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A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF CHOAN-SENG SONG'S EFFORT in CONSTRUCTING CONTEXTUAL THEOLOGY
By
YEUNG KWOK KEUNG
SUPERVISOR DR. ARCHIE C. C. LEE
A THESIS m PARTIAL FULFILnv,fENT
OF REQUIRENfENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF DIVINITY
4.
DIVISION OF RELIGION AND TÆOLOGY
GRADUATE SCHOOL
CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
JUNE 1995.
AN ABSTRACT
This dissertation aims to provide a critical assessment of Choan-seng Song's effort in constructing contextual theology, In the first place, the recent discussions in contextual theology is outlined as a background for the discussions follow. The factors, both external and internal that leads to the rise of the consciousness in doing contextual theology are pointed out. Afterwards, the different models of contextual theology were looked at. These models vary in their different proportions of emphasis putting on the local culture and the Christian tradition. Different Asian theologies, including Song's, actually falls in different theological models sketched. Secondly, Song's conception of theology is delineated. He maintains that the traditional way of theologization is and was unsuitable for Asia, since it completely misunderstood not only Asian cultures, but the very concept of culture. He has made efforts in explicating the notion of culture as well as his understanding of images and symbols, which are the very manifestation of Asian cultures. We note that Song's conception of Asian theology is a direct implication of his conception of cultures. Song also proposes the new way of constructing local theology in Asia : 'doing theology with Asian resources'. The raw material for and context of doing theology, the meaning of the 'Asianness' of Asian theologies, new orientation in doing theology, and the method of doing theology by telling stories are then discussed. Lastly, a critical assessment of Song's effort in constructing local theology is made. We see that although Song admits the presupposition in any understanding including the theological one, he never reflects critically on his own presupposition and seems to neglect the great difference between his own situatedness and that of other Asians. This negligence pses him to regard himself erroneously as located in the vaguely delineated 'Asian' tradition. Then, by emphasizing the dialectical relationship of the two moments of interpretation, explanation and understanding, we consider Song's interpretation of texts as not rigorous enough. Concerning the general notion Of culture and the narrower scope of Asian cultures appear in Song's works, we find that he assumes a too private notion of cultural symbols. Moreover, he pays little attention to the reproductive constraints imposed by culture on human agents and grants the latter a too active and free role to play. This far too romantic view causes him to neglect, whether consciously or unconsciously, the Cdemonic' possibility Of 'the people' Although we appreciate the pluralist view of culture advocated by Song, we find that his stance is not consistent, for while he acknowledges the plural nature of Asian cultures, he does not pay much attention to more industrialized Asian cultures. We try to demonstrate, with a substantiation of a in-depth study of Hong Kong culture, that his rejection of the latter is a result of his ignorance of them. Moreover, due to the lack of self-reflexive moment in his works, Song never makes explicit the role he is assuming. This absence obscures us to see the possible symbolic domination he may impose.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to some of the people who has given me help in the writing of this dissertation.
I want to thank my supervisor Dr. Archie C. C. Lee for his assistance and patience. I have changed the title and contents of this dissertation and this increase him a lot of administrative works. His kindness and patience is unforgettable. His criticism greatly improves the quality of this work.
I have been assisted by the material and thought of my fellow students Chan
Chi Wai, Chi Ka Bong, Cheung Hon Keung, Lee Ling Hon and Yip Ching Wah,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS i
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CONTENTS ii
1. INTRODUCTION 1
2. BACKGROUND : ASIAN THEOLOGY AS CONTEXTUAL 3
2.1 The Call for Doing Contextual Theol(W 3
2.1.1 Factors leads to the rise ofcontextual theolog 3
2.1.2 Different Models ofContextual Theolou 6
2.2 Constructing Contextual in Asia 9
2.3 Summary 12
3. SONG'S CONCEPTION OF CONSTRUCTING ASIAN THEOLOGY 14
3.1 Doing Theology with Asian Resources
3.2 Song's concept of culture 17
3.2.1 Definition ofCulture 17
3.2.2 Images and Symbols 20
3.3 Song's Doing Theol(W in Asia 22
3.3.1 Raw Material and Context of Theolou 23
3.3.2 'Reclaim Our Own Asianness ' 25
3.3.3 New Orientation in Doing Theolou 26
3.3.4 Doing Asian Theolog by Telling Stories 29
3.4 30
4. CRITICAL ASSESSMENTS OF SONG'S THEOLOGICAL PROJECT 32
4.1 The Interpretation of Culture 35
4.1.1 Prejudices in Reading Culture 36
4. I .2 Reading ofCultural Texts 39
4.2 The Notion of Culture 46
4.2.1 Culture and Human Beings 47
4.2.2 The Scope ofAsian Cultures 56
4.3 Reflexivity and Symbolic Domination 60
4.3.1 Reflexivity of Theory 60
4.3.2 Symbolic Capital and Symbolic Domination 63
4.4 70
5. CONCLUSION 72
BIBLIOGRAPHY 74
1. INTRODUCTION
Since the word 'contextual' became a vocabulary of theology, a drastic change has been taking place in the world of theology. What this word seeks to express is neither simply the adding of local elements to the imported 'theological products' from other places, nor the dressing of the theological immigrants in the local costumes. These two efforts can no longer be considered as adequate. More and more theologians agree that the starting point of theologization should be the experience of local people, rather than ready-made theology, which mainly come from the West. Among these exponents, we can find the Asian ones, and among the Asian ones, we find Choan-seng Song.
Song, trained in the Western theological tradition and being a professor at the Pacific School of Religion at Berkeley, is one of the founders of the PTCA (Programme for Theology and Cultures in Asia), which is lively and influencial contextual theological movement. His works mainly concentrate on the theoretical justification and exploration of the directions of creative living theology in Asia, and his series of works has a time-span of more than twenty years.
This dissertation is designed to provide a critical assessment of the works of Song, and is divided into three chapters. Chapter 2 functions as a background of the recent discussions in contextual theology. It introduces the factors, both internal and external, that leads to the rise of the concern in constructing contextual theology. Then two classification schemes of different models of contextual theology, which can help us to locate the theological concern of Song; will be presented. We shall also have a discussion on the general concern of Asian theologians.
Chapter 3 iä an effort to reconstruct Song's efforts in constructing contextual theology. Perhaps due his having difficulties with Western systematic theology, or to the fact that Asian theology is still in the course of formation, Song never makes a comprehensive presentation of his theological project. All his works are piece-meal treatment of one or two theological issues. It becomes, therefore, absolutely necessary to reconstruct a relatively clear and panoramic view of his works before a
Unless otherwise stated, hereafter, the term 'theology' refers solely to Christian theology.
critical assessment can be carried out.
Chapter 4 contains a multi-perspective assessment of the theological project of Song. Different theories, borrowing from the fields of hermeneutics, anthropology and sociology, are employed in order to illuminate the different facets of Song's project and to achieve a really critical assessment.
2. BACKGROUND : ASIAN THEOLOGY AS CONTEXTUAL
This chapter is intended to form the background for the understanding of the theological project of Choan-seng Song in the next chapter. We shall, in the first place, outline the idea of contextual theology by looking at the factors leading to the rise of contextual theology, as well as the different models of doing contextual theology. This discussion of the nature and different understandings of contextual theology will be based on the two important works of Robert J. Schreiter and Stephen B. Bevans. Then we shall have a discussion on the theological concerns of Asian theologians in recent years.
2.1 The Call for Doing Contextual Theology
2.1.1 Factors leading to the rise ofcontextual theology
That theology is contextual is now becoming the general consensus among theologians, In the 1950s, the consciousness of context took shape as there was a growing awareness that the "traditional" theologies inherited from the older churches of the North Atlantic community are in discord with circumstances and heritage of other cultures. Christians in cultures other than the North Atlantic ones, together with those marginalized peoples of Europe and North America, began to question the normativeness of the theology bestowed by the missionary. They tried to make sense of the Christian message in their own circumstances by articulating their own theologies.3
It is true that contextualization is a new approach in constructing theology, since classical theology never considers the incorporation of the changing context or culture in the course of constructing theology as necessary. In fact, theology was only understood as 'a reflection in faith with two loci theologici (theological sources) of
Robert J. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies (London SCM Press, 1985).
2 Stephen B. Bevans, Models ofContextual Theolov (New York : Orbis, 1992). 3 Schreiter,- Local Theologies, pp. 1-2.
scripture and tradition'. It was construed as a theologia perennis, an unchanging theology. On the contrary, contextual theology adds and emphasizes another locus theologicus : present human experience. Culture, history, contemporary thought forms can no longer be ignored. The claim of objective and ahistorical nature of theology can no longer gain support. In this respect, contextualization is a new approach to theology, which is described as a shift in perspective by Schreiter.
Nevertheless, all theologies are inevitably contextual, since there is no immediate truth. All understanding of the world is constrained, though also enabled by our own situatedness in our context. Every understanding of God is influenced by our own context and history. Thus, even classical theology is inescapably contextual, though they may claim to be universal and ahistorical. In this sense, every theological endeavor is a contextual one, which can be stated in Bevans' words, 'the contextualization of theology ... is really a theological imperative. As we understand theology today, contextualization is part of the vew nature of theolou itself.' [italics mine] Due to the conception of this new theological imperative, and other factors which will be outlined below, though the task of theology remains as the reflection of Christians upon their religious experiences, due emphasis has been paid to the circumstances in which these experiences originate and are nurtured.
Different terms is being employed to expressed this new awakening in doing theology, such as 'contextualization', 'localization', 'indigenization' and 'inculturation' of theology, 'all of these terms point to the need for and responsibility of Christians to make their response to the gospel as concrete and lively as possible. '
But what is the factors that provide the background for the appearance of contextual theology? Bevans suggests that there are both external and internal factors. The external factors point to 'the possibility' of doing theology, while the internal ones sees 'the necessity' of theology to be contextual. He suggests four external factors, which are the results of historical events, intellectual currents, cultural shifts, and political forces .10
(1) Classical approaches to theology are considered irrelevant to and incompatible with the local culture.
(2) The oppressive nature of older approaches to theology. The theological discourses are dominated only by western, white, male theologians.
(3) The growing identity of local churches. With the end of colonialism, Asian and African countries began to realize that the values of their cultures are just as good as, if not better than, those of their colonizers.
(4) There is a new, namely the empirical, understanding of culture provided by contemporary social sciences, which opposes the classicist conception of culture,
The latter sees that there is only one culture, which is both universal and permanent, while the former defines culture as a set of meanings and values, and there are many such sets. Theology is the way religion makes sense within a particular culture.
