Recently to feed my mind and soul, I've been watching the occasional documentary on Youtube. Today Raphael Treza's film Cobra Gypsies struck me as deeply profound and beautiful. The film is his record of three months spent among some nomadic tribes of Rajasthan in northwestern India. Some of the footage of ceremonies, eating rituals, dances, funerals, etc. have apparently never before been seen by modern western eyes.
Though I could write much more about the documentary itself, that isn't my reason for writing today. The burning question in my own mind while confronting such a foreign culture through film is this: how are these nomadic peoples so happy and content with their lives? Though they have very little in the way of material possessions and by western standards live an extremely harsh life in which they regularly confront death, disease, snakebites, and other natural disasters, yet they are always smiling and dancing and celebrating. What is it that provides them with this deep peace? Of course, I don't want to fall into the old trap of lionizing the "noble savage" or of elevating them to a mythical status, yet they do seem from the film to embody a deep, spiritual peace which is largely absent from my own life and the lives of many other busybody, lonely, technology-addicted North Americans that I know.
At one point in the film they show a man who, according to the translator, has never before showered or bathed. He's an elderly man who looks to be in his sixties, yet the people claim not to be bothered by his smell since they understand what he is doing to be an act of worship to God. The filmmaker then points out that "radical forms of worship" are deeply respected by many nomadic groups like the Kalbeliyas. Some Christians will insist that such an ascetic act of piety to a false god is mere paganism and darkness. Yet others like C.S. Lewis often seem to suspect that the sincere worship of another god, albeit a god with the "wrong" name, is in fact worship of the One True God. Perhaps the most classic example of this in Lewis' thinking can be found in his Chronicles of Narnia in which the worship of the false god Tash turns out to be an offering acceptable to Aslan.
For years I have wrestled with questions surrounding soteriological exclusivism, inclusivism, or pluralism. Raised within the exclusivist tradition, I began rebelling against it intellectually at the age of seventeen when it became impossible for me to worship a God who would necessarily condemn huge numbers of people to eternal hell simply because they were born in the wrong time or place. At Asbury I confronted the work of my friend Jerry Walls and, through him, his mentor Alvin Plantinga who seem to argue for a "generous" inclusivism in which Christ is understood as the only way to salvation, but this is to be held in distinction from the "knowledge of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth." Also influential in my thinking during those days was Gerald McDermott's Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? (recommended to me by Rick McPeak at Greenville). At Asbury I dove deep into the thinking of John Hick, a representative of the pluralist perspective on world religions, through his book God Has Many Names. Of course all such questions are deeply complicated within Christian theology by their ties to larger doctrines of Christology, divine providence, and so on. They are explored carefully in many wonderful books and I cannot rehash that huge debate here.
However, all these questions are in my mind this morning as I learn about the "gypsy" peoples of northern India. Ironically, the whole reason I'm watching such a documentary is because I have befriended a brilliant Christian man from Ahmedabad, India (the fifth largest city in India with a population of six million people, a city which I had never even heard of being the ethnocentric American that I am). My friend was raised in a culturally Christian home, which makes sense since Christianity has existed in India for basically as long as it has anywhere else in the world. He immigrated to the United States in the hopes of finding a new life and helping his family back home, which he has done quite successfully. However, in a very dark chapter of his life Richard nearly rejected the faith of his parents until he decided that he should, in his words, "investigate what it is that I might be rejecting." Through an intellectual quest that took him through the works of Tim Keller, William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, G. K. Chesterton, Ravi Zacharias, and especially the 16th century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, he came to a robust understanding of his own faith and through many long, long conversations I sometimes think that this odd Indian stranger is going to save my own faith too.
But here's the point: God is everywhere. The Christian Church has no monopoly on God. The Holy Spirit blows where it pleases and, though we may try to bottle it up, we simply cannot contain God in any meaningful sense. Our metaphors are too weak, our language too frail. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once pointed out, if we are not able linguistically to describe the aroma of coffee, what on earth makes us think that we could ever describe with words the ineffable nature of the Holy God? It's a fair question and one that perhaps ought to keep us a bit more intellectually humble than most of us in the Christian academy tend to be.
