KEYNOTE ADDRESSES (1)

 Asian Theology in a Changing Asia:
 Towards an Asian Theological Agenda for the 21st Century

by Dr. David Kwang-sun Suh

SOCIO-BIOGRAPHY OF MINJUNG THEOLOGY AS AN ASIAN THEOLOGY

James Washington, (who died about two weeks ago) a distinguished black American church historian, has left these words: �An historian is a social prophet looking backward.� I am no historian, but as I envision the future of Asian theology, I would like to do the same, to project our vision �looking backward,� by telling the stories of what we have done together so far. As we look forward and prophesy the future, we must look backward and inspect our past. So, here is my story:

I. DIALOGUE WITH ASIAN THEOLOGIANS

It was 1979 when theologian friends from several Asian countries �infiltrated� into Seoul to have a dialogue meeting with some of us minjung theologians. The meeting was a landmark event for us, both Korean minjung theologians and Asian theologians. For one thing, this was the first dialogue meeting between Asian theologians, and this was the first time Koran minjung theologians exposed themselves to the outside world, under the auspices of CCA�s Commission on Theological Concerns directed by Preman Niles. 1979 was the year that will be long remembered by the Koreans because right after our dialogue meeting, 18 years of Park Jung Hee�s military dictatorship was abruptly over as he was assassinated by his own KCIA director.

Until then, we the Korean minjung theologians were busy in struggling with our church leaders and students against Park�s military dictatorship. Most of minjung theologians were in and out of KCIA torture chambers and military tribunals and prison. Most of us were under close police surveillance, so that we had no freedom to attend meetings, to give speeches at the student rallies, and even to preach in the churches. Nevertheless, we met and drafted protest statements stating our theological and political position for human rights and demanding the end of the �politics of emergency decrees� and the military dictatorship. Between their prison terms, Suh Nam Dong, Ahn Byung Mu and Park Hyung Kyu among others articulated their theology which they named �minjung theology.� As I remember, and for the record., our first Asian theological dialogue was an ecumenical and theological conspiracy of Kim Yong Bock and Preman Niles who brought out Korean minjung theology in the ecumenical arena of Asian theology.

II. A �KOREAN MISSIONARY�

When I returned home in late 1960�s from my long years of philosophical and theological studies in the US, I thought I was fully armed with intellectual tools and techniques to propagate the most contemporary Western liberal theology. I joined my senior theological colleagues to study and discuss Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Harvey Cox, Jurgen Moltmann and the Death of God theologians. I appointed myself as a liberal Christian missionary to Korea to preach the gospels of neo-liberal and neo-orthodox theologies. In the class rooms I lectured on Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, thw three Karls (.i.e., Marx, Barth and Rahner), the three B�s (i.e., Brunner, Bultmann and Bonhoeffer), Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Tillich.

Like most missionaries, I had a messianic complex to save the Korean Christians from their fundamentalism, theological ignorance, and from their syncretistic �religious� Christianity. For the cure of all these theological maladies, I prescribed the most sophisticated Western theological discourses. I talked about �religionless Christianity� of Bonhoeffer, �Secularization� and the �Secular City� of Harvey Cox, and I invited Thomas Altizer to Korea to declare the death of God. With my senior colleagues, I challenged the suffocating Biblical fundamentalism and literary dogmatism in the Korean churches and theological schools. By teaching the history of Western liberal theological movement, I wanted to liberate Korean students and Christians from their dogmatic captivity.

I thought if I teach Christian theology as clearly and faithfully as possible, and if I preach the Gospel as I would in Korea or in the US, I am doing my job very well indeed. For Christian theology is a rational and universal scholarly discipline. I was a kind of universalist, thinking that as long as I teach and preach the Gospel that is relevant and meaningful to the modern world, it should be meaningful and relevant to the Korean Christians as well.

III. DOING THEOLOGY IN CONTEXT

As a professor of systematic theology, I was pushed into the circles of theological educators of Korea. The Korean Association of Accredited Theological Schools (KAATS) was a center where all the theological issues and the problems and programs of theological education in Korea were introduced, discussed and debated in the late 60�s and 70�s. Since KAATS was supported by WCC�s Theological Education Fund, Shoki Coe, the then director of the program, frequently visited Korea. He was a messenger of �contextual theology.� He urged us to do theology from our own context. And he talked about �text� and �context� and how text has to be relevant to the context. As he put it, context interprets the text, and the text cannot be interpreted meaningfully without a true understanding of our context.

