2. Toward Re-claiming Christianity as Asian
2.1. Emergence of the Christian Asian Subject
Intertwined with liberation from distorting views is the process of re-claiming Christianity as Asian. Central to this project is the historic emergence of the Christian Asian subject viewed from a multifaceted postcolonial perspective. This stance acknowledges colonial experience and its aftermath: it “encapsulates the social, political and cultural conditions of the world order, bringing to the fore the cultural, political and economic facts of colonialism, and aiding recognition of the ambiguities of decolonization and the ongoing neocolonization.”[21]
But despite totalizing colonial and religious aims, encounter with Asian contexts has not been unidirectional and monolithic. Often the indigenous and the local have asserted themselves, at times through open resistance but more insidiously with what has been called “the weapons of the weak.”[22] Thus the postcolonial perspective also “provides openings for oppositional readings, uncovers suppressed voices, and more pertinently, has as its foremost concern victims and their plight.”[23]
Given this dynamic between colonial intent and local resistance, postcolonial feminist theologian Nansoon Kang contends that “today the question of marginalization and oppression is becoming more complex and disputatious” and that “the complex and elusive nature of the two poles (the centre/colonizer/oppressor and the margin/colonized/oppressed) calls for deconstruction of the problematic binary of centre and margin, colonizer and colonized, inclusion and exclusion, powerful and powerless, which is based on rigid lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on.”[24]The significant product of this deconstruction is the “transformation not only of the objective condition but of the subjectivity of the colonized/marginalized themselves through a theological ‘pedagogy of the oppressed.’”[25]Thus emerges the Asian Christian subject with an “authentic identity, not in a unified, fixed, essentialized space but in a space of multiple, contradictory, paradoxical, hybrid positions, possibilities, and potentialities.”[26]
This epistemological decolonization begins “in a new space, from whose viewpoint—an original locus enunciationis and hermeneutic—it will necessary to redo all theology.”[27] Accordingly the fundamental epistemological locus for articulating Asian Christianity lies in the “lived religion” of Asian Christians—“how religion and spirituality are practiced, experienced, and expressed” in their everyday lives.[28]
2.2. Valorization of Asian Lived Christianity
This valorization critiques “postcolonial theologians [who] have followed the roadmaps of their postcolonial theorist predecessors too closely” and thus “have not sufficiently decolonized the Western origins and dominant practices of the academic discourse of their disciplines.”[29]
In contrast, the lived Christian experience of Asians—primarily that of the poor, the native, the previously colonized and women—expresses the inviolable subjectivity and agency of Asian Christians, and must not be construed in terms of the idealized native “who has remained through the centuries impervious to the cultures of the conquerors”[30] and who is construed to still be tied to “rooted, localized, and integrated communities, who lead settled lives.”[31]
Felix Wilfred explains that, in this lived Christianity, “powerlessness shared by millions of Asians living in poverty and misery opens up ever closer understanding of the world, the humans and the divine mystery,” and proves to be sites of creativity and liminality, rich “with wealth that has not been explored.”[32]
In these sites in traditional and contemporary media, one finds symbolic expressions and narrative reflections of Asian Christian faith. Moreover, these expressions often draw from other religious and local traditions—Buddhist iconography, local folk tales,[33] shrines shared with other faiths,[34] and festivals influenced by local traditions.[35]
These Asian Christian expressions influenced by social ethos and contextual structures “give rise to thought” and invite critical thinking and action.[36] The resulting theological articulation then comes from listening to these expressions of lived faith, formulating the thought within, and critically reflecting on them in the light of other religious articulations from and beyond Asia.
Many Asian theologians engage in this process and share its fruits in recent anthologies.[37] They contribute to discerning the sensus fidei, the sense of the faith as orientation and as content. Korean theologians illustrated this through their use of the notion of han which suggests “frustrated hope, the collapsed feeling of pain, letting go, resentful bitterness, and the wounded heart.”[38] Used in ordinary and literary discourse for personal and social woundedness, it became central to their theology of liberation focused on the marginalized minjung, and has since been related to the theology of sin and of psychosocial woundedness.
2.3. Translation and Conversation in the Name of Catholicity
These primary expressions of lived Christianity and their theological articulations both employ languages of Asian Christians, thus promoting fidelity to faith experience. However, they cannot be hermetically sealed from those of other Christians in and beyond Asia, but are inherently related to them in terms of Christianity’s catholicity. Thus global theological conversations take place, but often in languages different from the local. Translation occurs out of necessity, but the fundamental consequences of this practice need critical reflection.
