(Continued from part one)

This article is a continuation of a rebuttal to Balgrim Ragoonanan, a writer for the anti-Missionary website Crusade Watch which argues vehemently against Christian evangelistic efforts. In another one of his articles, entitled, The Insidiousness Of an Only Pathway to God,[1] he attempts to twist Jesus’ teachings in order to promote Hindu Pluralism. It would seem that the author believes that he can reconstruct Jesus in order to get around His clear teachings regarding salvation through Christ alone by reading into His statements things that He never taught:

Can it be true, according to the Bible, that God can only have one human form? The answer is obviously no, because Jesus said he will come again as a thief in the night, meaning that he will not be recognized in his new form, but only by his works they shall know him.

It is very clear that Jesus credits God with more than one human form and was fully aware of the principle of other forms of God. He was speaking about another one of his coming as God, consistent with the Hindu principle of the manifestation of God at other points in time for a special purpose at the time.

Now, the actual phrase “thief in the night” does not actually come from Jesus but from the words of the apostle Paul, who writes, “for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2). Nevertheless, Paul does accurately describe Jesus’ own eschatological predictions (Matthew 24:43 and Luke 12:39, cf. 2 Peter 3:10). But notice this: None of the passages just referenced speak about Jesus coming in secret. In fact, we see that exactly the opposite is the case:

As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.

Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.
(Matthew 24:36-44)

Both the apostles Peter and Paul expand upon this point in their own epistles:

While people are saying, “Peace and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.
(1 Thessalonians 5:3)

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.
(2 Peter 3:10)

Obviously, the eschatological occurrences just mentioned are not going to happen secretly; when a flood occurs, everybody will know about it. When Jesus and His apostles talk about the day coming like a thief in the night, they are referring to the suddenness of the occurrence, not the secrecy thereof.

So where is Jesus “very clear” about “credit[ing] God with more than one human form” and teaching “the principle of other forms of God” here? Nobody doing a plain reading of the New Testament would come to such absurd conclusions. However, this is what happens when “worldview confusion” develops. As D.A. Carson explains in Exegetical Fallacies:

The fallacy in this case lies in thinking that one’s own experience and interpretation of reality are the proper framework for interpreting the biblical text, whereas in fact there may be such deep differences once we probe beyond the superficial level that we find quite different categories are being used, and the law of the excluded middle apples.[2]

Unfortunately, writers who are influenced by Eastern philosophy are often guilty of this fallacy. One need only look at such New Age books as Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth or Deepak Chopra’s The Third Jesus to confirm that worldview confusion is very prevalent amongst those who are influenced by Hindu or Buddhist thought.[3]

The solution to this problem is quite simple: When reading the biblical text, understand the context of Jesus’ statements and try to know what kind of worldview He was espousing. The Bible proclaims a worldview that is independent of any system that has appeared outside of it, so it is totally illogical to read Hinduism into the scriptural text.

Jesus spoke to a particular group of people who needed assurance of the continuity of their beliefs in God and the continuation of their religion over time in the same vein of Hindu Avatars of God who come with a particular mission at a particular time. It can hardly be a reference to any finality of God and human society in any one point in time, because Jesus also said that many will be called, but few will be chosen.

The anticipation of the coming of Jesus as a thief in the night reminds the Hindu of Lord Krishna who was described as a stealer of butter. The significance of Krishna as a stealer of butter is that he stole the hearts of his devotees after making their hearts as soft as butter by their love for him. It stands to reason that Jesus is another form of an earlier form of God as Lord Krishna, the stealer of butter whom Hindus refer to as a Poorna (full by birth) Avatar of God. It did not require anyone to stop worshipping an earlier or different form of God, with the advent of a new Avatar of God, as Jesus.

Now, Mr. Ragoonanan is trying to grasp at straws by finding something that bears even the slightest resemblance to Christianity in the story of Krishna and using that to create a parallel between Krishna and Jesus. This ignores the fact that the universe as described by Jesus is nothing like the universe that is taught by Hinduism. For example, in contrast with the Hindu view that God one with the world, Jesus affirmed creation, thus making a distinction between the Creator and His creatures. As it says in the Gospel of John, “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3). If we are to take seriously what Jesus and His apostles taught, then we must conclude that God is in no way dependent upon or connected to His creation, and an event such as the incarnation is a unique moment in history that is totally unparalleled in the entire history of mankind.

There is no doubt, from reading the Bible, that God may take as many human forms, over time, as he wishes, and so can incarnate in any human form. This is a basic Hindu belief, and one that most Christians also believe, since they, too, believe that nothing is impossible with God. While Hindus speak about many forms of God, most Christians speak only about one form of God as Jesus, the only form of God of which they believe they know and about which they read and are told.

Mr. Ragoonanan obviously does not understand the Christian doctrine of God. He needs to define what he means by “form,” because once you take into account the doctrine of the Trinity, you would have take into account our belief that “Within the one Being that is God, there exists eternally three coequal and coeternal persons, namely, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”[4] We do not believe that the Father nor the Holy Spirit ever came in the flesh; only the Son. Also, the “Avatars of God” that he speaks of are mere exalted men. Do the Hindu scriptures ever attribute to them the kinds of titles that are attributed to Jesus? No, of course not. Listen to what the author of Hebrews taught regarding the Lord Jesus:

In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.
(Hebrews 1:1-5)

As John puts it, “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God [μονογενὴς θεὸς] who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (John 1:18, NASB). In recent years, it has been popular amongst liberal theologians and new age writers to downgrade the status of Jesus by placing Him on the same level as Krishna, Buddha, Muhammad, etc., but looking at the life of Jesus will reveal that He is totally unlike any other person who has ever lived in the history of this earth; even these so-called “Avatars of God” that Mr. Ragoonanan likes to tout. Jesus Christ is truly “God the One and Only,” as the New International Version translates the passage just mentioned.

