i am currently reading Gandhi and Jesus: The Saving Power of Nonviolence by Terrence Rynne. I have always been intrigued by the life of Gandhi but I learned a few things about him that I had no clue about before reading Rynne’s book.
For example, did you know that while Gandhi thought Christianity would be more effective if Christians spent less time preaching and more time just living out their faith???
Did you know that Gandhi was deeply inspired by the Biblical Jesus and actually thought that the Sermon on the Mount (the sermon Jesus preached in Matthew 5-7) was the sacred truth that the world yearned for???
I was aware of Gandhi’s Hindu influence but I was not aware of how much the Jesus of the Bible really influenced his stance on nonviolence. In fact, Rynne argued that Gandhi’s idea for a nonviolent society was more in line with the New Testament idea of the Kingdom of God than any other worldview.
Did you know that in Gandhi’s satyagrahi that there is no room for cowardly behavior? Rynne says that “Gandhi maintaine that it was better to be violent than to be a coward, while always maintaining the superiority of nonviolence.” Examples Rynne gave were “defense of the defenseless or the fending off of a robber or even in the ending of a life of unending pain.” Rynne stressed that Gandhi “saw violence and nonviolence as constituting a continuum not as absolute opposites.” Of course, nonviolence is the ideal, but it should not be embraced passively, rather it should be embraced actively.
These were just a few of the things that really struck me about the life of Gandhi while reading this book that I had never known before. They are definitely items that are food for thought as i am a student of life!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment