The Future of Asian Theology
10
Asian Perspectives on Twenty-First-Century Pluralism
Allen Yeh
Perhaps Asia’s greatest contribution to the religious landscape today is pluralism. Every major world religion has its roots in Asia, including Christianity.1 There is no extant world religion that originates from Africa, Europe or the Americas.2 The subject of missiology in Asia is unique because Asia is more like three continents: (1) In the case of the Middle East (e.g., Israel), it is like Europe in that it was the cradle of much of early Christianity but is now post-Christian.3 (2) In the case of Central, South and Southeast Asia (the so-called 10/40 Window),4 it is like frontier missions where many have yet to hear the name of Jesus but instead are rife with every other religion in the world. (3) Parts of East Asia (e.g., South Korea and China) are representative of world Christianity like sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, because these are arguably the heartlands of Christianity today. As such, at the very minimum three missiological approaches to Asian Christianity need to be taken. One case that illustrates all three is China’s “Back to Jerusalem” movement in which the Chinese want to bring the gospel westward across the Silk Road to its origin.5 In this case, number 3 above is making its way across number 2 to bring revival to number 1, which is “reverse mission” at its fullest implications: the coming of age of the majority-world church bringing the gospel to the non-evangelized and the already-evangelized. However, with the variety and breadth of religious practice in Asia, in mission there is always “power encounter,” when other deities or powers are believed to be resistant to or in competition against the Christian God; very rarely is it missions to atheists.
This chapter aims to show the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and pluralistic Asia, that it can be a mutually strengthening endeavor and not a contrarian one. Christianity can provide definition and direction to Asia’s pluralism, and Asia’s pluralism can be a mirror in which Christianity can assess itself aright and regain some of its radical authenticity. Newbigin, having been a missionary in Asia, will speak into the discussion at the end.
What Christianity Has to Offer Pluralistic Asia
What does Christianity have to offer religiously pluralistic Asia? There are several unique characteristics about the Christian faith, even in the midst of a multiplicity of other offerings. First, it is the largest religion in the world, though Islam is presently the fastest growing. Second, it is missionary, unlike Judaism and Hinduism.6 Third, it is monotheistic, which of course the other two Abrahamic faiths can also claim—this implies exclusivism that does not tolerate other gods. Though Islam can make all three of these claims as well, the distinction is best described by what a Pakistani Muslim once said to me: “Wherever Islam goes, it adapts the culture to the religion. Wherever Christianity goes, it adapts the religion to the culture.” Both Islam and Christianity have these three factors, which have moved them to the forefront of the world’s religious scene (this is why the Islam-Christianity encounter is not just limited to 9/11 but is the battleground in some of the greatest “hot spots” of the world, such as Nigeria and China).
But despite the similarities, the two religions come from very different points of view regarding pluralism. Islam chafes against it, either trying to deny it or squelch it altogether, denouncing other religions as idolatrous and their followers as infidels. When pluralism develops within Islam itself, such as the Shia, Sunni and Sufi offshoots, then caliphates and Islamic states are formed or wars declared. With Christianity, some react to pluralism (both outside and inside the religion) like Islam does with rigid, nonnegotiable entrenchment. Others, however, take pluralism as an unavoidable reality and perhaps even a boon, ranging from grudging toleration to seeing it as an ally in the spread of the faith. Lamin Sanneh makes this case in Translating the Message: “Christianity is remarkable for the relative ease with which it enters living cultures. In becoming translatable it renders itself compatible with all cultures. It may be welcomed or resisted in its Western garb, but it is not itself uncongenial in other garb. Christianity broke free from its absolutized Judaic frame and, through a radical pluralism, adopted the Hellenistic culture to the point of near absolutization.”7 Sanneh’s point echoes what the Pakistani Muslim said to me: Christianity is remarkable because it navigates the tension between solid rootedness and wide-bending flexibility, like a skyscraper that does not break precisely because it sways in the wind. This is the genius of the missionary enterprise.