Think about it: If Jesus was just one of several “Avatars of God,” then why did Jesus never inform His disciples about this? Surely, if our author is right, He must have taught this somewhere. We find no such teaching from Him, however. The reason is obvious: The Lord Jesus Christ did not teach the worldview that Mr. Ragoonanan believes in; Jesus was not a Hindu pantheist. Rather, He taught His disciples the worldview that is presented to us in the Bible, where God is Creator, man is finite and Jesus is the “one mediator between God and men” (1 Timothy 2:5). There is no other. Jesus never intended to teach that there were any others like Him. If there were any others like Him, then Jesus would be teaching us a lie, and an “Avatar of God” would not teach a lie, now would He?

It stands to reason that most Christians may be right about one form of God, since time only started for them with the story of Adam and Eve some six thousand or so years ago. Besides, Christianity started formally, as a new religion, some three hundred and twenty five years after the crucifixion of Jesus when the Council of Niceae was formed to launch Christianity as a new religion. One can know much more about other forms of God by reading ancient Hindu scriptures that describe multiple forms of God as Avatars of God much earlier than the advent of Jesus…

…Hindus worshipped God as one since ancient times. This is written in Hindu scriptures which are much earlier than the development of Christianity as a multi formed religion in the area of some forty thousand of them and still growing. We are told that most Christians know God only in one form, and are prepared to reject the existence of any other forms of God prior to Christianity. Their only excuse for their lack of knowledge about God in form much earlier than that of Jesus is to gain support for describing other forms of God as false Gods which drive the power of their aggression onto other religions.

And so, it gives most Christians some cover for persecuting the followers and believers of other forms of God. It is by far the most overt aggression and destruction ever perpetrated on mankind, only because they fail to understand the truth of multiple forms of God since ancient times. Like the British, most Christians would rather distort and destroy what they do not understand by spreading their only one-way religion for salvation that they do not know is a built-in form of self determination in all the forces of nature.

Actually, what Nicaea accomplished was to provide an orthodox definition of the deity of Christ against the Arian heresy (which was a contemporary controversy at the time). Any student of church history and/or of the early church fathers will know that Christianity and its core doctrines were already in place at the close of the apostolic age (circa 98-100 A.D.). Also, to think that the Hindu scriptures carry more weight because they precede the Bible is to commit the fallacy known as the appeal to antiquity, that is, to “assume that older ideas are better, that the fact that an idea has been around for a while implies that it is true. This, of course, is not the case; old ideas can be bad ideas, and new ideas can be good ideas. We therefore can’t learn anything about the truth of an idea just by considering how old it is.”[5]

That being said, the New Testament writings were written within twenty to sixty years of Jesus’ death and resurrection. This means that they contain eyewitness accounts of what Jesus actually said and did. Contrasted with this, what is the time gap between the events described in the Hindu scriptures and the actual enscripturation? Is there not a millennium and a half of a difference between when Krishna walked upon this earth and when the earliest portions of the Hindu scriptures were written?[6] Do Hindus even care about the historicity (or lack thereof) of the characters and events written in their own scriptures, or do they think of the men described therein and the events that happened to them as occupying some mystical “other” that is divorced from the real world that we inhabit?

Of course, in the end, none of what Mr. Ragoonanan claims here actually disproves the exclusivity claims of Christ. All the emotionally-driven rhetoric in the world will not change the simple fact that what Jesus taught is what Jesus taught:

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.
(John 14:6-7)

End Notes

  1. Ragoonanan, Balgrim. The Insidiousness Of an Only Pathway to God. Crusade Watch. <http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1085&Itemid=128>.
  2. Carson, Donald Arthur. Exegetical Fallacies, Second Edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1996. p. 103.
  3. In the book just cited, D.A. Carson cites James Sire and provides a very interesting example of how worldview confusion causes Hindu writers to completely miss the point when reading the biblical text: “Swami Satchitandanda interprets ‘Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God’ (Matt. 5:8, KJV) to mean ‘Blessed are those who purify their consciences, for they shall see themselves as God.’ Quite apart from the unjustified intruduction of reflexives, Satchitananda has imported his pantheism into the text, so that not only is the God of the Bible to that extent depersonalized, but also the ontological distinction between God and man is obliterated” (Ibid).
  4. White, James R. The Forgotten Trinity: Recovering the Heart of Christian Belief. Minneapolis, MI: Bethany House Publishers, 1998. p. 26.
  5. Appeal to Antiquity/Tradition. Logical Fallacies. <http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/appeals/appeal-to-tradition>.
  6. Krishna allegedly lived during the end of fourth millennium B.C., whereas the earliest portions of the Hindu scriptures were written during the second half of the second millennium B.C. This means that the time gap between when Krishna walked this earth and when the earliest sources for his life were written is at least 1,700 years!  It should thus surprise nobody that the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita should contain what are obviously legendary accretions. What a world of difference between them and the New Testament writings, which were written within the lifetime of Jesus’ own apostles.

(Continue to part three)

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