To me, the suggestion to do theology in my context was a challenge. What is my context? What is my theology? Do I need a theological identity? Is it not enough to have an identity of a �Christian theologian�? Do I not have this universal identity of Christian theologian? Even before I settled with these questions, I was forced into the context of the Korean political situation of the early 1970�s. I joined the editorial group of a theological journal, �The Third Day�, founded by the late Kim Jae Joon. In this monthly journal, we wrote our theology of interpreting the Gospel in the concrete political situation of the 1970�s. We interpreted the suffering of the Korean people under the oppressive military dictatorship as the suffering of the minjung of Jesus and of the Cross. We wrote about our hope in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Certainly my context was the political situation of the oppressive military dictatorship of Park Jung Hee, the brutal violation of human rights, and the rapid process of industrialization and urbanization under which most of the Korean people had been enslaved physically, intellectually and spiritually.

My question was: Is the Christian Gospel meaningful and relevant to this context? And how can Christian theology respond to this context? What would be the answer of Tillich and Niebuhr in this context? What would Jim Cone and Jurgen Moltmann say about our situation? We invited Cone and Moltmann to Korea anticipating some ready made answers for us. But what we found out was that they were asking their own questions in their own contexts, and they were searching for their own answers in their own contexts as well. We learned that we had to ask our own questions in our own contexts. We started all over again: we asked political, economic, historical and social questions about the context, and raised theological questions. Is the Christian Gospel meaningful in addressing the concrete issues of our own context? What can we do to change the oppressive situation under which we live?

Most of all, we responded to the cries of and acted in solidarity with the suffering and struggling people of Korea. We suffered and struggled together with the Korean minjung to bring about political change. That was our act of Christian faith, and therein we experienced the deep sense of liberation spirituality. It was out of the sharing of our experience of action and liberation spirituality that minjung theology was born. Minjung theology is a Korean contextual theology that is a response to the particular historical, political and socio-economic context of South Korea in the 1970�s.

In the process, I had gotten a new identity, a new name, that is, a minjung theologian, and I had gained a Korean identity of Christian theology. I may have been imposing my learning from contemporary Western theological thinking upon the Korean context. Indeed, Barth and Moltmann�s iconoclastic political theology were useful in condemning the political idols of military dictatorship which destroyed the image of God in individual human persons. We adopted Tillich�s theological method of correlation as our method of doing theology, asking the socio-political questions seriously and trying to give Christian responses. But when we claimed our Korean name in the doing of theology, we did so deeply immersed in our political situation, deeply engaged with the minjung of Korea, and deeply involved in acting and struggling with Korean socio-political problems. We used the Bible and Western theology only a reference as we were struggling to give answers to our own questions.

IV. INDIGENIZATION

Speaking of context, more particularly of the Asian context, Aloysius Pieris of Sri Lanka once said that �Any discussion about Asian theology has to move between two poles: the Third Worldliness of our continent and its peculiarly Asian character.� He also said that �the common denominator linking Asia with the Third World is its overwhelming poverty.� I would add another linkage between Asia and the Third World, namely, our shared history of colonialism and of post-colonial colonialism.

Another pole which Pieris has lifted up is Asia�s �multifaceted religiousness.� �These two inseparable realities (poverty and multifaceted religiousness) � he says, �constitute in their impenetration what might be designated as the Asian context, the matrix of any theology truly Asian.� ( �Towards an Asian Theology of Liberation: Some Religio-Cultural Guidelines, � in Fabella, ed., Asias�s Struggle for Full Humanity, pp. 75-9).

�Indigenization of theology� was a much talked- about subject when I came home to Korea in the 1960�s. Yu Dong Shik, Yun Sung Bum and Byun Sun Whan were the three major figures who had initiated the study of Koran traditional religions and proposed the indigenization movement. All of them were Methodists and on the faculty of the Methodist Theological Seminary. Yun studied Korean Confucianism; Yu, Shamanism; and Byun, Korean Buddhism. I learned about traditional Korean religions through their books. This was a second theological awakening for me, a second conversion, so to speak, this time to Korean traditional religious spirituality. Yu�s note in his writings about his love for Christ and love for Korea became for me a way by which I was able to affirm my identity as a Korean Christian theologian.

