Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg

Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (10 July 1682 – 23 February 1719) was a member of the Lutheran clergy and the first Pietist missionary to India.

Quotes

 * [They] lead a very quiet, honest and virtuous life infinitely outdoing our false Christians and superficial pretenders to a better sort of religion.
 * quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

Quotes about Ziegenbalg

 * Yet he considered it his duty to destroy idol worship, and wrote how he had destroyed idols in a prominent goddess temple. The Hindus were described as ‘being deeply affected with the sight so foppish a set of Gods’, and he proudly ‘threw some down to the ground, and striking off the heads of others’. He wanted to demonstrate to the ‘deluded’ Hindus that ‘their images were nothing but impotent and still idols, unable to protect themselves and much less their worshippers’. The most remarkable part of this incident was that the Hindus who gathered at the scene of destruction were agitated, but did not allow their agitation to turn violent. One man he described as a ‘pagan school teacher (upadhyayan )’ calmly entered into a theological debate and proceeded to show the missionary the folly of his actions. He concluded the debate by pointing out to the missionary that from the point of view of absolute being, all forms of matter are constructions of Maya, and that the pottery images the missionary broke were merely symbols.
 * Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines


 * For the last category of religions, Ziegenbalg used the word ‘heathen’ as equivalent to ‘pagan’ or ‘gentile’. It denoted non-monotheistic people and connoted ‘ignorant’ and ‘uncivilized’. All heathens, Ziegenbalg said, are under the rule of the devil, whom they worship as a god. He leads them into idolatry and superstitious rites. The devil is the father of them all, but they have divided into many sects and in Africa, America, and East India, they differ in their gods and teachings. 7
 * Hudson, Dennis D. — Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706-1835. Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2000. as quoted in Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines


 * It was  neither  the  powerful  English  nor  the  Dutch,  but  the Danes  who  sent  the  first  Protestant  mission  to  India, — to  Tranquebar, an  insignificant  locality  which  they  possessed  in  India.  Zeigenbalg,  the  first  missionary  who  reached  India  in  1706,  candidly  confessed  that  his  mission  had  little  success.  He  pointed  out  that  the Christians  in  India  were  “so  much  debauched  in  their  manners”, and  “so  given  to  gluttony,  drunkenness,  lewdness,  cursing,  swearing, cheating  and  cozening”  and  “proud  and  insulting  in  their  conduct”, that  many  Indians,  judging  the  religion  by  its  effect  upon  its  followers,  “could  not  be  induced  to  embrace  Christianity”.  Only  a  few poor  or  destitute  persons  were  converted,  and  they  had  to  be  fed and  maintained  by  the  mission.  When  Ziegenbalg  wanted  to  convert  the  upper  classes  by  argument,  he  failed  miserably.  “In  a notable  debate  held  under  the  auspices  of  the  Dutch  in  Negapatam, Ziegenbalg  disputed  with  a  Brahmin  for  five  hours,  and  far  from converting  the  Brahmin,  the  missionary  came  away  with  an  excessive  admiration  for  the  intellectual  gifts  of  his  adversary”.(150)
 * RC Majumdar, ed., Volume 10: British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, Part 2 [1818-1905]


 * Zeigenbalg’s missionary  effort  was  typical  of  Christian  missionary  enterprise  in  India  during  the  eighteenth  century.  No  doubt the  number  of  converts  steadily  increased  and  churches  were  founded in  different  parts  of  India.  But  it  was  the  remittance  from  Europe that  supplied  the  cost  of  building  churches  and  feeding  the  congregation.  Abbe  Dubois  (1,765-1848)  published,  at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth or  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century,  his  Letters  on  the  State  of Christianity  in  India .  In  these  he  “asserted  his  opinion  that  under existing  circumstances  there  was  no  human  possibility  of  so  overcoming  the  invincible  barrier  of  Brahminical  prejudice  as  to  convert the  Hindus  as  a  nation  to  any  sect  of  Christianity.  He  acknowledged  that  low  castes  and  outcastes  might  be  converted  in  large  numbers, but  of  the  higher  castes  he  wrote:  ‘Should  the  intercourse  between  individuals  of  both  nations,  by  becoming  more  intimate  and  more friendly,  produce  a  change  in  the  religion  and  usages  of  the  country, it  will  not  be  to  turn  Christians  that  they  will  forsake  their  own  religion,  but  rather to  become  mere  atheists.” (150-1)
 * RC Majumdar, ed., Volume 10: British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, Part 2 [1818-1905]