An Introduction to a Conversation with Short Stories by Jesus

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Amy Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus

I like to start a series of blog posts to interact with Amy-Jill Levine’s book Short Stories by Jesus.[1] I do this as a part of the preparation to go to Hong Kong’s Faith in Practice Lectureship in HK Baptist University this year. I hope my readers can benefit from my own reflections. These reflections are contextualized to our time both in the US and in Asia, the two realms of my work. In addition, this reflection also allows me to unpack for my readers (both English and Chinese) of the book Right Kingdom, Wrong Stories what some of the presuppositions and limitations are in reading Jesus’ parables.[2] The Chinese version of Right Kingdom will debut in the Faith in Practice Lectureship as well. My blog posts will prepare my readers to see where I’m coming from. These blog posts will hopefully demonstrate the relevance of reading Jesus’ parables. Levines’s excellent book will become my conversation partner. I hope my readers will also enjoy reading her work to see a Jewish point of view in reading Jesus.   I feel that in doing this, we can have a much more meaningful conversation during the Q and A time of the lecture series in those few days. I’m very much looking forward to meeting all my listeners and readers when I finally arrive. I hope everyone is ready to edify each other in our conversation. Although I’m coming as an invited speaker, I also hope to learn from my readers and listeners when I arrive.

 

The introduction of Levine’s work points to the usual domestication of Jesus’ parable by churches. She points out that parable as a genre fits very well within Israel’s history. They’re part of Israel’s writings (2 Sam 12.1-7). Jesus’ choice of using parables wasn’t unusual. It would fit the norm of his time. Yet, she points out that Jesus’ parables have historical contexts. Today, the risk of the church is to interpret the parables without that context, thus domesticating the parables. Some of the fallouts include anti-Semitism. How often do we hear that Pharisees were bad guys? Levine’s concern is real and ethical.

 

When interpreting parables, I think Levine is right on the money as far as reading them in contextual perspectives. I think it’s also important to understand whom Jesus was speaking to and speaking against. Quite often, we only get information but what we do with the information determines the result we reap. For instance, a Sunday school teacher may say, “The Pharisees were a sect of Judaism that … , and they were always Jesus’ opponents. The Jews respected them. Yet, they’re the bad guys.” These statements above are as straightforward as they’re popular. History however was more complicated.

 

We normally read parables into our own context immediately when we do Bible study, but Levine suggests rightly that we need to view parables from cultural lens to understand what they meant.

 

My reflection besides agreeing with Levine’s concern is that methodologically we really need a polyphonic reading of parables. There’re many possible voices and narratives Jesus could use in telling the parables. To gain historical insight, we don’t only need to know the background of Pharisees, we also need to understand why Jesus talked to the Pharisees and why the Gospel writers used Pharisees to inform their readers about how they should live their faith. In other words, in order to see what Jesus was doing with the parables and what the Gospel authors were doing with the parables, we must understand both Jesus’ audience and original audience.

 

Another simpler issue we need to reflect on is the way we look at Scriptures. We normally think of Scriptures as “the word of God.” Based on just this model of parables, we must say that Scriptures shouldn’t only be considered “the word of God” but the channel of the biblical author through which “God” speaks. The simple and traditional model of the Scriptures in all their plain sense are the word of God is oversimplification that doesn’t reflect reality. In fact, even confession to and adherence to that doctrine of “the word of God” does nothing in the interpretive process. If we understand Scriptures as the “message of God”, then we’re getting somewhere. When a message is delivered, the messenger is “doing something” with the words. The messenger isn’t just saying that the message is the sum of the words. The message goes beyond the sum of the words. This has nothing to do with me not having faith in the Bible. This has everything to do with how the Bible functions and how WE use the Bible. This leads to my next point.

 

 

I’ve heard from more than one colleague that the only difference between ISIS and fundamentalist Christianity that professes its Scripture being the word of God is by degree and method but not in mentality. Whether we think such a saying is overstatement, I think it has huge merit. What I’m saying is, what we do with the Bible matters. Interpretation is ethical, evident in the way interpretation happened during the HK Umbrella Movement. The same thing happens in immigration reform debates or gun ownership in the US. All this has to do with our view of Scripture, whether this Scripture is the Quran or the Bible. We must think about this when reading Jesus’ parable or we’ll “domesticate” them. Levine’s concerns are real.

[1] Short Stories by Jesus (San Francisco: Harper, 2014).

[2] Right Kingdom, Wrong Stories (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2013)

“Relativism” as Resistance from the Margin?

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1 Corinthians 2.3, liberation theology in Asia, Umbrella Movement

“I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.” 1 Corinthians 2.3

I’ve been reading and writing a lot about liberation theology. Soon, I’m beginning to discover that what I’ve been told by many evangelicals about liberation theology (i.e. overly realized eschatology, liberal etc.) is simply wrong. I’ve read all the books and knew all the names, but it never hit me quite so hard until I place myself in the situation of Hong Kong Umbrella Movement. Being back in Hong Kong also helps.

 

Many who look at liberation theology or any other theology that is different from their own, the quick knee-jerk reaction is that relativism has finally conquered the Christian world. Alarm bells go off. Is this true though?

 

I suggest otherwise. I suggest that we take another look at the way we approach truth.  The insistence on a singular truth is a rhetorical move of the powerful. It hasn’t always been the case in the Bible, but in modern times, it’s quite the popular move.  The sooner we learn this, the better off we are. The sooner we get over ourselves, the better we can work together, both the powerful and the powerless. Yet, in the real world, power corrupts. It’s hard to give it up because we’ve worked so hard to earn it. We’ve worked so hard by speaking and writing about our point of view. It’s hard to be told that there’re other equally valid and valuable points of view.

 

As I read, I discover that the charge of “relativism” is a straw man and a scapegoat for those who are afraid of losing their version or narrative of “truth.” The louder the people from the margin cry out, the harder the resistance from the powerful to change. What many evangelicals perceive as relativism is nothing more than resistance from the margin. What average evangelicals do not realize is that most of the New Testament was written from the margin. When we neglect this marginality either deliberately or inadvertently, we completely skew our view of God and His work.

 

Relativism practiced by those in the margin merely challenges the status quo to open up the system just a bit to accommodate different points of view. The next generation, especially those in the trenches of oppression and liberation, is asking for an open system instead of a closed system, a healthy pluralism instead of blind singularity.  Avoidance of the real issue is not the answer. Denouncement and pontification are certainly not the answer. The real TRUTH is out there. Little “truth” may be discovered among us in community, from both ends of the power spectrum but especially from the margin. If that little “truth” is to be discovered, dialogue needs to open up, but it’s hard to give up power. Sometimes the blind spots are not killing us; sometimes our love for power murders our conscience.  We’ll be doing the very opposite as Paul’s mission.

 

When our conscience dies a painful death, so will our faith and mission.

More Cheap Unity? Truth that Divides!: 2 Corinthians 11.24, Paul, and the Subversive Gospel

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2 Corinthians 11.24, harmony in Chinese Christian circles, HK mega church compromise, Occupy Central, Occupy HK

Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. 

2 Corinthians 11.24 (NIV)

 

It is a well-known fact that I love reading the writings of Jesus scholar Larry Hurtado. His latest blog interaction with the work of Paula Fredriksen intrigues me, not only because her work was widely cited in my book on Paul in Chinese, but because of its implications for many HK churches, especially in light of the further call for harmony and tolerance for another fake election by the Anglican provincial secretary on HK TVB. I will cite below what Fredriksen claims from Hurtado’s blog. At some near future point, I will read her work in its entirety at which point I can give it a fair reading.

 

“In a recent publication, she probes the matter by first addressing Paul’s references to being on the receiving end of floggings by fellow Jews (five times) in the course of his Gentile mission (2 Corinthians 11:24).[2] Her cogent hypothesis is essentially this: Paul required his pagan converts to withdraw from worshipping the gods of the Roman world. Given the place and significance of the gods in Roman-era life, this would have generated serious tensions with the larger pagan community. As he identified himself as a Jew and linked up with Jewish communities in the various diaspora cities where he established early assemblies of Jesus-followers (ekklesias), these Jewish communities could have feared that they would bear the brunt of these tensions. So, Paul was meted out synagogue discipline in the form of the 39 lashes as punishment on several occasions (he mentions five).”

