INTRODUCTION

The church, the community of the disciples of Jesus Christ, is continuity in discontinuity. It is the continuation of the mission initiated by Jesus Christ, but a discontinuity in so far as this mission implies the fulfilment of every culture, as Jesus came to fulfil and not to destroy. The history of the Indian church, heir to a ‘tradition that sought God with a relentless search’, is a manifestation of the church's hot and cold relationship to the religious and cultural traditions of India. Whereas the earliest community, the St Thomas Christians, considered each religion salvific to the followers of the religion, the age of Inquisition would tolerate nothing of it.

Today Christians in India along with the rest of the Asian Christians are becoming increasingly aware of the Asian roots of Christianity. Though they are largely compromised to a Christianity that has come to Asia in its western form, there is increasing talk of the need to rediscover the Asianness of the gospel teachings and thought patterns.

PART 1 HISTORICAL CONTEXT

A context of pluralism

Traditional Asian thought, while sharing western abstract thinking, is very much context-dominated. The abstraction is not free from the context in which it is made, the reality of the experience. As the Japanese thinker Hajime Nakamura writes: