(REVIEW 13) Asian and Oceanic Christianities in Conversations: Exploring Theological Identities at Home and in Diaspora

Asian and Oceanic Christianities in Conversations: Exploring Theological Identities at Home and in Diaspora

Heup Young Kim, Fumitaka Matsuoka and Anri Morimoto (eds)                                          New York: Radopi, 2011

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

This book is an outcome of a panel session at the “2005 International Congress on the History of Religion” held in Tokyo, Japan. It tries to address the question of “Christianity” in a post-Christendom period.  How do we address the question of universality and particularity of gospel in the post-globalized era?  What do we learn from the experience of those for whom their Christian identity is necessarily “amphibolous” in the multiplicity of origination, homeland, nation, race, color, and religion? How do we re-do theology from the Asian/Oceanic/ diasporic location today? These are the questions that set the thesis of the book.  

Asian and Oceanic theology is polyphonic and complex. The diasporic translocal citizens add new questions to Asian theology.  This has widened the task of re-defining the categories such as ‘home,’ ‘context,’ and ‘local.’  How long the Asian theology can be located in the ‘inverted Orientalist’ identity?  What difference will it be when one uses the diasporic context as a hermeneutical key?  There are the questions that this book tries to engage with.   

The chapters are divided into three sections. The first section explores issues of hermeneutic framework, sources, norms, and methods of interpretation. Here the life experiences of Asian/Oceanic/ diasporic communities are used as the major hermeneutical resources. Heup Young Kim writes about the need of the ‘owning up’ of Asian metaphors in theologizing. Anri Morimoto offers the divergent and experimental forms of Asian theology as testimony to the breath and vigor of the living Christian tradition. Peter Phan’s provocative set of questions- an Asian Christian? Or a Christian Asian? Or an Asian-Christian?-draws us out of territorial understanding of Christianity to a creative articulation of Christian identity in Asia.  

The second section embraces a critical and theological reading of the locus, social location, pain and promise emerging out of a particular context. This section explores and weaves religious and theological resources that illuminate the lives of Asian/Oceanic/ diasporic Christians. Traversing the terrain of Indian Christian Theology and surveying various attempts at responding to Christ in the Indian and Asian contexts, Jayakiran Sebastian creatively proposes the model of the guide who stands aside as offering rich theological directions in exploring Christological ramifications within an inter religious milieu. The Third section is devoted to the exploration and articulation of Asian/ Oceanic/ diasporic Christians’ visions of life. This section deals with the questions of global migration, global solidarity, and global theology.  

M. Thomas Thangaraj offers an introductory note to the whole discussion. In this overview he differentiates Christianity and Christendom. According to Thangaraj, the term Christianity stands for a religion with all its variety of meanings. Christendom, on the other hand implies a temporal and territorial connotation which is colonial in content. Thangaraj here prefers the term ‘World Christianity.’ It is to recognize all local forms of Christianity as forms of Christian faith. No one local form, whether it is European or non-European can become benchmark of Christianity. At the same time, these local forms do not exist in isolation. They are related in a dialogic existence. This book highlights the need of the dialogue between the Western and Asian theological contexts.

(REVIEW 12) churrasco: A Theological Feast in Honor of Vitor Westhelle

churrasco: A Theological Feast in Honor of Vitor Westhelle

Mary Philip, John Arthur Nunes, and Charles M. Collier (eds)

Eugene, Oregon: PICKWICK Publications, 2013

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

This book is a collection of articles written in honor of Vitor Westhelle, the well known Latin American liberation theologian and the professor of systematic theology at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC). The contributors are either his colleagues or students. In his thirty years of teaching ministry Dr. Westhelle has mentored about one hundred and fifty students from various parts of the globe. churrasco is a Brazilian barbeque of variety of meets. By this title to his book, the editors meant to attend the eclectic ground of Dr. Westhelle’s theological world.

Oswald Bayer initiates a discussion on the theology of cross. Robert Kolb traces five components of the cross: 1) as a burden to help crucify the flesh, 2) as eschatological battle evidenced in the suffering of church, 3) as the means of atonement through Jesus death and resurrection, 4) exhibiting a weak and foolish epistemology as contrasted with human wisdom, 5) as distinguishing the hidden God and the revealed God. Antje Jackelen, the bishop of Lund offers an ecclesial-theological consideration of faith in the public sphere. Ted Peters and Kathleen Billman engage Westhelle’s conceptual framework of spatiality. Else Marie Wiberg Pederson is inspired by the powerful concluding pages of The Scandalous God (Westhelle’s book on the theology of cross), in which Westhelle ponders the “mad economy” of an empty tomb filled with women bearing gifts of fragrant spices.

John Arthur Nunes is moved by Westhelle’s work to attend to the questions at the intersection of theology and postcolonial studies.  Philip Hefner’s article analyzes Westhelle’s theology of creation. Claudia Jahnel offers a treatise on “The Flavor of the Other.” She argues for the reality of a “cultural interviewing… full of transgressions, exchange processes, and syncretism.” Roberto Zwetsch engages with Westhelle’s translation of what NRSV calls “to the ends of the world” (Romans 10:18). Mary Philip writes on remembrance through which she tries to analyze the theological fecundity of Westhelle’s works. Luis Dreher tries to unearth the influence of Luther in Westhelle’s theology. Kathlen Luana De Oliveira comments that Westhelle’s work is nothing but the “knowledge transfigured by love.” In an essay most explicitly engendering the place of women, Musimbi Kanyoro elucidates three considerations for our global engagement:1) be prepared to be disturbed by the chasmic socio-economic gap that divides humanity globally; 2) be ready to be in conversation concerning the place of privilege and power those in the North experience; 3) claiming God’s hope and refusing fear will lead to risk-taking for the sake of celebrating diversity. Walter Altmann’s contribution is a sermon on Psalm 90.

