Hendrik Kraemer wrote The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World back in 1938 at the request of the International Missionary Council. Much of what Kraemer has to say about the crisis of religion in the East still applies.
The Eastern crisis of religion is caused by external factors, primarily the penetration by the West, whereas the Western crisis results from inner development (20). Eastern religions, excepting Islam, have always held to the relativity of all truth. So the Japanese and Chinese had no difficulty absorbing Buddhism, despite its Indian origin. But the meeting of East and West is of earthquake proportions. For the West, as experienced by the East, is particularly characterized by a “foreignness” we cannot expect time to erase (18).
The seismological centre for this earthquake in the East is the machine, “the symbol of the inventive and organizing capacity of the West” (18). The response and reaction of the agricultural East to the West, with its technological superiority, has resulted in both destruction and reconstruction. So the East too is a world in transition.
The 19th century Eastern response and reaction to the West, with the exception of Japan, was essentially passive, since the “West was the determining and directive force” (20). But in the 20th century “the victims have become actors” (20). But this resolute action involves a resolve to energetically retain its own identity. There is no longer a Western hegemony. Now the East is as influential as the West in shaping the course of world history. Kraemer rightly perceived that the latent dynamics of Islam, Buddhism and “the great Eastern idealistic systems” may become world-factors (21).
The concept of nation as the integrating idea is a new phenomenon for the East, arising from its active response to the impact of the West. But national reconstruction involves “a radical break with the past and an equally radical re-evaluation of the value and the position of all classes and conditions of men” (22). Nationalism, profoundly influenced by modern incentives and modern ends, leads to the burning problem of secularism, with the traditional treatment of corporate forms of life as sacred orders now threatened by the nationalistic subordination of the human order to increasingly secular standards. So “the old sacred bonds of family and clan, with which are bound up so many moral and religious values, are becoming weaker and weaker”, though it is not individualism that takes their place but what might be called atomism (22-23).
While Christianity in the West, as the religion of revelation, experiences the relativist spirit as “a revolutionary and explosive influence”, the East, with the sole exception of Islam, has always accommodated the relativity of all truth. In the East only a few religious devotees reach or merge with the highest gnosis which constitutes ineffable Ultimate Reality and Absolute Truth. Yet one’s conformity to religious customs and practices is an essential precondition to one’s religious relativism and skepticism being accepted (23).
The East also welcomes modern forms of rationalism and humanism:
The deadening grip of religion, with its systems of degrading and life-stifling beliefs, customs and institutions in the lives of millions of human beings, is such a dreadful reality that the philosophy of progress, emancipation and self-reliance sounds like a gospel of liberation; and in the existing circumstances it actually is so (23).
Yet for many in the East relativism has become a much more painful problem because “certainty about Truth is man’s prime life-necessity” and the influences outlined above all conspire to expose this. Kraemer fully expected that this crisis of the East would result in “a desperate surrender to false absolutes”, since “the traditional attitude of aristocratic relativism” cannot cope with this crisis (24).
Posted June 5, 2009
Upon clicking 'Buy now' you will be redirected to paypal.com where you can securely and quickly complete your purchase with a few clicks.
Immediately after payment at PayPal you will be redirected to a download page which
provides you instant access to your purchase.