 

If what Fredriksen says is true, then Paul was not punished because he preached the gospel as people traditionally believe, but because the gospel Paul preached caused disharmony both with society and within the synagogue system. Let’s think about the current culture of the HK mega-churches that tend to speak for oppressive government policies. The best example is from one church where members who opposed oppressive governmental policies would be punished by having their memberships revoked from the church. Other less severe but equally misleading responses would be to call for harmony at all costs without adequate discussion on the issues that divide.

 

In essence, if Fredriksen’s claim is true, then some churches behave more like Paul’s Jewish oppositions than Paul. Paul has already shown that the gospel is not mainly meant to cause harmony. Truth doesn’t necessarily harmonize. Quite often in Paul’s ministry, it confronted and divided. When people point out falsehood, the church’s job is not to call for harmony but to call for discussion, circumspection and introspection or even repentance. False harmony punishes the wrong people and in the long run ruins lives. Getting truth right is tough.  Living truth out is even tougher.  It takes prioritizing ideas and conflict, just like Paul did in his life.  It takes tough struggles over issue rather than a simplistic call for cheap unity while covering over the holes in our imperfect ideals.  The only question to ask of such churches is this, “What kind of faith do we hold when we behave more like Paul’s opposition than Paul?”

When being called “Christian” is stinky: rereading conclusions from statistics

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs from people who quote Pew Research this and Barna Group that.  Quite frankly, people just quote these stats without even a second thought about the hermeneutics behind such “research.”  These thoughtless blogs are once again a proof of “lies, damn lies and statistics” being the trinity of modernistic deception.  This way of blogging has been so hip that it’s become pandemic.

The logic of such blogs usually goes one of the following two ways.  They could say, “Oh, based on these statistics, America has become less Christian.  Look how few people identify themselves as Christians.”  They could also say, “Based on these statistics, these many people who identify themselves as Christians also believe that ___ (fill in the blank: living together, being homosexual, drinking, premarital sex etc.) is okay.  Look how Christian value has eroded.”  There you have it.  The first basically says that the present statistics are accurate reflection of how many real Christians there are, and the number is declining.  It also assumes that previous statistics are quite reliable with the greater number of real Christians.  See? Assumption is everything.  The second basically assumes that whatever ethical value being put in the blank is the key issue that divides what is a true versus a false Christian.  Assumption again!

I wish to question all such assumption as being lacking in any sense in our everyday experience.  I’ll use my experience as an example.  Where I grew up in the Southern part of the US, you can’t kick a little pebble without hitting a baptist.  In fact, I bet the Muslims there are also baptist.  No, I’m kidding.  If you were to ask anyone around where I live with a simplistic statistical questionnaire whether that person is Christian, Catholic, Jew, or Muslim (I’m using their common categories of course), you would find that most would say they’re Christians and some would say that they’re Catholic.  In addition, aren’t Catholics also Christian?  Not according to the way these discussions are framed. I overheard one particular discussion that went something like this.  Person number 1 says, “Are you Christian?”  Person number 2 answers, “No, I’m Catholic.”  What the statistics in the past and often in the present do not tell us is that they frame such questions in such biased way that they would inevitably get a large percentage to be Christian. What being a “Christian” actually means does not matter.

For some, being Christian just means being white and middle class, while believing there’s a god.  I’m not joking. I’ve seen enough examples to tell you that this is true.  And being white and middle class while believing in God is the cool thing to do in the past because that’s the American way.  There’s no way to verify whether that person really is a Christian.  The paradigm begins to shift however.  Now, with the moral value of the society defining what is cool, being Christian may not be cool any longer.

Now, being a Christian could mean being a homophobe and a sexual prude.  That is NOT cool.  Since the Christians no longer project that cool value, less people now identify with being Christians than before.  This is natural.  To top off the problem is the Christian’s own hermeneutics on the Bible as to what consists of “Christian value.” This kind of value obviously shifts, from the prohibition of drinking to premarital sex to now homosexual lifestyle.  What we haven’t realized is that our main problem has not changed: our hermeneutics and ethics still suck.  Only because more people were in agreement that drinking and drugs are usually not good for you, we were able to become more of a moral majority (I mean that, of course, sarcastically) in the past.  Now, societal value can no longer accept “Christian value”, less are willing to be identified as Christians.  I suspect that the decline is over exaggerated.  I suggest though that we have proclaimed something that has repulsed society.  The real issue then is whether the repulsion we have caused is the right issue, the one that we’re willing to die for.   I mean, is not sleeping with your girlfriend before marriage really is the ethical defining line of Christianity?

You see?  The first and the second set of logic are actually related.  When the hermeneutics of scripture on which Christian value is based are framed a certain way, people either identify or not identify with it.  At that point, people’s identification with it shows whether that value is cool or not.  Nothing in such assumptions have to do with truth.  It is a popularity contest.  It is a publicity disaster.  When we use such assumptions, we only reinforce but not solve the problem.

The Gospel according to the Mikado Controversy

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The Mikado

The light opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, “the Mikado”, has been making the news since the Seattle Times editorial columnist Sharon Chan had taken the show to task for its comedic portrait of Japanese people.  Since then, Dave Ross, the radio show host of KIRO Radio, who also starts in Mikado has interviewed Chan to figure out what the offensive elements are.  l think both sides have much to commend them and both sides could also do better in certain areas.  For the sake of fairness, I will try to pick on both sides to get to the bottom of what offends.

To Ross’ credit, he has done so much more than evangelical leaders who repeatedly offend Asian-Americans (henceforth AA) in their own public (either through speech or writing) engagements.  Ross at least tries to engage the offended  to see what the problem is. Thus, I would give Ross credit for not being racist.  To Chan’s credit, she is right to speak out from what she perceived to be the sentiments of many AA’s.  As she pointed out somewhere in the interview, AA’s have protested in the past, even as far back as the 90s. This was not the first time.  Here’re some of the issues I’ve gathered in listening to his response and his interview and in reading some of the defenders of the opera.

1) Ross focuses on the color of the label “yellow face” when Chan clearly tells him that it is not the color of the face but the act of white people portraying Asians (e.g. Halloween Geisha girl etc.).  Ross continues his discussion by talking about a black face flash mob in which he participated, dressing up as Michael Jackson.  Ross’ framing of the argument centers ONLY on his own obsession about skin color. Yet, I think both Ross and Chan miss the point.  The problem though is this.  The Michael Jackson flash mob does not offend people because the intent was to honor and not to mock Jackson (or African-American in general).  Besides obsessing with skin color, Ross moves on to using examples such as wearing martial arts clothing by westerners in Asian martial arts.  I’m unsure whether Ross has any experience with practicing martial arts in a multicultural dojo. I’ve had plenty of experience.  The point is, whenever we participate in, let’s say, a Japanese art, we’re learning all we can about the culture in a respectful and non-joking way.  WE DON’T MAKE A KARATE LIGHT OPERA TO MAKE FUN OF WESTERN SOCIETY!  Ross’ examples just do not parallel the present production of the Mikado.  Chan however freely gets led by her nose in this discussion as she puzzles over whether a white man playing a black role is OK or whether wearing karate gi is OK.  She’s clearly missing the point.  I share Chan’s concern but not her logic because the point is genre and context!  Other arguments I’ve seen in favor of keeping the Mikado as it is comes from drawing simplistic parallels with Turandot and Huckleberry Finn or the Catcher on the Rye.  The fact is, none of these is a comedy specifically to either make fun of a race or using the mockery of a race against one’s own society, even if racial stereotype exists in all of them.

