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Book Review
Asia
D. Dennis Hudson. Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 17061835. (Studies in the History of Christian Missions.) Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans. 2000. Pp. xi, 220. $45.00.
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Mission history is becoming increasingly the story of cultural encounter, and D. Dennis Hudson's theme is the deeply intriguing account of how converts from a South Indian Hindu elite, the Vellalas, appropriated Christianity and a growing hostile response by Protestant missionaries to their eclecticism. It is a territory that Hudson has made his own, and mission historians are already deeply in his debt. |
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The story begins with the arrival of two Saxon Halle missionaries, Ziegenbalg and Pluetschau, in 1713 in the Danish settlement of Tranquebar. Theirs was a pietism based on the writings of Philip Spener (16351705) and one to be preached unadulterated. Ziegenbalg was a strange mix of intolerance: he smashed several heads of those "foppish Gods" of an Indian temple and refused to take off his shoes when visiting a nearby Sufi master, yet could in a very eighteenth-century way write an account of this religious community, Genealogy of the South Indian Gods (not published in English until 1869). There follows an account of the outreach of this evangelicalism in Tamilnadu. This is a multifaceted story of cultural transitions, from Hindu to Christian, from Catholic to Protestant, from an eighteenth-century Lutheran pietism to a nineteenth-century Calvinist Protestantism. |
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