What is Hinduism?

Question 60013.

Hinduism and Christianity are often placed side by side as two religions, and the comparison misleads before it begins. Hinduism is not a single religion with a founder, a creed and a date. It is a family of traditions that grew over three thousand years in the Indian subcontinent.

That makes generalisation risky, and I want to be careful. What follows is a description most Hindus would recognise, followed by the places where the gospel says something genuinely different.

Hinduism and Christianity are not parallel systems

There is no founder, no single scripture and no central authority. The Vedas are the oldest texts, the Upanishads contain the philosophical development, and the Bhagavad Gita, part of the Mahabharata epic, is the most widely read.

Practice ranges from village devotion to a local deity to a highly abstract philosophy in which all distinction is finally illusion. Some traditions are firmly monotheistic in practice, worshipping Vishnu or Shiva as supreme.

So the first thing to say about Hinduism and Christianity is that the comparison is uneven. Christianity makes historical claims about a person. Hinduism offers a way of seeing reality within which a great many practices are accommodated.

Brahman, atman and the goal

The philosophical core, particularly in the Advaita tradition, holds that ultimate reality is Brahman, an impersonal absolute, and that the individual self, atman, is finally identical with it. The famous phrase is that thou art.

The human predicament is therefore ignorance rather than guilt. We do not know who we truly are, and we mistake the world of appearances for reality. Liberation, moksha, is release from that ignorance and from the cycle of rebirth.

Here Hinduism and Christianity diverge at the root. Scripture teaches that God is personal and distinct from His creation, and that you are a creature made in His image rather than a fragment of Him that has forgotten itself.

Karma and rebirth

Karma is the moral law of cause and effect, and samsara the cycle of birth, death and rebirth it drives. Your present circumstances reflect past actions, and your present actions shape what comes next.

There is real moral seriousness in this. Karma insists that actions matter and that the universe is not indifferent, which is more than secular materialism can offer.

But Scripture says it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement, Hebrews 9:27. One life, one death, one judgement, and no return trips. That single sentence reorganises everything.

Where karma leaves you

The pastoral weight of karma is heavy, and I have heard it from converts. There is no forgiveness in the system, only working off. Every debt must be paid by the one who incurred it, across however many lifetimes it takes.

There is also the difficulty of what karma does to compassion. If a beggar’s suffering is the working out of his own past, then intervening becomes complicated, and the caste structure that developed alongside these ideas has been defended on exactly that basis.

The gospel cuts the knot. God, being rich in mercy, made us alive together with Jesus, and by grace you have been saved, Ephesians 2:4. Somebody else paid, and the debt is cancelled rather than gradually reduced.

Many gods and one God

Popular Hinduism venerates an enormous number of deities, often explained by educated Hindus as many faces of one reality. Household shrines, festivals and temple worship are woven into ordinary life.

Christians should be careful how they speak here. Paul in Athens did not begin by mocking the altars, he began by observing that the Athenians were very religious and used one of their own altars as a bridge, Acts 17:23.

That said, the difference is not cosmetic. Hinduism and Christianity cannot both be right about whether the ultimate reality is personal, and the whole of biblical faith depends on a God who speaks, chooses, loves and can be addressed.

Avatars are not the incarnation

Hindu tradition speaks of avatars, appearances of a deity in the world, most famously Krishna. Some conclude from this that the incarnation is simply the Christian version of a familiar idea.

The differences run deep. Avatars are multiple and recurring, they are typically appearances rather than a permanent union with human nature, and they belong to mythic time rather than to datable history.

Jesus was born under a named emperor and executed under a named governor, took a real human nature, and keeps it for ever. The Word became flesh, John 1:14, using the word sarx, and He did not put it down again after the resurrection.

Hinduism and Christianity on time and history

Underneath the specific disagreements sits a difference about time. Much Hindu thought treats history as cyclical, vast ages repeating, with the individual life a small movement within an endless wheel.

Scripture presents history as a line with an author, running from creation through the fall to redemption and on to a new creation. Events happen once, they are real, and they carry eternal weight.

This is why Hinduism and Christianity produce such different attitudes to the material world and to human action. If history is going somewhere, then what you do this afternoon is part of a story rather than a ripple on a wheel.

Talking with a Hindu friend

Begin by asking rather than assuming, since the range of belief is so wide. A Gujarati shopkeeper, a Punjabi academic and a devotee of Krishna may hold quite different things under the same broad label.

Look for the points of contact. The longing for release, the sense that something is deeply wrong, the seriousness about moral consequence. All of these are real and the gospel answers them rather than dismissing them.

And be aware of the family cost. In many Hindu households, faith is bound up with identity and community, so following Jesus can mean losing a great deal. That deserves respect rather than impatience, and it should shape how the church receives a new believer.

Guarding against a soft syncretism

Ideas from this tradition have travelled west in diluted form, in the language of karma, energy, the divine within, and the self that must be realised. Many Christians absorb them without noticing.

The tell is the location of the problem. If your spirituality tells you that the answer lies within you, waiting to be uncovered, it has drifted from Scripture, which locates the problem within and the answer entirely outside.

Hinduism and Christianity part company most sharply on that single question, and it is worth checking which answer your own devotional habits assume.

Caste, dignity and the image of God

The caste system is not identical with Hindu belief and reformers within the tradition have opposed it, but it grew up alongside these ideas and was justified from them, since a birth into a particular station could be explained as the outworking of past lives.

Scripture gives no such account. Every human being is made in the image of God, and the New Testament church deliberately gathered slaves and owners at one table. Comparing Hinduism and Christianity on human dignity is not a matter of scoring points, since the church’s own record on caste in India has often been shamefully accommodating.

It is, however, one reason the gospel has spread among Dalit communities. A message that says God became poor, ate with outcasts and died for those the system had written off is not an abstraction to somebody whose grandparents were forbidden to draw water from the village well.

Yoga, meditation and Christian caution

Practices from this tradition have travelled west and been separated from their setting, and Christians ask what is permissible. I try to answer with categories rather than rules, since a blanket prohibition satisfies nobody and a blanket permission notices nothing.

Stretching is stretching. Breathing exercises are breathing exercises. Where the practice comes with instruction about realising the divine within, or about dissolving the self into a wider consciousness, the doctrine is being taught alongside the posture whether or not anyone names it.

Biblical meditation fills the mind rather than empties it. The psalmist meditates on God’s works and His word, and Paul tells the Philippians to think about whatever is true and honourable and just. The difference between Hinduism and Christianity at this point is not the stillness. It is what occupies the stillness. Test it by Philippians 4:8 and you will usually know where you are.

So, now what?

If you have Hindu neighbours, learn the name of one festival and ask about it this year. Interest costs nothing and opens more than argument does.

Then read Acts 17 and watch how Paul handles a culture full of gods. He is neither contemptuous nor accommodating, and the balance is worth studying.

And check your own thinking for the quiet drift. Do you speak of God as a personal Lord who speaks and acts, or has He slowly become a force you tune into? Which of those did you pray to this morning?

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Romans 1:21, ESV