How does one discern between contextualization and syncretism, then?8 This is the difficulty with accepting pluralism as an inherent necessity of the system. Not enough flexibility leads to ghettoization, but too much flexibility leads to syncretism. People who are afraid of heresy end up absolutizing everything about their expression of their faith, including their culture. People who are overly accepting of everything also make culture an idol, except instead of being blind to their culture they worship it knowingly. The key is accepting pluralism in the good sense and not in the bad sense.
The Oxford English Dictionary has four definitions of pluralism, two of which are listed below and useful for this discussion:
Therefore pluralism can either be the doctrine that reality is composed of many ultimate substances or the belief that such a condition is desirable or socially beneficial. David Hume’s skepticism at the pinnacle of the Enlightenment took the fact-value distinction as “how things are” versus “how things ought to be.”9 The former can scarcely be denied; the world is made up of multiple cultures and languages and religions. The latter can be either good or bad: it is bad when it is akin to relativism, but it is good when it means diversity. Lesslie Newbigin calls these religious pluralism and cultural pluralism.10
Relativism says that truth is rooted in the individual hearer/receiver/observer rather than the source/author/fact. It says that all truths are the same, and all truths are equally valid. However, all religions cannot be right, because they have mutually exclusive truth claims. A pluralism that derives from relativism says that nobody has the truth. Clearly this is not Christianity.11
However, Christianity is diverse in its very essence. It is built to be pluralistic in a missionary sense, as proven by four historical and biblical examples: (1) It is the only religion whose Scriptures are not written in the language of its founder. Jesus spoke Aramaic; the New Testament was written in Koine Greek—because that was the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean—to get the message out to as many people as possible. Christianity cares less about its own cultural absolutism and more about reaching the masses. (2) The location of Israel is right at the crossroads of three continents—Africa, Asia and Europe—meaning that it was originally situated to spread multidirectionally. Just as chosenness is always about responsibility and not for resting on your laurels, the Promised Land was not meant to be a final resting place but a launching point to the nations. In fact, today Christianity is the only major world religion without a geographic center. (3) The command to spread is a missionary mandate throughout the Bible, from the Cultural Mandate (Gen 1:28) to the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:8-9) to the Abrahamic covenant (Gen 15:5) to the Great Commission (Acts 1:8). (4) Multiethnicity or multiculturalism is a key characteristic of Christianity. The first time the believers are called Christian was at Antioch (Acts 11), the first multiethnic church in history. The Way was not considered Christianity until the gospel had gone to the nations. Even in Pentecost and Revelation 7:9, Babel was not reversed as if it were a curse; diversity is maintained and celebrated as an essential hallmark of Christianity.
Missions is the mother of theology, as proven by the apostle Paul, who was the greatest missionary of the early church and, not coincidentally, also the author of half the New Testament. Theology is occasional, and who had more crosscultural occasions than Paul, founder of dozens of churches in Jewish and Gentile contexts? This first came to a head after Paul’s first missionary journey. His missionary encounter with Gentiles provoked questions about pluralism that led to the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:1, 19-21) to settle the dispute of whether Gentiles need to live like Jews. The verdict was a qualified no: some rules can be bent (like the need for circumcision), and some rules cannot be broken (like the injunction against sexual immorality). The core cannot shift, but the rest must flex, like the skyscraper designed to give with strong winds and earth tremors. The Jerusalem Council allowed Paul to proceed with confidence into his second missionary journey. Not only did missions give birth to theology, but theology gave birth to more missions. It is a synergistic circle that is the lifeblood of the church.
Henry Venn, general secretary of the Church Missionary Society from 1841 to 1873, coined the phrase “the three-self church,” referring to a church that is self-governing, self-sustaining and self-propagating.12 Paul Hiebert calls the Two-Thirds World churches to a fourth self: self-theologizing.13 Without this last one, majority world churches could remain in a state of rote copying of the West, mechanical imitation without original ideas suitable to their context. If the confrontation with pluralism leads to “invention” of more theology, then Asia should be the greatest birthplace of self-theologizing in the world today! But most of the self-theologizing is not happening from Asia. Latin America certainly has its share of original theology, especially with liberation theology, which had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. Sub-Saharan Africa is arguably the heartland of Christianity today, and it has started producing volumes like the Africa Bible Commentary.14 Whither Asia?
