:14.12
being a lot longer developed
00:14:14.15\00:14:16.15
and been around
a whole lot longer,
00:14:16.18\00:14:18.49
and so there was
some suspicion even...
00:14:18.52\00:14:22.06
The charge is
always easily given.
00:14:22.09\00:14:25.69
I don't think we
should be as scared of it
00:14:25.73\00:14:29.93
as we sometimes are,
00:14:29.96\00:14:31.30
but there shouldn't
be a total dislocation
00:14:31.33\00:14:33.17
between the God you present
and the faith that you live.
00:14:33.20\00:14:38.14
But, of course, none of
us can be Christ on Earth.
00:14:38.17\00:14:41.51
We'll take a short break,
00:14:41.54\00:14:43.14
and we'll come back to
talk a little more of India
00:14:43.18\00:14:46.98
and other religious viewpoints
00:14:47.02\00:14:50.05
and how we can
function in a global world
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with religious diversity.
00:14:53.42\00:14:54.76