Christianity in India

From Beginnings to the Present

robert eric frykenberg

OXFORD

university press

OXFORD

university press

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp

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© Robert Eric Frykenberg 2008

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First published 2008

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Frykenberg, Robert Eric.

History of Christianity in India / Robert Eric Frykenberg.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-19-826377-7 (alk. paper)

1. India—Church history. I. Title.

BR 1155.F79 2008

275.4—dc22 2008002511

ISBN 978-0-19-826377-7

OXFORD HISTORY OF

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

Edited by

Henry and Owen Chadwick

PREFACE

The religion of Christ is one of the most dynamic factors in the world. It always bursts its boundaries, however strong and rigid those boundaries may be. It refuses to be confined to any one race, class, or caste. It seeks to embrace all.

(Vedanayagam Azariah, Bishop of Dornakal, 1932)

Christianity has always been, in its inherent nature and especially in its expansive phases, transcultural and migratory. Its bent, as manifest in its historical and universal claims, has been to change with each wave of expansion. From its initial cultural matrix in Jerusalem, each successive set of interactions—with cultures of the Graeco-Roman (Mediterranean) world, with Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic Europe, as also with cultures of Persia, India, and China—has led to alterations within Christian culture itself. Modern interactions between Western and non-Western forms of Christianity have brought further mutations: with distinctive ...