Reinhard Hutter offers a careful consideration of the nature and universality of human experience. Kathleen Billman reflects on the narratological dimensions of faith. Jose Rodriguez writes about the prophetic alternative to human dividedness. Barbara Rossing’s essay registers an eschatological dimension of the Oikumene. Towards the end, Deanna A. Thompson offers a prayer for the hope of an eco-living in this world of adversity. Of course, it is a theological churrasco from those who love to do theology passionately. The reviewer joins in this chorus of the well-wishers of Vitor Westhelle to thank God for the meaningful words and the challenging life of Vitor Westhelle-a passionate theologian, teacher, and a friend.  

(REVIEW 11) Alternatives Unincorporated: Earth Ethics from the Grassroots

Alternatives Unincorporated: Earth Ethics from the Grassroots   

                                                                                                            George Zachariah                                                                                                              London: Equinox, 2011. 183 pp. ISBN 978-1-84553-689-3.

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj                                                                                             (published in Religion & Society, Vol. 56 No. 3-4, Bangalore: CISRS, 2011)

George Zachariah’s seminal work “Alternatives Unincorporated; Earth Ethics from the Grassroots,” is a remarkable book on Eco theology from the Indian context. As an academician, activist and theologian who has been actively involved in the grass-root engagements of various social movements in India for the last twenty-five years, George Zachariah shares with us his vibrant spirituality of subaltern resistance and passion for social justice. By taking Narmada Bachavo Andolan (The Save Narmada Movement) as a text, he creatively proposes the contours of a contemporary earth ethics that stems out of the crucible of grass-root subaltern political practice. As his professor Larry Rasmussen comments, this book belongs to the heart, soul and mind of the mandatory effort of validating the grass-root resistances for water, food, energy and life.  

Why an earth ethics from grass-roots?  George argues that “it is the methodological commitment to recognize the agency of the victims of environmental destruction that seems to be missing in the wider discussions of eco-justice,” that necessitates the grass-roots earth ethics. He expounds the significance of his thesis and declares that “an earth ethics from the grassroots is a vision and praxis to interpret the reality and to change it radically from the subaltern standpoint so that a different world may become a contemporary reality.”  It is an attempt to attend, acknowledge and validate the silenced voices/ lifeworlds/ epistemologies of the subjugated masses that signals a new world which is devoid of all kinds of domination, exploitation and marginalization.

The first chapter elucidates how development and the neoliberal globalization continue the colonial legacy of colonizing the life world and erasing the moral agency of the subaltern communities. The author reiterates the urgency to reclaim the moral agency of the dispossessed that would be the political and spiritual power to change the world. The second chapter narrates the stories of the people and the wider community of creation in the Narmada Valley. It interrogates the modern development gaze on the indigenous people that marginalizes them from their livelihood, social space and cultural heritage. Narmada Bachavo Andolan (NBA) - the grass-roots organizational set up that provides the consolidated space for the voices of resistance thus becomes the theological crucible from which the rationale for the new earth ethics emerges.

The third chapter exposes the hegemonic nature of the regimes of truth and underscores the agency of oppositional consciousness and knowledges that stem from the subaltern social movements. Zachariah argues that the grass-roots epistemologies are embodiments of resistance and transformation. Thus, contemporary social movements are theological texts that can inform us in our search for a world devoid of the axis of domination and alienation. It is here the author emphatically comes up with his new ways of doing theology and ethics that resist all manifestations of the idols of death and celebrates life in its fullness.

The last chapter is the constructive attempt to map the earth ethics from the grass-roots. Here, Zachariah discusses the epistemological, praxiological and political content of the emerging subaltern earth ethics. The book concludes with a manifesto of the earth ethics from the grass-roots, reclaiming the moral agency of the subalterns to dream and to midwife alternatives that are “unincorporated.” The testimony of the book is that the content and challenge of the subaltern theology and earth ethics is to keep alive the hope of transformation in the realized epiphanies of the Slain Lamb- the Absolute Subaltern who lived out an alternative politics and spirituality yet remained eternally unincorporated.  

The book invites us to the politics and spirituality of the subaltern earth ethics and envisages a new way of doing theology that stems out of the lived experiences of the struggling masses. This book has signaled the new phase of theological engagements in India. It has posed a new direction of the subaltern politics and the social practices in India.  It is a gift to the students of Eco theology, and to all those who wish to taste the spirituality of resistance in and around us.  As Arundhathi Roy exhorts us listen to the grasshoppers and sense the spirituality of the life world. It is the sense of grass-roots earth ethics that brings us the sense of infinite justice. 

The focal point of doing theology from the subaltern engagements in fact exemplifies the epistemological shifts in the discussion of theological methodology in the Indian context.  It envisions a post-Marxist method of doing theology that transcends the limitations of class analysis. At the same time it re-imagines an eco-theology and eco-practice that transgresses the modernist trappings of doing theology in a postmodern/ postcolonial context. This book offers new discussion on theological methodology, epistemology and politics that determine the content and challenge of Indian Christian Theologies in the post-Marxist/ postmodern/ postcolonial epistemological Indian context.

(REVIEW 10) Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

Merold Westphal                                                                                                                             Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2009

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

Merold Westphal is the distinguished professor of philosophy at Fordham University. His other publications are postmodern philosophy and Christian thought and over-coming Onto-theology. In this book Westphal relates the current philosophical thinking with the biblical hermeneutics. This book defines church as the faithful community which is being called to interpret the signs of the world.

Why we need interpretation?  Westphal contends that we need interpretation because world is not ‘out there’ or given.’ What ‘we see’ is a construal of an interpretation mediated by a tradition that is still alive in community and in our own thinking. So, ‘just see’ is not an absolute see. It necessitates multiple ‘seeings.’ It was the modern romantic hermeneutics that offered the scientific and objective method of interpretation. Roland Barthes ‘The Death of the Author’ (1969) and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” offered a paradigm shift in the modern Biblical hermeneutics. According to Barthes, it is not the author who speaks but the language speaks. Barthes gives more importance to the reader and the reading.  

The most important contribution of this book is the hermeneutics of revelation. Westphal opines that ‘to speak of the divine nature of Scripture and of the church as a community built on the foundation of the Scripture is to speak of revelation. To speak of revelation is to speak of divine transcendence. The divine voice is not reducible to the human voices that give us Scripture either by writing it or by interpreting it. The revelatory content of the biblical hermeneutics finds philosophical grounding in the Levinasian notion of the radical other. The other is the radical other. The other is beyond my comprehension and objectification. God is the radical other as we see in the glory and the height of the face of the other-the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. The face of the other is the locus of divine epiphany. So every human community whether it is religious or political needs to be opened to the voice of the other in its immediacy. Westphal emphatically contends that it is the voice of the other that interrupts the authority and the power of the church. At the same time, it is the hermeneutical fecundity for the church today to discern its response-ability.  Whose Community? Which Interpretation? is a useful book for theologians, pastors, and laypeople.

(REVIEW 9) Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views

Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views

Stanley E. Porter & Beth M. Stovell (eds.)                                                                        Illinois: IVP Academic, 2012

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

This book provides an introduction to the variety of different methods of biblical interpretation.  It contains a survey of the key issues of biblical hermeneutics using the literary categories of “behind the text,” “within the text,” and “in front of the text.”  “Behind the text” is a traditional approach through which the scholars locate the text within the ‘original’ context and the original readers of the text in that historical context.  “Within the text” was the modern approach that looked within the constitution of the text itself.  It was a shift of focus from the evolutionary model to a communication model of hermeneutics. Emphasis on the autonomous text, but led to a focus on textual unity. This “In front of the text’ model on the other hand, discusses the effect of the text on the reader. This model is more reader-centered and attends the issue of the interaction between the text and the interpreter.

The book offers five views of biblical hermeneutics: (1) Historical-Critical/ Grammatical; (2) Literary/ Postmodern; (3) Philosophical/ Theological; (4) Redemptive-Historical and (5) Canonical. The historical-critical method view seeks for insights for interpretation from taking a critical view of the history behind the text, on the one hand, and utilizing a grammatical analysis of the text, on the other. This approach includes various forms of critical analysis such as source, form, redaction, tradition and textual criticism. The literary/ postmodern view assumes a considerable fluidity between the text, reader, and the author. There is no meaning innate in the text. Thus in this method, the politics of interpretation is very important.

The proponents of the redemptive-historical view follows the theological interpretation of the reformers. They argue that the role of Christ in his redemptive work is central to interpreting the whole of Scripture, whether the Old or the New Testament. The canonical method argues for the necessity of reading the entire canon in relationship to each part of the canon. Thus the Old Testament should be read in light of the New Testament and the New Testament in light of the Old Testament. This framework influences the goals, procedures and results of a canonical approach to biblical hermeneutics. Philosophical-theological method locates biblical hermeneutics in a postmodern context. It is more concerned about the philosophy of the hermeneutics.

This book does not offer any conclusion to the question of hermeneutics (that is impossible in a book), but provides us a very useful survey of different approaches in the history of biblical hermeneutics. This is a useful book for all those who are interested in the practical interpretation of the Bible.

(REVIEW 8) Method Matters: Essays on the Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Honor of David L. Peterson

Method Matters: Essays on the Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Honor of David L. Peterson

Joel M. Lemon and Kent Harold Richards (Eds)                                                                                                     Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

Method Matters in Biblical hermeneutics. This book is a handbook of methods in Hebrew Bible scholarship. This collection of essays it contains focused discussions of traditional and newly emerging methods including historical criticism, ideological criticism and literary criticism, as well as numerous case studies that indicate how these approaches work and what insights they yield. The additional essays provide a broad overview of the field by reflecting on the larger intellectual currents that have generated and guided contemporary biblical scholarship. In order to focus a particular method of biblical interpretation, this review concentrates on the essay on Postmodern Literary Criticism: The impossibility of Method by Mark. K. George (p. 459-478).

Mark K. George makes clear that the method matters only in modernity. Method as a systematic, orderly series of steps that a scholar follows in order to analyze a text from a particular vantage point, is a modern paradigm. Then, what does the method do in postmodernity? Postmodern thought seeks to move beyond the modern paradigm. Postmodernism does not assume that biblical interpretation as an apolitical activity. For postmodernism, neither the interpreter nor the text is objective or innocent. Just like the text, the interpreter is also influenced and shaped by the larger social, economic, political, theological, historical, and cultural context within which she or he is situated. What is the most important for postmodern biblical hermeneutics is that the reading of the text. It is the reading that creates new texts. Of course, it points towards the possibility of multiple readings and multiple texts.

The methods of reading exercise power in the interpretative process. It is the question of power in the process of assigning meanings is the locus of scrutiny in postmodern hermeneutical criticism. Who speaks for whom? How the other is being portrayed?  What is the power politics of both the text and the interpreter? Postmodern interpreters seek to counter the exercise of power and allow multiple meanings of a text to emerge, even though they contradict each other.  Here, the interpreter is also challenged and invited to deconstruct her/ his own assumptions and power consciousness.  

The question of meaning, particularly absolute or ultimate meaning, is a final challenge postmodern interpreters make to the concept of method. Postmodernism does not allow any foundational claim for a particular meaning. Derrida challenges the fixity and rigidity of a particular meaning and offers multiplicity and fluidity of meanings. Interpretation cannot convey ultimate Truth; it can merely participate in the referential condition through its ongoing process of creating new interpretations.  Thus, for postmodernism, to use a particular method to ascertain “the meaning’ of a text is impossible.

The question then arises is what do we mean by the postmodern literary criticism? George argues that it is a “polythetic mode of classification that does not fix the boundaries, leaving open the possibility of movement within and between classes of objects” (p. 465). What is important for George in his postmodern (non) method of biblical criticism is the “commitment to the impossibility of one interpretation dominating all others; therefore, interpretations may be meaningful within the interpreter’s particular context, but not necessarily beyond it, which encourages other interpretations to be offered” (p.466).

(REVIEW 7) Texts under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination

Texts under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination   

                                                                                          

Walter Brueggemann                                                                                                                                              Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

Walter Brueggemann’s postmodern approach to scripture replaces modern critical methods of biblical interpretation with little little stories of the Christian community whose complex and ambiguous meaning subvert the culture of the world. According to Brueggemann, the collapse of the modernity and its biblical interpretation informed by the historical critical method provides new freedom for the text of scripture and for our own construal of the word through what we take to be the living word of God. For Brueggemann, the postmodern shift means: (1) Our knowing is inherently contextual; (2) Contexts are quite local; and (3) Our knowing is inherently pluralistic (P. 8-9).

Brueggemann conceives Interpretation as counter imagination (30-39). The point of Scripture is to subvert the dominant world culture and offer an alternative world. He contends that the point of scripture study and preaching is to make possible an alternative to “the world.” “Coming to us through scripture, preaching, and continuing revelation, the gospel is the good news that we can live differently.” “To be a Christian is to believe that conversion.” This conversion has mainly three dimensions: self, community, and world (The origin of self: life as gift of God, born out of dust-the fragility of life (Ps.139:13-16; 103:13; 131:1-20)-equity in human life (prov.14:31, 17:5; 22:2; 29:13); The origin of the world; God’s creation-ps:104, 51:11; Isa. 40:22-23; 55:10;40:30); 3. The origin of the community-Israel is a gift of God (isa.40:1-4; Ezek; 16; 5-15).

According to Brueggemann, the church is the place where the large dreams are entertained, songs are sung, boundaries are crossed, hurt is noticed, and the weak are honored (P.37). It is the place of scriptural negotiations and the personal re-imaginations. Brueggemann highlights three important tools for postmodern biblical hermeneutics: memory, covenant and hope. The ‘present’ for Christians is not just a ‘now’ but a moment of transformation and re-imagination. It is a “readiness to receive life from the other, from God and neighbor, rather than from self (54).  For Christians the ‘now’ is ordered by Christian memory and hope. We and the world are figured by memory and hope, and thus, so are our scriptural texts.

Memory in the community as a counter imagination in the contemporary globalized world is imperative for biblical hermeneutics.  Today we live in world of Amnesia. We aggressively forget everything. Covenant becomes counter imaginative in a marketed world where the community is deeply enmeshed in commoditization and materialization. Hope as a hope against hope and the hope in the promised and possible becomes a counter imagination where the community is trapped in despair and death (P.55).

Of course, it is an interesting book that helps us to think the biblical interpretation in terms of the past as memory, the present as covenantal fidelity, and the future as anticipation; despite the lack of the discussion of the epistemological trajectories of the postmodern hermeneutics.    

Reading the Hebrew Bible After the Shoah: Engaging Holocaust Theology

REVIEW 6

Reading the Hebrew Bible After the Shoah                                                                                                                     Engaging Holocaust Theology                                                                                                                                   

Mervin A. Sweeny                                                                                                                                      Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2008

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

Mervin A. Sweeny’s book, Reading the Hebrew Bible after the Shoah, Engaging Holocaust Theology, deals with the impact of the Holocaust or Shoah on the reading of the Hebrew Bible in both Judaism and Christianity. Mervin argues that consideration of the Shoah points to a need to rethink traditional concepts of divine presence, power and righteousness together with traditional notions of human guilt or sin in relation to G-d. The book exhorts us the human beings as partners with G-d in creation are expected to play the primary role in completing the creation of the world begun by G-d and thereby in restoring the presence of G-d that was shattered by the very act of creation itself.

The Shoah refers to the issue of mass extermination of Jewish population in Europe by the Nazis during the World War II. The writer argues that Shoah in the patristic period employed the power of state deliberately to suppress Judaism and pointed to the oppressed state of Jews in Christian society as a means to demonstrate the consequences of failure to acknowledge Christ and church authority. Such a stance played a major role in promoting antagonism against Jews throughout the Christian world. The author raises the question of the absence of Christian theological response to this issue in the earlier times.

In the introduction, Mervin makes a survey of Jewish theological discourses of Shoah. He starts his enquiry on the assumption that the biblical theology especially Old testament had failed to account for the Shoah, so he turns to the discussion of the theological interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in the twentieth century. This study argues that the problem posed by the Shoah call for human beings to take on greater responsibility for the sanctity, well-being, and fundamental justice of the world in which we live.

The book consists of ten chapters excluding introduction and conclusion, which cover the pages 1-283. The first chapter “Abraham and the Problem of Divine fidelity,” deals with the Abraham –YHWH relationship and the Abraham-Sarah narratives. He argues that it points to a fundamental concern with Divine fidelity in the Genesis narratives concerning Israel’s first ancestors, Abraham and Sarah (P.25).

Chapter two discusses with Moses-the founding leader of Israel in the pentateuchal narrative and the problem of Divine violence. The condemnation of Moses is on the context of emergence of priestly and political leadership to Israel and the author argues that with those new changes in the leadership, Israel is capable enough to address the hostile situations against them (P. 63). Chapter three “The Question of Theodicy in the historical Books (Jeroboam, Manasseh, and Josiah) defends the power and righteousness of YHWH in the face of disaster and evil. The fall of Jerusalem, the exile of the people, the death and the suffering of so many were not due to YHWH’s impotency, moral fidelity or lack of attention. Rather YHWH”s power, righteousness, and attention to the human affairs brings about the disaster when human beings fail in their obligations to YHWH (P. 83).

Chapter four discusses with the Isaiah’s question to G-d. The book of Isaiah is a work of theodicy that attempts to defend YHWH from the charges of impotence and immorality. YHWH is the G-d who brings judgment against those nations when they fail to recognize YHWH as the source of power and He is the G-d who restores the people from exile to Jerusalem as it symbolizes YHWH’s role in the world (P. 103).  Jeremiah’s struggle with his Divine commission is the content of discussion in the fifth chapter. Mervin contents that in order to defend the sanctity, righteousness, and power of YHWH, Jeremiah’s only recourse was to argue that the people-and not YHWH- were responsible for their own fate and that YHWH would ultimately act to restore Jerusalem, Judah and Israel once the period of exile and punishment was over (P. 127).

In the chapter six where the author deals with Ezekiel and the issue of the Holiness of G-d, he contends that Ezekiel describes a restored temple and a restored Israel at the centre of a restored creation to signify the outcome of YHWH’s efforts to purge the world of its impurity and corruption and to reestablish the sanctity of creation (P. 145). The next chapter discusses with the Twelve Prophets and the Question of Shoah. According to Mervin, every one of these books raises issues concerning YHWH’s power, righteousness and willingness to act in relation to the experiences of Shoah in the ancient world. For Mervin, these are the questions posed about G-d in relation to the modern experience of Shoah (P. 166).

The eighth chapter deals with the complaints to G-d in Psalms and Lamentations, the voice of the victims. When he discusses with the role of Laments, he argues that “such a dialogue points to a robust relationship between YHWH and the people in which both parties express themselves, forcefully and deliberately when either perceives wrongdoing on the part of the other. Nevertheless, neither YHWH nor the people abandon the dialogue, but instead look for the means to ensure its continuity (P. 187). He discusses with the Divine hiddenness and human initiatives in the Wisdom Literature that constitutes the ninth chapter. Mervin is convinced that the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible calls upon human being to act, that is, to discern wisdom and order in the world and to act on that knowledge, however limited it might be, to ensure a stable and productive order in creation and life in the world (P. 207).

In the last chapter, “Lessons from the Didactic narratives of the Writings,” he is of the opinion that readers of the didactic narrative literature of the Hebrew bible learn the importance of Jewish life, practice, and identity, and the imperative to assert and defend all three when living in a gentle world (P. 227). In the conclusion Mervin compares the predicament of the human being with experience of Eve in the Garden of Eden. G-d’s absence is because of our wrong doings. “To a dialogue, the question of divine engagement or absence is irrelevant.” For him, the key question is, “will we continue to uphold the ideas learned from G-d of power, righteousness, fidelity and engagement in our own lives? He exhorts us that “we need to accept our own responsibility to complete and sanctify the world of creation in which we live (P. 241).   

This book is a meaningful intervention to the efforts that propagates hate against people, communities and nationalities. Especially in the case of Jews, as Mervin A. Sweeny argues, there has been a conscious effort to alienate them at the cost of the biblical narratives on Jews. In that matter, it is a hermeneutical resistance to those engagements of hate and alienation. The best way to challenge the programme of hate is to retreat/ re-read/ re-imagine/ re-member the history and re-locate it theologically. That is what Mervin is doing through this work. As a hermeneutical engagement for love and reconciliation, this effort is to be acknowledged and appreciated.

 However this book, from the very beginning seems to defend God’s fidelity and righteousness against the question of theodicy.  As he tries to attend the question of theodicy, Mervin blames human beings for their irresponsible life on the earth. This condemnation of the human being on the basis of the “original sin,” locates its hermeneutical stand point against the contemporary discussions on the biblical hermeneutical engagements.  Condemning human beings in total and demanding their universal change outrageously, strategically places these discussions in the ‘air’ and it lacks the specific attention to the particular textual engagements that problematize the hermeneutic programme of hate.

REVIEW 5

Faithful Interpretation: Reading Bible in a Postmodern World

A.K.M Adam
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

In Faithful Interpretation, Reading Bible in a Postmodern World, Adam tries to elucidate a postmodern approach of biblical hermeneutics that attends the multi-model differential hermeneutics with various points of emphases and trajectories. His intention, here, is to go beyond the modern technical interpretation and to search for a more interactive and flexible approach to meaning. Adam intends to propose more meaningful transformative hermeneutics in the postmodern context.

The first chapter discusses with the trajectories and limitations of modern biblical interpretative program that constituted the modern biblical theology in the history of the hermeneutical tradition. According to Adam, it was the quest for an authoritative, scientific, historical foundation that led the modern biblical theology into a contradiction and crisis (p.20). In fact his intention is not to reject the historical critical method, rather to de-centre it from the biblical hermeneutical program and give much more emphasize to the aesthetical and the ethical-political content of the interpretative engagement. He asks the question; can we live by this biblical theology today? Adam seems to be located in the  ethical hermeneutical tradition.

The second chapter confronts with one of the most common rationales for assigning historical critical analysis the authority in the interpretative program-the rationale of delineating Docetism. By countering Ernst Kasemann's argument that validates the historical critical method in delineating Docetism, Adam explains that the historical critical method is ill suited for a role as defender of faith (P. 43). He argues that "the opposite of Docetism is not certified historical scholarship, but a resolutely Chalcedonian Christology" (p.13)

The third chapter takes up the problem of subsistent meaning and textual agency. Adam argues that interpretations of biblical texts as traffic signs- always have consequence; because it is ineluctably a social act. He clarifies it: " The constraints upon textual interpretation do not derive from the nature of understanding, or texts, or of language  or of communicative intent, or of truth, or of speech-acts, but always only from the sunday collocations of circumstances within which we formulate interpretations and judgements" (P.59). The legitimacy of an interpretation is determined by the body of readers evaluating it. There is no single  universal criterion to determine the truthfulness of any interpretation. On the other hand, he reminds us that there is a strong connection between our hermeneutics and the ethics we proclaim and practice (P.65).

The forth chapter deals with the question of meaning and ethics with particular references to the gospel of Matthew's attributed nature of anti-jewish text. Adam explicates his postmodern theoretical position and says: "no text is ideologically tainted without cooperation of readers and institutions that construct the text as "Ideologically tainted" (P.71). Thus, he contends that it is not just the 'reading effect' but 'our living effect' makes our hermeneutics transformative and just (P. 79).

In the fifth chapter he argues for a 'differential hermeneutic  (which locates meaning in human interaction, with the result that different interpretative outcomes are only to be expected as signs of the pluriform character of the human imagination) over against an 'integral hermeneutics  (which assumes for each text a singular, correct meaning). according to adam the differential hermeneutics affords the prospect of a more harmonious practice of biblical interpretation, "attentive to the myriad particularities that constitute biblical interpretators as different people, with a view toward embodying the truth we claim to learn from the Bible" (P. 103). Chapter 7 exemplifies Adams' 'differential hermeneutic' with its examination of the interpretation of the 'sign of Jonah" in the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels.

