‘Why I am not a Christian’ – A Personal Statement

by O. Kandaswami Chetti (1915)

[Editor’s Note: A paper read by O. Kandaswami Chetti to the Madras Missionary Conference and published in the Madras Christian College Magazine in 1915, pp. 352ff.]

The fact that the secretary of this Conference, acting under instructions from the committee, has thought fit to ask me to say why I remain outside the Christian Church shows that he entertains certain ideas concerning my religious position, which he thinks justify his putting to me a question which he would not, I take it, think of addressing to any and every person whom he regards as outside the Christian Church. He probably thinks that I am what is called a Christian at heart. Now, what does this description mean? It means one who believes in Christ as the Saviour of men but would not show to the world that Christ is the God in whom he believes, to whom he prays. From whom he seeks enlightenment and strength in hours of doubt and darkness, of weakness and temptation, and whose will he would earnestly study and endeavour to carry out in his life. This is a description, however, which, as applied to me, I must confess I accept only partially. 

It is true that I believe in Christ as the Saviour of men. When I say this, I do not mean that He is one of many saviours whom God is said to have sent down into the world from time to time. I know only too well that one way in which it is sought to defeat and counteract Christian teaching in this country is not to contradict it – for that would ‘go against the grain,’ as it were, of the highest in every man – but to rob it of its distinctiveness and the potency that comes from a recognition of its distinctiveness and the potency that comes from a recognition of its distinctiveness, and to represent Christ as one of many avatars or manifestations or messengers of God, whom as such the Hindus should have no objection to receive, but any claim on whose behalf for a special or unique place in the economy of the universe should be resisted as being nothing short of treason against the country and its peculiar civilization. To my mind, the idea of ‘many’ spoils the peculiar beauty and efficacy of God becoming incarnate. Does not God reveal Himself every moment of our lives in nature, in His sustaining providence, in the great men whom He raises as leaders, in the accidents which determine the course of the future for individuals as well as for communities and in the great movements of history? Why, then, should He break through the screen behind which He acts and acts so continuously and so powerfully if it were not for the purpose of revealing Himself not to the intellect of man but to his wayward heart? And does not a repetition of the process bring it within the sphere of normal manifestations which, though appealing to the intellect, fail to convert the heart?

There is a vital difference between a king appearing in flesh and blood before his subjects and living and moving among them so that they feel the charm and force of his personality and get a glimpse of his loving heart and a king acting from behind a constitutional system of well-balanced forces. By the one fact of his incarnate appearance he removes misunderstanding by speaking with an authority which could not be commanded by any middle agency which could only half reveal and half-conceal the soul within. Moreover, he establishes between himself and his subjects a channel of communication and a method of interpretation which would have been impossible but for his having given his subjects the priceless advantage of a face to face contact and acquaintance. Such a king need not come more than once. Once come, he is come for ever. Every act of his, even from behind the veil of nature and of history, becomes fraught with new meaning and alive with new significance, all due to the fact of his personality once revealed acting in the mind and in the heart of his loyal subjects. Every fresh message proceeding thereafter from the great King-Emperor, whether in prosperity or in distress, in peace or in war, comes charged with the remembrance of His loving visit to His far-off subjects with all its beautiful incidents, and acts with an electric moral force which would have been impossible but for that majestic though informal visit. 

For my part I believe that there are in this universe two planes of manifestation – on one plane, the address is to the natural instincts and faculties of man, with all their tendencies for good and for evil; and on the other, the address is to the heart which would fain see its God and having once seen Him follow Him whithersoever He leadeth. It is on the latter plane that God has drawn near to man in Christ. 

The very God! Think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too-
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, ‘O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
And thou must love me who have died for thee!”
The madman saith He said so: it is strange.

(The last stanza of Robert Browning’s poem “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician” (https://www.poeticous.com/robert-browning/an-epistle-containing-the-strange-medical-experience-of-karshish-the-arab-physician).) 