There are also three internal factors, which are due to the nature of doing theology .11
(1) Incarnation nature of Christianity. Christianity has to continue the incarnation process by becoming contextual. 'God must become Asian or African, black or brown, poor or sophisticated, a member of twentieth-century secular suburban Lima, Peru, or of the Tondo slum dweller in Manila, or able to speak to the ill-gotten affluence of a Brazilian rancher. ' 12
(2) The sacramental nature of reality. Through concrete things, encounters with God in Jesus continue in our world.
(3) A shift in the understanding of the nature of divine revelation. Revelation 'was conceived as the offer of God's very self to men and women by means of concrete actions and symbols in history and individuals' daily lives. '13 Revelation is God's offer of relationship to men and women in the way that they can understand. It is then the task of theology to take seriously the actual contexts in which the revelatory work ofGod is to be continued.
In sum, the changes in political, economic and cultural environments have capacitated and energized the 'contextual turn' in theology. These new currents in turn refashion the understandings of theology itself, which then in turn alter the perspectives on the current environments. Through this dynamic process, that the contextual nature of theology today must be explicitly acknowledged seems to be an undebatable issue now. The questions remain : to what extent and how theology shall be contextual. We are going to look at some endeavors in answering these questions.
Bevans, Models, pp.7-IO.
12 Ibid., p. 8.
13 p.9.
2.1.2 Different Models ofContextual Theolog.'
Both Schreiter and Bevans offer models of contextual theology. Before looking at different models of contextual theology, however, there is a need to clear up some confusion in terminology. Schreiter puts under the umbrella of local theology, three kind of models : translation, adaptation, and contextual models,14 while in Bevans' map of models of contextual theology, there are five models, namely anthropological, transcendental, praxis, synthetic, and translation models. "Contextual theology" in Bevans' sense is more or less equivalent to Schreiter's "local theology". The following table of equivalence may provide further clarification
Schreiter's LOCAL THEOLOGY Bevans' CONTEXTUAL THEOLOGY
Translation Model Translation Model
Adaptation Model
Synthetic Model
Contextual Model Praxis Model
Transcendental Model
Anthropological Model
We will follow Bevans' map of models of contextual theology, which is now reproduced here .16
Transcendental
Model
Culture Gospel Message
Social Change Tradition
Schreiter, Local Theologies, pp.6-16,
This map represents contextual theology as a continuous spectrum, in which different models locate themselves in different equilibrium points in the tension between two important poles • culture and social change, and gospel message and
17
tradition. In this spectrum, the most conservative is the translation model. It presupposes that the essential message of Christianity is supracultural and considers the gospel message as separable from the bound of culture. Although it regards culture as important, if conflict between the gospel message and the cultural values arises, it is the former that is to be preserved with all efforts. 18 The most radical one is the anthropological model, which tries to establish or preserves the cultural identity. Its starting point is human culture, and human experience is the basic criterion of judgment as to whether a particular contextual theology is really a good message to the local people. Human culture is the medium through which God reveals Godself, and it at the same time shapes the way Christianity is expressed. This model 'recognizes that revelation is not essentially a message, but the result of an encounter with God's loving and healing power in the midst of the ordinariness of life. '21 It emphasizes that each culture has its unique way of expressing their own religious experience
Other models are somewhere in between of this two extreme positions. The praxis mode1 concentrates on social change with focuses on the identity of Christians within a culture. What theology concerns is not only reflection on culture but also commitment to Christian action. It sees that culture involves a dynamic change besides constitutes human values and ways of living. Although culture is essentially good but sometimes might be perverted, and requires healing and liberation. The synthetic mode1 tries to keep a 'creative dialectics' among the
above three models. While acknowledging the uniqueness of every culture, it holds that every culture has its bad side and thus can be benefited by other culture, if each culture maintains an openness towards and dialogue with the others. This attitude must be upheld since there is no timeless and straight theology. The last one is the transcendental mode12 which concentrates not on the content of theology but the subject who theologizes. Its concern is not to focus on the essence of the gospel message and tradition, or to analyze the local culture, but the knowing subject's own religious experience. God's revelation is therefore not 'out there' but within human experience. The subject, however, is not one in the cultural vacuum, but, on contrary, nurtured by the very context one lives. Thus the starting point is very contextual and communal, and the subjective experience mirrors the very common structure. It presupposes that though different persons are determined by their own history and culture, their mind operate in identical ways.25
Bevans's and Schreiterrs pictures of different models of contextual theology present to us a very useful mirror by which we can have reflections of our theological reflections and articulations. It helps to locate and formulate the approach employed in this study. Before the elaboration of this approach, however, I would like to have a simple evaluation, based on the framework delineated above, of Asian theologies, especially those proposed by theologians in the PTCA movement. The latter is an energetic and contextual effort in doing living theology in Asia. This evaluation is thus necessary since, although I am in accord with the basic attitudes of doing theology in Asia, I have some reservations of part of the methodologies and presuppositions. Just because what I am trying to do is to theologically reflect on the culture of Hong Kong, which is at least geographically an Asian city, there is a need to justiÜ what I am doing in relation to the spirit of the existing Asian theologies in a broader sense.
24 Ibid., pp.97-110. The term transcental refer to the transcendental method established by Immanuel Kant, which advocates that it the knowing subject who determines the shape of reality. See ibid., pp.97-8.
25 Besides sketching the features ofeach models, Bevans also offers a detail and incisive critique ofeach model.
2.2 Constructing Contextual Theology in Asia
In the light of the delineated by the works bf Bevans and Schreiter, it is not hard to discern the direction Asian theology is heading. The first step of doing theology in Asia is to shatter the fetters imposed by the western Christian tradition. Choan-seng Song criticizes the notion of the identification of the history of the Christian Church with the so-called of 'history of salvation' generated in the history of western theological thought. Westem Christian church, even today, argues Song, cannot resist the charms of monopolization of the history of salvation.
He reproaches western theologians for that
they obstinately persist in reflecting on Asian or African cultures and histories from the vantage-point of that messianic hope which is believed to be lodged in the history of the Christian Church, so that the relations of these cultures and histories to God's redemption become intermediate, and redemption loses its intrinsic meaning for cultures and histories outside the history of Christianity. The universal nature of God's dealing with his creation forfeits its particular and direct application, except within the cultures and histories affected and fostered by Christianity.
Song contends that this kind of mentality actually contradicts the biblical prophetic tradition, which refuses the identification of history of Israel with the totality of
God's presence in history. Though the acts of God in Israel is unique, what the Asian nations need to do is not just to unquestionably accept this fact, but to 'learn how their histories can be interpreted redemptively. ' [italics added] Asian nations, as a consequence, should consider their history as another one in God's salvation parallel to that of{srael.
This realization of the equal status of Asian history in God's salvation, however, is not without a historical background, as we have seen that there are both external and internal factors, suggested by Bevans, that lead to the emergence of contextual theology. Song points out two factors. Firstly, the spiritual vacuum as a result of secularization propels the West to seek helps from Asian faith and ideologies for spiritual revival. This makes both eastern and western theologians pay due attention to faiths and ideologies other than Christianity. The second factor is the failure of western missionary movement in Asian countries. The churches in the West cannot reacts timely and correctly, with their conceptual and propositional theologies, to changing situations and the long-established cultural traditions in Asia.
29
Thus the once held continuous history of salvation is 'interrupted and broken'.
But the road on which Asians construct their own theology is not a straight one.
In a short summary of the directions and contents of Asian contextual theology,
30 Kwok Pui-lan gives us a brief description of the change in doing theology in Asia. She points out that in the past, Asian Christians concentrated on the dialogue with Asian traditional cultures and religions, which produced different indigenous movements. 1 Some of these endeavors have been criticized as irrelevant to lives of ordinary people since the dialogical partners are mainly intellectual elite in society. Other theologies tried to transplant model of Latin American liberation theology, which is in heavy Marxist tone, to Asian context. Kwok argues that this kind of transplantation overlooked the anti-religious sentiment of Marxist framework and
32
was impotent in dealing with multi-religiously characterized Asian culture- Thus, the Asian contextual theology must focus on the political and economical liberations
29 Ibid, pp.220-I. Song advocates that "theology of essence", which is the traditional paradigm, must be replaced by "theology of existence" The question of "what God does" must replace the question Of "what God is", and "we cannot know what God does apart from events and realities in which we are involved existentially." Ibid, p.221.
For example, the Chinese christians in the early decades ofthis century paid much effort in dialogue with Confuscianism, which was, and may still be, considered as the representative, or even the deep underlying structure, of Chinese culture. In recent years, many scholarly works, mainly in historical perspective, has emerged to provide analysis of this important period ofChinese history. These works mostly focus on the Anti-Christian Movement in the twenties. For analysis of the indigenized theology
:
1985)
; for historical analysis of events, see Jessie G. Lutz, Jessie G, Chinese Politics and Christian Missions : The Anti-Christian Movements of 1920-28. (Indiana : Cross Cultural Publications, 1988); for analysis ina perspective ofrelation between politics and religion, see :
1992)
32
of Asian people, and, at the same time, must concern the cultural and religious renewal. ' 33 The emergence of Asian contextual theologies marks the relentless movement under the direction of local consciousness. But will it be running in the opposite direction of ecumenical movement?
Kwok gives a definite negative answer : the mystery of God transcends all our human imagination, and will not be limited by any society or culture. Gospel is universal. It is we, finite human beings, who restrict the understanding of God to particular situation. The universal gospel can only be understood through the contributions from every faith community.34 Douglas J. Elwood has a similar notion. Defining Asian contextual theology as an Asian expression of Christianity, he maintains that Asian theology is not an exclusive or esoteric theology that is designed for Asians only. In his eyes, 'the best Asian theologians are making possible an Asian development of "ecumenical theology', a property of no particular nation or region but the heritage of the whole church. Kosuke Koyama uses the notions of (local) traditions and the Tradition to explain the relationship between local faith tradition and the original Christian Tradition. He contends that Jesus Christ is the source of the Tradition, which cannot be monopolized. Each tradition is only a partial expression of the Tradition.36
No matter what the details of argument are, every Asian theologian would likely hold an inclusive view of the coexistence of the local traditions and the universal tradition, and see the former as constitutive components of the latter, though they may maintain different proportions of emphasis on the two.
33 Ibid, p.4.
34 [bid, p.2.