Both Ross and Chan have not realize is that the problem is not the dress, skin color or white people playing Asians.  The problem is the entire means by which the opera communicates mockery.  Asians are the comedic means by which Gilbert and Sullivan use to mock their British society.  We like to use this saying in our AA circles to those who use us as a joke.  We aren’t your punchline.  That principle still holds true.  It has nothing to do with having thin skin.  No people group likes to see the culture which they treasure being used as a means for mocking some other culture.  In other words, Ross seems to miss the point that the Mikado mocks the Japanese in order to mock the British society.  The means is as important as the end here.  For the 21st century audience, the play “as is” is a failure in rhetoric as the means has overrun the message.  Perhaps, the Mikado has both artistic and social value, but its offense can overtake its value.  In the light of the present situation, I wonder if modern producers can find other ways to produce the Mikado to accomplish the same end as Gilbert and Sullivan intended.  Indeed, some are doing just that with the youth version in Seattle.  Maybe a needlessly offensive means is not the best or only way to stay true to the intent of its original authors.  Maybe there’re some other ways to stay close to the content and intent in a creative way for the 21st century political climate.

2) Ross also brings into the discussion of subjective perception in response to Chan’s sentence about just because the Mikado has been done in a racist way for 100 years, it doesn’t make it not racist.  Ross retorted by saying that just because Chan sees it as racist, it doesn’t mean that racism is there, and that Chan doesn’t speak for ALL Asians.  This is the classical argument about intent without considering impact perfectly illustrated by the statistical joke of “how many Asians does it have to offend before it’s racist?” or “I’m not racist because some of my friends are Asian.” The problem has never been statistics.  Anyone talking in statistical terms doesn’t understand the dynamic of this offense.  Ross’ argument is about reducing the AA experience into statistics (more or less Asians offended and more or less Asian friends) in order to allow something to keep going.  Ross fails to realize that the problem is not the NUMBER of the offended but the NATURE of the  offense. No matter how many are offended or not offended, we ought to look at the content at its very essence and see if the essential offense violates the very principles that bind us as Americans.  In order to understand the HOW, he has to, first of all, abandon “HOW MUCH” to get down to the narrative level of the AA’s.   At the narrative level, he will be able to see if the offense is legitimate or otherwise.  People aren’t numbers.  People are storytellers.  Some of our narratives intersect with some of the offensive elements not just in the Mikado but in other cultural heritage.

What kind of narratives do AA’s have?  I can’t speak for all AA’s.  I can only share my narrative.  My narrative is typical of many 1.5 generation AA’s (those born overseas, immigrated and become bicultural/bilingual).  I came here at 10 years old with hardly any English.  Being the only Asian in my school didn’t help.  Kids would make fun of me and my gym teacher would call me Hop Sing (surely, he wasn’t racist. He was just having fun, and he was very nice to me.) after the servile character in the western TV show Bonanza.  That’s almost as bad Pastor Mark Driscoll calling Pastor Francis Chan the “international man of Fu Manchu mystery” in his interview.  In no time flat, I was able to speak fluent English because, as you know, English is cakewalk compared to Chinese.  Once I started speaking like a native speaker, I experienced a different set of problems.  Kids would ask me, “How do you speak such good English?”  (My sons also experience this as native speakers born in the English-speaking world)  I’m fairly sure they wouldn’t ask me that if I were European descent.  When I couldn’t speak English, they made fun of me because I sounded funny.  When I began speaking English too well, they asked me how I did it because I looked funny.  My own narrative of sounding and looking funny contains just about all that is offensive in Ross’ framing of the Mikado.  I was the punchline.  The means has overtaken the message until all I receive is the means.

How does all the above discussion relate to the Bible?  I write all this to point to the important biblical truth of using the right means for the right message.  The Bible does talk about using the right means.  Ross’ controversy with the Mikado acts as a parable to how one kind of text impacts its listeners in real time.

This instance in the Mikado reminds us that we live in a time where certain traditional assumptions are no longer held to true.  The cultural paradigm is shifting. I think it is important for Christians to understand the cultural paradigm shift especially in regard to how we deal with the issue of race and diversity.  The church has been notoriously divisive when it comes to race.  Such conversation about the Mikado informs us that when we speak in public, we have to reexamine the paradigm by which we view “the other” or society in general.  Quite often, whatever we consider unoffensive and “biblical” is neither.