It is strange, but it is true. To my mind, the divinity of Christ is, however, not a truth which can be communicated from man to man, nor established by arguments such as would satisfy a purely scientific mind. It comes as an answer to a soul which conscious of its weakness and thirsting after a righteousness which it does not find in itself nor anywhere else, sees it in One who, Himself sinless, suffered as no sinful man ever suffered, all because He was sinless while others were sinful. Once the desire for the vision of God comes to be established in the heart of a man – a desire not for a physical vision which would bring no satisfaction to a heart hungering for righteousness but a moral vision which alone could purify and elevate and energise – once this desire has been created in the heart of a man – a desire rendered all the keener by a spiritual apprehension of the life of Christ culminating as it did on the Cross – the truth dawns upon the mind and the soul, or rather flashes upon it like lightning as it did upon Peter to whom Christ said ‘Blessed art thou, Simon Bar Johah, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee but my Father which is in Heaven,’ the truth that the Creator, at all events the Increaser, of this desire is also its Fulfiller. I am sure that if instead of preaching the divinity of Christ – or rather His divine Personality – to those who would not recognize it, disinterested efforts were directed to the creating of a desire for a knowledge of a Holy God and a spiritual vision of Him which would purge the heart of man and strengthen it for all the works of love and the problems of social fellowship which wait upon man’s energies, men would naturally turn towards Christ as the Revealer of God and their Saviour from the thralldom of sin and their Reconciler with God. I speak from experience. This, at all events, is the road along which I have come to what measure I have attained of a consciousness of the interpretation in human terms of God’s inmost nature to be found in Christ. Holding this view, it has always seemed to me an invidious and a thankless and sometimes a mischievous task – I would even go further and say, it is very often a man-imposed and not like Jonah’s a God-inspired task – to go and tell people who believe they have seen God in one or another of the saints and religious heroes of history and mythology that they can see God in Christ and no other. If that is their belief and this is yours, your duty is plain – to deepen and enlarge their sense of need until they are enabled to realize that Christ and not another will answer their purpose and meet their case.

If such a spiritual hunger and thirst is created in man, and if before such a man you place the great religious leaders of the world and among them the Christ of history, I have no fear as to whom the choice will fall upon, the choice of the thirsty soul which panteth after the waters of the brook. A choice too which will be heartily hailed by the masters of the religious world themselves who, I fondly believe, will exclaim with the just and devout prophet Simeon: 

Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace according to Thy word:
For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation,
Which Thou hast prepared before the face of all people;
A light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel. (Luke 2:29-32.)

On the other hand, any iteration and re-iteration on your part of Christ’s claims on the human heart and on human homage with people in whom a desire for a moral comprehension of God’s nature has not been sufficiently awakened, may give you the satisfaction of feeling that you have done what you deem your duty but will not advance the cause of the Kingdom in the same way as would an intelligent adaptation in view of an existing situation of means to an end, which springs from a desire to co-operate with God in His own endeavours to get man to realize His loving purpose towards Him. 

I have said that the description of ‘a Christian at heart’ applies to me only partially, so far as I can understand myself: there is only One who knows me and you as we truly are. I repudiate that description in its negative significance of one who would not let the world know the faith that is in him. 

I am conscious that belief in Jesus as the Saviour of the world carries with it a duty and a privilege – namely, that of communicating it to our fellow-men; I do not speak of the command which Christ gave to His immediate disciples, a command of their obedience to which spread the truth over a great portion of the then known world and has preserved it for all ages and created a human vehicle through which the spirit of God works for the highest good of mankind. I am thinking rather of the dynamic force of the truth itself which urges men to go forth facing danger, disease and death in strange climes and among strange peoples. I am aware also that Christ is not a mere moral philosopher who has come to inculcate a system of principles of conduct. He came to found an ever-present society of which He is the head, and all who believe on Him are the members, receiving wisdom, guidance and inspiration through communion with Him. I realize the immense blessing to themselves and to the world which comes from fellow-believers congregating for the worship of their common master and encouraging one another in their attachment and obedience to their common Lord.

Nothing would give me a deeper satisfaction than to feel that I belong to His Body. I am not altogether sure that I remain outside the Christian Church. The wording of the subject is not mine: it is Mr Leith’s and his committee’s. The fact that I have consented to speak on it, does not, I believe, commit me to an admission that the statement implied in it is true. If finding you very much puzzled I undertake to answer your question, why I beat my mother last night, it does not mean I suppose an admission on my part that I beat my mother or even that she is alive (I lost my mother – I have a picture impressed on my mind of a short, smiling bustling lady – when I was seven or eight years old). All I can say is that I count myself a follower of Christ and would fall at His feet and like Mary Magdalene wash them with my tears. I would proclaim Him as my Saviour:

Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear,
It is not night, if Thou be near,
O may no earthborn cloud arise
To hide Thee from Thy servant’s eyes. 
(From the hymn “Sun of My Soul, Thou Saviour Dear” by John Keble.)

