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Books & Culture, January/February 2008

Mustard Seed and Leaven
Reflections on Asian theology.
by Nate Jones

Water Buffalo Theology
Kosuke Koyama
Orbis, 1999
187 pp., $22, paper

Christianity with an Asian Face, Asian American Theology in the Making
Peter C. Phan
Orbis, 2003
253 pp., $30, paper

In Our Own Tongues, Perspectives from Asia on Mission and Inculturation
Peter C. Phan
Orbis, 2003
220 pp., $30, paper

The Asian Jesus
Michael Amaladoss
Orbis, 2006
180 pp., $22, paper

A few months ago, I left my home in Wheaton to return to Indonesia, where I was born. Besides a few boxes, my trans-Pacific baggage included a handful of stubborn expectations about the shape and substance of my future work. Above all, I carried with me the conviction that God was calling me to sojourn with him again in a new place.

As the weeks and months passed, Jakarta smeared my Wheaton polish of perceptions, opinions, and convictions. Learning again how to live in my adopted home, I was peculiarly ready to pick up and listen to some of Asian theology's foremost authors. My guides in this new (to me) theological world began their reflections where I was—at the margins of divergent political and cultural worlds. I read how Kosuke Koyama tried to piece together his own fractured past, torn between Japan, America, and Thailand. Peter Phan taught me about theology among the in-between and "in-beyond" lives of Vietnamese Americans. Michael Amaladoss emphasized to me that Jesus himself was marginalized, articulating a Christology in which Jesus is sketched from Asian cultural reference points. Together, all three authors emphasized the marginality of Asia's poor and religious masses, declaring confidently that a theology that does not mean good news for these people is utterly inadequate to the Asian context.

Writing from this conviction, all three authors were inevitably concerned with the dynamics of power. What political and economic centers relegate Asian peoples to the margins? What theological center relegates Asian theology to the edge of acceptability and perhaps orthodoxy? What kind of power characterizes the Kingdom of God, in which the last become first and a homeless, itinerant patriarch becomes the spiritual father of all God's people? What kind of power works triumphantly through the resurrection of the crucified Christ?

With one eye on the Asian masses and the other on the failure of Christianity to establish itself as an Asian faith, Phan and Amaladoss confront these questions aggressively. Both authors re-slant the contours of Christian faith and praxis away from traditional Western theological emphases on doctrine and church-as-institution in favor of a more inclusive kingdom-focused gospel, in which the church is God's servant at Asia's margins, deliberately marginalizing and crucifying herself in imitation of Christ in order to build the reign of God in Asia.

In Christological terms, Phan and Amaladoss connect ecclesial marginalization with kenosis, emphasizing Christ's rejection of conventional power structures and his insistence on the social and economic implications of the liberating power of God. In their view, the Son's marginalization and rejection is of particular resonance to many Asians, who themselves live marginalized lives. In turn, the Son's resurrection by the Father's power constitutes the good news of justice and redemption that the church can proclaim to Asians. Both authors view the Father's eschatalogical kingdom as guaranteed by the resurrection of Jesus Christ and currently mediated by the work of the Spirit throughout all of Asia's institutions, including particularly other Asian faiths.

Despite my years in Asia, reading Koyama, Phan and Amaladoss was a disconcerting experience. Their new methods, aggressive readings of tradition and Scripture, and persistent focus on Asia's poor further blurred the careful distinctions of my Presbyterian theological background, responding to questions of soteriology, pneumatology, and Christology in new and unexpected ways.

Indeed, this blurring is precisely the point. These self-consciously Asian theologians—though not, it's important to add, Asian theologians across the board—deliberately reject the categorical approach adopted by their Western forefathers in favor of approaches such as Choan-Seng Song's "story theology" or Koyama's "water buffalo theology," in which theological concepts are deliberately rooted in and connected with the everyday experiences of marginalized Asians. Inevitably, the resultant theology lacks the comforting clockwork precision developed by systematic theologians in the Western tradition and by contemporary Asian scholars working in the same idiom. It is precisely such freedom, however, that encourages thinkers such as Koyama, Phan, and Amaladoss to undertake the challenge of rooting Christianity securely in Asia's cultural and religious soil.