Without professing “untranslatability” between languages or determinism of thought by language, one must examine underlying views of translation. Some focus on the transfer of a definite message or the search for “dynamic equivalence” between languages[39] and hence fidelity is seen as reproduction of the message. This is analogous to the misleading understanding of inculturation as bringing an ahistorical Gospel to new contexts, as the Gospel is always historically mediated.[40]
These views rooted in the medieval Latin translatio as the transfer of relics have been questioned in contemporary translation studies, because meaning is not an object to be relocated.[41] Moreover, other contexts, including Asian, see translation differently. For instance, the Malay root salin used for translation means “pouring liquid or grain” and “giving birth,” thus emphasizing fluidity in translation.[42]
In contrast, contemporary views “incorporate within its remit various types of non-verbal material as well as the different agents who produce translated texts and mediate oral interaction, and the cultural, historical, and social environments that influence and are influenced by cultural agents and their production.”[43] These views recognize that translation “involves the interface of languages, semiotic systems, cultural products, and systems of cultural organization, and it makes manifest the differences and similarities of systems across cultures.”[44]
With this more comprehensive perspective, translating Asian Christian faith expressions and theological articulations into other languages in Asia and beyond becomes a process of mediation, not imprisoned by words but engaging wider socio-religious worlds.
This admittedly complex task requires profound respect for these expressions and articulations. Nuances of discourse and emotive associations must be listened to. Otherwise, accounts of Christianity in Asia run the risk of sounding banal or being distorted and therefore unable to enter into authentic mutual exchange with Christians from other contexts.This ongoing exchange among Christians across contexts throughout history constitutes the singular witness of Christianity’s catholicity, not measured by geographical extension or institutional uniformity but “marked by a wholeness of inclusion and fullness of faith in a pattern of intercultural exchange and communication.”[45]Asian Christians are empowered to fully participate in and truly contribute to this exchange only if they liberate themselves from distorting perspectives and reclaim their Christianity as Asian.
[21] R. S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Reconfigurations: An Alternative Way of Reading the Bible and Doing Theology(London: SCM Press, 2003), p. 4.
[22] James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
[23]Sugirtharajah, op. cit., p. 4.
[24] Namsoon Kang, ‘Theology from a space where postcolonialism and theology intersect’, Concilium 2013:2, p. 61.
[25]Ibid., p. 64.
[26]Ibid., p. 66.
[27] Enrique Dussel, ‘The Epistemological Decolonization of Theology’, Concilium 2013:2, p 29.
[28] McGuire, op.cit., p. 12.
[29] Joseph Duggan, “Epistemoligical dissonance: Decolonizing the postcolonial theological canon,” Concilium 2013/2, p. 18.
[30]Sugirtharjah, op. cit., p. 127.
[31]Ibid., p. 123.
[32] Felix Wilfred, Margins: Sites of Asian Theologies (Delhi: ISPCK, 2005), p. xix.
[33] C. S. Song, In the Beginning were Stories, not Texts: Story Theology (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke & Co., 2011).
[34] Laksana, ‘Multiple Religious Belonging,’ in Wilfred, Handbook of Christianity in Asia.
[35] Patrick Alcedo et al. (eds), Religious Festivals in Contemporary Southeast Asia (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2016).
[36] Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of evil, Boston, 1969, pp. 347-57.
[37] R. S. Sugirtharajah (ed), Frontiers in Asian Christian Theology: Emerging Trends(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994); Vimal Tirmanna (ed), Harvesting from the Asian Soil(Bangalore: ATC, 2011).
[38] Andrew Sung Park, The Wounded Heart of God: The Asian concept of Han and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), p. 31.
[39] Eugene Nida, Toward a Science of Translating with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures involved in Bible Translating(Leiden: Brill, 1964), p. 24.
[40] Jose Mario C. Francisco, ‘Un trittico sull’inculturazione in Asia’ in Antonio Spadaro and Carlos Mariá Galli (eds), La Riforma e Le Riforme nella Chiesa (Brescia: Editrice Queriniana), 2016, pp. 552-68.
[41] Maria Tymoczko, Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2010, p. 126.
[42]Ibid., p. 75
[43]Mona Baker, ‘The Changing Landscape of Translation and Interpreting Studies’, in Sandra Hermann and Catherine Porter (eds), A Companion to Translation Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p, 15.
[44] Tymoczko, op. cit.,p. 43
[45] Robert J. Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), p. 132.
Author
Jose Mario C. Francisco is a Filipino Jesuit professor of theology at Loyola School of Theology (LST), Ateneo de Manila University and the Pontificia Università Gregoriana. After postgraduate studies at the Jesuit School of Theology and Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, he held leadership positions in academic and religious institutions such as LST and East Asian Pastoral Institute, and is founding member and Southeast Asian representative of the Academy of Asian Christian Studies. His teaching, research and publications focus on the interphase between theology and cultural studies especially in Asian contexts. He has taught and lectured in the U.S. at Boston College as Gasson Professor and the Jesuit School of Theology as well as in Asia and Europe. He has published 17th century Philippine manuscripts and anthologies on Asian Christianity as well as essays in The Oxford Handbook on Christianity in Asia, The Cambridge History of Christianity, Christianities in Asia, and in international journals.
Address: Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, P.O. Box 240, U.P. Post Office, 1144 Quezon City, Philippines.