What Pluralistic Asia Has to Offer Christianity
Religious pluralism is good for Christianity because it helps us to know who we are. Just as Americans in the US often do not know what constitutes “Americanness” until traveling abroad or being confronted with it by foreigners, Christianity is best identified when set up side by side with other religions. Thus, Asian Christians know who they are and what they believe, perhaps more than Christians in any other continent, because of persecution and rubbing shoulders daily with others. Most Christians in the Two-Thirds World today are well acquainted with at least one other world religion. With Asian Christians, it’s a daily encounter with two or more world religions. There are at least four major realities of Asian pluralism that can positively affect Christianity on that continent.
1. Minority status. Asia is the only continent on earth that has never had a Christian majority in its history. It need not be said that Europe, at one point, was. Christianity has now overtaken Islam as the biggest religion in Africa. Both Americas have been mostly Christian since the arrival of Europeans. Oceania is the great missionary success story. But Christianity in Asia, even in the early church where it originated, was always a minority. And today, the great religious pluralism ensures that it will remain so. World Christianity, the shift of the center of gravity of Christianity to the global South (Africa and Latin America), leaves out the global East: Asia. As Aloysius Pieris writes:
Asia is the cradle of all the scriptural religions in the world, including Christianity, which, however, left Asia very early and forced its way back several centuries later as a stranger and “intruder” whom Asia consistently refused to entertain. Thus, after four centuries of missionary presence, Christians are numerically and qualitatively an insignificant minority. . . . Can a Christianity that has lost its “Asian sense” presume to create an Asian theology? Even the churches of the Oriental rites have frozen their early openness to the Asian reality.15
John Stott supports this by pointing out the disadvantage of a Christendom mindset:
When I was ordained in the Church of England, evangelicals were a despised and rejected minority. . . . Over the intervening 60 years, I’ve seen the evangelical movement in England grow in size, in maturity, certainly in scholarship, and therefore I think in influence and impact. We went from a ghetto to being on the ascendancy, which is a very dangerous place to be. Pride is the ever-present danger that faces all of us. In many ways, it is good for us to be despised and rejected. I think of Jesus’ words, “Woe unto you when all men speak well of you.”16
Christendom has never existed in Asia as a whole. And this may be a good thing, as Asian Christians largely do not have to struggle with nominalism. Persecution is much more the norm, as was also the norm in the early church.
2. A world of contrasts. Asia, in a sense, could be a self-contained entity and a world within itself, because it has over half the world’s population on a single continent,17 often with the greatest polarizations. But the polarizations are what give it strength and authenticity. Addressing the realities of urbanization is more pressing in Asia than anywhere else, because of the twenty-five largest cities in the world, fourteen of them are in Asia.18 Yet it is also rich in farmland and has vast rural swaths that ought not be ignored. Partially due to this urban-rural dichotomy, economic pluralism is also rife. The richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor reside in Asia, sometimes side by side—there may be no greater economic contrasts in any other continent on earth. Three of the world’s BRIC nations are in Asia.19 When the poor can prophetically confront the rich, some of the authentic textures of Christianity can be seen more clearly. This is in contrast to a nation like the United States, where Christianity and wealth have often been strange bedfellows, a concept which would have been so foreign to the early Christians that they probably would have had to convene another Jerusalem Council to address this singular juxtaposition—how can one serve both God and mammon?
With Asia having the largest population on earth, this also means potentially the greatest missionary force in world history if they could be converted and mobilized. David Aikman recounts:
“Muslims prefer Chinese to Americans. They don’t like Americans very much,” one Chinese Christian said bluntly. He outlined several reasons why Chinese Christians can succeed where Westerners have failed. A major advantage is that the Chinese government supports the anti-American objectives of some political groups in the Middle East “so the Muslim nations support China.” He added, “Besides, we have a lot of experience of persecution.”20
And with a rise in missions would come a rise in self-theologizing, as theology often arises from missionary encounters. One very interesting battleground is Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, which also has a significant Chinese Christian minority who happen to own most of the businesses and capital.21 Another is the aforementioned Back to Jerusalem movement, which aims to reclaim Central Asia. India is itself a unique situation in that it has just about every religion within its borders, so crosscultural missions does not even have to involve leaving the country.
