Shibi Peter
The renewed visibility of religion in public life has become one of the defining characteristics of the twenty-first century. Contrary to the predictions of classical secularisation theory, religion has neither disappeared from the public sphere nor retreated into the realm of private belief. Across the world, religious traditions continue to shape political discourse, social movements, ethical debates, and public identities. Scholars such as José Casanova, Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, and Talal Asad have therefore questioned the assumptions of modern secularism and opened new conversations on what has come to be described as the "post-secular" condition. While much of this discourse has emerged from European intellectual contexts, its implications are especially significant for India, where religion has remained a constitutive force in shaping public culture, democratic life, and national identity.
Within this context, the theological legacy of Rev. Dr. Paul David Devanandan (1901–1962) deserves fresh scholarly attention. Widely recognised as one of the pioneers of modern Indian Christian theology, Devanandan developed his understanding of Christian mission during a formative period marked by India's struggle for Independence, the emergence of a Secular Democratic Republic, and the search for an authentically Indian Christian witness. Rather than viewing Christianity as an isolated ecclesiastical enterprise, he consistently interpreted the mission of the Church as participation in God's reconciling activity within the social, cultural, and political life of the nation. His concerns extended beyond evangelistic expansion to include nation-building, interreligious dialogue, social responsibility, and the transformation of public life through the values of the Kingdom of God. As Siga Arles observes, Devanandan understood Christian mission as an engagement with India's cultural and religious realities rather than as an attempt to impose a foreign ecclesiastical identity upon them.
This paper argues that the contemporary discourse on post-secularism provides a fruitful hermeneutical framework for retrieving Devanandan's theological vision. It does not suggest that Devanandan himself was a post-secular theologian in the contemporary theoretical sense. Such a claim would be historically anachronistic. Rather, the paper proposes that his theology offers an indigenous Indian grammar for Christian public witness that speaks with remarkable relevance to the questions raised by post-secular thought. His insistence that Christian faith cannot be confined to the private sphere, together with his conviction that the Church must participate responsibly in the moral reconstruction of society, anticipates many of the concerns that occupy present debates on religion and public life.
The theoretical framework of this study draws particularly upon Talal Asad's critique of the categories of "religion" and "the secular." In Genealogies of Religion (1993) and Formations of the Secular (2003), Asad demonstrates that these categories are not timeless or universal but historically constructed through specific Western political and intellectual traditions. His work challenges the assumption that religion naturally belongs to the private sphere while politics and public reason belong exclusively to the secular domain. This insight is especially significant for interpreting Indian Christian theology, where the relationship between religion, society, and public life has developed within a markedly different historical trajectory. Devanandan neither accepted the privatisation of faith nor advocated a theocratic understanding of Christianity. Instead, he envisioned Christian mission as a form of public participation grounded in dialogue, reconciliation, and service within a religiously plural society.
Rather than reading Devanandan merely as a pioneer of interfaith dialogue, this paper seeks to recover the broader coherence of his theological vision. His reflections on lokasaṃgraha, the Kingdom of God, Christian participation in nation-building, the ministry of reconciliation, and the integration of kerygma, koinonia, and diakonia reveal a comprehensive understanding of mission that resists the modern separation of religion from public life. In this respect, Devanandan may be understood not simply as an ecumenical thinker but as a theologian of public responsibility whose vision continues to challenge the Church in contemporary India.
The paper contends that re-imagining Devanandan's theology is particularly significant at a time when Christian witness in India is confronted by the twin challenges of religious majoritarianism and an exclusive understanding of faith. Contemporary debates frequently oscillate between two inadequate alternatives: either religion is reduced to an exclusively personal experience with little relevance for public life, or it becomes an instrument of ideological and political mobilisation. Devanandan's theology offers a compelling alternative to both. His vision of mission neither withdraws from the public sphere nor seeks political dominance; rather, it understands Christian witness as a humble yet transformative participation in God's reconciling work within society. Mission, therefore, is not merely an ecclesiastical programme but a public vocation rooted in justice, dialogue, peace, and the common good.
A central contribution of this paper is its proposal that Devanandan's theology may be interpreted as a distinctly Indian expression of public theology. Although the term "public theology" gained prominence only in later decades, many of its essential concerns are already visible in Devanandan's writings. His reflections on nation-building, inter-religious engagement, economic justice, and social reconstruction reveal a theological imagination that refuses to isolate the Church from the historical realities of the nation. His appropriation of the Bhagavad Gita’s concept of lokasaṃgraha was not an attempt to assimilate Christianity into Hindu thought, but an effort to articulate Christian participation in the welfare and moral cohesion of society through categories intelligible within the Indian cultural context. Such theological engagement reflects neither accommodating nor apologetic compromise; it represents an incarnational understanding of mission that remains deeply Christ-centred while genuinely dialogical.
This paper also revisits Devanandan's understanding of dialogue. Existing scholarship has often remembered him primarily as a pioneer of Hindu-Christian dialogue. While this contribution remains undeniable, such an interpretation risks narrowing the scope of his theological vision. For Devanandan, dialogue was never an end in itself. It emerged with the conviction that God's redemptive activity transcends ecclesiastical boundaries and that the Church is called to discern, rather than monopolise, the signs of God's work in history. Dialogue therefore functioned within a larger theological framework shaped by the Kingdom of God, the ministry of reconciliation, and the Church's responsibility towards the transformation of society. Read in this broader perspective, dialogue becomes an expression of Christian discipleship rather than merely a strategy of interreligious engagement.
The paper concludes by arguing that Devanandan's vision provides valuable theological resources for Christian mission in post-secular India. His insistence that the Church should participate constructively in the life of the nation without surrendering its theological distinctiveness offers an important corrective to both sectarianism and ideological activism. At a time when public discourse is increasingly marked by religious polarisation, constitutional contestation, and the threat of cultural nationalism, Devanandan invites the Church to recover its vocation as a community of reconciliation and public responsibility. His theology reminds contemporary Christianity that authentic witness is not measured by institutional expansion or political influence, but by faithful participation in God's continuing work of justice, peace, dialogue, and the renewal of creation.
By bringing Devanandan into conversation within contemporary post-secular discourse, this paper neither seeks to impose modern theories upon a historical theologian nor to claim that he anticipated the later academic debates. Rather, it argues that his theological vision possesses an enduring interpretative capacity that enables Indian Christianity to respond creatively to the challenges of the present. In this sense, reimagining Devanandan's vision is not merely an exercise in historical retrieval; it is an invitation to recover an intellectually rigorous, culturally rooted, and publicly engaged understanding of Christian mission capable of contributing meaningfully to India's plural democratic future.
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