35 Douglas J. Elwood, "Introduction : Asian Christian Theology in the Making" in Douglas J. Elwood ed. What Asian Christians Are Thinking (Philippines : New Day Publishers, 1976), p.xxviii. Agreeing with Lesslie Newbigin's idea that "there is a core of hard hsitoric fact which remains normative and which forbids us to make the 'context' alone decisive for our thinking and teaching," [original emphasis], Elwood makes a warning that there may be "over-enthusiastic contextualizers who may be tempted to make the 'context' more important than the text'". We will see in the following discussion that theologians in the PTCA movement, at least some of them, do not see this notion as of first priority in their theological reflection. In practice, they, at least implicitly, emphasizes the context more than the text, though theoretically they may claim equality ofboth.
36 Kosuke Koyama, "The Tradition and Indigenisation", Asia Journal of Theoloo, vol.7, NO. l, Apr.,
1993.
2.3 Summary
In the beginning of this chapter, we have pointed out the factors, both external and intemal, suggested by Bevans, that leads to the rise of the consciousness in doing contextual theology. We then looked at different models of contextual theology suggested by Schreiter and Bevans, especially those of the latten These models vary in their different proportions of emphasis putting on the local culture and the Christian tradition. Lastly we have outlined the concerns of Asian theologians in their movement of constructing contextual theology. Different Asian theologians fall in different theological models sketched above.
3. SONG'S CONCEPTION OF CONSTRUCTING ASIAN THEOLOGY
In the previous chapter, we have sketched the concems of constructing contextual theologies. Against this background, we are going to locate the contextual theology of Choan-seng Song, which he and others describes as 'Doing Theology with Asian Resources'. As we may soon note, Song's theological model is actually a representative of the anthropological model, which is the most radical one among the variety of models discussed in the last chapter. This fact may even be sensed from the rubric of his theology. With 'Asian resources', Song and his colleagues, which we will called them 'Asian theologians' hereafter, attempt to put forward a new way of constructing theology, which is aimed to be completely different from that of traditional, western kind.
This radical and provocative claim compel us to raise a set of questions : What is the concem of these Asian theologians? How is it different from that of traditional theology? What are the contents of 'Asian resources'? How do the Asian theologians deal with these resources? Or what are the methods they employ or devise?
These are the questions that we are going to probe in the following pages. It should be mentioned beforehand that there is a focus of concern in our following exploration of the above cluster of questions, namely the notion of culture. It is this notion of culture of Choan-seng Song that we will critically assessed in the sections to come.
3.1 Doing with Asian Resources
If one wants to classiö' Song's theology, one may probably put it into the category of Bevans' anthropological model, which considers the preservation of cultural identity as most important and sees local human experience as the basic criterion of whether a theology is really conveying a good message. I Song traces the history of local theology and reckons World War Il as the watershed, which signifies the rise of local consciousness. He says
See Section 2.1 above for a sketch ofBevans' map of different models ofcontextual theology.
[World War Ill marked the beginning of the end of Westem colonial culture in Africa and Asia. Emerging from the war were newly independent nations preoccupied with the terrifying task of nationbuilding. Inevitably, there was resurgence of the indigenous cultures and religions resurgence that often went hand in hand with a strong sense of nationalism.2
A consequence of this 'resurgence of the indigenous cultures and religions' was a question about the former understanding of the relations between Christianity and cultures. Song is disappointed by results of missionary efforts in Asia. He laments that although enormous amount of both human and material resources was invested, the return in the number of converts was greatly out of proportion and Christians consists only a small minority ofthe great Asian population. How to account for this phenomenon?
Song says that it is due to the missionary approach together with its theological assumption. The missionary approach exercised in Asia in the past was completely ignorant to the well-developed and widely spread cultural, especially religious, reality of Asia. Asian cultures were only considered as pagan, if not evil, waiting for the redemption of Christ as represented by the Western culture. Even the notion of 'anonymous Christian' held by those 'liberal' wing missionary, which states the already presence of Christ in Asian cultures, cannot be accepted. Songs rejects this view as full of 'ignorance and blindness' to the real Asian cultures, which are profoundly constituted by Asian religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism. Just because of these, Song concludes the past missiological history in Asia by saying that
The stereotyped theological and missiological pronouncements on our cultural, religious and historical realities made by our mentors in the West, if not entirely fallacious, are invalid and misleading. ... To some of us Christians and theologians in Asia, ... the theological and
2 Choan-seng Song, 'Culture' in Nicholas Lossky et.al. ed. Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva : WCC Publicatm 1991), 257.
3 Choan-seng Song, 'Christian Theology • An Asian Way' in Yeow Choo Lak and John C. England eds. ATESEA Occasional Papers No. 10 : Doing Theology with GM's Purpose in Asia (Singapore
ATESEA, 1990), 27-8. 4 Ibid., 29.
missiological accommodation made within traditional theology is not only inadequate but counter-productive. It does justice neither to the Christian faith nor to other religions and cultures. For us the reality of
Asian religions, cultures and histories developed outside the orbit of Christian influence presents a theological challenge of a radical kind. It touches our theological being to the quick, forces to stop singing the theological tunes we have leamt from some where else, and inspires us to compose our own theological symphony.
Song calls this understanding a 'hermeneutic of suspicion'. This hermeneutic requests a screening of all the ready-made theologies and missiologies produced by those Western theologians who are '"genetically" incapable of knowing what it means to Live in the world ofBuddhist culture, Hindu culture, or Confucian culture. '6
Song believes that Asian Christians can no longer rely on the theological products of Western worlds, but must take up their responsibility to theologize their own Asian experiences by using Asian resources. The way of 'doing theology with Asian resources' can be regarded as the central direction of a group of Asian theologians, among which Song acts as one of the main spokespersons. These theologians put forward a theological movement, the Programme for Theology and Cultures in Asia (PTCA). As the name may suggest, PTCA is specifically interested in tracking the culture of Asia. Culture, including religion, thus provides the substance for Asian theology.
In Song's eyes, only through the study of cultures (Asian local cultures of course!) can theology be true theology. Otherwise, theologization will only be reduced to an intellectual game, as can be illustrated by Western, traditional theology.
Song actually proposes a new way of theologization, which he together with other Asian theologians regard as not only distinct from traditional theology at the substantive level»but also at the methodological level. Before making a tour on Song's theological method, a few questions have to be cleared up first : What then is culture? How is Asian cultures distinct from others? Or, in other words, what are the characteristics of Asian cultures? How to interpret Asian cultures anyway?
5 Ibid, 27-9. 6 Ibid, 27.
7 Choan-seng Song, 'Freedom of Christian Theology for Asian Cultures : Celebrating the Inauguration of the Programme for Theology and Cultures in Asia' in Asia Journal of Theology, vol.3, No. 1, Apr. 1989, 88-9.
3.2 Song's concept of culture
3.2.1 Definition ofCulture
It may seem contradictory and ridiculous at the first sight to provide a study of Song's theology at the conceptual level, as he often seems to reject putting culture on the desk of conceptual analysis. In fact, he reminds that in Asian cultures, 'we are not dealing with abstract concepts of Asian cultures, but living entities; not general idea but "dynamicforces that create or destroy the lives ofpeople."' [italics added]8 However, theology that excludes conceptual analysis as its subject does not (cannot?) defr conceptual analysis of itself. This conceptual analysis is deemed necessary since Asian theologies often impress us as interesting but loose. Without such kind of systematic treatment, critical assessments, the task of this dissertation, cannot be carried out. More importantly, it is only through a thorough and systematic reconstruction can Asian theologies be not only critical towards others, but also be self-critical. Application of the 'hermeneutic of suspicion' to oneself appears to be the most neglected work of Asian theologies themselves. We will have more on this problem in the next chapter.
In Song's view, only by carrying out a re-conceptualization of Asian cultures, can Asian theologians on a new way of theologization in their ox,vn places. Song firstly gives a head-on attack on Ctraditional theology'. He argues that what the
8 Ibid, 89.
9 Third world theologians even coin their theologies as 'unsystematic'. See :
' 83 ' 1985 {F 9 1. This anti-systematic bias may be related to the anti-Western-traditional sentiment in theologization of Asian theologians. 10 We may well ask : what is 'traditional theology' anyway? The impression that can be got in Song's theology seems to be too vague. Sometimes he mentioned one or two early church fathers, e.g. Tertullian, or a few modem theologians, such as T.F.Torrance, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Is the whole western theological tradition a unifring stream? Are all the 'traditional' theologians unconcern with the lives of people? How about Barth's Barmen Confession which attacked the Nazi's making of idols for people? How about Bonhoeffer's project of assassination of Hilter and his return to his home country from America just to be with his own fellow Christians? What about the philosopher-theologian Simone Wile's working together with workers to the very end of her life? And can we neglect that the Rheinhold Niebuhr's theology of nature of man is a direct consequence from his being a pastor in Detroist for more than ten years? Can we draw the conclusion that the social gospels of YMCA/YWCA, which was being applied to China in the early decades of this century, are doing something unrelated to the lives of ordinary people? We can still add more if we want. What I want to point out is Song's over-simplification ofthe whole westem theological tradition. He often put westem theologies in cultural vacuum, which is the very act that he himself reject!
theologians in the West concerns is only the abstract concepts of culture and gospel. For them, culture is incompatible with the Christian faith; and Song terms this attitude the 'theological bias against culture'. Il And it is this attitude that Asian theologians must correct.
Although Song seldom provides us with definition of cultures in his works on cultures, occasions can still be located. 1--1e sees culture as an all embracing constituting force. He says •
We are all under the power of culture into which we are born. Our cultural heritage makes us what we are. Our views on life and the world are formed under the direct and indirect influence of our cultural traditions.12
We may conceive, from this definition, that culture is a molding force that shape both our life-views and world-views. Human seems passive in this respect. Song nonetheless also provides us with another formulation of the human-culture relationship by saying that
In culture we have to do with human beings - us human beings. Culture is us - what we are, what we stand for, how we live and how we create meanings that transcend the present. Study of culture, then, is study of human beings.
This formulation puts the emphasis on the human side rather than the culture. Human is no longer a passive product of culture but rather an active creator of meaning. Culture only acts as environment for us to live in and create. In fact, Song always directs our attention to the human beings, the central focus of his conception of doing Asian theology. For him, it is completely making no sense to say such thing as 'culture in Asia' without at the same time talking about the men and women of
Asia. Every time we mentions about Asian cultures, we must be speaking of Asian
Song, 'Freedom', 88-
Choan-seng Song, Third-Eye Theolov (New York : Orbis, 1979), 6. This definition of culture situates itselfvery near to those provided by anthropologists, as we shall see in the next chapter. In fact, Song suggests that theologians should learn from cultural anthropologists, sociologists and historians of religions in the study of culture. See 'Freedom', 88.
people. These people are living beings, not ideas; they have their concrete lives. 'When we seek to understand the meaning of cultures in Asia, we are in fact seeking to understand the meaning of the life that people in Asia live with all its precariousness and hope, in fear and in expectation. To explore theologically Asian cultures is to explore the history of Asian people, to listen to their stories, to hear the cries of their hearts' 14
As this notion suggests the equivalence between culture and people, culture cannot be stagnant, since people are not stagnant. Culture is actually historically formed. It has its starting and ending points, as well as a life in between- 'Even a culture already dead - culture, for instance, housed in a museum - was once alive and active in a particular society and in a particular time. Culture is a spatial-temporal reality.' 1 This living history is not only a self-developmental process of an isolated culture, but also one consists of assimilation and rejections of foreign cultural elements. No culture can ever claim of monolithic which is a uniform cultural entity. We should note that what really interested Song here is not the cultural change itself, but rather the rejection of cultural imperialism of the West. He suggests that even Alexander, who has such a great military prowess, failed to subsume the cultures of the Arabs, the Indians and the Nile Africans. And even Western culture itself is not monolithic but rather a term signifring a bundle of cultural patterns, It is the cultural diversity and plurality that he wants to uphold, for he believes that 'the vision of a world community must be a vision that presupposes fruitful and constructive interactions among rich and diverse cultural heritages and characteristics. ' Thus he proposes the replacement of Asian singular 'culture' by the plural 'cultures' in our discussion.17
Culture is the lives of people, but how are cultures manifested? One of the ways is through symbols and images.
Ibid.
15 Ibid, 88.
3.2.2 Images and Symbols
It is not easy to grasp what Song means by images and symbols, since he never prepares for us any clear definitions of them. He nonetheless has treated them as a separate topic and points out some characteristics of them.
Song does not tell us what images are, although he advocates the significance of imagination. He says 'imagination is the power of human self-transcendence. It gives us freedom from the limitation of time and space. ' By the power of imagination, we are no longer bounded by time, we can 'transpose ourselves from the present to the past and to the future. ' We are no longer bounded by space either.
The power of imagination transports us from our own space to the space of others. With imagination, communion with others will be possible, even though we and others are separated by space or even time. Moreover, the power of imagination applies not only between human, but also between human and God. Prayers are made possible through imaginations. Song maintains that 'imagination is the energy of human life. '
What is a symbol then? Song tells us what a symbol is through its relation with an image. The function of symbol is 'translating visual perception of images into meanings. A symbol is the meaning of an image. ... Symbols, at any rate, are images reconstructed to direct people to the meanings of images.... Symbolism is in fact semantics of images.' 20 Song does not make clear to us whether symbols are images or meanings of images. Neither does he tell us clearly how and why images are reconstructed. He, however, does tell us something about the nature of symbolism. He uses the example of sacred stone as an illustration.
He points out that when a stone becomes a sacred one, nothing of its appearance has changed- For those who are outside the culture where the stone is considered sacred, the stone is in no difference from any ordinary one. But for those
G insiders', the stone is by no means an normal one, 'it is now a stone bearing a meaning representing an awesome presence of a reality beyond itself.' This process of changing a stone from 'secular' to 'sacred' is actually a symbolization process. In this process, a stone change 'from a stone to an image of a sacred reality to symbolism of the presence of that reality.' Symbolism is the 'grappling with the meaning of the sacred in the secular. '21
We may now see that, for Song, both imagination and symbolism is the path through which human can transcend their limitations to reach for the sacred reality. 'The world of images and symbols is a real world. It is a world in which human beings discover the deep meaning of life and experience the power of transcendence. '22 But how does these images and symbols come? Those artists 'endowed with uncanny power.' Song describes poets and artists as 'priests of images and symbols', who are responsible for the making and remaking of the latter, and
They reveals to us the mystery of God's creation that defies the penetration of our everyday language. They show us what the real world must be like with the images that contradict our common logic. And they disclose to us the subtlety and complexity of human relations using symbols that shock and disarm us at one and the same time.
Through their efforts, symbols are possible. This conception has a clear assumption : symbols is created by artists. But a series of questions instantly pop up in our mind Is symbol an object itself or a meaning carried by an object? Does the meaning of the symbol appear in the process of interpretation or in itself? Is symbol private or public?
Is symbols just a creation of an artist? Does that creation constitute what a symbol is? In other words, is symbolism a personal work or an group phenomenon? We shall deal with these questions in the next chapter.
Creators of images and symbols may not be at the same time the custodians of them. There are priests of images and symbols, who are the interpreters and perpetuators of the latter. Because what images and symbols concern is the sacred power, the priests are endowed with power also. And Song believes that the fact is
Ibid
22 Ibid, 5.
23 Ibid, 3.
that just because of this sacramental power, there exists power struggle in a religious hierarchy. He sees such struggle as an irony for that power struggle is most profane treatrnent of the sacramental power. And the history of religions, including
Christianity, is full of such ironies.
Song never forgets to point out the evil side of traditional Christianity. He argues that the interpretations of images and symbols are often developed into teachings, doctrines and dogrnas within religious institution and community. It is these very acts that images are stylized and symbols are formalized. As a result, the power of symbols of pointing to something other than themselves is restrained, and it is the root-cause of religious absolutism and theological dognatism. Out of these absolutism and dogrnatism, the dichotomization of orthodoxy and heresy cannot be avoided. All the symbols and images of Asian cultures are considered as idols. Converting to Christianity requires the smashing of these symbols and images to pieces. Song maintains the 'cultural particularity' of all symbols and images, and contends that if the cultural limitations of Christian symbols and images are overlooked, no fruitful interaction between the Christian-Western images and symbols and the local-indigenous ones.
He laments that our imagination is too often suffocated by too much tradition. Imagination must be preserved with all our efforts if we do not want to be 'dictated by animal instincts for survival and by preoccupation with biological needs.' Without room for symbolism, religion would only be reduced to literalism without life.
3.3 Song's Doing Theology in Asia
The above understanding of Song's conception of culture sets up the stage for his theologization. We now move to Song's doing theology with Asian resources. The following pages will cover four areas : (1) raw material and context of Asian theology; (2) reclaim the Asianness of Asian theology; (3) new orientation in doing theology; and (4) doing theology by telling stories.
3.3. I Raw Material and Context of Theolog.'
From the above discussion, we can infer that, for Song, the subject matter of theology which is justified is not abstract ideas, but something related to the concrete lives of people which is manifested in culture. It is the message that appears again and again in Song's work.
He forcefully reject the concern of 'traditional theology' . 'For theology to refrain from asking questions at this point is to flee back into the shelter of academic theology, which is more interested in the metaphysics of God than in the concrete acts of God in society and history. '28 In his view, theology would become a vain effort if it regards God as a problem of idea, which has nothing to do with the real life of people. Unless we abandon this pure academic kind of approach to understand God and move into the real life situations, in which God acts, theology will have no relation to Asian people.
There we see the theological presupposition of Song : 'God is already in human history and on earth.' [original emphasis]29 The implication of this presupposition is not the change in the understanding of the nature of God, which is still confined to Intellectual area, but the very starting point of doing theology. The starting point is not the abstract, immovable God, but the history of human beings.
Both attitudes to God and human have to be reoriented. Firstly, the understanding of God has to be reoriented. God is a God involves in human history. He gives response to the experience of human beings. To study the lives and histories of humanity is to study God's creation. 30 Theology is then an effort to make sense of God's involvement in human history, but not intellectual reflections on the doctrines or teachings of the church alone. 'It is a feeling of God's heartbeats in the heartbeats of Suffering human beings. It is the touching of God's compassionate heart in the tormented hearts of our neighbours. '31
theologization in Asia, one may refer to his 'Ten Positions' in doing Asian Theology, in Tell Us Our Names (New York : Orbis, 1984), ch. I28 song, Third-Eye, 80. 29 Ibid, 85.
Ibid, 95.
31 Choan-seng Song, 'I Touched the Theological Heart in Japan' in East Asia Journal of Theolou, vol.4, no.l, 1986, 10.
Secondly, at a consequence, the position of human in theological inquiry has to be re-situated. The questions to be asked in theology are 'human questions', the questions conceming the ultimate meaning of life as we encounter the daily life in human history. Theology must concerns people in their everyday lives together with their suffering and joy. Theologians must listen their weeping and laughter, they 'must be able to touch the hearts of women, men and children who seek liberation in body and in spirit from centuries of oppression, poverty, fear and despair, who struggle to regain their rights to be human. ' It is these Asian people who are in struggle that Asian theologians must identify with. They are the sources of the0105'. Study of humanity must precede the study of God. Song considers this kind of theology completely distinct from traditional one, and terms former 'living theology' , since
God who invites us .. to do theology is a living God. The community in which God calls us to do theology is a community of living human beings. And those of us who consciously respond to that invitation and that call to do theology are living Christian persons. Theology - a joint enterprise of the living God, living human beings and theologically conscious living Christians - has to be living, then. [original emphasis]
35
Living human beings have their living problems. These problems--social, political, psychological, ecological, etc.—are the subject matters of theology, they are the context of theology. For Song, context is neither the static space-time, nor sociopolitical and cultural-religious framework that shapes theological effort, but rather 'a particular space-time where the living God interacts with living human beings in suffering, in judging, in healing and saving.
3.3.2 'Reclaim Our Own Asianness '
The people who Asian theologies should concern are those who are living in Asian cultures. As implied by the notion of culture conceived by Song outlined above, cultures are not abstract concept waiting for analysis, but are real forces that shape and condition the lives of people. To speak of Asian cultures is to speak of Asian people. To peruse Asian cultures theologically is to peruse the history of Asian people. Thus the correct questions about cultures should be something like : 'How do human beings ... fare in Asian cultures? What has a culture in Asia done and what does it continue to do to its people? Is it oppressive or liberating? Does it help create a space of freedom in the life of people or does it deprive them of that space? Is it a culture that allows to justice for the powerless and the marginalized?'38
In Asia, the socio-political and cultural-religious realities can, Song believes, be represented by 'the overwhelming presence of the poor in the midst of "economic development and prosperity'.' 9 Asia is very different from all the rest of the world in terms of the degree of suffering. The number of people in suffering exceeds even the sum of those of the rest of the world40 Asia is full of women, men and children whose spirits have been in oppression, poverty, fear and despair, and Asian people are in constant struggle to get themselves liberated. Thus, we may reasonably point out that it is not all the living human beings, but only those who are politically oppressed and economically kept poor, who are of interest to Song. Or we may say, only they are the living people cared by the living God. For this reason, some of the people can no longer be accepted as Asian people, even though they are geographically situated in Asia. Asia must be characterized by suffering and oppression. 'This is the Asia betrayed by the prosperous Hong Kong, the orderly Singapore, the industrialized Japan, and by pseudo-democracy in most Asian
countries. '41
Thus, Song contends that it is burden of Asian theologians to abandon the old way of constructing theology and switch for a completely new one. He urges 'to reclaim our own Asianness for our theological tasks, and to be able to carry on our
37 Song, 'Freedom', 89.
Song, 'Freedom', 90.