3. Holistic worldview. It is not just religious and economic and ethnolinguistic diversity that is plentiful, it is also a pluralism of worldviews. With all the debates of modernism versus postmodernism in the West, it is Asia that combines these while also including premodern views. Sri Lankan Vinoth Ramachandra of International Fellowship of Evangelical Students lamented at the Edinburgh 2010 missionary conference that the Western view of Asia is one dimensional: “India and China together produce more science and engineering graduates every year than North America and Europe combined. But Asian mission studies dissertations and the bulk of articles in mission studies journals focus on historical studies of religious sects and denominations, traditional tribal cultures or exotic new religious movements.”22
Part of the reason for Asia’s technological boom and the West’s postmodern shift is that East and West have exchanged educational philosophies. As the West becomes ever more fascinated with Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, Asia is becoming ever more scientific, and some parts have even absorbed Marxist thought, which derived from Europe. Asian communication, which is known to be more indirect, has been replaced by straight lecture and rote memorization in the classrooms. The West, in contrast, has become more universalistic and “tolerant” along the lines of South Asian religions and encourages more dialogue. Yet, this does not mean that Westerners are more attuned to the workings of the spiritual realm in daily life, what Paul Hiebert calls the “flaw of the excluded middle.”23 Asia has less of a natural-supernatural divide, and this may be a more realistic way of viewing the world.
Worldview also includes the way that culture affects theology, because theology is ultimately an attempt to answer the great questions of life that culture demands. Christianity was originally an Eastern (Semitic) religion, just as the other two Abrahamic faiths are. However, its missionary encounter with the Hellenistic world changed its flavor forever, especially with the injection of an Augustinian Platonism. Yet there is a potential for Christianity to return to its Eastern roots by reabsorbing an Asian mindset, which is the womb where it was originally nurtured and birthed from. For example, the gospel, while about guilt, is perhaps even more about shame.24 This is also the crux of N. T. Wright’s arguments for the new perspective on Paul: that to affirm the deep Jewishness of Paul changes things more drastically than if we were to read him simply as a Hellenist.25 There could be a radical recovery of authentic early Christianity if Asia can contribute its culture to Christian theology, and by scraping off some of the accretions of time, there can be a rediscovery of the original Christian message.
4. Redemptive analogies. What is the biggest challenge to Christianity: No religion or other religions? Though the 10/40 Window is often touted as the place with the most urgent need, some might make a case for post-Christian Europe as the top of the list of need. Nominalism and passivity and cynicism seem to be the biggest killers of the faith. In contrast, people who are spiritual but not Christian already have an advantage: at least they have no problem believing in a god. As far as we know, the apostle Paul never confronted atheists, but he confronted people of other religions and used their religions to his benefit. This is called the principle of redemptive analogy.26 The most notable example is in Acts 17 where Paul used the “unknown god” of the Athenians in Mars Hill to point to Jesus. As long as one can gain a foothold using the society’s own religion and culture, a link to Christianity may be drawn. Some would level charges of universalism at this, but again, it is the fine line between syncretism and contextualization. The key lies in articulating the name of Jesus. In the view of redemptive analogy, the more footholds the better, but that is insufficient until there is special revelation (either Scripture or preaching)—Paul certainly did not think that the “unknown god” could save, nor was Philip content to let the Ethiopian eunuch read Isaiah without explanation (Acts 8). This is in keeping with Lesslie Newbigin’s position:
The position which I have outlined is exclusivist in the sense that it affirms the unique truth of the revelation in Jesus Christ, but it is not exclusivist in the sense of denying the possibility of the salvation of the non-Christian. It is inclusivist in the sense that it refuses to limit the saving grace of God to the members of the Christian Church, but it rejects the inclusivism which regards the non-Christian religions as vehicles of salvation. It is pluralist in the sense of acknowledging the gracious work of God in the lives of all human beings, but it rejects a pluralism which denies the uniqueness and decisiveness of what God has done in Jesus Christ.27
One historical example that illustrates this effectively was Oxonian sinologist James Legge (1815–1897), who was embroiled in the Term Controversy.28 As any Bible translator will attest, the hardest word in the Bible to translate is “God.” When Legge served as a missionary to China, he advocated for the word Shangdi as the biblical word for God. Meanwhile, a contemporary American missionary, William Boone, argued for Shen.29 Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who had come several centuries earlier, used the word Tianzhu.30 All of them came loaded with linguistic baggage: the first implies a supreme being who is head of a pantheon of gods; the second suggests ancestral spirits; and the third seemed too accommodating to Confucianism. However, none of the three missionaries ever advocated for Yehehua, the transliteration of the Tetragrammaton into Chinese, because it was a foreign word. The one thing they all could agree on was that Christianity had to be couched in indigenous terms for the Chinese, otherwise the locals would not accept it.