Chapter six spells out further the ethical focus of the church's interpretative work, emphasizing interpretations that generate multiple/ different forms of christian discipleship resembling/ enacting the life of Jesus. Adam contends that "thus we can sponsor an imitation of christ's unwavering faithfulness to the gospel that respects distinction and particularities at the same time it draws us ever closer to one another and to God" (p, 17). Chapter 8 engages with a similar agenda, this time with reference to human sexulaity and hallowed relationships. It develops the criteria for discerning what characteristics bespeak holiness in intimacy and how churches may face the difficult challenge of putting discernement into practice.

In this book, adam succeeded to a certain extent elucidating the postmodern content of biblical hermeneutics, in constitution with his previous work. As he proposes the differential hermeneutics that attends the plurality, contextuality and intractability of the hermeneutical triad-the text, author and the reader, in a way signify the inter-textual, intra-textual and the multi-cultural aesthetical dimensions of the biblical interpretation. What is significant in his postmodern hermeneutical program is the sole emphasis on the ethical content of the biblical hermeneutics. Here adam shows his invincible allegiance to the idea of the communicative action of Habermas. According to Adam, reading Bible meaningfully is the responsibility of the faithful community that imitates or interprets Jesus christ who has been placed in the order of signs. Thus the faithful or the disciples are the called out communities who engage creatively with the Bible in their local practices of every day life. The biblical theology or systematic theology is to de-sign the texts, the selves and the events that come across in the everyday experiences and find a harmonious order of justice and fraternity in the postmodern world.

Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections (BOOK REVIEW 4)

REVIEW 4

Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections

Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia (eds.)

London, New York: T&T Clark International, 2005

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj 

Postcolonial studies mark the most contemporary and challenging methodological innovations in the field of biblical studies. Postcolonialism as a hermeneutical method interrogates and re-visit the colonial imprint inscribed on the histories, biographies, epistemologies and politics of the ‘colonized.’  Anti- Euro-centrism as the methodological cutting edge, it provides new spaces for the ‘colonized’/ ‘marginalized’ people in the arena of biblical criticism. The introduction of the Postcolonialism into the realm of biblical studies, created remarkable effects in terms of accepting the plurality of doing the biblical hermeneutics and contextual theologies.  The book, Postcolonial Biblical Criticism is the most significant initiative in this regard.

Postcolonial Biblical Criticism is the sixth volume in the series of books edited by R. S. Sugirtharajah and entitled The Bible and Postcolonialism. The first volume which was published in 1998, entitled The Postcolonial Bible, functioned as the forerunner of this series in which R.S. Sugirtharajah discussed the issue of decolonizing the Bible. This sixth volume is originated from the panel discussion organized by the Society of Biblical Literature in 1998 to deliberate on the implications of the cultural hermeneutics in the field of biblical studies.  This volume brings out the relevance of postcolonial biblical criticism by locating it in relation to other important methodological currents in the contemporary biblical studies: Feminism; racial/ ethnic studies; post structuralism; postmodernism and Marxism.

The first chapter, “Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Beginnings, Trajectories, Intersections,” by the editors, is almost like an introduction to whole content of the book. It provides us the history of the formation of Postcolonial Biblical Hermeneutical programme as an academic project in the field of biblical studies. The co-editors outline the epistemological trajectories through which the postcolonial biblical criticism has been emerged in connection with the biblical interpretation of the Liberation Theology and the postmodern/ post structural/ cultural hermeneutics as well.

In the second chapter “Mapping the Postcolonial Optic in Biblical Criticism: Meaning and Scope” Segovia tries to locate or ground Postcolonial Theory in the field of biblical criticism by tracing of its meaning and scope through a close reading of the postcolonial introductory literature such as Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Leela Gandhi, 1998), Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (Ania Loomba, 1998), and Beginning Postcolonialism (John McLeord, 2000). According to Segovia, the Postcolonial criticism highlights the relationship between centre and periphery, metropolis and margins, the imperial and colonial. For him, Postcolonialism is a hermeneutical process of realization of the problematic of domination and subordination in the geopolitical realm (P.65). Thus Segovia defines the role of his project as the hermeneutical effort to attend the question of power in the programme of colonization and its politics of inequality.

Stephen Moore’s article that constitutes the third chapter of the book discusses the issue of the relationship between Postmodernism/ Poststructuralist and Postcolonialism. Moore discusses the contributions of the postcolonial trinity- Said, Spivak and Bhabha to the project of Postcolonialism and analyses how they are indebted to the Post structural theories of power, resistance, language and subjectivity. Apart from that, he specifically attends to the work of Bhabha and analyses how he is considering Bible as simultaneously imperial and native.

In her contribution “Gospel Hauntings: The Postcolonial Demons of New Testament Criticism,” Laura E. Donaldson raises the issue of gender within the context of Postcolonial Biblical Studies. For Laura, Postcolonial criticism is “an oppositional reading that is multinational in nature, keenly attentive to the intricacies of the situation in terms of culture, race, class, and gender” (P. 97). By fruitfully implementing some of the postcolonial feminist concepts of Spivak such as ethical singularity, planetarity and spectrality, Laura tries to re-visit/ re-member the forgotten imaginations/ locations of women in history, literature and politics. Laura (re-)reads the story of the “demon-possessed daughter” of the “Syro-Phoenician/ Canaanite women” in terms the colonial representation of the “mute”/ “disabled”/ “anonymous”/ “demon-possessed” girl and argues that “ a poetic description of postcolonial feminist criticism might be allowing ourselves to be haunted by those ghosts whose suffering undergirds the routine banalities of daily life” (P. 110).  Her task is here to re-define not only the postcolonial feminist biblical criticism but also the feminist theology itself.