39 Song, 'An Asian Way', 29.
40 Choan-seng Song, Jesus, The Crucified People (New York : Crossroad, 1990), 8. 41 Ibid.
theological responsibility with our fellow Asians.' [emphasis added]42 Song rejects all those efforts ofjust adding an 'Asian colour' to Christian theology, or 'sprinkling traditional theology with oriental perfume'. Asian theologians must search for their very Asian roots, retum to their Asian womb, and compose their own 'theological symphony' .43 All these call for a new orientation in doing theology.
3.3.3 New Orientation in Doing The0100'
The theology that can 'reclaim the Asianness' must be relevant to the Asian cultures. But how? Through 'transposition', Song argues. The theology which is developed in the West must be transposed into other cultures, lest no relevancy is possible. But what is transposition then? Song gives us three steps of transposition.
The first transposition involves a shift in from one particular place or time to another. It refers to the process in which the Christian faith is transferred from the Western worlds to the so-called Third World. An obvious example would be the missionary expansion carried out during the last two centuries. The second transposition relates to the communication between the above two worlds. It concerns how the Christian message can be transmitted and received. It can be called the translation process, provided that it refers more than just the formal or linguistic problem; it has to do with the substance of the message which the church has to communicate. The third and the last one attends to what Song regards as the most important one, namely the process of incarnation. In explicating the meaning of incarnation concerned here, he says that
no cultural assimilation could take place without the two cultures becoming "incamate" in each other. It is neither simply a matter of imitation nor a matter of uncritical fusion. It is a matte of an alien culture "become flesh" in a native culture. A metamorphosis must take
42 Song, 'Freedom', 87.
43 Song, 'An Asian Way', 30.
44 Song, Compassionate God, 5-7.
45 Ibid, 8-10.
Song sees 'incarnation' as the heart of all theological efforts in dealing with the question of relations between Christianity and cultures, such as indigenization, contextualization, acculutraion etc. See 'Culture', 258-9.
place in the cultures concerned.
In other words, the transposition of a foreign culture to a native culture cannot be regarded as successful unless the two cultures are merged together to the extent that the former has become already part of the native culture. Song illustrates the idea of incarnation of the gospel by the example of the May Fourth Movement in the second decade of this century. In this movement, some held that the traditional Chinese culture should entirely abandoned without any sympathy, while the Western ideas accepted without questions, in order to save China. Others maintained that Chinese culture can be kept intact during the introduction of foreign ideas. Song sees that neither side was correct since 'it is neither a matter of imitation nor a matter of uncritical fusion. It is a matter of an alien culture "become flesh" in a native culture. ' Both the Chinese cultures and the imported foreign has to be transformed.
Here we meet the problem of the understanding, which can be technically called hermeneutics. Song once asked the following set of questions
How to interpret the message of the Bible? How to understand the Christian faith? These were our central questions. But interpretation in relation to what? Understanding in what context?
For him, the biblical world of faith and the Asian world of faith are two with little in common. But if we can dig through the surfaces of them, we can find their common cores, namely 'the human spirit in agony and hope in the grasp of the divine spirit of love and compassion.' The two worlds come into 'intense interaction' at 'the very heart of struggle for human life and destiny.' Song asserts that this 'intense interaction is none other than "interpretation" or hermeneutic. ' In fact, theology is itself a hermeneutics of the actions of both God and man in the human community. The gospel message must be understood through this hermeneutical activity. Thus there is no 'change-proof' message, not even the gospel. In order to have the gospel known, it must be interpreted, it must be fused, or incarnated into the native culture. But how can this incarnation take place in the doing of theology? Song suggests a reorientation of theological exploration with four elements : vision, community, passion and 'imag-ination'
The vision in doing Asian theology relates to the new understanding of God and human lives and history discussed above. The content of this vision is that 'God has been personally involved in the Asia since the beginning of creation.' Such vision is also a vision of hope. It is a vision of 'Jesus suffering with the people, empowering and reconciling them in their struggle for meaning, justice and love. It is a vision that enables us to encounter Jesus in the redemptive power at work in society and among people. ' This vision of hope is important, Song contends, since despair is more common and more real than hope in most Asian countries.
Community is another element in theology of Asia that must be emphasized. Theology without community is like fish without water, Song added. He advocates that 'God is the God of community' who participates in his own creation as a member of the community. By Jesus (incarnation), God 'dwell among' the Asian community 'peopled with sun, moon, stars, trees, fishes, animals and human beings.' This community is the Christian church, that is the community of believers, which bear witness in word and in deed to the good news of God's saving love in Jesus. But doing theology needs another community : the community of the people with different cultural and religious commitments of the whole of Asia. It is this community that provides the necessary resources for theology.
The third element is passion. Doing theology in Asia is to resonate with the loving and suffering of the people, to respond to that passion at the heart of Asian humanity. In giving this passion, theology at the same time has to give account of God's passion, his loving and suffering, towards his creation. This passion is the passion of hope and new life.
The last element concerns 'imagi-nation', which has been mentioned in previous section. Without the power of 'imagi-nation', theologians cannot look through the surface of live to the very struggling hearts of sufferings. 'Imagi-nation' enables theologians to image of the real life of men, women and children as well as to image God and his thoughts.56
After all, by what means all the above be put into practice? How can 'doing theology with Asian resources' be achieved?
3.3.4 Doing Asian Theology by Telling Stories
By telling stories, Song asserts. In discussing the merits of doing Asian theology by telling stories, he once quoted the saying of one of his colleagues :
There I realized the potential power of popular culture-literary products as tools for crystallizing and articulating the most profound ideals, aspirations and longings of the common Asian who is often powerless, voiceless, exploited and oppressed. I saw that even the most seemingly harmless folklore stories can in fact be the vehicles of a popular protest movement and, therefore, function as an object of theological exploration on the very theme of liberation in the Asian setting.57
The ideas in this quotation is a representative of the view of doing theology by telling stories. I want to mention some main points here. Firstly, as Song explicitly stated, this story-telling approach is one starts from the bottom up which begins from the human community, but not one from the top down which kicks off from the world of ideas and concepts. Therefore, secondly, this approach put the common folks at the centre of the their concern. Through stories, the lives of the common folks shall be understood, and theologians can come close, feel what the common folks feel, hear their laughter and sighs.58 Thirdly, the folklore stories not only record the feeling, but 'can in fact be the vehicles of a popular protest movement.' In other words, by analyzing the contents of the stories, we may obtain what is just needed,
% Ibid Song suggest that Vintage' should be used as a verb : 'God gave the power of imaging to humankind so that the latter can image God in human persons - God not as an image, not as an ikon, but God as passion, loving and suffering, in people. ibid.
37 Song, 'Freedom', 86. 58 Ibid, 86-7.
the direction, of political movement. This direction is the liberation of people. Song advances that 'in stories of ours we heard the echoes of the humanity seeking liberation contained in the stories of the Bible.'59 In both the Asian stories and the biblical stories, we can find both hopes and power for liberation. This point implies the last one, which refers to the purpose of God. The work of an theologian is not only to listen to these stories, but must listen theo-logically. That is, by listening to the Asian stories, we know the purpose of God in Asia, and we get the hope in God
60 revealed through the incarnation of Jesus Christ.
Listening with hearts is thus the very task of theologians. Song renounces the role of objective observers or disinterested spectators who concern nothing of the human problems. What theologians have to achieve is a 'communion of souls and spirits seeking an "ultimate" answer to "penultimate" questions of the present life. '61
3.4 Summary
In this chapter, we have gone through the conception of theology of Choanseng Song. We have laid out the reasons suggested by him for the reconceptualization of theologization in Asia. He maintains that the traditional way of
theologization is and was unsuitable for Asia, since it completely misunderstsood not only Asian cultures, but the very concept of culture they upheld is mistaken, since it wrongly opposed the gospel to the Asian cultures. We have delineated Song's notion of culture as well as his understanding of images and symbols, which are the very manifestation of Asian cultures. Song's conception of Asian theology is a direct implication of his conception of cultures, We have draw the picture of the content and method of his 'doing theology with Asian resources', including the raw material for and context of doing theology, the meaning of the 'Asianness' of Asian
59 Song, 'An Asian Way', 32.
60 Ibid Song has actually given us an example of doing theology telling Asian folklore stories in his work The Tears of Lady Meng ( Geneva : WCC, 1981). Through the story of Lady Meng, Song celebrates the 'paradoxical power ethics' 'a power ethic not built on powerfulness but on powerlessness' which believes that 'powerlessness can transform into powerfulness through the power of tears, that is, the power of love and turth.' (59) What this story reveals the history Ofthe cross and resurrection in Asia Song contends, is in accord wsith the biblical revelation. (65-6) Thus through this example of Song, we can better know what doing theology by telling stories means. 61 Song, 'An Asian Way', 34.
theologies, new orientation in doing theology, and the method of doing theology by telling stories.
4. CRITICAL ASSESSMENTS ON SONG'S THEOLOGICAL PROJECT
In order to assess the project of doing Asian theology proposed by Choan-seng Song, it is our first task to find out some suitable measuring rods. The measuring rods employed here are mostly fabricated by social scientists and philosophers. 1 And we find that these tools are really powerful ones, especially in terms of their critical abilities.