At the end, Ross has proven himself not to be racist, but at the same time, has viewed the situation through racist cultural lenses.  His miscalculated contextualization of the opera does not bode well for him.  If Christians fail to see things through the lenses of others, they will surely meet the same rejection.  The means can often speak louder than the medium.  I hope no one who speaks about the gospel will ever forget the Mikado.

Reblogged: On Accepting Pastor Rick Warren’s Apology: The Yellow Man’s Burden

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Asian Americans, Asian jokes, model minority, race relations, Rick Warren's Red Guard joke

http://engagethepews.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/on-accepting-pastor-rick-warrens-apology-the-yellow-mans-burden/

Cyber Space Politics of Holy Discontent

I think I first heard the term “holy discontent” from Bill Hybil.  I wish to comment on what I see in blogsphere and Facebook pages lately.  Some of the most popular religious bloggers (both in English and in Chinese) are those who point out the problems of the church.  Many of them have made a living blogging about these problems.  Their contribution is very important.  I often read many of them faithfully.

Several themes surface among these bloggers and some Facebook updates (and such updaters happen several times a day on the same topics).  They may say that the church has lost the gospel.  Others may say that the church’s stance on certain issues (e.g. homosexuality or same-sex marriage) is passé.  Still others point out that based on this or that study, numbers are declining, making the church irrelevant and even unnecessary.  In many cases, the framing of the problem is almost formulaic.  The problem could be theological, ethical or numerical (or pragmatic).  There’re two ways to react to such bloggers.

First, some may choose to conveniently ignore them by maintaining status quo.  Others are more vocal in denouncing such bloggers as radicals and liberals.  I believe there is a third way.

I always feel very hesitant to buy into everything these bloggers say simply because some of them have not had church ministry experience.  Sure, I think ministry experience is not the “be-all and end-all” criterion in judging someone’s observation. In fact, I think some of the keenest observations come from my non-Christian friends.  This is the problem however.  They only become popular because they hit a nerve on many others who feel equally discontent.  Before we know it, there’ll be a chorus of curses raining down on the church. What they say may be valid, but their observations often offer no solution to the real problem.

Real problems have to be solved within the church.  I believe that it is naive to get rid of all of the structures of the church and then call it renewal.  If we were to do so, we end up with anarchy in the name of renewal.  I also feel that structures were set up for a reason.  We somehow lost the reason along the way, thus being stuck with the structure.  Thus, i think the solution to structural issues should be solved by research and reflection on why certain setup worked in ages past.  As Christians, we can’t simply assume that the Spirit somehow works NOW in the renewal of the church without regard for the PAST work of the Spirit.

Many studies have been cited by bloggers to back this or that reason why numbers are down.  The fact is, statistics could often be listed along with “lies, damn lies and …” You get my point.  Those who are familiar with statistical analysis know that certain sociological studies are heavily laden with presuppositions and in some sad cases, question-begging and circular reasoning.  Statistics tell only part of the story if they even do that much at all.  Statistics are the metanarrative of modernists and unaware postmodernists.  Even if the metanarrative is right bout the dropping numbers, can we simply correlate one cause to the drop?  From my observation of many declining churches, each case is often drastically different. Even if the statistics are true, what different factors are causing the drop in attendance in church? These factors could fill up tomes.  The whole “the number is dropping” argument also creates another pesky problem.  We’re starting to measure success purely based on statistics, and number becomes a larger and larger part of the way we evaluate truth.  In such a case, is the church more and more becoming just like a corporation, with some being successful numerically (and turning profit) while others failing miserably (and suffering loss in finance and attendance)?  The very tool we often use to evaluate success represents the very thing many such blogger hates: institutionalized religion.  I’m unsure whether many who make such an argument are aware of this fallacy.

