Towards the Sunrise I

JERUSALEM TO ZOLAND I wonder how many of us know or ever care to know the history of how we have become what we are to-day ? Very few, perhaps. But we must know our past to know our present. The past shaped our present as the present shapes our future. We can never know our real identity unless we know who we were and where we came from. A person without an identity is a non-entity and carries no baggage. This also applies to the nation as well. A cluster of communities calling itself a nation without an identity is not a nation in real terms.

The Zo people living in India, Burma and Bangladesh are known to-day as Chin, Kuki and Mizo/Zomi (CHIKUMI). I have adopted here the ‘Zo’ terminology to cover all Chikumis including the apostates who had adopted their fostered father’s name for sheer survival. We have virtually become a christian nation within a short span. But few knew how christianity came into our land. In this column, I will try to introduce the outline picture of the march of the Gospel from Jerusalem to ‘Zoram khawvel’ through the mighty Roman Empire and later the British Empire. It took almost 1900 years to reach us and transformed our people. My attempt will be to serialise these unfolding events in about 12 articles. In this introductory article, I will cover 1900 years highlighting only the major landmarks so that we can have a bird’s eye view of the march of Christianity into our land. As we are going to travel at high speed, please tighten your seat belt. The Great Commission After the death and resurrection of Christ and just before he ascended into the heaven, he gave a Commission to his disciples to go out to the four corners of the earth and preach his teachings to all nations. He promised to send them Holy Spirit to strengthen and guide them in all things and that he would be with them always. It was a Great Commission with an unfailing built-in support system. No power failure. No engine failure. Excepting human failure, no failure of any kind at all from the supply side which is eternally bounteous. But his surviving 11 disciples as also the early apostles were Jews. The Jews were biblically a chosen people to reach out other nations with the message of Jehovah. Paradoxically however, they have a tendency to suck in everything into the bowels of their Holy Jerusalem. For this Jehovah punished them several times and forced them into exiles and bondages in other countries. The Book of Jonah is the best caricature of their national psyche. Naturally, their approach to the Commission given by Jesus was no different. Instead of going out into the world, the disciples initially spent most of their time in the Jerusalem temple preaching the Gospel to the Jews only. If this had continued, they might cause the Gospel sucked in by the Jerusalem ‘black hole’ and denied others to share the Living Word. Marching on God did not allow this to happen. He caught hold of one of the most notorious and zealous Jews named Saul and gave him a christened Gentile name ‘Paul’. Paul became the greatest Christ messenger and builder of the foundation of the church and christianity in Turkey and the neighbouring countries then known as Asia-Minor under the Roman Empire. From there, the fledgling church invaded the mighty Rome where, according to legends, Peter and Paul were martyred. It took almost 300 years to win the Roman Empire for Christ. With the conversion of Emperor Constantine, christianity was declared the state religion of the Roman Empire and Rome became the seat of the Church and continued till this day. From Rome, the Gospel spread to Europe including Russia and within a short period christianity became the State religion in most countries of Europe. The Roman Catholic Church became the biggest organised church followed by the Orthodox Church. Soon, the Islamic invading forces who swallowed the Middle East including Palestine and North Africa in quick succession, began to invade Europe and took over Sicily, Portugal and Spain. The nervous Church then joined hands with secular forces to expel the advancing Muslim hurricane. It was this situation which led to the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. The French king Charlemagne (Charles The Great) became the first annointed Holy Roman Emperor on christmas day in 800 AD. It was he who successfully stopped the marauding Muslim forces at Pyrene mountains and converted large areas in Europe for the church by force of arms. But the Church’s several attempts to take back Palestine did not succeed except for a brief interval. With the receding of threat from outside, Europe fell into the so-called ‘Dark Age’. In the Western context, this period is known as the Middle Age. It was a period associated with the oppressive rule of the Roman Catholic Church in league with the secular rulers. The Church became corrupt, intolerant and oppressive. Any voice of dissent simply meant incarceration or death. The Bible was chained and access to it was restricted only to the few selected clergymen. Laymen were allowed to read only portions of the Bible considered by the Church as safe to be read by them. A Gospel, which holds the key to free men from the fetters of Satan, had become a fetter that chained men and dragged them into the dark dungeons. A classic example of a reversed logic! Reformation Movement It was this unfortunate situation that produced a man like Martin Luther. An educated German clergyman with an inquisitive mind and soul, he began to teach the doctrine of salvation by faith rather than works as taught by the Church. He was expelled from the Church as heretic and ordered to be arrested and imprisoned. But he was saved and protected by his sympathisers. While in hiding, he translated the New Testament in German which was published in 1455 at the first printing press invented by Guttenberg and the Bible became known as ‘Guttenberg Bible’ after the name of the inventor of the press. The two greatest forces in living history- the printing press and the freed Bible- stormed Europe and the papal domain. The world never became the same again since. This attempt to reform the Roman Catholic Church was known as ‘Reformation’. Martin Luther was a staunch Catholic and it was never his intention to break away from the Church but to reform it. But the Church was resisting and instead of welcoming those who stood for reforms, it identified them as ‘Protestants’, a name they carry till this day. Consequently, the Roman Catholic Church took steps to correct some of its wrongs to save its own skin. This move was known as Counter-Reformation. The greatest beneficiary of the Reformation movement was Great Britain which, under Henry VIII, snapped ties with the Pope and established Anglican Church with the King/Queen of England and not pope as its supreme head. The British Parliament passed The Act of Supremacy in 1534. With the freeing of the Church and the mind of the people from suppression, many new translations of the Bible in English appeared. Subsequently, the desire to maintain uniformity in the churches resulted in the publication of King James Version of the Holy Bible in 1611. It also soon led to Industrial Revolution that catapulted the small British Isle from a farming nation to an industrial nation. Utilising this newfound wealth and technology, the British conquered and colonised two-third of our planet in a short time. Wherever the Union Jack fluttered, the light of the Gospel was lit. Towards The Sunrise Initially, the Protestant Church was busy in organising itself and therefore did little or nothing to send missionaries outside Europe. The Wesleyan revivals and the formation of an ‘Evangelical Group’ changed all that. The idea of sending out lay missionaries to spread the Good News abroad was born out of this movement. Its greatest product was William Carey (1761-1834) who earned the most coveted title of ‘Father of Modern Mission’. He came to Calcutta and later set up his Mission at Serampore. It was he who sent his first Indian convert Krishna Pal as missionary to the Khasi land. A year after Carey’s death in 1834, Khasi land was annexed to the British and his mission, abandoned after his death, was taken over in 1940 by the Welsh Missionary Society. In 1887 one of their missionaries Rev. William Williams visited Mizoram for 38 days but died soon after his return but not before he sent a report to the Welsh Mission headquarters in Liverpool recommending Mizoram as their next field of engagement. This was accepted and their first missionary Rev. D.E.Jones (Zosaphluia) arrived in Aizawl on August 31, 1897. Earlier, three missionaries namely F.W.Savidge (Sap Upa), J.H.Lorrain (Pu Buanga) and William Pettigrew sponsored by the Arthington Aborigines Mission arrived in Silchar. Manipur and Mizoram were both invaded by the British in 1890-91 and took over the administration. As soon as law and order was restored, in 1894 Pettigrew headed for Imphal and Savidge and Lorrain entered Mizoram. From here the first chapter of our new history began. (August 5, 1999, Delhi)