Learning and knowing something about Korean traditional religions would by themselves however not be enough. The more crucial question is what to do with the �other� religions. Most of the indigenization theologians� theological paradigm was to �plant the seeds of the Gospel in the fertile soil of Korean religious cultures.� This is one step ahead of the missionaries� �mission posture� of the total exclusion of �pagan� religions. Most missionaries completely disregarded �the soil� in which they have planted the seeds of the Gospel. In this light, our indigenization theologians helped us open our minds to other religions and to understand them, and perhaps even come to have dialogue with people of other faiths.

Most Korean Christians, even the leaders of �exclusivism,� would tolerate a comparative study of other religions in so far as the purpose of the study was understanding and learning about them. But the outcome was only to affirm the superiority of Christianity over any other religious faith. In the end, the purpose of such study has to do with how best to convert people of other faiths to Christianity. Any small step that moved towards a posture of �inclusion,� even only if one �hints� either at a Christian �anonymity� in other religions or at the potential soteriology in them, is anathema. �There (could be) salvation outside the Christian church.� By just quoting this statement from a well-known European theologian, Byun Sun Whan, the President of Methodist Theological Seminary, had to sit in a religious trial before the Korean Methodist Church. He was forced to resign from his presidency and �excommunicated� from his clerical status.

The irony of it all is that despite the effort of the early missionaries to destroy the native religious faiths, and regardless of the more positive approaches of recent indigenization theologians, Christianity in Korea has been and is thoroughly indigenized into the Korean religious cultures. The hierarchical structure of the Korean churches is more Confucian than Christian. It is patriarchal and clergy centered in a very Korean way. The theological language of Korean Christianity is more dogmatic than that of the Reformed dogmaticians elsewhere and owes its character more to Korean structures of thought and relationships. The literary Biblical fundamentalism of many Korean Christians is in fact deeply rooted in the old ethos of neo-Confucian literalism rather than on influences from outside sources. Our Pentecostalism is an expression of shamanized Korean Christian spirituality.

In short, missionaries and our �Gospel purists� tried to exclude traditional religious attitudes and behaviors; in fact and in reality, they are already �in� Korean Christianity. They deny �indigenization� and assert �pure� Gospel, but Christianity in Korea has been indigenized and has been so from its beginnings. They are afraid of syncretism, but Christianity in Korea is in fact very distinctively Korean, one that has grown in and fed upon the fertile soil of Korean religions and cultures. Without being fully aware of it and before we came to know it, what has happened is not that �Christ� has transformed Korean �culture,� to use H. Richard Niebuhr�s typology of the relationship between �Christ� and �culture�, but that Korean culture has transformed �Christ.� Christ in Korea is already a Christ of Culture in our situation, where Christ has in fact been swallowed up by culture. This is a problem but also a critical point. This was the dilemma, I submit, that Barth and Bonhoeffer were facing in their own contexts. When one painfully realizes that a culture is oppressive and anti-Christ and only perpetuates evil forces of power, of mammon and of the principalities, should one be satisfied with �indigenization?� Religion in this sense functions only as opiate of the people, and the Christ of religion only enforces an �amnesia of the han� of the minjung.

Thus, our theological project is and should be, what I call, �liberational indigenization.� As Paul Knitter, who was inspired by Pieris, puts it, �there is indeed revolution in religion... .and there is revelation in religion.�(Aloysius Pieris, An Asian Theology of Liberation, 1988, p. xii.). We have ignored revelation and the presence of God in our cultures and religions; we have also ignored the prophetic, political and revolutionary energy of the spirit in our cultures and traditional religions. We must learn to tie up these two (revolution and revelation) together and bring about an Asian spirituality of liberation. The �Minjung Jesus� will be at the center of this �liberational indigenization� movement.

V. MINJUNG AMONG MINJUNG

The Korean minjung theologians have often been accused of being patriarchal and male- centered. The accusation is that we have not addressed the issue of the oppressed women of Korea. I would like to remind us, in this context, that minjung theologians had in fact initiated their praxis with and among minjung women in urban industrial mission work. A number of theology students from Ewha Women�s University were sent to the Inchon industrial complex to work as factory workers with teenage female laborers. There, our students discovered the �minjung among the minjung.� They also discovered in the process new theological meanings and orientation in their work place, for example, that Jesus is with the minjung women and that the liberation of women is the mission of God.

