Was Iengar religion influenced by Christian theology?

[Frylock]

From this link,, I find that within the religion of the Iyengar there are two sects, and they are divided on the following questions:

1.Whether Lakshmi, the consort of Vishnu, is (Vibhu) co-omnipresent and co-illimitable with Vishnu;
2.Whether Lakshmi is only the mediatrix for, or the co-bestower of moksham or final beatitude;
3.Whether there is any graduated moksham attainable by the good and blessed, according to their multifarious merits;
4.Whether prapatti, or unconditional surrender of the soul to God, should be performed once for all, or after every act of spiritual rebellion;
5.Whether it (prapatti) is open to all, or is prescribed only for those specially prepared and apprenticed;
6.Whether the indivisibly atomic human soul is entered into, and permeated or not by the omnipresent creator;
7.Whether God’s mercy is exerted with or without cause;
8.Whether the same (the divine mercy) means the overlooking (dhosha darsanam) or enjoyment (dhosha bogyatvam) of the soul’s delinquencies;
9.Whether works (karma) and knowledge (Jnana) are in themselves salvation giving, or only lead to faith (bhakthi) by which final emancipation is attained;
10.Whether the good of other (unregenerate) castes should be tolerated according to their graduated social statuses, or should be venerated without reference to caste inequalities;

You could, for most of those, just do a mad-lib style replacement with Christian theological terms and get a list of the issues that divide various Christian sects from each other.

Was there an influence here? Whether directly from religion to religion, or more distally from culture to culture?

[Kimstu]

@Frylock

Was there an influence here? Whether directly from religion to religion, or more distally from culture to culture?

AFAIK, probably not. Although it is definitely true that discussions of these theological issues in English sources are influenced by Christian theology. (Translating a given Sanskrit or Tamil technical term as “grace” or “mercy” or “works”, for example, is intended to help explicate its meaning by reference to a similar concept in Christianity.)

Arguments on theological issues similar to these divided various sects in Indian philosophy and religion at least as far back as the late first millennium BCE, when Brahmanists/Hindus and Buddhists and Jains were disputing such arcane points well before Christianity came into existence. Controversies about the attributes of God and souls and salvation and what-not sound very specifically Christian in our Western ears, but they’re definitely not specific to Christian theology.

[capybara]

Sounds pretty darn post-Vedic to me, with the phrasing of the translation of concepts into English (‘works’, ‘salvations’, etc) maybe informed by a Christian-theological-vocabulary base. In terms of ‘salvation’ and such, probably a closer influence would be Mahayana on ideas about bhakti.