With the immense pluralism of the Asian continent, it would seem that this means much more opportunity for redemptive analogies to be employed. There are far more footholds for the gospel in such a scenario than if the continent was mostly atheist, as Europe is. What looks like a challenge may be one of Asia’s greatest assets.
Lesslie Newbigin on Asian Pluralism
Lesslie Newbigin, having been a missionary in India, was steeped in the most pluralistic of all Asian nations. India is rightfully called a subcontinent, and the multiplicity of etymologically unrelated languages, and therefore the ironic necessity of English as the binding mechanism, is insightfully explained by Aloysius Pieris:
The task of Asian theologians is more complex than that of their colleagues in the North Atlantic region and the Southern Hemisphere. After all, do not European theologians communicate in the same Indo-Germanic languages? Latin American liberation theologians think, act, and speak in a common Iberian idiom. They are all within reach of one another by means of a European medium of communication. Such is not the case in Asia. It is therefore regrettable that Asians are not able to consult each other’s hidden theologies except in a non-Asian idiom, thus neutralizing the most promising feature in our methodology. (The same applies to Africans.) We Asians professionally theologize in English, the language in which most of us think, read, and pray. The theological side of language in a “continent of languages” has been grossly underestimated and our stubborn refusal to consult each other’s treasures directly in each other’s linguistic idioms, or even to be familiar with one’s own cultural heritage, will remain a major obstacle to the discovery of a truly Asian theology.31
This is illustrative of the downside of pluralism. How is common ground to be found in such a broad spectrum? Often it seems like the outsider, the colonizer, the Westerner, becomes the arbiter and mediator of what is true. In world Christianity, some people take it to mean that there is “cultural” theology, like African theology, Latin American theology and Asian theology, and then there is “pure” theology, meaning Western theology. Or within Indian theology, there is Tamil theology, there is Malayali theology, there is Hindi theology, but Anglo theology is metatheology. This was basically Newbigin’s problem with the illustration of the blind men and the elephant: one claims to see all while the others only see a part.32 In truth, the one who claims to see all is also seeing just a part. But is this relativism?
A better analogy than the blind men and the elephant would be what Andrew Walls calls “the human auditorium.” In this metaphor, a crowded theater’s numerous guests are all able to see the stage, although none of them can see it in its entirety. As the drama is acted out, each attendee has a different perspective; some can see more of the stage than others, and some can see more clearly than others, but all are watching the same play. Walls writes, “The play we are watching is the drama of life. The whole human race can see the stage on which the drama is enacted; but the focus varies according to the place in the auditorium.”33 From this framework, Walls argues that, in order to make sense of the “drama” of not only the human race but also the activity of God on earth, one must understand his or her own place in the theater. Every perspective is incomplete, needing other perspectives to form a coherent understanding of reality. Any culture can maintain an orthodox theology; however, if one were to ask each culture to make a list of which aspects of their theology affect their day-to-day lives, there might be a different list for each one. As he continues, Walls writes, “It is necessary that we hear the Gospel under, and in relation to, the conditions of our experiences and relationships, our environment and society—our culture in fact. Others seated elsewhere in the world theatre will see the same action, hear the same words; but their seating will enable them to see parts of the stage that we do not and will obscure some things which may seem to us crystal clear.”34 For this reason, dialogue between cultures is of utmost importance in humanity’s attempts to understand God, develop a coherent theology and missiology, and strategize to most effectively reach nonbelievers. The principles behind this analogy suggest that multiple cultural perspectives on the Christian faith are necessary to move toward gaining a complete picture of the truth. Just as experience and perspective differ from person to person, so also they differ from region to region.