The fifth chapter by Tat-siong Benny Liew that deals with the issue of race/ ethnicity on biblical authority and postcolonial biblical criticism argues that “none of these categories are unitary or identical and they are linked each other and leads to a multi-dimensional hermeneutics.” In conclusion, he provides a reflection on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Asian-American novel Dictee, a work that Liew sees as a racial/ ethnic/ postcolonial text- as an illustration of cutting-edge biblical scholarship.

The last two essays address the conflictual but enabling relations between Marxism and Postcolonialism. Roland Boer in his article titled “Marx, Postcolonialism, and the Bible”, argues that “it is imperative for both postcolonial theory and postcolonial biblical criticism to recover their theoretical and enabling history in the Marxist tradition. By analyzing the works of postcolonial writers like said, Spivak and Bhabha, he argues that what we find in post colonial writings, are “Derridean Marxist” or a “demarxified Bakhtin”.  Along this direction, David Jobling conceptualizes a triadic method of biblical interpretation- the interpretation that takes seriously the three locations: Bible/ Christianity, Marxism and Postcolonialism. But he concludes with hybrid method of biblical hermeneutics. Jobling contents that “the Marxist points to the historical failure of Christianity (the issue of colonialism), but now that the charge of historical failure hangs heavily also over Marxism, perhaps the ball is back in the Bible’s court. Or better, perhaps it is now the turn of the hybrid of biblical studies and Marxism” (P. 199).

As an initial engagement to collect various perspectives on the focus-Postcolonialism, this work deserves our acknowledgement and appreciation. Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia have succeeded to certain extends to sketch out the contours of the project of postcolonial biblical criticism.  Its connection with Feminism, Marxism and postmodernism is brought clearly. Almost all theoretical concepts and themes are being tackled. The writers with their rich experience in the field of biblical studies and the theological teaching have helped a lot to envisage a new hermeneutical engagement in the field of biblical criticism. Along with these strengths, it faces several flaws in its formulation and articulation. Of course Postcolonialism itself is vast and a multifaceted theory or method. This work, on the other hand, has failed to locate biblical criticism in its multi-layered/ polyphonic social/ epistemological context.  By locating the attention into the ‘binary opposites,’ it neglects the other divisions/ multiple locations of oppression and marginality. That is why it lacked the perspective of the ‘queer politics’ or ‘transgender’ concerns. It is not accidental that this book eventually ends in the question of the inclusion of Marxism into this methodology. Since Marxism deals with the class struggle between the bourgeois and the preliterate-the binary opposites for the ‘liberation” of the “oppressed,”  the authors of this book unintentionally go with the binary opposition with the imperial and the colonized which is fundamental to the postcolonial theory.  Is this the problem with this book or with the entire theory of Postcolonialism?

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

What is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics?

REVIEW 3

What is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics? Reading the New Testament

Tat-Siong Benny Liew

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

‘The ways of reading are the ways of being’. Hermeneutics is not at all an apolitical activity. It is a political activity through which we read/ re-read ourselves. Benny Liew in his book, What is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics? tries to re-read the meaning of the identity and the agency of ‘Asian American communities’ who live in the context of multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicity (p. 3). As he says in the preface, the book is organized in three foci: (1) methodology (the distinguishing characteristics or sensibilities of Asian/ American biblical hermeneutics), (2) community (the politics of inclusion and exclusion), (3) agency. This book has two general characteristics: (1) it uses an intertextual and interdisciplinary approach. It covers all of the major genres found within the New Testament. Beyond the literary text (or canon) it uses films and events like human genome project and September 11, and (2) this book affirms Asian America as a pan-ethnic coalition and acknowledging the differences within that very same coalition.  

            The whole task of this work is to envisage how Asian American hermeneutics is possible without essentializing identity and community. Asian American biblical hermeneutics that he envisions “has no individual center, instead the sub-discipline is built on the interaction or in-between-ness of multiple engagements” (p.10). The methodology of biblical hermeneutics that he used in this book is “paying attention to how the machinery of discursive construction has functioned in biblical texts of the past sensitizes and enables one to critique constructions of the present” (p. 12). The interdisciplinary approach that he used in this book allows him to use the open-ended range of theoretical/ methodological practices rather than revolving around any particular theoretical framework which is imperative to design the ‘pan-ethnicity’ of the ‘Asian American identity’ (He does not homogenizing the ‘meta-identity’/ ‘coalition identity’; rather he gives attention to the very particular differences of the ‘sub-identities’ / ‘multiple locations’/ ‘sub-ethnicities’ within it).  The very question of Asian American biblical hermeneutics’ is emerges out of the epistemological and historical location of Empire and its hegemonic practices in an ‘alien land”. And thus Liew claims that the postcolonial theory and studies occupy a very significant role in the writing of this book because, he says: “that reads the text as an ideo-grammer” (p. 14).

By stating the rationality of his postcolonial hermeneutical methodology, Liew argues it is helpful to re-locate the question of the locations of identity and agency in the context of colonialisms and the practices of othering and to interrogate the assumed understandings and practices of the these hegemonic power systems; because “Bible is a fascinating library of texts that pose issues and raise questions concerning multiple and interlocking differential relations of power” (p.xii). In the second chapter where he tries to speak about the colonial assumptions of the new testament especially the gospel according to Mark, argues that “reading with yin yang eyes is a reading from a marginal sight/site as it features a contrary look that reads against itself, a returned gaze that reads without any assumption of biblical authority, a broad view that reads beyond single-issue politics, and a transgressive perspective that reads across disciplines” (P.33). While critically analyzing the contradictions in the rhetoric of John regarding community whether it is built upon choice and consent or hereditary and the issues of integration and oppression in the text of Acts, by which he finds immense possibilities of de-colonizing the practices and the rhetoric of empire in  united states. He uses feminist critical hermeneutical methodologies to discuss the politics of ‘redressing the ‘ethnicized’/ ‘minoritized’/ ‘sexualized’/ ‘victimized’ bodies in the Roman/ Corinthian imperial politics of body in the fifth chapter, in order to show how the experiences of Asian Americans may help to inform a different reading of difference concerning 1corinthians. The whole intention or analyzing Paul’s psycho-political operatives in 1corinthians, in the next chapter, is not only to address the issue of melancholia both in self understanding of both Paul and the Corinthian Diaspora  but it is intended to unveil the ‘imperial ills of empire’ in the hegemonic process of locating the hybrid/ liminal bodies. By doing the biblical interventions in the Theressa Hak kyungs Cha’s Dictee, he locates the agency of the Asian American community as ‘hetero-glossic’ in content and identity. By disclosing the role of apocalypse, in the last chapter, he affirms the change ness/ ‘fluidity’ of the very category of ‘Asian Americanism’ itself.