The first thing to be assessed is the interpretation of culture. Assessment shall be given with respect to both the presuppositions and the methodology of interpretation. The problematic of the first one is how interpretation is at the same time enabled and constrained by the situatedness of the interpreter, while that of the second is how an interpretation can be a rigorous performance instead of a loose free-association. For these purposes, contemporary hermeneutical theories would be invoked in order to clarify, in our view, some confusions appear in the works of
Song
The second set of measuring rods is chosen for assessing the notion of culture appearing in the works of Song. Culture, however, is a complicated and elusive concept that seems to de%r any definition. It embraces a wide range of meanings, materials, processes, differences, conflicts. Most importantly, different people carrying different spectacles get different images and understandings of it, and a variety of designations of the word 'culture' thus result. Nonetheless, efforts from different academic fields have been paid to capture the nature of culture. Among all the endeavors in understanding the culture of ordinary people of any local society, anthropology2 seems to be hitherto the most powerful academic discipline. Actually, it is the aim of anthropology to study culture. This fact can be illustrated by looking at the task of anthropology, namely the study of culture in terms of all aspects of
I In fact, Song himself has more than once suggested that theologians must take seriously into account the studies and findings made by social scientists. See C. S. Song, 'Freedom of Christian Theology for Asian Cultures : Celebrating the Inauguration of the Programme for Theology and Cultures in Asia' in Asia Journal of Theoloo, vol.3, no. I, Apr., 1989, 88; 'Christian Theology • An Asian Way' in Yeow Choo Lak and John C. England eds. ATF-SEA Occasional Papers No. 10 : Doing Theology With God 's Purpose in Asia (Singapore : ATESEA, 1990), 37.
2 Anthropology here refers specifically to cultural anthropology, which is one and the most influential sub-discipline of anthropological science. This designation applies hereafter, unless otherwise stated.
living of different people, as outlined in some standard textbooks of cultural anthropology:
Anthropology is devoted to the study of humans as cultural beings . anthropologists concern themselves with variety of ways people live, with the development of those ways over time, and also with the development of human body and the ways people's bodies influenced their lives. ... anthropologists look at different human groups from the perspective of the different cultures these groups share. A main objective of anthropology is to go beyond simply understanding the groups themselves and beyond just increasing understanding of our own societies, to an increased understanding of all humanity through achieving a better grasp of how culture works in the lives of all humans regardless of where or when they live. The task of anthropology is to examine the whole array of human societies and lives in order to contribute to the fullest possible understanding of humanity as a whole. [italics added]
'Cultural anthropology' is often used to label a narrower field [relative to the whole anthropological discipline] concerned with the study of human customs, that is, the comparative study ofcultures and societies. [italics added]
All types of cultural anthropologists may be interested in many aspects of customary behavior and thought, from economic behavior to political behavior to styles ofart, music, and religion ... The distinctive feature of cultural anthropology is its interest in how all these aspects of human existence vary from society to society, in all historical
periods and in allparts ofthe world. [italics added]
Ln sum, we can say that (cultural) anthropology is the discipline which set culture as its subject of study. It covers every component of cultures from different angles, which means every aspect of human existence. Besides culture as such, it also studies culture in relation with social structure, social action and personality. It examines how culture is constituting and constituted; or in other words, how individual members of society are shaped by culture and how the former in turn constitutes and changes the latter. The objects anthropology studied, spatially speaking, include virtually every society, and temporally speaking, extend from prehistorical buried tribes and cities to modern complicated ones. Thus the knowledge from anthropological studies shall greatly enhance our understanding of culture. And we shall show that this enhancement is a very needed improvement of the project of Song.
Besides this wider notion of culture, we will also deal with a narrow issue : the scope of Asian cultures. Song often reminds us of the pluralistic nature of Asian cultures. With the help of a substantive study of the culture of Hong Kong by a sociologist, we are going to show that the pluralist appearance of Song is actually a fake one.
The last set of measuring rods are borrowed from an important French social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu, for the self-critique of theologians themselves. Bourdieu proposes a reflexive sociology, which, on the one hand, puts the results of study based on theory back to modify the theory itself, and, on the other, using the theory to study the field in which theory arises, namely the academic field- Bourdieu's theory helps us to see the role of theologian, as well as what is going on in the process of theologization, from a sociological point of view.
With the aid of the above frameworks, the assessment on Song's project of theology of Asian cultures will be divided in three parts, which respectively deals with three problems concerning : (1) the interpretation of culture, (2) the notion of culture, and (3) the reflexivity and symbolic domination.
The Interpretation of Culture
The first step in all sorts of contextual theology will undoubtedly be the study of the local cultures. What this study involves is actually the interpretation of cultures. This work is no simple and direct work as it appears and the topic of interpretation has perplexed western philosophers from the very beginning of Greek philosophy, In the past two centuries, however, philosophers have make a lot of breakthroughs in the understanding of the nature of interpretation, as well as the method of interpretation.
In the course of dealing with the project of doing theology proposed by Song, we actually meet, both explicitly and implicitly, the questions of interpretation.
Explicit are those concerning the reading of folklore stories and biblical exegesis. Implicit are the very presuppositions of reading cultures, such as the role of the interpreter, the enabling and constraining factors in interpretation. Until these questions are answered, I believe, no rigorous interpretations in depth can be obtained.
4.1.1 Prejudices in Reading Culture
One of the main efforts of Song's theological proposal is making explicit the weaknesses of traditional theology. In his discussion of images and symbols, he complains that too much tradition has already suffocated our imagination. He believes that unless we throw off the yoke of the Western tradition of theology, it is impossible for us to construct our very own Asian theology. So he asks Asian Christians to do their theology with their own resources. And why not? Is it not freeing ourselves from the bondage of tradition, at least the western one, that we are able to have our very Asianness back, and only by doing so, that we can construct our own theologies? By the help of philosophical hermeneutics, I want to show that this idea is actually a pseudo one, though it seems sound at the first sight.
In his works on philosophical hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer explores the very nature of understanding. One of the questions that he what to solve is : how is understanding possible? By tradition. To start with, we will look at Gadamer's defense of 'prejudice'. Based on the insight of Heidegger, Gadamer gives the following formulation on prej udice
It is not so much our judgrnents as it is our prejudices that constitute our being. This is a provocative formulation, for I am using it to restore to its rightful place a positive concept of prejudice that was driven out of our linguistic usage by the French and the English Enlightenment. It can be shown that the concept of prejudice did not originally have the meaning we have attached to it. Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, so that they inevitably distort the truth. In fact, the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience. Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world. They are simply conditions whereby we experience something whereby what we encqunter says something to us. This formulation certainly does not mean that we are enclosed within a wall of prejudices and only let through the narrow portals those things that ca produce a pass saying, 'Nothing new will be said here.' Instead we welcome just that guest who promises something new to our curiosity.
In this formulation, Gadamer tells us that prejudice is not necessarily a hindrance to have clear knowledge. Behind this negative view on prejudice is the believe of the possibility of clear and objective truth through self-reflection. Gadamer rejects this argument. He contends, it is that very prejudice that is enabling in our understanding of the world around us. This prejudice is 'our whole ability to experience.' We are unable to get rid of it, since it arises out of our very human finitude. We can only look through our own pairs of spectacles, or we do not see at all.
But are not there blind prejudices in any understanding? Yes, but we cannot get around these blindness through clearing up of our prejudices since it is impossible. Accepting our dependence on prejudices, however, does not implies that there is no way out of our blindspots, we are not 'enclosed within a wall of prejudices'. For Gadamer, it is in and through the encounter with works of art, texts, and more generally what is handed down to us through tradition that we discover which of our prejudices are blind and which are enabling. For 'it is only through the dialogical encounter with what is at once alien to us, makes a claim upon us, and has an affinity with what we are that we can open ourselves to risking and testing our prejudices.' Here we encounter Gadamer's famous idea 'fusion of horizons.' 'The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of narrowness of horizon, of the*possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up of new horizons, and so forth. '8 In Gadamer's eyes, there can never be a truly closed horizon. It is through our encounter with others with their horizons that our own horizon is
6 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, tr. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley ; University of California Press, 1976), 9.
7 Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1983), 128-9. 8 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth andMethod tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York Continuum, 1994), 2nd ed., 302.
enlarged and enriched. It is through the fusion of horizons that we risk and test our
9 prej udices.
We do not understanding with a blank mind, but must have some fore-sight, fore-conception, that is, prejudices to enable us to do so. Moreover, these prejudices are not our own invention. They are given to us by the tradition that we belong, 10 In his defense of tradition, Gadamer considers it a deformation of the concept of tradition if we think of it as a dead burden of the past. 'The fact is that in tradition there is always an element of freedom and of history itself. Even the most genuine and pure tradition does not persist because of the inertia Of what once existed. It needs to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated. ' Tradition provides us the possibility of understanding, we enlarge and cultivate the tradition.
With the above notion in mind, we can fully agree with Song in his rejection of the claim of context-free of Westem theology and missiology since all our understanding is shaped by the tradition to which we belong. Every knowledge of the Western theologians are conditioned by their own Western history, culture and tradition. It is undoubtedly an erroneous claim of the universal applicability of Western theological tradition, since it neglects the very finitude of human understanding. Yet what is left out by Song's is the same critical distance required
12 for self-reflection, the same 'hermeneutic of suspicion' to one's own works.
What troubles us is Song's suggestion of the reclamation of the Asianness and the abandonment of Westem tradition. It is true that we can turn our heads away from the literature of Western theology and concentrate on the resources of Asia. Nonetheless, as ones which have gone through the Western education, we cannot escape the influence of Western tradition. Actually Western tradition is already a, smaller or larger, part of our prejudices. At least part of our spectacles are irreversibly Western made. Song is no exception. As a man who was educated in the
9 Ibid, 300-7.
10 Here we touch the real concern of Gadamer, the ontology of hermeneutics. We all belong to our tradition, we are 'thrown' to it. This tradition constitute our being and becoming in the world. Gadamer provides us a convincing argument of the hermeneutical nature of being in the world through a discussion on language. Language is our experience of the world. See Ibid., 381-491.
Ibid, 281.
12 The self-critical moment in putting theory to practice is a important issue in recent development of social theory, we will have more in section 4.3 ofthis dissertation.
West and is now living and teaching in North America, he can claim no pure Asianness. His prejudices is to a large extent different from that of native Asians. He can only understand Asian cultures from a foreign point of view. This is why he can make such a statement that Asia is 'betrayed by the prosperous Hong Kong, the orderly Singapore, the industrialized Japan, and by pseudo-democracy in most Asian countries' I , which is a view that I, as one living in Hong Kong, can surely judge as obviously too-simple and superficial, if not ridiculous. Different Asian people are living in different Asian traditions. A Chinese has not the right to claim that he is part of the Indian tradition. Nor a man living in North America claim that he knows Indonesia better than an anthropologist who studied there, not to mention a native Indonesian. More will be discussed on the extent of Asian cultures later.