In this sense, Walls is advocating the second OED definition of pluralism: “Perhaps it is not only that different ages and nations see different things in Scripture—it is that they need to see different things.”35 Is this what Newbigin would malign as the false “fact-value dichotomy”?36 It would only be if Walls were defining it in the bad sense: religious pluralism as relativism, that everyone has their own truth and is content to let that be the only thing they ever see. But Walls takes the definition in the good sense: cultural pluralism, that everyone’s perspective is actually true as a small slice of reality, but instead of remaining isolated, we need each other. It is like the apostle Paul’s injunction that the various parts of the body are indispensable to each other (1 Cor 12:12-31). Newbigin describes it in these words: “It is essential to the integrity of our witness to this new reality that we recognize that to be its witnesses does not mean to be the possessors of all truth. It means to be placed on the path by following which we are led toward the truth. There is indeed a proper place for agnosticism in the Christian life. There is a true sense in which we are—with others—seekers after the truth.”37 This is not atheism, nor is it relativism. It is agnostic pluralism, to follow Newbigin’s suggestion. However, that makes the establishment nervous because it seems like a slippery slope to atheistic relativism and heresy and syncretism. But the opposite end of the spectrum, unyielding intractability, is death to contextualization and innovation and discovery. What we need is Martin Luther’s reformata et semper reformanda: to be reformed and yet always reforming.
The problem with the fact-value dichotomy is ultimately a question of integration. Just like the “flaw of the excluded middle,” Western thought is so often black-and-white. For devout Christians, the temptation is great, in an exclusivist faith, to think in such a way. It seems logical that utter devotion would be a mark of fidelity, much as the first two commandments of the Decalogue forbid worship or idolatry of other gods. It seems to be anathema to even consider anything else. But Andrew Walls observes that Christians are subject to both the indigenizing principle and the pilgrim principle: basically, we are in the world but not of it.38 We cannot escape this world we are placed in, yet that does not mean we need to be beholden to it. Newbigin calls for a reintegration of the subjective and objective poles of religion and science, of the supernatural world and the natural world.39 The one place where I would challenge Newbigin is in his Reformed replacement theology where he does not see the Semitic framework as relevant anymore.40 It is possible that Christianity can go so far afield from its roots that Gentiles and the church become the entirety of God’s people. Though the apostle Paul does say that faith, not the physical seed of Abraham, constitutes God’s people (Rom 2:29), he also charges in the same epistle that Gentiles ought not to be arrogant lest they be broken off too, just as the natural branches were (Rom 11:17-21). Semper reformanda means to keep going back to the roots. Jesus exemplified it best in that he was both universal and culturally specific: he was a first-century Aramaic-speaking Jew in Roman-occupied Israel, and yet he is the Savior of the world.
A large part of the reason why Christians are uncomfortable in proceeding with what George Lindbeck calls the “third way” or the Cultural Linguistic Model41 is because there exists confusion about whether nature is created by God to be good or if the fallenness of sin has irreparably tainted the world. Those who hold to the former, the liberals, espouse what Lindbeck calls the Experiential Model, where everything ought to be used, with no discernment as to what may be harmful. Those who lean on the latter, the Fundamentalists, champion the Propositional Model, where stark boundaries need to be drawn between Christian and non-Christian at least in part because of an Augustinian/Reformed lens, which emphasizes the noetic effects of sin. The result is that either missions becomes unnecessary and even offensive as it is couched in postcolonial imperialistic terms, or missions becomes professionalized rather than an action of the laity. The apostle Paul was a tentmaker. Yes he went to synagogue like a devout Jew, but he did not remove himself from the marketplace, because that would go against the absolute nature of the Father’s mission who sent the Son into the world rather than keep him apart and untainted by the world. The missio Dei demands that God is the initiator, the Prime Mover, and the one who conquers sin and death rather than being afraid of its taint.42 This is not to make light of God’s holiness but to suggest that the missionary nature of Christianity is first exemplified by the Trinity. Christians do missions because of the imago Dei, so there is divine precedence.
