(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.