I’ll use one more example.  Some have said that we have lost Jesus or lost the gospel and so on.  Well, that’s fine. It’s easy to say that we’ve lost Jesus or the gospel. Okay, fine!  Such rhetoric even makes one sound “cool” and “hip.”  (Can we even use the word “hip”?  It is so uncool.  Maybe I should say “sick” as in “dude, that’s an uber sick ride. It’s dripping in gold.”)  How do you FIND Jesus and the gospel?  Would the same bloggers offer solutions via serious research in biblical studies, church tradition, and theology to formulate the TRUE Jesus or the gospel?  It’s easier to complain than to do serious research.  I can tell you a secret.  Most of them are not serious researchers in any of these areas.  If you don’t believe my claim, google them for any serious research on biblical studies, theology, church history or ethics, in serious academic publishers and journals. Whoops, I’m exhibiting academic snobbery, yet another hated trait by this group of cool bloggers.  IF by some chance some of them have done some serious research, not many of them have  tried to preach regularly in a contextualized manner what regaining this Jesus or that gospel actually means.  At the end, these blogs are spiritual junk food.  Sure, they taste good initially because you can resonate with the problems they bring up, but then after you devour them day after day, they can hurt your attitude and ruin your spiritual health.  The unsolved problem therefore remains: “cool” is overrated.

The third way is a simple way.  IF you want to complain, earn the right to complain by being part of the solution, by doing serious and deep reflection or research, and by participating in the church’s life to bring forth change.  When people do not participate in the church’s life, they should also lose the credential to complain.

For my Chinese readers: Video highlight of my first Hong Kong book tour in 2007

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narratives

On how to study narratives.  Feel free to share with other Cantonese-speaking Christians on Facebook.

Conversation in Australia about the making of Right Texts, Wrong Meanings

Here’s a youtube conversation with Pastor Steve Nation in Australia about the making of the book.  Click to listen or view.

Labels and Evangelical Liberationist?

On the week of commemorating Tienanmen Square massacre on June 4th, 1989, we must think about liberation.  I don’t have much to say about June 4th that people who are much better qualified haven’t already spoken.  The bodies flattened by tanks (literally flat) are still fresh in my memory.  As a biblical studies specialist, I may have something of broad relevance.  The relevance came by the way of an advertisement I saw recently.

Recently, I’ve seen a new series by a reputable publisher that started a new series on contextual reading of the Bible.  The advertisement causes me to pause long enough to disrupt my Right Texts, Wrong Meanings series.  One description of a book caught my eyes. More importantly, this description made me think.  It describes the book as “These essays de-center the often homogeneous first-world orientation of much biblical scholarship and open up new possibilities for discovery.”  Of course, the “first-world” technically means that the location was under US (and western) control while the “second-world” was under the USSR.  The “third-world” is contested territories.  Now that the second-world has collapsed with the breaking up of the USSR, we have only two worlds left: the first and the third.

Upon further review of the authors, I notice one of the editors to be Asian-descent but is now teaching in the US.  The Asian country from which he immigrated is far from third-world (in the pejorative popular usage of the term “third-world” by “humanitarians”). In fact, it is a much more thriving country than the US at the moment.  Even as a developed world, US may even be less developed than some of the formerly third-world countries.  These countries now become the “more developed” world.  So, how is his position non-first-world? I should call his world the “hyper-first-world” (at least “developed world”) based on what I know about that country, but then his teaching in the US causes him to be a hybrid of sorts with perhaps the label Asian American.   Thus, his perspective should not be considered non-first-world at all.  It wold be hard for him to demonstrate 1) he was under poverty and oppression 2) he is now highly influenced by that experience.  To call his perspective third-world is to categorize everything “occidental” to be first world (and “modern,” “advanced,” … “better”).  Even with intentionality of trying to yield to a broader perspective, this series creates a description that smacks of the pitfall it is trying to avoid.

A friend of mine (aka the blog name Chinglican) and I have been conversing about how it is possible to be an evangelical with liberationist tendency in many parts of the world but not so much the US.  In the US, the “liberationist” is the “other”, a liberal, a nut case and most likely a commie.  Not so other parts of the world. Why is this?  I think we should relabel everything.  How about calling the western US reading of the text, a capitalist reading?  The fact is, an interpreter can be an evangelical reader of the text without sacrificing cultural context.  Sure, grammar and syntax as well as historical backgrounds are important.  I believe that.  But after that, so what?

