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Soteriological Convergences in the Hindu-Christian Dialogue

Conference Paper · May 2008

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4099.9763

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Stanley Sfekas
University of Indianapolis
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 Soteriological Convergences in the Hindu-Christian Dialogue
By
Dr. Stanley Sfekas

Professor of Philosophy
University of Indianapolis

Hinduism is a diverse system of thought with beliefs spanning

monotheism, polytheism, henotheism, monism and atheism. In this paper,
I shall strive to indicate certain structural affinities between the ideas of
Liberation from Bondage found in theistic Hinduism and Salvation in
History found in Christian thought. This entails an elucidation of the
meaning of Moksha, the Hindu counterpart of salvation.
One of the significant features of Hindu thought is a polarization of
two standpoints: the theistic and the absolutist. This polarity must be
recognized in order to understand Hinduism. Absolutist Hinduism is
characterized by its view of Liberation as liberation from Time, the
World and all that has been conditioned by time. Absolutist Hinduism
declares the world to be a Falsity. Theistic Hinduism, on the other hand,
has been shaped by the stimulus of the challenge of Buddhism and its
concern with the suffering of this world. Theistic Hinduism of all shades
stands defined by its readiness to affirm freedom, love, personality,
community, history and moral obligation, and to rediscover their spiritual
significance for man. Their positive role in the service of man’s freedom
from the thralldom of unfreedom can be duly appreciated once man is
liberated from the penumbra of illusion, or Maya. There is a spiritual
purpose to history: to reclaim man estranged from himself and from
others in consequence of his estrangement from the ground of his very
being. God’s cosmic function is to help us grow into full spiritual
realization through the historical process. History, as the sphere of man’s
conscious, deliberate and collective striving, is what makes possible the
realization of his values. This is not itself viewed as an accomplishment,
but as an aspect of cosmic history.
Two kinds of eschatologies—under the categories of ‘bondage’
and ‘liberation’—are used. There is a continuity between the two.
Bondage, or samsara, includes the conception of an ‘after-life’ which
remains on the same level as the present life and is grounded in moral
responsibility. The corollary to this after-life concept is karma. The
individual continues from life to life in an embodied existence, the
contents and forms of his life dependent on what the individual has
performed in former lives, yet affording some scope for growth and
gradual perfection by the performance of meritorious actions. This is the
sphere of dharma.

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 The second eschatology consists of the assumption of a
‘liberation’ (moksha), from bondage into unending embodied existence.
Negatively, it is the deconditioning of the individual who is otherwise
subject to multiple conditionings or bonds. Positively, it is unhindered
conformity to the gracious will of God, not in spite of the individual’s
freedom but in proper compliance with it, and a consequent experience of
blessedness in the wake of this fulfillment and freedom.
Cosmic action on the part of the divine will is conceived
imaginatively to consist of two phases: God’s self-veiling and God’s self-
revealing. In the initial phase, God veils himself even as he is witness to
the obstructing function of human ignorance. God is thus not only the
ground but the hidden meaning and motive of history. The endless
sequence of life and death, of wakefulness and sleep, of memory and
oblivion, of creation and destruction, is really the grand work of God’s
construction, a construction which exists in free complicity with man who
is obstructed in his vision and constricted in his action. History is not a
series of meaningless recurrences of the ‘natural’ world but a process
moving toward a fuller disclosure and realization of life’s essential
meaning. That this is so becomes apparent retrospectively in the
experience of moksha. This marks the second phase of god’s cosmic
function, the self-revelation of God coinciding with the termination of
bondage, which is of the nature of a revelation. The entire historical
sweep of man’s existence thus stands in relation to God as a preparation
for moksha. No special religious sphere need be set apart from the secular
world. Ordinary life as such takes on religious meaning. Dharma and
moksha are continuous, the continuity of course being perceptible only
from the perspective of the second.
It is also to be noted here that though bondage and liberation from
bondage are alike ‘caused’ for man from without, the decision, however,
rests with man and depends on his preparation. Full scope is thus
provided for man’s being motivated to exert himself individually and
collectively toward the common goal of liberation.
The essence of Hindu religiosity is often thought to be the
immanent conception of truth. Truth is something which cannot be
introduced from without, but is within the individual. The individual’s
task is accordingly to strive to appropriate the God within. This is what is
meant by the ‘infinite resignation” of the ascetic who renounces the
temporal for the sake of the eternal. Even the teacher cannot directly
teach but can only serve as a stimulus or occasion for the individual to
help himself. He can, to use Socrates’ words, stimulate but not beget.
Truth is immanent, but the individual is transcendentally
conditioned as a being primordially divided from the truth by an infinite
qualitative gulf. He neither has the truth, nor is he able to acquire it. The