What are the broad contours of this Asian good news? First, these theologians argue that the good news cannot exist without joyful recipients. As such, they are concerned not with "adapting" Christianity to Asia's particular context but rather with reading the Scriptures and following Jesus Christ as Asians. This shift from Christianity-the-institution to discipleship-as-experience undergirds the various soteriologies, pneumatologies, and christologies that such self-consciously Asian theologians are developing in their search to follow the Asian Savior.

Freed from institutional preoccupations, these Asian theologians question traditional Christian suppositions about the nature of other religions, seeing much evidence of God's Spirit at work in Asian faiths. Here their work parallels developments in the Western church. Because all three of the authors I read practice Roman Catholicism, their efforts in this area were greatly helped by post-Vatican II developments in the Church's position toward other faiths. But similar arguments are being made, for example, by some evangelical scholars (see the work of Gerald McDermott, for example). This remains a strongly contested subject, but among orthodox Catholics and Protestants who see the Spirit at work in other faiths, there is an unambiguous insistence on the unique salvific work of Christ and on the fullness of truth as distinctively revealed in whole witness of Scripture—emphases that may be blurred or missing in some indigenous theologies.

Seeing God's saving work in Asia unbounded by Christianity-as-institution and already at work among Asians in need, Asian theologians are particularly concerned with understanding the immanent features of the Father's coming kingdom. Phan and Amaladoss both aggressively reread the Scriptures with a strong emphasis on Jesus' kingdom teaching in the synoptic gospels, to the point where Amaladoss feels free to dramatically reinterpret Jesus' passion entirely in terms of the reign of God, rejecting completely a soteriology based on sin and the wrath of God. In his view, Jesus' death is the sign and seal of a new political community characterized by divine love and an Acts 4 community of common property and respect for all. This community is inherently marginal, drawing its power from the coming kingdom of God and changing sinful and unjust political and economic structures through persevering imitation of Christ's non-violent response to political power.

Although other Asian theologians would highlight different aspects of God's immanent and powerful saving presence, Asian theology as a whole stubbornly emphasizes the importance of the concrete aspects of the gospel. If an understanding of Jesus' good news has nothing to say about, toward, or against the politico-economic power structures that oppress Asia's poor, then such an understanding becomes merely a theology of the powerful. As they declare the importance of the "option for the poor," Asia's theologians testify that uncritical acceptance of traditionally systematized, institutionalized, and thoroughly eschatalogical Christianity represents in reality a choice against the poor in favor of the current centers of political and economic power, which Asian theologians name Mammon.

Looking ahead, all three authors assume that Christianity is destined to remain a minority faith in Asia for centuries to come. Clearly eschewing the institution- building penchant of American evangelical missiology, Phan and Amaladoss choose to celebrate the church's minority status. How this orientation fits with the explosive growth of Christianity in China, where the faith certainly has "minority status" but where that minority is characterized by extraordinary dynamism, is a subject not adequately addressed in this particular conception of "Asian theology." These three theologians believe that the inadequacy of Christian institutions in Asia will push Asian Christians to return to the gospel's images of the leaven and the mustard seed. As a small servant in God's great project for Asians, the church can rejoice in faithfully permeating Asian peoples, cultures, and institutions with the leavening truths of Christ. Instead of accepting the exclusion/inclusion thinking that has characterized failed missions efforts in Asia and elsewhere for the past 500 years, these Asian theologians argue that a faithful reading of the gospels relegates all institutional and exclusionary concerns to second place in favor of God's urgent good news to all humanity and particularly to the marginalized and poor.

As a passport American serving with an evangelically motivated organization in Asia, I found myself helpfully unsettled by these Asian theologians' radical re-conception of God's work. Imitating Asian theologians themselves, I have been forced to confront my own past with what Phan calls "the hermeneutics of suspicion" and "the hermeneutics of retrieval." In order to respond faithfully and authentically to the concerns of Asian theology, I must first come to terms with the assumptions and understandings that I have carried with me to Asia.

