(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).