On the academic level, I initiated with progressive members of the faculty in the university, a feminist studies program in the university curriculum ,and have helped establish a research institute of feminist issues in 1975, and another institute for women�s theological studies in 1990. The development of women�s studies in Korea had started with the importation and translation of the Western concerns and perceptions. And most of its movement was to promote equal participation of women in the socio-political arena. For this purpose, public education for women had to be a priority issue. But now the Korean women�s theological movements have come of age to address the issues of the socio-cultural oppression of Korean women under the Confucian patriarchal system of society, and in gender relations in private and public spheres such as family, work place, churches, government and the various spheres of economic life.

Among the leading feminist theologians of Korea, it is Park Soon Kyung who has insisted on the connection of the liberation of Korean women with the reunification of Korea, a matter that resulted in her imprisonment. Many other younger feminist theologians who related themselves with urban, poor women ended also in prison. Doing women�s theology in Korea is costly discipleship; it is and has been a movement for liberation. Considering that nearly 80% of church- goers every Sunday are women, the status of women in the Korean churches is something that is incredibly low and one that demands a critical theological and pastoral inquiry. Church women in Korea are doubly and triply oppressed and exploited by the �Christian structure� within the church and by the �Confucian structure� within society at large. The liberation of Korean church women from the yoke of �religious slavery� has as yet to come.

VI. �ASIAN THEOLOGY�, �THEOLOGICAL AGENDA,� AND �THE 21ST CENTURY.�

After my retirement from Ewha Women� s University I moved to New York to teach at Union Theological Seminary. As a visiting professor, I opened a seminar course on Contemporary Asian Theology. This was my first attempt to give such a course. At the end of the semester, I came to discover two things. On the one hand, I discovered painfully that I am really ignorant about Asia. As a result, I became very cautious and even timid about talking about �Asian theology� as such. Asia is so big , diverse and so different not only in relation to other continents but also within itself and among the peoples and societies within it. On the otherhand, I became more firmly aware that, an outstanding commonality among us is our colonial history of oppression and exploitation. We have all been struggling to overcome foreign dominance and our colonial dependency. Our common struggle is to be independent economically and politically, and to be able to resolve the problem of poverty. Our common task is economic and political development. To put it most simply, we want to see our people well fed and free. The peoples of Asia are moving towards these goals of achieving economic development and democratic government.

In setting our theological agenda for the future, I would like, firstly, to suggest that we should continue working in the way that we have been doing our contextual theology as I have tried to describe it above. If I need to name the items that should be a part of it, they include the following: �the post-colonial critique of Biblical interpretation,� the development of a political theology in our contexts, the exercise of theopraxis in our socio-political situations; our engagement in the post-modern studies of religions, the development of an Asian theology of religions, a post-colonial analysis of globalization, and the development of a women�s theology from the post-colonial perspective.

More specifically, I would like to suggest to this Founding Congress of the Congress of Asian Theologians that we initiate the writing and editing of a history of Asian Christianity and of Asian theological movements. I appreciate Yeow Choo Lak for his five volume series of Doing Theology With Asian Resources, and John England for his tireless compilation of Asian theological bibliography. It is about time for us to put our theological work in the context of the history of Asia, of the history colonization and of the history of Christian mission, not from the conquerors� perspective but from the perspective of the oppressed and exploited--from, as it were, the underside of � world history.�

Secondly, I would like to propose to theological educators who are here to offer a course on �Asian Theology� in their curriculum. In order to offer such a course, we need to initiate the building of a common syllabus. I have consulted with John England on building a syllabus for my course at Union, and I am willing to share what we came up with. Beyond this, we could develop other courses in our seminaries and universities on such subjects as �The Bible and Asian Theology,� The History of Christian Mission in Asia,� �Worship and Liturgy in Asian Churches,� �Asian Concepts of God,� �Christologies in Asian Theology,� �Christ and Buddha,� �An Asian Theology of Religions,� �Women�s Theology in Asia,� �Revolution and Religion in Asia,� and similar subjects. At the end of the next century, I would like to envision a total overhaul of our theological curriculum in such a manner that we do not need to constantly be pointing to its being �Asian.� When we reach this point, we will see some courses named as �History of European Christianity,� or �Contemporary American Theology,� along side with �History of Asian Christianity,� or �Contemporary Asian Theologians.�

I have become more than ever optimistic about the future of Asia in the 21st Century. We will have overcome hunger and poverty. We will be materially rich in proportion with our spiritual wealth. We will be able to care for our nature in accordance with our tradition. Countries in Asia will achieve the establishment of democratic forms of government. Sustainable development and democracy will be the two major goals of Asians in the coming century. Christianity in Asia will be, I believe, one of the leading spiritual sources for this historical process of Asian revolution.