Beginning with the hermeneutics of suspicion, I found that my experiences at fundamentalist churches in the United States and at a mission school permeated by fundamentalist understandings of Christian texts and history exemplified many of the qualities that Asian theologians found most objectionable and most opposed to the good news and God's work in Asia. My experiences in these places was illumined by contrast with Asian theology's persistent emphasis on context, local interpretations of the Scriptures, and the importance of inculturated faith.

In particular, Phan's discussion of the importance of popular piety in the inculturation of the gospel offered a powerful response to the critiques of Filipino popular piety I had heard as an adolescent. Phan asserts that popular religion is neither a debased form of Catholicism nor the remnants of pre-Christian faith. Rather, popular religion should be understood as "a whole way of understanding and living the faith," as the Pontifical Council asserted in Toward a Pastoral Approach to Culture. Phan argues that Filipino and Vietnamese piety both owe their origins to late-medieval Iberian Catholicism, which emphasized popular devotion and Marian piety (American evangelical opposition to Catholic popular piety seems to have descended via America from English Reformation propaganda).

While Phan and other Asian theologians would be quick to agree that much work remains to be done in terms of educating Asian laity about the gospel and their own responsibilities to be involved in God's kingdom work, their refreshing perspective on popular piety in Asia empowered me both to appreciate Asian Catholicism afresh and to see evangelical popular religion in America in a new light.

Moving beyond my fundamentalist experiences, my Presbyterian training and Calvinist heritage were also affected by my encounter with Asian theology. The strict categories and clockwork precision of Barth and Calvin were softened by my new ability to articulate previously marginalized aspects of my faith—convictions about the breadth of God's saving work, his disregard for Christianity-as-institution, and his passion for Asia's poor.

Thus I was encouraged to see that the insights of Asian theology touched some of my deepest theological yearnings, which my Calvinist training had suppressed. Asian theology did not negate but rather supported my already firm belief in God's sovereignty, in the goodness of all God's creation and in the importance of Christian participation and influence in politics and economics. At the same time, Asian theology nuances Calvinism's emphasis on God's sovereignty with a strong emphasis on the kenosis of the crucified Christ.

Furthermore, Asian theologians correct Calvinism as well as other Western theological systems in their pretension to permanency and their claim to a normative theology that is objective and context-free. By insisting that all theologies are products of a particular place, person, and time, Asian theologians re-situate Western theological systems within their historical contexts, offering Calvinists and others new room for growth as they relate their theological heritage to the challenges of a church that is increasingly both global and southern.

After allowing Phan's hermeneutics of suspicion full play in my life and background, it was time to employ the hermeneutics of retrieval. What was useful and helpful in my own past and understanding that could contribute to Asian theology's concerns and understandings? One of my first finds was my own academic training in international affairs and international economics, including various perspectives on the economics of developing countries. From my reading, it seemed clear that although Phan in particular emphasized the importance of the social sciences in the Asian theological project, both Phan and other Asian theologians lacked a nuanced perspective on international politics and economics in general and the globalization process in particular.

While Kosuke Koyama refrains from pointing fingers in the economic and political spheres, Phan, Amaladoss, and their fellow spirits have deliberately incorporated the cynicism of liberation theology in response to the global capitalist system and the political powers that sustain it. This new generation of Asian theologians asserts that Asia's poor are oppressed and held back by wider economic and political structures manipulated by the United States in order to preserve its own wealth and power.

Frankly, I was a bit inclined to smile at these naïve proposals implying a simplistic, zero-sum global system dominated by one country at the expense of all others. While a realpolitik perspective does emphasize the exercise of military and economic power strictly in terms of national self-interest, this bleak understanding must be carefully correlated with a contextual understanding of the internal dynamics of democracies, the positive sum nature of a free market, and the economic and political success stories of Asian countries like Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and others.

