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A few months ago, I left my home in Wheaton to return to Indonesia, where I was born. Besides a few boxes, my trans-Pacific baggage included a handful of stubborn expectations about the shape and substance of my future work. Above all, I carried with me the conviction that God was calling me to sojourn with him again in a new place.
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As the weeks and months passed, Jakarta smeared my Wheaton polish of perceptions, opinions, and convictions. Learning again how to live in my adopted home, I was peculiarly ready to pick up and listen to some of Asian theology's foremost authors. My guides in this new (to me) theological world began their reflections where I was—at the margins of divergent political and cultural worlds. I read how Kosuke Koyama tried to piece together his own fractured past, torn between Japan, America, and Thailand. Peter Phan taught me about theology among the in-between and "in-beyond" lives of Vietnamese Americans. Michael Amaladoss emphasized to me that Jesus himself was marginalized, articulating a Christology in which Jesus is sketched from Asian cultural reference points. Together, all three authors emphasized the marginality of Asia's poor and religious masses, declaring confidently that a theology that does not mean good news for these people is utterly inadequate to the Asian context.
Writing from this conviction, all three authors were inevitably concerned with the dynamics of power. What political and economic centers relegate Asian peoples to the margins? What theological center relegates Asian theology to the edge of acceptability and perhaps orthodoxy? What kind of power characterizes the Kingdom of God, in which the last become first and a homeless, itinerant patriarch becomes the spiritual father of all God's people? What kind of power works triumphantly through the resurrection of the crucified Christ?
With one eye on the Asian masses and the other on the failure of Christianity to establish itself as an Asian faith, Phan and Amaladoss confront these questions aggressively. Both authors re-slant the contours of Christian faith and praxis away from traditional Western theological emphases on doctrine and church-as-institution in favor of a more inclusive kingdom-focused gospel, in which the church is God's servant at Asia's margins, deliberately marginalizing and crucifying herself in imitation of Christ in order to build the reign of God in Asia.
In Christological terms, Phan and Amaladoss connect ecclesial marginalization with kenosis, emphasizing Christ's rejection of conventional power structures and his insistence on the social and economic implications of the liberating power of God. In their view, the Son's marginalization and rejection is of particular resonance to many Asians, who themselves live marginalized lives. In turn, the Son's resurrection by the Father's power constitutes the good news of justice and redemption that the church can proclaim to Asians. Both authors view the Father's eschatalogical kingdom as guaranteed by the resurrection of Jesus Christ and currently mediated by the work of the Spirit throughout all of Asia's institutions, including particularly other Asian faiths.
Despite my years in Asia, reading Koyama, Phan and Amaladoss was a disconcerting experience. Their new methods, aggressive readings of tradition and Scripture, and persistent focus on Asia's poor further blurred the careful distinctions of my Presbyterian theological background, responding to questions of soteriology, pneumatology, and Christology in new and unexpected ways.
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