SADHU SUNDER SINGH: AN INDIAN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN

·         Robin Boyd calls him the ‘most famous Indian Christian who has yet lived’. As part of his missionary journey’s he visited several places like Afghanistan, America, Australia, Britain, Burma, Tibet, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and several other European countries.

·         Contemporary to many Indian Christian Theologians, he stood outside the purview of all theological and literary development

·         Though not a technical theologian, but all his writings and recorded sayings are full of Indian theology. Robin Boyd calls him as one of the greatest of all the other Indian Christian Theologians.

·         Robin Boyd says, “Though he had little formal theological training he was steeped in the teaching of the New Testament and had an instinctive, or perhaps rather inspired, understanding of the nature of theological thinking.

His life

·         Sadhu Sundar Singh was born to a Sikh couple in Patiala in the year 1889.

·         His mother was a woman of outstanding devotion and love and she trained her son in the bhakti-tradition of Hinduism as well as of the Sikh religion.

·         As a small boy SSS learnt Bhagavadgita by heart.

·         Acknowledging the spiritual contribution of his mother in his life, he firmly asserted without a doubt that her mother, though she did not become a professing Christian joining the institutionalized church, would certainly find her place in heaven.

·         He came in contact with Christianity first in the mission school in which he studied.

·         He fiercely rejected it and went to the extent of burning a copy of the Bible, an act for which even his strict father also rebuked him.

·         Despite all his religious inclinations i.e. the study of Bhagvad Gita, the Upanishads and even the Koran, and his practice of Yoga, his heart remained restless.

·         At the age of 15 he resolved one night to kill himself by lying down on the railway line.

·         However, according to his report, in the early hours of 18^th December, 1904 to his complete surprise, he had a vision of Jesus, radiant in his beauty and commanding him to obedience.

·         Immediately there was great peace in his mind, a peace which made him constantly assert that he was living in heaven upon the earth.

·         In September, 1905 SSS was baptized and just according to the expectation of his mother he became a Sadhu at the age of sixteen. He donned the saffron dress to become a Christian Sadhu.

·         During his early wanderings he met an American missionary, S. E. Stokes, a follower of  St. Francis. He told him a great deal of St. Francis.

·         On the advice of his missionary friends he tried a theological seminary by entering into St. John’s Divinity College at Lahore. But soon he developed distaste for academic theology. He left the seminary with a preacher’s license, which he later returned because he felt to preach in churches other than the Anglican Church also.

·         He wandered all over India and also went up to Tibet carrying with him just a New Testament.

·         He reported of frequent mystical experiences of communion with Christ. He speak of mysterious happening, such as his deliverance without visible human agency from a dry well full of dead bodies into which he was thrown in Tibet, and his meetings with the aged Christian rishi of the Himalayas, who was reputed to be three hundred years old. Such fantastic claims were not very easily accepted by the people and they called him an imposter, but according to Robin Boyd, “it is difficult to study his writings and his life without coming to the conclusion that he was genuine with the true simplicity of the children of God.”

·         In the year 1920, he visited many European countries including America and unlike K. C. Sen and Vivekananda, who proclaimed what India, through the Vedanta, had to offer to the West, he spoke from a profound religious experience in a thoroughly Indian way, and whose message was yet that of the self-revelation of God in Christ.

·         He soon became a world-famous figure, and thousands came to hear him speak in every country he visited. His religious discourses caused great spiritual renewal and awakening leading to the conversion of many and the deepening of their faith.

·         His impressive appearance, his romantic story, and the simplicity and vividness with which he spoke attracted ordinary people, while theologians were eager to hear an Indian interpretation of the Gospel from one whose spiritual and even psychic experiences seemed so unusual and interesting.

·         After his return to India, his resumed his sojourn all over India and in the process came out with a lot of literary activity, the first of which, ‘At the Master’s Feet’, was published in 1922.

·         Tibet held for him a fascination because it was closed for the gospel and also because many of his missionary friends who ventured into this Buddhist stronghold died as Christian martyrs. The death of a martyr held a special attraction for him too.

·         In 1929, in failing health, he decided to go to Tibet, a journey from which he never returned. In the words of Robin Boyd, “At the age of thirty-nine Sundar Singh had followed his Master to the end.”

His Theology

·         The basis of SSS’s theology is his direct experience of Jesus Christ. It is the experience of the risen Christ and constant communion with Christ through prayer.

·         Unlike Hindu bhaktas, SSS does not believe in just a process of self-immersion in the Absolute but rather a continuous dialogue, a ‘practice of the presence of Christ’, in which the distinction between himself and the personal Christ remains clear.

·         For him, the aim of prayer is union with God, but this must be the union of two free personalities rather than of absorption in the divine.

·         According to him, “If we want to rejoice in God we must be different from Him; the tongue could taste no sweetness if there were no difference between it and that which it tastes.”

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