A Theology of Dao
This article reviews Heup Young Kim’s A Theology of Dao, which presents an articulate argument for the synthesis of Daoist and Christian theologies. It also provides a helpful overview of systematic theology that has come out of East Asia in recent decades. As with other works of its kind, one wishes there were (1) more accounting for the decline of Asian values from within, instead of simply assuming their destruction by encounter with Christianity/the West and (2) more grounding of the new theo-Dao with reference to its history within Asian Christianity, which could show its applicability for global Christianity generally.
Reading Heup Young Kim’s Theology of Dao, one can’t help but hold the work in enormous esteem and appreciation.1 It is a rich amalgam of current trends in systematic theological thinking, especially those concerned with broadening, enriching, and enlarging Christian theology with perspectives drawn from non-Western traditions. He has gathered here decades of effort by such pioneers of “theo-Dao” thinking as Ryu Yŏng-mo and Lee Jung Young (to name only two among the many he cites), introducing readers to Asian—especially Daoist and Confucian—parallels of concepts in Western theology. Encyclopedic in its coverage from Christology to ecology, he brings together rich clusters of related ideas and terminology (e.g., apophatic vs. cataphatic) from both cultural spheres for mutual elucidation, with which to engage in further studies of this kind. In that sense this is a major contribution adding an important layer to the synthetic, constructive model of Christian theological thinking in which theo-logos and theo-praxis are brought together toward a new theo-Dao. Professor Kim’s work is moreover sure to be a useful tool for students of theology of both East and West for its painstakingly detailed footnotes.
Without wanting to reduce in any way what Kim has achieved in the present volume, however, I feel bound to point out two fundamental flaws that in fact have been characteristic of a fair portion of the systematic theology that has come out of East Asia in recent decades and that are laced throughout this work as well. In all fairness, it is more as a reflection on Asian theology as a whole and not of Kim’s work in particular that I venture to discuss them here. The first is a flaw of historical inaccuracy; the second is a matter of confusion or hubris in which theory is substituted for theology. The two together suggest a third comment. It is not so much a flaw as it is a need for a shift in approach to East/West syntheses.
Put simply, the point of historical inaccuracy stated outright in Kim’s work but also implied in a number of works by others concerns the assumption that it was Christianity (and more broadly the coming of the West and its ideas) that wreaked havoc on Asian values, spiritual and otherwise, in Korea and elsewhere in Asia. Kim specifically suggests, for example, that the monotheistic exclusivity of the Christian Gospel message destroyed or at least made contentious the culture of peaceful religious pluralism in which Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism had freely coexisted. Concepts of personal salvation in Christ are blamed for the erosion of communitarian dynamics built on social trust and cooperation, and the idea of original sin is said to have broken down the deeply held Mencian view of human nature as good, on which a complex tradition of social dynamics and structure had been built. Indeed, there are bound to be incalculable differences of ethos between a culture founded on the belief that “There are no bad people, only bad environments” and one that not only categorically imputed “sin” to everyone without exception (an idea that had its strong counterpart in East Asia through Xunzi and the Legalists) but, even more important, categorically denied the possibility of human solution by effort.
There is much that is not wrong about Kim’s diagnosis—for example, his understanding of what is happening currently, especially in some circles of South Korean and Chinese underground church communities. But before entering into questions of the validity or invalidity of his analysis (including specific aspects of Confucian and Daoist developments he discusses)—and without in any way disregarding the very real upheavals the coming of the West did inflict on the East in many other ways—it is of great importance to recognize that Confucian and other Asian spiritual values had been on a long downward spiral of decline from within, long before Christianity ever appeared on the scene. It was the state of spiritual vacuum that those values found themselves increasingly unable to fill throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that—at least in Chosŏn Korea—made the people so receptive and even hungry for the new teachings brought by missionaries. In other words, it was not Christianity that rendered Asian values ineffective but something else. I certainly do not mean to imply that the values that had sustained and given vitality to civilizations in Asia for millennia were in some way intrinsically defective or inadequate. All civilizations go through cycles of decline and renewal according to rhythms marked by the combination of internal cohesion of values and external pressures. But such an admission does not absolve us of the imperative to understand and come to terms with the causes of a given decline. Put another way, one needs to first grapple with what fundamental human issues those values, as understood and practiced at the time, had not been able to adequately address, and why. Only then can one move forward to rebuild those values in ways that do address current needs.
