How did India, a land of frequent famines, become a food-exporting country?
Starting with Calcutta’s Agri-Horticultural Society (1820) and climaxing in the “Green Revolution” in 1970, the Gospel brought abundant life to India. It revealed that
(a) Man was created to live in abundance, in Eden.
(b) Sin drove him out of that bliss and
(c) brought unproductivity as a curse, but
(d) that sin and its curse were nailed upon the Lamb of God.
This was a transforming worldview.
On Thursday, May 15, 2025, Dr. Blesson Paul, a postdoc research associate investigating the neuroscience of chronic pain, will shed light on the Bible’s impact on Indian agriculture. Most historians do not know this history of India’s Green Revolution because most Church historians don’t know that the Bible created modern India.
Between 1965 and 1969, for four years, virtually every week I went to the Allahabad Agriculture Institute to be “discipled” by the Evangelical Union (EU). Some of our Bible teachers were professors at the Ag Institute; others taught at the Allahabad Bible Seminary. Not one of them, however, ever told us that the Gospel was liberating India from chronic starvation.
Our Bible teachers were ignorant because Indian Christianity is a victim of Western Protestantism, which split into two camps following the Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910:
* The “Simple Gospel” camp, now called “Evangelicalism,” limited its perspective to the fact that Sin condemned human beings to death and hell. Consequently, it taught the Gospel as good news of ETERNAL Life: the Lord Jesus took our sins upon the cross in order to save us from hell. This reductionistic perspective produced ministries such as the InterVarsity Fellowship, Union of Evangelical Students of India and the Lausanne Movement for World Evangelization.
* The “Social Gospel” movement, on the other hand, narrowed its attention on ABUNDANT life. This “Liberal” theology was spearheaded by theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch. It looked at Sin’s social consequences and saw the Bible’s social ethics as redemptive. Putting Rationalism above Revelation, it taught salvation by good works. This outlook was championed by the Student Christian Movement (SCM) and the World Council of Churches. This gospel of humanistic efforts undermined the Bible and also the ethics of God’s kingdom.