While imbalances of power do exist within the global system, these imbalances do not imply that the United States or powerful countries control globalization processes or that this imbalance means inevitable poverty for most Asians. In fact, legal and economic reforms and careful government intervention in a number of Asian countries have raised the standard of living for a broad spectrum of the population.

Although rural development remains a challenge for Asian countries, the difficulties of development in rural areas are conditioned more by weak infrastructure, local context, and a lack of understanding globally about non-urbanizing development models than by some evil empire. Ironically, Asian theologians' suggestion that the poverty of Asians is primarily caused by a U.S. orchestrated global system fails precisely because it ignores local contexts, both in the United States and in rural areas throughout Asia.

While Asian theology by definition requires extensive interaction with the social sciences, it seems more appropriate for Asian theologians to reserve these studies for the laity, whom they wish to involve in Asian theology in any case. In this way, Asian theologians could hope to develop a fruitful cross-collaboration with Christ-following academics in the social sciences, encouraging them to consider the implications of Christ's "option for the poor" as they themselves begin to appreciate the nuanced realities of global affairs.

Besides my education in international affairs, another important retrieval was my understanding of the nature and diabolical intensity of evil. While Asian theologians are quick to identify the sins and evils within political and economic structures, they tend to discard or ignore traditional Western understandings of personal sin and the Devil, with their attendant implications of divine wrath. In The Asian Jesus, Amaladoss describes Satan as the "personal principle of evil." "It" is expressed through personal and corporate pride. In light of the overwhelming witness of Scripture and of humanity in general—and Asia's poor in particular—to the personal, malevolent, and very real presence of spirits, this oversight seems astonishing. While Asian theologians rightly link Western understandings of sin and the Devil to a Western soteriology emphasizing Christ's sacrifice for sin and his triumph over the Devil, they ignore the thunderous implications of a denial of this aspect of Christ's passion.

In their eagerness to reread the gospel in light of Jesus' kingdom teaching, Asian theologians have forgotten that Jesus is also the Lamb of God, and that the God who brings in the kingdom also reserves to himself judgment for the wicked. In fact, Asian theologians have little to say to the survivors of 20th-century genocides, or the victims of the torture and war crimes perpetrated across the globe. By ignoring or denying a soteriology that has historically been strongly associated with Christianity-as-institution, Asian theologians have shut their ears to the cries of the martyrs.

Asian theology needs to reread both the Scriptures and the global context more carefully, listening for the rumble of God's not-so-distant judgment in Jesus' promises of the kingdom and remembering that the Son's incarnation and crucifixion were conditioned entirely upon sin—sin that the entire canon describes consistently in both personal and corporate terms.

Asian theologians would also do well to listen to the witness of the Orthodox church, which suffered greatly under communism throughout most of the 20th century. In an article in the Spring 2007 issue of The Review of Faith and International Affairs, Frederica Matthews-Green describes the sufferings of her spiritual mentor during the notorious Pitesti experiment in Romania. After describing the horrible personal suffering caused by enforced participation in torture, she closes by reflecting on the reality of the Devil, declaring that Orthodox Christians "still believe in a real devil." Asian theologians should take this to heart, recognizing the soteriological and christological implications of such a view.

Putting down my introductions to Asian theology, I feel thankful. Thanks to Koyama, Amaladoss, and Phan I have been able to interrogate my stubborn expectations of the contours of Christian work, my theological presuppositions, and my own past more thoroughly. With their help, I've been able to sort through the mental baggage I brought along to Asia, discarding understandings and expectations that are unhelpful in my adopted context and rejoicing in my new ability to articulate truths I had only half-grasped in my own mind. I hope Asian theologians will be willing to sort through their own past, taking stock of their liberation theology heritage and the implications of their context-lite approach to Jesus, the Scriptures, and the promise of the kingdom of God.

Nate Jones was born and raised in Indonesia and also lived in the Philippines before returning to the United States to attend Wheaton College. He graduated in 2005 and is currently involved in minority language development in western Indonesia. Nate lives in Jakarta with his wife Charity and their two cats.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
January/February 2008, Vol. 14, No. 1, Page 44

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