Beyond dualistic theology in Asian contexts

 For the global church, three questions that have attracted significant debate and division are the following.

1. What is the relative priority and relationship between evangelism, social action, and political involvement?

2. Do miracles of physical healing and exorcism of evil spirits happen today?

3. How unique is the Christian message and the salvation that Jesus offers in light of a pluralism of religions?

Over the past century, the global church has become divided over these issues. These fractures are not always just along liberal and conservative lines but between Pentecostals and others, and the Western and the Majority World.

These issues are explored in depth in Mangoes or Bananas? The Quest for an Authentic Asian Christian Theology, by Hwa Yung. This is the book for this month's theology reading group.

Most advocates of a particular answer to these questions may claim that their position is supported by the Bible or at least by their theological tradition. Hwa's important contribution is to argue that there is more to the story. Two influences drive different answers, and these are interrelated and in tension. The first influence is the culture and context of the theologian. Culture affects the way people think and reason; it gives them a worldview, a set of presuppositions that are usually implicit and rarely questioned. The second influence is related to the first, but more specifically, the overpowering intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment. 

Although Hwa focuses on his own Asian context, the book is relevant to a broader audience, including Westerners, such as myself, as it may stimulate a greater self-awareness of the influences shaping one's own theology.

Hwa follows David Bosch to identify seven contours of the Enlightenment worldview. In his classic book, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Bosch has a chapter that is 90 pages long, Mission in the Wake of the Enlightenment. The seven contours are the following.

1. The supremacy of reason

2. Subject-object dichotomy

3. Elimination of the idea of purpose

4. Optimism in Progress.

5. Distinction between facts and values

6. All problems are solvable in principle

7. Humans are emancipated and autonomous individuals

Hwa explains how much of this is alien, both intellectually and emotionally, to Asian thought and culture. In a moving and personal chapter (added to the second edition) he says (p. 199-200).

"With these three issues troubling me (their resolution came only later) I almost lost confidence in my theological pilgrimage. Some of my good western friends urged me to go back to work on a PhD in the west. But I told them that I could not bring myself to go back to do a doctorate in systematics, even to the most illustrious of institutions, because I would die emotionally. For then I would have to spend the bulk of my energy and time justifying my presuppositions to Western teachers and examiners, whose Enlightenment mind-set would probably mean that they and I live in different thought-worlds."

The key issue for Hwa is the dualism of Western thought, in contrast to the holism of Eastern thought. He argues that this dualism underlies Western answers to the three questions, and even how the questions are framed or the importance that is placed on them. This dualism is nicely summarised by a footnote on page 53.

 "In commenting on the differences between the positions of Melbourne 1980 and Pattaya 1980 [a meeting of the World Council of Churches and Lausanne, respectively], David Bosch (1985:85) writes: ‘My contention has been, and still is, that both positions are indefensible, as both have succumbed to a perhaps, not easily detectable but nevertheless insidious dualism in which, ultimately, grace remains opposed to nature, justification to justice, the soul to the body, the individual to society, redemption to creation, heaven to earth, the word to the deed, and evangelism to social responsibility.’"

Balance is the necessary but impossible task of theology.  We need to be aware of and avoid false dichotomies and be open to dialectic and integrative thinking.