What we have is the occidental blind spot.  What do I mean by that?  It is terribly easy to label the “other” this or that category without being quite aware of one’s social location when reading the Bible.  This is a fact! If we look at the “first world” and “third world” labels, we would find that such geographical terminologies to be divided by the Global North and Global South, with the underprivileged being the Global South (aka the “third world”).  My friend who’s almost done with his PhD, Mr. Chinglican, gladly informed me that such terminologies reflect a time when global wealth was distributed based on colonial power.  This outdated historical fact no longer holds true.  The world has moved on, especially in economical and intellectual terms.  The sooner we wrestle with this fact, the better reader we will become of the Bible, not in terms of its original message but in terms of the relevance of the original message for today’s world. We should also wrestle with how others read the Bible who according to historical past were the “other” but are no longer so.  Without first properly and accurately applying a label (even a negative label) to our own social location in light of the “other” (well, what we consider the “other” though the “other” may consider us the “other”), we continue to favor our own version of truth to be the whole truth.

I do not think we have deconstruct all the old labels thoroughly enough.  At least a lot of labels, based on colonial (and antiquated) social-economic geographical terms, are no longer adequate if not outright misleading.  Purely from social-economic and intellectual development, the colonial dichotomy between first world and third world isn’t always going to work.  Having taught in Hong Kong for almost three years and being active in many contexts over there, I can no longer read the text the same way.  Am I third-world?  Well, Hong Kong is not third-world. Although it was still a British colony, its social-economic condition was already first-world even when I first immigrated some forty years ago.  Its present subway system is more efficient and cleaner than any of the ones I’ve seen in the US.  No, I did not work in a third-world mission field.  Hong Kong is a developed world.  By all accounts, I worked in a first-world academic post dealing with a different set of political and social challenges than the US.

Due to my contextual concerns, I do not think I can ever apply the Bible the same again the way I did in the US.  Some might see some liberationist tendency, but that is just my own contextual application of the gospel with no deliberate leaning towards liberationist hermeneutics.  Most people who know me still consider me evangelical, though I even have trouble with that label “evangelical.”  How do I mix the liberationist and evangelical together? I never try. It just happens when the biblical world and my world collide  Beautiful fireworks happen when the two worlds collide.

In my own experience and reflection of the false labels (I can name so many examples), I think we need to start thinking about our own reading context in light of other people’s reading context.  Sure, there’ll always be haters saying stuff like, “Oh, he really isn’t Reformed enough.  He is a liberationist.  He must be liberal then because we know that all liberationists are liberals.”  I used to worry about how people would label me but I realize in the last decade or so that such haters will always exist because the majority of the people in our world do not know how to walk in the shoes of the others (and I don’t use the word “others” pejoratively here).

Contrary to the impression of this post, I’m not trying to advocate for more politically correct vocabulary here.  My plea is grander.  The fact is, many in the US are too comfortable where their biggest problem may be whether Obamacare would take a bit of their earnings away while people are getting killed, imprisoned and oppressed not just in “third-world” societies but even in developed places.  Then, I just brought up the political dimension.  My context here then isn’t about economics then but has a political aspect because certain environments call for a political reading.  Politically speaking, economically developed countries that appear stable are not necessarily stable at all.  In other words, the old labels tell me nothing about the interpreter’s perspective or context or experience.  Being aware of our interpretive location also demands that we understand the locations of others.  This is why we must surge ahead and do better for the sake of the gospel.

I think we’re facing challenging times in the globalized culture. Paradigms shift faster and faster.  We’re being challenged to revamp or even discard all our labels.  Navigating in this murky water will be risky but navigate we must or our blind spots will become our entire vision.  It is no longer (it never was) adequate to label anything that does not fit our comfort zone of old labels.  Everyone reads the biblical texts with his or her lenses.  Everyone interpreting other readings also interpret those lenses through our own personal lenses.  Our reading of other readings and other lenses determine whether we reach true understanding of what “others” are saying.

Liberationist or not, never forget June 4th, 1989.