Before going on to my second point, it is perhaps worth noting that such historical inaccuracy as pointed out above is far from unique to any one region or time. America in this very moment is divided over the issue of immigrants, with their various faiths and cultures said to be “eroding and destroying” American values and way of life. But as had been the case in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Asia, many intellectuals, cultural historians, and even pundits sensitive to nuances of such things have been pointing out for some time how American values have been in slow decline for decades, its once-stalwart individualism increasingly corrupted to outright materialism and “me-ism” and leaving a huge spiritual vacuum in its wake that no amount of consumerism, virtual reality, and flag-waving about “family values” are able to fill. To try to fill that vacuum, some are indeed turning to different traditions of thought, including Islam—sometimes even to the most militant forms of Islam—but it is not Islam that created the vacuum. However politically convenient to blame the coming of these other traditions onto American soil for all of America’s problems, their presence actually provides new prisms by which to study, update, and revitalize American values for our time—if Americans should so choose.
The ramification of starting from the historically more accurate view—according to which the arrival of Christianity led not to the destruction of Confucian, Buddhist, or Daoist values but instead to an opportunity for their renewal and revitalization—is directly related to my second point about theory being mistaken for theology. One cannot propose a “theo-Dao” as a solution or an alternative to Western theology (maybe “theo-logos” or “theo-logy”) when this “theo-Dao” has had no history of success or indeed even of application as contemporary Daoism, much less as part of Asian Christianity. Daoist philosophy and spirituality lost its vitality (i.e., its ability to identify and directly address fundamental issues of society) in Asia before the arrival of challenges from abroad, and it has yet to demonstrate the recovery of that vitality in Asia. That is to say, Daoism in Asia has yet to develop the wherewithal within itself to engage with Western or Christian teachings in such meaningful ways as to have become a necessary sustaining value in today’s largely Westernized Asia. Not having found relevance even in one’s home contexts, on what grounds should it be proposing itself as a solution for the contexts of another? At best, this could be only speculative hypothesizing, not theology founded on engagement with the deepest human questions. One understands, even shares, the wish that precisely by engaging in the kind of theorizing involving “systematic theology,” the synthesis of Western theo-logos (as theo-logy) with Eastern theo-praxis one would somehow arrive at a theo-Dao that not only unites East and West seamlessly toward a more “global” ethos but helps each move beyond its past toward an equally “glocal” future. Indeed, syntheses founded on such terms may not be lacking in sparks of academic brilliance. But ultimately such endeavors will not move beyond the postcolonial status quo—one side eager to demonstrate the value of its native culture without sufficient attention to soundness of methodology, the other side eager to show its neocolonial generosity by assuming the pose of intellectual affirmative action. It cannot lead to true synthesis.
The preceding thoughts lead to my third point, which is a call for a shift in approach. I have said elsewhere that the arrival of Christianity in Asia offered an opportunity for renewal and revitalization of Asian spiritual values (esp. in the case of Chosŏn Korea) by way of what I have elsewhere called interculturation—an opportunity that in my view neither side has understood even now, more than a century later, to take advantage of to its full potential.2 As the three components of the word indicate, “inter-culturation” involves activity of some kind between (“inter”) different cultures but in addition carries strong implications of directionality that might be described as a self-transformation that is mutually enlarging. And I argue these components of interculturation not as theory (and of course, not as theology either) but as a pattern shown again and again throughout world history at points of successful transition to renewal, as for example when China absorbed Buddhism into itself in a way that not only embedded Buddhism within Chinese culture but ultimately gave impetus to the rise of neo-Confucianism. In the process, China also fundamentally changed and enlarged the way the world subsequently understands Buddhism, which was a natural but hardly intended by-product of China’s self-transformation.3 Similarly, Korea took those neo-Confucian ideals from China and so developed and applied them to its own contexts that it led to a remarkable social and cultural renaissance in which, it has been said, Korea rediscovered new heights of its nascent character.4 Again, the transformation was of Korea, but one of its by-products was to enlarge and even redefine the potential of “neo-Confucianism,” to the point where no discussion of it would be considered complete without taking account of its application in Korea. Europe, too, entered its Renaissance as it learned how to reevaluate its relations to the “pagan” Greek and Roman philosophy it had “always known” yet held at arm’s length. Though Greece itself never again reached such intellectual heights and even may go bankrupt in our time, it will yet always be known to history as a major source of the grand Western tradition. In each case there was no effort to try to change the source of the challenge; effort was always focused on deep-level critical engagement with the nature of the challenge, not so much for the purpose of accepting or rejecting it, as learning how to be challenged by it.