But Gadamer also tells us that there is no need to feel hopeless in facing a foreign culture or tradition. The very boundedness of our understanding is at the same time the enabling and empowering element of the interpretation of other cultures. Actually, it is often through the encountering of other cultures that the weaknesses and incompleteness of our prejudices are exposed. I believe, although a speculation, that it is through the encounter of Asian cultures, that Song's notion of theology has been changed. Although it is understandable for local communities, especially those which has been under the rule of others, to claim their rights in understanding their own cultures and current situations, there is, in reality, no monopoly.
4.1.2 Reading ofCultural Texts
After exploring the conditions of understanding, we now move to look at the epistemological question : How to interpret a culture? This question is relevant since to construct local theologies successfully, the first step is to get a good knowledge Of the local cultures, and Asian theologies are no exception. In Song's theological reflection, he has done a lot of interpretation on Asian cultural texts, both cultural environment and folklore stories, and one of his books actually deals with the
13 Choan-seng Song, Jesus, The Crucified People (New York : Crossroad, 1990), 8.
rpethod of doing story theology. Thus, the method qf interpre!qtion becomes an inpcapable question to be answered. In fact, it is also task q? heqmeneutics in answering this question. We will look at the interpretation theory qrticulated by Paul Ripoeur, which has not only an impact on the theory of interpre$@tioq of written texts, but also a long-lasting influence on the reading of cultußl texts, !hat is, meaningful actions.
@efore we deal with the interpretation of texts, it is appropriate to ask the question : what are the characteristics of a text?
A text is 'any discourse fixed by writing'. Ricoeur maintains that a text is not simply speech written down; speaking and writing is equally fundamental. When uTiting works, it takes the place where speech could have occurred. A text 'is really a text only when it is not restricted to transcribing an anterior speech, when instead it inscribes directly in written letters what the discourse means. '16 This fixation of discourse through writing is no longer just the inscription of spoken discourse, and it is just due to written text that the hermeneutical problem arises. Ricoeur suggests that there are four traits to capture to difference between the two forms of discourses.
The first trait involves the fact that in writing discourse is fixed since discourse is a 'fleeting event'. What is fixed is not the speech event as event, but the meaning, the said, of the speech event. 'The said' includes three levels of the hierarchy of speech-act described by Austin, namely the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. All these three aspects of speech-act are codified into writing by different literary devices.
The second trait concerns the relationship between the author's intention and the meaning of the text. In spoken discourse, to understands what the speaker means is tantamount to understand what the discourse means. But with written discourse, the author's intention and the meaning of the text cease to coincide : 'the text's career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say, and every exegesis unfolds its procedures within the circumference of a meaning that has broken its moorings to the psychology of its author.' Just because of this reality that 'only the meaning "rescues" the meaning' : only interpretation is the 'remedy' for the lose of the author's intention.
The third trait is due to the fact that discourse is always about something. In spoken discourse, the dialogue refers to the situation in which it is carried out through different methods of indication, such as gestures. In this case, reference is ostensive. In written discourse, however, there is no such thing as ostensive reference
(the Umwelt), but there is the non-ostensive reference : a projected world (the Welt).20 We will have more on this projected world later in our discussion of explanation and understanding.
The fourth and final trait concerns the audience of discourse. While spoken discourse is addressed to a second person, the interlocutor, written discourse 'is addressed to the audience that it creates itself: ' There is no longer the co-presence of subjects in the latter case. 'In escaping the momentary character of the event, the bounds lived by the author, and the narrowness of ostensive reference, discourse escapes the limits of being face to face. It no longer has a visible auditor. An unknown, invisible reader has become the privileged addressee of the discourse. '21
After going through the characteristics of texts, we can now move to the methodology of interpretation of texts. Ricoeur lays out his paradigm Of textinterpretation consists of two dialectical moments : explanation and understanding. This innovative paradigrn connects these two approaches of epistemology, that is, explanation (Erklären) and understanding (Verstehen), which are conceived to be mutually exclusive since Dilthey. Ricoeur situates explanation and understanding in two different moments of interpretation to form a dialectical relation. This interpretation paradigm is considered to be a significant contribution to, if not a breakthrough in, the advancement of the hermeneutics tradition.22
Once again the four traits concerning texts are important and characterizes the paradigrn of interpretation. These four traits constitute the 'objectivity' of the text and from this 'objectivity' derives a possibility of explaining. For the sake of convenience, Ricoeur divides the dialectics of interpretation into two procedures.
This first procedure is 'from understanding to explanation'. Since the notion of the text tells us that the meaning of the text can no longer coincide with the intentions of the author, the objective meaning can be construed in various ways through different interpretations. Thus there exists a plurivocity of a text, that is, there is more than one understanding of the text. This means that the interpretation of texts is an open process, but it does not mean that all interpretations are valid. Ricoeur argues that it is possible to judge the validity of an interpretation. This validation process is not a kind of empirical verification but rather a process of argumentation and debate, in which exponent of any view has to produce reasons
24 and coherent arguments based on what is contained in the text itself.
The second procedure is from explanation to understanding. The freeing of the text from the interlocutors and the speech situation also let the text to be treated as a 'worldless' and closed entity for analysis. This is the approach adopted by the structuralists, with Lévi-Strauss as the most prominent figure in the anthropological
22 See for example JosefBleicher, Contemporary Hermeneutics : Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and Critique (London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). Bleicher reckons Ricoeur's phenomenological hermeneutics as a resolution to both Hans-Georg Gadamer' s dichotomy of truth and method, and the conflicting conceptions of hemeneutics, especially the two portrayed in the debate between HansGeorg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas. See ibid
23 Ricoeur contends that we cannot exhaust all interpretations, and at the same times every interpretation can be challenged. 'Neither in literary criticism, nor in the social sciences, is there such a last word. Or, ifthere is any, we call that violence.' See Hermeneutics, 215.
Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 175-6. Ricoeur argues that fit is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our immediate reach', see idem., Interpretation Theory, 79. This validation process follows 'closer to a logic of probability than to a logic of empirical verification.' Ricoeur suggests the juridical process of legal interpretation as an analogy to this validation process. See Hermeneutics, 212, 2 IS.
discipline. On the one hand, Ricoeur sees Lévi-Strauss structuralist analysis of myth as a valid method in the explanation, while on the other, he accuses the structuralists of not going further. As a result, 'the text no longer has an outside, it has only an inside.' Instead, Ricoeur contends that we should try to disclose the non-ostensive references of the text, to access to the 'depth semantics' of the text.
Therefore what we want to understand is not something hidden behind the text, but something disclosed in front Q/ the text. What has to be understood is not the initial situation of discourse, but what points toward a possible world. TO understand a text is to follow its movement from sense to reference, from what it says, to what it talks about.' [emphasis added]26
The structuralist analysis as explanation plays only an mediating role in this second procedure of interpretation.
The movement of the readers from sense to reference requires them to situate themselves within the world of text. Ricoeur terms this apprehension of the world through personal commitrnent 'appropriation'. Appropriation is a form of 'the revelation of new modes of being', and 'gives the subject new capacities for knowing himself .27 This self-understanding is an essential part of understanding human phenomena in general. This procedure, from explanation to understanding, combines with the previous one, from understanding to explanation, forms Ricoeur's notion of the dialectics of interpretation, which is the 'hermeneutic circle' 28
In sum Ricoeur's dialectics of interpretation starts with a guess, or a naive interpretation, which is then corrected through the mediation of a critical approach of structural method. After this critical moment of structural method, another moment of understanding, which is the final appropriation of meaning, follows. This final moment is actually a revelation of an alternative articulation of the human condition.
Although Ricoeur's theory of interpretation is not without limitations, 29 it is
25 Ibid, 216. Ibid, 218.
Ibid, 192. 28 [bid, 221.
29 Henrietta Moore, for example, points out three limitations ofRicoeur's interpretation theory. First, it leaves out the sociocultural and politicoeconomic conditions in which the are produced. Second, it
rigorous enough to reveal some of the problems of Song's interpretation of Asian cultures. The dialectics of the interpretation theory is actually an effort intended to solve the problem arising in human sciences in choosing exclusively between explanation and understanding. Ricoeur rejects this kind of epistemological reduction in interpretation. Ulin puts the problem of this reduction in the following sentences : 'the privileging of theories based upon natural science explanation reduced the intersubjectivity of meaning to the classification and verification of facts, while theories based upon understanding reduce the dialectical movement of meaning to the ostensive reference of context. '30 The problem of this reduction is due to the absence of the reflexive dimension of the interpretive process. For Ricoeur, texts or other cultures can really reveal to us our own life situation.
I would like to advocate that the problem of Song's interpretation of cultural texts is the leaving out of the explanation moment, if not the understanding moment also. In reading Song's interpretations of stories, one can easily feel that those interpretations are too loose, and they are more of free-associations than really rigorous interpretations. For example, in chapter one of Tell Us Our Name, Song quotes a very short story which was popular in the Tang dynasty. This story describes the reactions of different people to a piece of mirror, all the people involved were ignorant to the nature of rmrror, and misread their own images that were reflected in the mirror. Song explains that we have a mirror of 'theology', which reflects the image of God deeply rooted in the soul of Asian Christians, on the one hand, and the variety of images of God understood by different people living in different social, political and cultural contexts. From this introduction, Song provides with his grand
neglects the conditions ofreception ofthe texts. Third, it does not treat the production and maintenance of power relations involved in the process Of interpretation. In other words, 'Ricoeur does not try to deal with issues of power, coercion, authority and control in society.' See 'Ricoeur : Action, Meaning and Text' in Christopher Tilley ed. Reading Material Culture (Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1990), 1 11118. Similar concern arises in Robert C. Ulin's treatment on the use of the structuralist semiotic mediation in Ricoeur's interpretation theory. He states that 'although the critical moment Of semiotic mediation was developed to transcend the limitations of traditional hermeneutics, it shares with this interpretive process inability to account for how power, as it arises in the form of historically specific social relations, shapes and limits communicative interactions.' Thus gthe inequalities in human interactions and the concrete institutional limits on human actions' go untouched. See 'Beyond Explanation and Understanding • Anthropology and Hermeneutics' in Dialectical Anthropolou, vol. 17, 1992, 260-5. We will see, in the later discussion, the recurrence of this political concem in contemporary anthropology, 30 Ulin, 'Beyond Explanation', 266.
ten positions in doing Asian theology. This and the remaining stories quoted in the book are interesting ones, no one will doubt. But many readers, including me, would wonder : how is this story related to the later positions in doing theology? No relation. All stories are just working as introductions to the discussion follows, just like a little story scheduled as an introduction to a Sunday sermon. All the stories in the book function in the same way. We discover little, if not no, explanation.