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teacher must supply the condition as well as the truth. This particular
teacher can only be God. He acts in history, confronting man in an “I and
Thou” personal relationship and investing time with decisive
significance. His action gives the temporal eternal significance. Man, tied
to the temporal, is redeemed in time ‘at the appropriate moment’, a
moment which is filled with the significance of the eternal.
Moksha, then, implies the eternal conquest of the negative.
Bondage is a ‘privation’ of one’s will, a thwarting of compliance with
one’s own unrestrained will which fulfills itself by conforming to the
divine will. Liberation, therefore, is a privation of this privation, a
thwarting of the thwarting of will, or, positively, a free, unhampered
exercise of will as in “Thy will be done,” which is joy itself.
There is a basic polarity in the meaning of moksha between its
positive and negative aspects. Negatively, liberation is liberation from
pain, suffering and loss. From estrangement of every kind. From the
vulnerable character of human existence. But in its positive aspect, it is
liberation or freedom to do. The free man, theologically speaking, is one
who is unhindered in his freedom of volitional conformity with the
Divine. It is the freedom of attaining union with God. Bondage is a
thwarting of one’s will, and liberation is a thwarting of bondage. The
liberating agent merely arrests the arresting of the constraint or opposes
its opposing. This freedom from impediments permits the will to
experience bliss.
The second polarity of meaning that gives substance to the
theistic understanding of moksha is the polarity of the divine and the
human, of Divine Grace vs. human freedom. Acknowledging the one
without the other leads to a view of moksha either as a prize to be won
entirely by one’s efforts or as a gift freely given but not earned. This
conflict runs throughout Indian culture and is even more intensely present
in Christianity in the form of opposition between grace and self-reliance.
The Christian debates concerning the Pelagian heresy, or effectual vs.
prevenient grace, have their parallel in Hindu theology.
In theistic Hinduism, grace supplies the transcendental element,
but it does not present itself as irresistible. Rather, it is received as
awaited, aspired to, and craved for with the whole of the centered self.
There is, therefore, a polar relation between self-effort and grace that is a
key characteristic of moksha. It enables the avoidance of moral legalism
and graceless moralism, on the one hand, and amoral lawlessness or else
a supra-ethical mysticism, on the other hand. Much like the polarity St.
Paul confronted in the contrast between his letters to Galatians and
Corinthians. Moksha, therefore, understood from the perspective of the
striving seeker is not exclusively God’s work utterly apart from man’s

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 latent resources and endowment. These must be utilized, transformed and
transmuted. God accepts us, and we accept God.
Hindu spirituality places the Christian notion of God’s grace in the
context of a Divine initiative in the sphere of knowledge and being, an
initiative which does not contradict human freedom but rather assumes it
and builds upon it. Hindus will simply add that man’s real freedom to be
himself comes by the surrender of all claims to isolated independence and
self-willedness. It is precisely this that man contributes to his own
deliverance which he must work out by ‘fear and trembling’, as it were,
for the very reason that ‘deliverance’ belongs to God. We become aware
that this is so in so far as we make ourselves open to the power of God
which God makes available to us. Accepting God’s acceptance of us, love
answering love—is the profound theme of Hinduism. This is Liberation.
Overcoming of suffering, escaping the wheel of rebirth, all these are
circumstantial to it.
It is in this sense that liberation is revelation. The history of divine
self-disclosure and the history of man’s liberation from bondage are one
and the same history. The bestowal of revelatory grace is moksha just as
the veiling of it is bondage. Just as moksha may be conceived as life that
finally triumphs over what restricts it, death, it can also be viewed as a
divine kingdom triumphing over the demonic power structure that is the
world. Conceiving moksha in this way highlights an overarching
eschatological, teleological and soteriological convergence between the
two religions which should prove fruitful in the Hindu-Christian dialogue.

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