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| with Professor John Cobb |
As
an Asian postcolonial feminist theologian, my relationship to the Christian
past is multifaceted and ambivalent. My reading of the Bible and the long theological
tradition is never a “natural” reading, arising out of a living tradition that
shaped my culture. For example, I wondered how the terms ousia and hypostases in
the debates on Trinity could be translated into Chinese and whether there would
be equivalent concepts in Chinese philosophy.
So
why do we have to study the Christian past? Sometimes my students put this even
more bluntly, “Why do we have to study the dead white guys?”
We
study the past because we want to learn different models of how theologians
addressed social, political, and ecclesiastical issues of their time. Take for
instance, this year we are commemorating the 500th anniversary of Luther’s
posting of the 95 theses. The questions that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and
Münster raised for the church and wider public remain with us to this day, such
as, the source of authority, the shape of liturgy and the meaning of
sacraments, the visible and invisible church, the relation between the two
kingdoms, and the relation between the established church and radical reform
impulses.
A
highly relevant question for today might be “How can the Church be reformed so
that it might respond to the challenges of the Trump era?” Although the Chinese
may not have an event equivalent to the Reformation, the Reformation provided a
mirror through which to look at the relation between religion, politics, and
power at a watershed moment of the early development of capitalism and
modernity.
Without
learning from the past, we impoverish ourselves because we are left with the
tyranny of the present. We can easily lose hope and fall prey to cynicism and
despair. This is especially important in the United States because historical
literacy is low and people seek immediate relevance. Facebook and social media
outlets can make us obsessed with the immediate present. Learning from history
allows us to maintain a certain distance and to have a broader perspective when
examining our present time.
Given
that we have such a long and rich theological tradition and so many theological
giants before us, there is also the danger of the tyranny of the past. We might
become so immersed and inculturated into certain modes of theological thinking,
patterns of argument, and the common vocabularies of a certain theological
tradition and our minds be so colonized that we are unable to see the horizon
beyond or dare to take the road less traveled.
Theological
innovations often begin by posting radical questions to the past. The feminist
theological movement wrestled with the validity of past tradition. Mary Daly
argued that the Christian tradition is so sexist that it is irredeemable, while
Letty Russell spoke of a usable past. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza offered a revisionist
history of Christian origin, and Rosemary Radford Ruether recovered the lost
voices of Christian women in history.
Many
theologians who have found their cultures and traditions left out from the
dominant theological tradition have recovered their histories through the use
of slave narratives, alternative archives, oral history, literature, and myths
and stories to create a colorful tapestry of theologies. Today, theology is a
global enterprise and we must pay attention to the global contexts shaping
human lives and our theological imagination. Theology is contextual, but our
contexts are deeply intertwined today. We need to find ways to educate
ourselves about how others are developing theologies to respond to common
concerns of our time. This must be a sustained and deliberate effort and not
something to do only when we have time.
I wish I knew when I began to study
theology that this would be a life-long vocation with many twists and no easy
answers. Our
work is harder because, unlike Luther and the reformers who stood in the
vanguard of the intellectuals of their time, we as contemporary theologians
have to defend our existence in the academy and larger society. When Christian
theology is in a defensive posture, the marginal voices within it could be even
more marginalized or suppressed. A danger for theological movements is that
they become reactionary or ossified over time and fail to respond to new
challenges. There is often much excitement when a theological movement begins,
but as it becomes institutionalized or domesticated, it needs new reformers
and discussants to keep it alive and on the cutting-edge.
Facing the future, theologians have
important roles to play in the Trump era. Latin American theologians reminded
us that we must distinguish between the worship of God and the worship of
idols. When people are mesmerized by populist claims such as “Make America
Great Again” and the representation of the President as pseudo-Messiah,
theologians must challenge idolatry and alternative facts. In the battle for
truth, we stand on the shoulders of giants such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther
King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Y. T. Wu, Oscar Romero, Mercy Oduyoye, Tissa Balasuriya,
Desmond Tutu, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Ivone Gebara, and others. When the country
begins to look inward, we need theologians and leaders of faith communities who
are cosmopolitan in theological
outlook, astute about world politics, and have a deep sense of American
multiracial and multicultural history.
We
must develop a culture of resistance in the churches and rid ourselves of Constantinian Christianity in order to see clearly the life
and ministry of a postcolonial Jesus. Americans have not been comfortable
seeing the connections between empire and Christianity. Middle-class American
Christianity has so successfully adapted to the individualistic culture that
religion has often become a private affair.
The Christian message of
sin, atonement, justification, and salvation has been thoroughly
individualized, if not psychologized, such that they have relatively little
social import. We look at Jesus as primarily a religious figure, separated from
the highly politicized and volatile situation of his time, an era filled with
periodic popular revolts and protests against Roman colonial rule. We must
recover that the Jesus movement was a resistance movement against Pax Romana.
Jesus was not a passive religious leader, but took an uncompromising stance
against the Roman Empire and its client Judean and Galilean rulers. Jesus’
revolutionary message is relevant to our time more than ever as we struggle
against pax Americana.
Do I think theology will have a
positive future? My answer is yes. When I began to study theology in the early
1970s, Gustavo Gutierrez has published A
Theology for Liberation Theology for a few years. Mary Daly has not
published Beyond God the Father. As a
doctoral student, I witnessed the development of Womanist theology, Mujerista
and Latina theology, Asian American feminist theology, and gay and lesbian
theology. Today we have such a plurality of voices arising from racial and
ethnic communities in the U.S. and from faith communities around the world.
In the 1960s, some of the avant garde theologians launched a
series of books with the title “New Frontiers in Theology” and their aim was to
facilitate “discussions among Continental and American theologians” and the
discussants were all male. Here at this conference, we have such diversity of
theological voices, and this should give us hope for a positive and more inclusive
future.
(Presented at the “New Frontiers in
Theology” Conference at Claremont School of Theology on February 17, 2017)