So what might these considerations mean in the present work and its contexts? For one thing, Asian theologians might begin by trying to understand the reasons that caused the values of the Dao to have been on the wane, also the reason why the influx of “theo” into the world of the “Dao” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not enough to inspire a renewal and revitalization of Daoist values. The question might in time be extended to ask also why the “theo” that met with “Dao” in the land of Dao has not been able to transform itself into a life-sustaining “theo-Dao” in Asia either. In short, the task confronting Asian theologians is not to presume to find solutions for Western Christianity or global Christianity as a whole that lie outside their own contexts, as Western Christianity once presumed to do for peoples everywhere and failed. The way forward, rather, is to engage in serious studies of (1) why “Dao” entered a trajectory of decline, (2) why and what aspects of it had stopped providing vital energy for renewal of society even before Christianity came into the picture, and (3) how it can engage in meaningful interculturation with Christianity to strengthen both itself and Asian Christianity for real human contexts emergent in the region. It will indeed involve going back to the texts—but an ad fontes through the lens of reality, because the task is to rebuild from a place of actual historical decline and failure. It will not be enough, in other words, to point to the wisdom of this or that text in all its abstract perfection, which in the end is as meaningless as its opposite of rejecting everything indigenous by way of indiscriminately confusing corrupted practices of tradition to be true expressions of its core principles.
This is where I think the example of someone such as Horace G. Underwood, the first Protestant missionary to set foot in Korea, can be so illustrative. For over twenty years he agonized mightily both in himself and with colleagues about the appropriateness of using the Korean word “Hananim” to refer to God instead of the term “Ch’ŏnju” (i.e., Tien-chu, used in China), before finally coming round to support the former wholeheartedly. He understood that words carry not only literal meanings and etymological overtones but also strong (though not always articulated) connotations of accumulated local cultural understanding and nuance. He understood the need for time to sufficiently familiarize himself with the ethos of such an important word as “Hananim” among the Korean people, to understand how the living ethos contained in the word expanded not only the “God” he himself knew but would influence and characterize the future of Korean Christians’ manner of relating to God. The choice of word was not only a textbook matter of translation and analysis but a taking stock of the deepest longings of a people toward the Gospel from the Korean glocal context (long before the word “glocal” had been coined). It was not that he sought to change Korean Christianity according to his own vision of it; on the contrary, what he undertook was his own self-transformation through his coming to understand the Korean people, their context and ethos. And ultimately it was this—that his missional activities had been a proactive process of self-transformation more than an effort to transform an Other—that served Korea and Korean Christianity so well.
Do such considerations leave any room for Asian theologians to contribute to the future of Christian theology as a whole? As I have argued, self-transformation is the best way to transform the whole. Only after truly understanding for themselves the reasons for the historical failure of values within Asia would Asian Christians perhaps be in a position to begin to understand why Western theology, similarly, is having difficulty breaking through its current theological impasse. Usually, elements of the answer lie already embedded within the tradition if that tradition has been around long enough, and indeed contemporary Western theologians as different from each other as Jürgen Moltmann and Sarah Coakley are increasingly looking to previously “peripheral” aspects of their own traditions—to trajectories represented by the likes of Gregory of Nyssa and the medieval mystics—for new direction. What is needed is not some new answer from outside but rather an understanding of why the West’s (or East’s) manner of looking at things has not allowed them to harvest the answer staring at them. In that sense, what each cultural hemisphere can offer the other in this age of global identity is not theology but pedagogy.
Author biography
James Jinhong Kim is the Horace G. Underwood Chair in Missiology and Global Christianity and the director of the Underwood Center for Global Christianity at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, New Brunswick, NJ.