The whole political/ theological significance of this book is being stated clearly by the author in the very first chapter of this book itself: “By turning out “our” attention from whites to each other, different racial/ ethnic minority groups can work together to form new ways of reading, knowing, and be(com)ing that go beyond reversing, reinscribing and resisting dominant, colonial, or orientalist ideologic and it may help to displace identity-based politics” (p.15). It is here the author succeeds to go beyond the epistemological/ methodological limitation of post colonialism.

Though these two books come from two different context and divergent locations they share some commonalities. First, their hermeneutical methodology whether it is interdisciplinary or postcolonial, it shares a common passion for critical reading that challenges all kinds of dominations and thus tries to foster a culture of justice and equality. Second, their methods intend to valorize the anti-imperial practices, languages and enrich contemporary struggles of the marginalized. And thus they re-imagine new ways of doing theologies today. On the other hand, they face interrogations from other contextual theologies for being ‘grand narrative’ of multiple identities or ‘exclusivist’ jargons that neglect other contexts so on and so forth. However, it is these interrogations and interventions that determine the future of biblical/ theological studies in the future.

The Power of the Word, Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire

REVIEW 2

The Power of the Word, Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza

Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza in her book The Power of the Word explores how the power of empire has shaped and affected Christian scriptures and how it still shapes our self understanding. It is an invitation to re-visit our ‘own tongues’ how far it is anti-empire and nurturing a language of social democracy of equality and fraternity. By analyzing Roman Empire as the context and the social location of Christian scriptures and seeing the contemporary forms of empire, she proposes a critical feminist postcolonial hermeneutics of the scriptures and thereby tries to valorize the global possibilities of resistances. 

She locates this book within the framework of feminist political theory which includes three specific modes, as it was proposed by the political theorist Nancy Fraser, viz: historical redistribution, ideological deconstruction and theological constructive re-presentation. Through these modules of reading she indented to   de-kiriachialise or de-imperialize or de-colonize both the inscriptions of the biblical discourses and our concept of Divine itself. Her whole task here is to invite us to have a counter imperial imagination of the ‘text’ and the ‘self’.

The book is divided into seven chapters. In the first chapter she tries to articulate a theoretical space for mapping a critical transnational feminist biblical interpretation. She argues that the biblical concept of ekklesia, as a counter biblical imagination of radical democracy that even provides the equal space for the agency of wo/men, is capable enough to challenge myriad of dominations against wo/men and foster their struggles for survival and transformation (p.35). In the second chapter, by re-imagining the ekklesia of wo/men as the hermeneutical ‘imagined community’ she understands the biblical authority as a resource for creativity, courage and solidarity. She explains it further by stating that “it [the critical biblical reading that constitute ekklesia as an ‘imagined community’ of wo/men] does not understand scripture as tablets of stone but rather as nourishing bread” (P. 67). She contends that by deconstructing the all encompassing kyriaichal rhetorics and politics of domination and subordination, the wo/men are able to generate new possibilities for engaging in emancipatory practices of biblical meaning making and political resistance to imperial globalization (p.67). In the third chapter where she explicates the ekklesia as the decolonizing space  and an active process of struggle moving toward greater equality, freedom, and responsibility by which wo/men re-imagine and challenge the multiple forms of empire,   she declares her thesis emphatically: “All wo/men silenced and marginalized by kyriarchal-hierarchic structures of domination are crucial in this ekklesial process of struggle for a radical democratization that is inspired by an eschatological vision of a society and world free of exploitation, domination and evil (p. 109).

In the fourth essay in which she discusses the issue of empire and its rhetoric of subordination, she convincingly argues that the biblical texts are shaped by the rhetoric of empire and thus it must be ‘detoxified’ in a process of de-colonializing interpretation. By analyzing the inscription of empire in the book of revelation, she tends to propose an intersectional kyriarchal analysis that can decode the complex power of domination inscribed in biblical texts. This idea is explained in detail in the fifth chapter. According to Fiorenza, the ‘detoxifying’ process of interpretation challenges us to become the*-ethically sophisticated readers by reflecting our own socio-political locations and functions in global structures of empire. In the sixth chapter where she deals with the feminist critique of androcentric G*d language, proposes new modules for decolonizing Divine and G*d talk. She suggests that “only a the*logical strategy that approaches classic discourses about G*d with a mobile method of deconstruction and proliferation, of symbolic critique and amplification, of construction and imagination is able to develop a decolonizing and liberating feminist way of engaging and transforming G*d language” (234) .  In the final chapter she discloses the relevance of her critical feminist hermeneutical method in the biblical studies. According to Fiorenza, “the task of biblical studies is to research both the inscriptions of empire, on the one hand, and to trace alternative radical democratic visions in biblical language and texts that functions as ‘scripture’ in Christianity and western culture, on the other” (p. 265). The critical feminist hermeneutical strategies aim at the re-reading of the dominations inscribed on the ‘scripture’ and the wo/men body. 

The whole programme of this book can be summed up as follows: (1) The need to go beyond the androcentric language in the G*d talk (Theological discourse), (2) To promote the practice of living as the citizens of ekklesia- where all exercise their agency in a democratic space of equality in order to combat the rhetoric of empire, and (3) To promote the postcolonial feminist critical biblical studies in order to de-inscribe empire from the scripture and wo/men body. What is interesting in this approach is that Fiorenza’s villain- the Empire is prominent here and sometimes the Villain takes the position of the hero in the narrative!  

reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj (LSTC)