Though I could write much more about the documentary itself, that isn't my reason for writing today. The burning question in my own mind while confronting such a foreign culture through film is this: how are these nomadic peoples so happy and content with their lives? Though they have very little in the way of material possessions and by western standards live an extremely harsh life in which they regularly confront death, disease, snakebites, and other natural disasters, yet they are always smiling and dancing and celebrating. What is it that provides them with this deep peace? Of course, I don't want to fall into the old trap of lionizing the "noble savage" or of elevating them to a mythical status, yet they do seem from the film to embody a deep, spiritual peace which is largely absent from my own life and the lives of many other busybody, lonely, technology-addicted North Americans that I know.
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| Kalbelia Snake Charmers |
At one point in the film they show a man who, according to the translator, has never before showered or bathed. He's an elderly man who looks to be in his sixties, yet the people claim not to be bothered by his smell since they understand what he is doing to be an act of worship to God. The filmmaker then points out that "radical forms of worship" are deeply respected by many nomadic groups like the Kalbeliyas. Some Christians will insist that such an ascetic act of piety to a false god is mere paganism and darkness. Yet others like C.S. Lewis often seem to suspect that the sincere worship of another god, albeit a god with the "wrong" name, is in fact worship of the One True God. Perhaps the most classic example of this in Lewis' thinking can be found in his Chronicles of Narnia in which the worship of the false god Tash turns out to be an offering acceptable to Aslan.
For years I have wrestled with questions surrounding soteriological exclusivism, inclusivism, or pluralism. Raised within the exclusivist tradition, I began rebelling against it intellectually at the age of seventeen when it became impossible for me to worship a God who would necessarily condemn huge numbers of people to eternal hell simply because they were born in the wrong time or place. At Asbury I confronted the work of my friend Jerry Walls and, through him, his mentor Alvin Plantinga who seem to argue for a "generous" inclusivism in which Christ is understood as the only way to salvation, but this is to be held in distinction from the "knowledge of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth." Also influential in my thinking during those days was Gerald McDermott's Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? (recommended to me by Rick McPeak at Greenville). At Asbury I dove deep into the thinking of John Hick, a representative of the pluralist perspective on world religions, through his book God Has Many Names. Of course all such questions are deeply complicated within Christian theology by their ties to larger doctrines of Christology, divine providence, and so on. They are explored carefully in many wonderful books and I cannot rehash that huge debate here.
However, all these questions are in my mind this morning as I learn about the "gypsy" peoples of northern India. Ironically, the whole reason I'm watching such a documentary is because I have befriended a brilliant Christian man from Ahmedabad, India (the fifth largest city in India with a population of six million people, a city which I had never even heard of being the ethnocentric American that I am). My friend was raised in a culturally Christian home, which makes sense since Christianity has existed in India for basically as long as it has anywhere else in the world. He immigrated to the United States in the hopes of finding a new life and helping his family back home, which he has done quite successfully. However, in a very dark chapter of his life Richard nearly rejected the faith of his parents until he decided that he should, in his words, "investigate what it is that I might be rejecting." Through an intellectual quest that took him through the works of Tim Keller, William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, G. K. Chesterton, Ravi Zacharias, and especially the 16th century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, he came to a robust understanding of his own faith and through many long, long conversations I sometimes think that this odd Indian stranger is going to save my own faith too.
But here's the point: God is everywhere. The Christian Church has no monopoly on God. The Holy Spirit blows where it pleases and, though we may try to bottle it up, we simply cannot contain God in any meaningful sense. Our metaphors are too weak, our language too frail. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once pointed out, if we are not able linguistically to describe the aroma of coffee, what on earth makes us think that we could ever describe with words the ineffable nature of the Holy God? It's a fair question and one that perhaps ought to keep us a bit more intellectually humble than most of us in the Christian academy tend to be.
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