Asian pluralism has the power to challenge this disjunctive approach. A true, proper integration is the unification of knowledge, both what we can learn from the Bible (special revelation) and all we can discover through the exercise of our own faculties (general revelation). It is not Enlightenment philosophy, which sees reason as the arbiter of faith.
Perhaps one of the greatest needs today due to the fact-value dichotomy is for religion and theology to be reinstated as a required field of study. That would fill a huge void in this world that sees international relations purely in terms of politics and economics. The West is seeing its engagement with China and the Muslim world as political and economic,43 but the missing part of the equation is the explosive growth of Christianity in China, which is creating a Copernican revolution in that country, and the West’s proper engagement with Islam as a religion and not as a “war on terror.” The West has effectively truncated itself from study of religion because it has relegated it to the sidelines of “values”—but with the rise of the Islamic State and a post-9/11 world, obviously religion is still hugely important today to be studied. Newbigin argues that the idea of an increasingly secularized world is a myth.44 He was correct in 1989 when he wrote this, and he is even more correct today. Religion is a fact of our time, and nowhere more so than Asia.
The Future of Asian Theology
What is Asian theology? Is it even possible to articulate a cohesive “Asianness” in the midst of such pluralistic diversity? What positives can be derived from Asian pluralism? So far we have “water buffalo theology”45 and Minjung theology,46 but perhaps we need to move beyond these iterations. Like Maoism owing its foundations to Marxism, these are Asian adaptations of European ideologies. In addition to its imported nature, Newbigin chides liberation theology for being anthropocentric rather than acceding to a God-led missio Dei.47 The struggle of the oppressed is surely one theme of Scripture, but it is not the only one.
To bring the conversation full circle, perhaps Asian theology should be grounded in the pluralism of religious expressions. Instead of class or race or gender or language, the unique contribution of Asia is religion. But is this a contradiction, trying to define one religion by using a multiplicity of religions? Not if the other religions are taken simply as culture, much as the West regards Greco-Roman mythology. Asia is so diverse that to link this vast continent with a meta-paradigm, either a foreign structure needs to be imported like Marxism or the English language, or the linking mechanism needs to be found within the continent itself. In the same way that a more indigenous word for God is always preferable to something like Yehehua, I want to argue that the native materials of the continent should be the grounding for an indigenous expression of the faith, not an outside arbitrator.
My proposal is this: Despite the fact that Asia is like three continents, we need to use the three religions or philosophies that have historically proven successful in transcending international boundaries in Asia: Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism, which originated in the West, the South and the East of the Asian continent, thus having representation spanning the entirety of its geography. Islam began in Saudi Arabia but has stretched as far southeast as Indonesia. Buddhism began in India but has made its way as far northeast as Japan. And Confucianism has permeated East Asia and even some of Southeast Asia. If Asian Christian theology can use these three raw materials to construct its own indigenous theology, like Muslim C1 to C6 insider movements48 or employing Confucian and Buddhist philosophy the same way Western theology builds on the pagan Greek philosopher Plato, then there will be the beginnings of a self-theologizing that is authentically true to the Asian context and that is built on the very pluralism of the continent. What initially seemed to be a hindrance could actually be a benefit: Christianity built on a combination of Islamic/Buddhist/Confucian thought, a strategy similar to the Nestorians’ in the seventh century who were the first missionaries to China and used Taoism as their basis for communicating the gospel.49 The difference is this: it will involve hybridity due to the globalized nature of the world, where absolute insularity is nigh impossible. Instead of being content with a multiplicity of Asian theologies, it may actually be possible to construct an Asian theology today. Religion can be to Asia as Koine Greek was to the ancient Eastern Mediterranean world: the commonality that all believers in that part of the world can understand.
Linked by religion instead of language, and framed in Eastern rather than Western thought, Asian theology will inevitably take on an expression different from the logos of the West. Instead of relying on creeds,50 the logos of the East perhaps will look more like John and less like Paul: more mystical and less propositional. Once Asia has its own voice on par with the West, even on par with the global South, we may see a revolution in theology. This is the kind of pluralism that Lesslie Newbigin would approve of.