I am not sure He would repudiate me; you may, and some of you have done so; but I have no grievance against you. My feelings on the other hand are those of endless gratitude to those who have led me to His feet. But for them, humanly speaking, I should not have known Him. And how can I best return their services to me but by making known in my turn Him whom they and I acknowledge as ‘the True Light, the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world and the world was made by Him and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name: which were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.’ (John 1:9-14.) This is the central truth which I have learnt from my teachers in Madras Christian College and I feel the responsibility of communicating it to my countrymen at large. Communicating it not by mere words which, too often springing from no experience on the part of the speaker and unrelated to the experience of the world at large, convey no meaning such as thrills and throbs through a man’s being – words, words, words, which serve as shibboleths in the war of organized religions and serve rather to alienate than to enlighten. I feel the responsibility of communicating the truth of Christ crucified for you and me to live, of communicating it though the testimony, very often silent but none the less powerful or compelling on the account, of a life and a life-work inspired by it, but which when expressed in words at all is best expressed in words which spring naturally and spontaneously out of that life and that life work. 

I am not altogether sure – I speak with all the humility and shame arising from a consciousness of failure, however incomplete, and I speak without any claim of merit – I am not altogether sure that I have not endeavoured to communicate the truth, in however remote a form – for suggestions which are sometimes more potent and thought-compelling and hence more fruitful of spiritual results than bare bold statements, have got to be more or less remote – to those whom it has pleased God to bring me in to contact with. This is a matter at which one can only delicately and tremblingly hint; to do anything else would be to adopt the style of the Pharisee’s prayer, if prayer it could be called.

It is true that I have never felt any inward call such as I could recognise as divine in its inspiration to join the Christian Church in the narrow sense in which some evidently use the term. For I believe such a step as this can be justified on not less an authority than the constraining power of God such as compelled Abraham to leave his people and found a family in which all the nations of the world were blessed. I have no feeling but one of reverence towards those, and they are many, who shift their tents under orders from above. I look upon them as more blessed than myself. But I have nothing but contempt for those, and they also are many, who, yielding to very very human influences and to a call from unworthy quarters cut themselves off from those whom it is their duty to be in touch with, if for nothing else, at least in the interests of the Lord whom they profess to follow. Nor do I believe that while every believer is called upon to let his light shine before all the world, he is also called upon to join the Christian Church in the narrower sense of the term. There is nothing essentially sinful in Hindu society any more than there is anything essentially pure in Christian society – for that is what this Christian Church amounts to – so that one should hasten from the one to the other like the Pilgrim from the city of Destruction to the Heavenly City. The City of Destruction is unfortunately so overspread as to include within its borders tracts belonging to both civilizations, while the Heavenly City requires for its realization the working of the spirit of Christ in one society as well as in the other. The servants of Christ have work to do in both societies, and they should recognize their brotherhood and devise ways of strengthening and stimulating one another through their common Lord. If the testimony of a Christian believer in Hindu society for their Lord and Master is weak and timid, it is very often the fault of believers within the Christian Church who boycott him for his imputed cowardice so that in course of time he either gets ashamed of his Lord or is frightened into the Christian Church. Instead of trimming the lamp within the magic lantern of his soul so that a more and more steady and bright picture of the Lord may be cast upon the canvas of Hindu society, they either put out the lamp or remove the whole lantern for repair elsewhere. In this connection there is one point on which I should touch in justice to myself if not in fairness to you – What about the customs and social practices to which the position of a Christian believer in Hindu society makes him party? So long as the believer’s testimony for Christ is open, and as long as his attitude towards Hindu society in general is critical, and in particular is protestant and practically protestant towards all those social and religious practices which are inconsistent with the spirit of Christ, I would allow him to struggle his way to the light, with failure here and there perhaps but with progress and success on the whole. The spirit of Christ is against all appeasement with error and sin, I may assure you.* If you co-operate with that spirit, your Christian believer in Hindu Society will come out all right in the end. He may not join your Church but he will prepare the way for a movement from within Hindu society towards a Christ who shall fulfill India’s highest aspirations and impart that life of freedom for which she has been panting for ages. Is this not a consummation for which some of you who know what I am speaking about would give your lives?

*These two sentences have been edited to try to capture Chetti’s meaning. The original states: “So long as the believer’s testimony for Christ is open, and as long as his attitude towards Hindu society in general is critical and, towards social and religious practices inconsistent with the spirit of Christ in particular, is protestant and practically protestant, I would allow him to struggle his way to the light, with failure here and there perhaps but with progress and success on the whole. The spirit of Christ is a peace-destroying spirit, I may assure you.”