John Thatamanil seeks to bridge the gap between Christianity and other religious traditions

by Joan Brasher
photo by John Russell

If Assistant Professor of Theology John Thatamanil had experienced a typical childhood in his native India, his life’s work likely would have taken a much different route.

In a country where the Hindu tradition is commonly practiced, Thatamanil was reared by a devout Christian family. In fact, one of his grandfathers worked for the Salvation Army, and the other was an evangelist who traveled across South India converting Hindus.

When his family immigrated to the United States, 8-and-a-half-year-old Thatamanil quickly assimilated to American culture. But over time, he felt a sense of disconnection and began to question who he really was.

“Growing up as a Christian, it was pretty easy to be acclimated here, but it also meant that I wasn’t able to find out in any deep way what it means to be distinctively Indian,” he said. “I think that’s what made me interested in the religious traditions of India.”

Thatamanil earned a bachelor of arts in philosophy and religion at Washington University in St. Louis, and a master of divinity and Ph.D. in religious and theological studies at Boston University.

“In college I was pretty evangelical,” he said. “My closest friend was a Hindu and he told me years later that I was pretty judgmental. But at some point, I moved into a deeper relationship to God and to my own faith and developed a love for other religious traditions.”

During his graduate studies, Thatamanil learned Sanskrit and embarked on a journey. He returned to India to study the Hindu scriptures with a guru in the Advaita Vedanta tradition. As a Christian American, he entered the process with some hesitance.

“I told the guru I was just interested in studying with him academically, and that he wasn’t my ‘guru’ in the sense that Hindus use the word. But as we worked together, it was a transformative experience. I began to see how the Hindu scriptures were themselves life-giving and healing to me. Ultimately I found that my attitude toward my guru became more devotional than I had thought possible.”

This experience opened his eyes to the importance of breaking down the barriers that often exist between Christians and people of other traditions.

“The call of the biblical witness is to love the other in their otherness,” he said. “We must begin by practicing hospitality and by not bearing false witness. The deepest goal should be a kind of mutual transformation where we learn what the other sees about the nature of God that we don’t clearly see in our own tradition.”

His current work, through his books and teaching, is focused on encouraging people of different faiths to come into a place of communion so they can learn from each other and deepen their own faith practice in the process.

Thatamanil’s first book, The Immanent Divine: God, Creation and the Human Predicament: An East-West Conversation (Fortress Press, 2006), was a text for his Hindu-Christian dialogue class, co-taught with engineering professor Sankaran Mahadevan last semester. In past years, he also has co-taught a class on Buddhist-Christian dialogue.

Thatamanil is a regular at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Chapel on campus with his wife, Lyn Fulton-John, who is director of the Office of Honors Scholarships at Vanderbilt, and their daughter, Katie. Thatamanil recently taught a Sunday school series titled “Praying and Believing: How To Get Through the Creed Without Your Fingers Crossed.” He also attends a Buddhist meditation group as often as he can (“It calms me and makes me more centered,” he said), and he frequents Indian celebrations on campus such as Diwali, the annual Hindu Festival of Lights.

Thatamanil’s belief is that once people of different faiths get past preconceived notions, fears and judgments, they find they share more similarities than they previously imagined.

“All traditions understand that human beings are caught up in a ‘predicament’ or ‘bind,’” he said. “How that bind is understood varies across traditions. Sin is the Christian way of understanding what the problem is. If you ask, ‘What do Christians really mean by sin, and what do Buddhists mean by suffering?’ you can find lots of overlap. Very often, Buddhists, Christians and Hindus have more in common than they might expect.”

Religious Diversity After Religion: Rethinking Theologies of Religious Pluralism is the working title for Thatamanil’s second book, which is slated for publication in late 2010.

“My research and teaching require lots of work with Christians and lots of engagement with other religious traditions,” he said. “The reason we have to do that work, as I tell my students, is because people from other religious traditions are no longer just on the other side of the planet, but often on the other side of the bed. They are our husbands and wives. They are our children and our siblings. Because we are in these intimate relationships, it becomes impossible to say these people are lacking the presence of God. In fact, it is often our neighbors in other traditions who seem to model a life of faith with greater integrity, passion and sincerity than we ourselves do.”

Thatamanil is cognizant that embracing people of divergent faiths isn’t always the easiest thing to do.

“Sometimes we as Christians use a Bible verse to decide who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ of heaven. It’s very easy from the comfortable, materialistic life that we lead to say, ‘I believe in Jesus, so I’m set.’ But that doesn’t mean we’re actually following the way to which we are called – the way of discipleship, the way of the Christ. We often replace the crucified Christ with the crusading Christ.”

Thatamanil does not advocate the watering down of one’s beliefs, nor does he believe religions are interchangeable. “I’m not saying all traditions are the same. In fact it’s the differences that makes comparison interesting,” he said.

“But exclusivism need no longer be a part of our life insofar as it damages our capacity to live like the Christ – to live loving, self-sacrificial lives.”

To listen to an interview with John Thatamanil, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/news/audio.

Posted 05/01/09