This phenomenon appears nearly in every work of Song. He often quotes a sentence or two from literature, such as ancient Chinese classics to substantiate his arguments. This way of using Asian resources can have direct and instant effects on audience, but one may wonder whether it is necessary to use Asian resources only, and not stories and pieces of literature from other cultures as well. The words of
David Tracy appears especially powerful here :
After those explanatory moments the reader has, in fact, a better understanding of the subject matter (as in-formed subject matter) than any interpreter does without them. Indeed, without the use of such explanatory methods as formalist literary criticism or even semiotic and structuralist methods, it is difficult to see how ... the interpreter is not in danger Of simply extracting messages (under the rubric 'subject matter') from the complex, structured, formed subject matter which is
33 the text.
These words of warning suitably applies to Song's interpretation of Asian resources, and the incorporation of the explanatory moment in the interpretation of cultural texts is therefore urgently called for. 'Thick description' of culture must replace the 'thin description' hitherto entertained by Asian theologians. Different welldeveloped explanatory methods are available." Moreover, the interpretation of
theory applies not only to written texts but other cultural texts, such as oral texts and action as text.% The wealth of western theories is lying before us, what Asian theologians lack is the putting down of their unnecessary anti-Western sentiments, and the paying of due efforts in equipping themselves with these Western theories.
4.2 The Notion of Culture
The subject matter of Song's theological proposal is Asian resources. These resources are the manifestation of Asian cultures, and Asian cultures are equivalent to the lives of Asian people. This sequence of ideas entail the assessment comprising ofthe following questions : What is the relation between the people (as acting agent) and culture? Is the culture constituting or constituted by the people? What are Asian cultures? How 'Asian' is defined? Is Asian a geographical category or otherwise? Have Asian cultures any defining characteristic? And after all, what is culture? Now we are going to explore these inescapable questions in doing theology of Asian cultures.
Tracy See Tracy, A Short History, 164-6
36 In fact, Ricoeur has laid out the similarities between written texts and 'meaningffl actions as texts?
He points out the four traits of meaningåJI actions, which are corresponding to those of written texts. Firstly, meaningfill action is an object for study only a kind ofobjectification occurs which is equivalent to the fixation of a discourse by writing. This objectification constitutes a delineated pattern which can be interpreted. It is made possible if we can note that the action-event has the features of a speech-act because it has both a propositional content (the act of doing), which allows it to be re-identified as the same action, and an illocutionary force (actions can be threats, warnings, expressions of regret, etc.) Taken together, the propositional content and the illocutionary force of the action constitute its 'sensecontent'. Thus Ricoeur argues : 'Like the speech-act, the action-event (if we may use this analogical expression) develops a similar dialectic between its temporal status as an appearing and disappearing event, and its logicar status as having such-and-such identifiable meaning or "sense-content"' The second point concerns the autonomy of actions. This autonomy is comparable to the autonomy of written text. Actions 'escape us and have effects which we did not intend.' Some actions have durable effects—persisting patterns and imprint their mark on their time. These actions leave 'traces' when they help the emergence of such patterns which become 'the documents of human action.' Thirdly, meaning action has the importance that goes 'beyond' its relevance of its initial situation. An important action contains meanings which can be actualized or fflfilled in situations other than the one in which the important action occurred, it has 'omni-temporal' relevance, It is why those great works of culture can overcome the conditions of their social production and confer meanings to different times. Finally, human action is an 'open work', the meaning of which is 'in suspense'. Fresh relevance can be derived from it upon new interpretations in new situations. Important events and actions are opened to practical interpretation through 'present prtüis', and are open to anybody who can read. See Hermeneutics, 205-8.
4.2.1 Culture and Human Beings
In the last chapter, we have reconstructed the concept of culture that appears in the works of Song, and we have seen that, although he mentions frequently the necessity of paying attention to cultures in the course of constructing theology, he never discusses extensively what culture is. Nonetheless, he still tells us some 'protodefinitions' of cultures, which we have seen in the last chapter.37 In his arguments, although human beings are recognized under the influence of our cultural traditions, culture is used as a synonym of human beings : 'Culture is us - what we are , what we stand for, how we live and how we create meanings that transcend the present. Study of culture, then, is study of human beings. ' 38 How this study of culture is carried out? 'When we seek to understand the meaning of cultures in Asia, we are in fact seeking to understand the meaning of the life that people in Asia live with all its precariousness and hope, in fear and in expectation. To explore theologically Asian cultures is to explore the history of Asian people, to listen to their stories, to hear the cries of their hearts.'3 To study cultures, m simple terms, is to listen to the stories of
people.
In order to give this view critical comments, we now go to some definitions of culture. Jenks summarizes some of the accounts of the genesis of the concept
'culture' through a four-fold typology .40
1. Culture as a cognitive category : culture is considered as a general state of mind On the one hand, it designates the idea of perfection, a goal or an aspiration of individual human achievement or emancipation, and concerns the superiority of humankind; while, on the other, it includes the negative meanings suggested by Marx and other Marxists as 'false consciousness'.
2: Culture as a more embodied and collective category : culture invokes a state of intellectual and/or moral development. This idea contains a evolutionary tone and links culture to the idea of civilization. It, nonetheless, does not regard culture as
37 See Section 3.2. l.
38 Choan-seng Song, 'Freedom of Christian Theology for Asian Cultures : Celebrating the Inauguration of the Programme for Theology and Cultures in Asia' in Asia Journal of Theolou, vol.3, No. I, Apr., 1989, 89.
39 Ibid.
40 ChHs Jenks, Culture (London : Routledge, 1993), 11-12..
containing in individual's mind, but as related to collective life.
3. Culture as a descriptive and concrete category : culture viewed as the collective body of arts and intellectual work within any one society. This usage carries the senses of particularity, exclusivity, elitism, specialist knowledge and training or socialization. It includes culture as the realm of the produced and sedimented symbolic; this symbolism of a society is esoteric.
4. Culture as a social category : culture considered as the whole way of life of a people. This view takes the pluralist and relativist stance of culture, and is adopted in social scientific fields such as sociology and anthropology.
With this delineation, we can see that the differences between the categories of culture are quite large and some of them even seems conflicting. Social category of culture, for instance, rejects the elitist exclusion of the lives of ordinary people as too narrow. As may have already been noted in the discussion of the previous section, the fourth category has the greatest affinity to the concern of contextual theology, since theology is no longer regarded as purely intellectual exercises monopolized by elite, but as endeavors contributed by intellectual for the general public. Thus in order to formulate contextual theology which is relevant to the mass, we cannot consider the elitist thoughts and lives, that is the 'high culture', of those upper-class people as the only meaningful and proper culture, but must study the lives of all people as meaningful. This understanding of culture as the whole way of life of people is in fact the direction adopted by anthropologists in their study of culture. Now we are going to take a look at some of the definitions of culture provided by them.
As expected, there is no univocal definition of culture in the anthropological discipline. We cannot make a general overview and companson on different anthropological perspectives on culture and can only present here some views of
culture which are related to our discussion. 42These views, nonetheless, enables us to gain a more refined understanding of what culture is. We first look at a famous definition of culture quoted from a famous work ofKroeber and Kluckhohn.
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior, acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements offurther action. [italics added]43
culture is not behavior nor the investigation of behavior in all its concrete completeness. Part of culture consists in norms for or standards ofbehavior. Still another part consists of ideologiesjustifying or rationalizing certain selected ways of behavior. Finally, every culture includes broad general principles of selectivity and ordering ('highest common factors') in terms of which patterns of and for and about behavior in very varied areas of culture content are reducible to parsimonious generalization. [italics added]u
In his standard textbook of cultural anthropology, Keesing states that culture refers to
learned, accumulated experience. A culture ... refers to those socially transmitted patterns for behavior characteristic of a particular social group ... We will restrict the term culture to an ideational system. Cultures in this sense comprise systems of shared ideas, systems of concepts and rules and meanings that underlie and are expressed in the ways that human live. Culture, so defined, refers to what humans learn,
45 not what they do and make. ' [emphasis original]
We note several characteristics of culture explicated in these definitions. First,
42 For descriptions and evaluations of the perspectives on culture from three important schools of anthropology, namely, the pattern theory of culture in the works Of Kroeber, Kluckholn, Benedict, White; the social structure theory of culture initiated by Racliffe-Brown; and the functionalist theory of culture initiated by Malinowski, see Jenks, Culture. For a more well-written and thorough treatment of different schools of cultural anthropology, see an historical introduction written by two Chinese anthropologists, 1992 )
43 A. L Kroeber and C. Kluckholn, Culture : A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York : Vintage, 1963), 181, quoted in Jenks, Culture, 37.
44 Kroeber and Kluckholn, Culture, 189, quoted in Jenks, Culture, 38. 45 Keesing, Cultural Anthropolou, 68.
culture is socially transmitted by symbols. It is passed to individuals through various social means, e.g. through education, and sometimes is embodied in artifacts. This transmission, moreover, is of symbolic nature. Second, culture refers to norms of and standards for behavior. It directs the everyday behavior of individuals at times explicitly, but mostly implicitly, that is unconsciously. It is important to note that the relation between culture and individual is reciprocal, that is, culture systems are both constituted by and constituting of individual behavior. Culture is the product of human action, as well as the conditioning elements of further human action. 47 Third, culture is a shared world of meanings. It is not invention of individuals, it is public. Only through a social process, namely the social construction of shared meamngs,48 can the cultural meaning be created and sustained.49 And the last, culture consists, besides norms for behavior, ideologies for justification of certain kind of behavior, and general principles of selectivity and ordering.50
The above understanding of the nature of culture helps us to see some of the weaknesses of Song's notion of culture. In the first place, we shall keep our eyes on the public nature of culture. Culture is a shared world of meanings. It is not the
46 Interpretation of symbols is the central theme of Clifford Geertz's interpretive theory of culture, which plays a central role in our analytical framework. See the discussion in the following sections.
47 Keesing realizes there is dangers to emphasize too heavily on independent nature of culture, which he the dangers of reification' of culture. See ibid, 72. 48 Ibid, 74.
49 This characteristic of publicness is emphatically mentioned in Geertz's theory of culture. See the discussion follows. For a sociological approach to the publicness of culture, see Peter Berger's classic, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City • Doubleday, 1967). Berger sees that culture must be constructed and reconstructed as a continuous process- Culture is an all-embracing socially constructed world of subjectively and intersubjectively experienced meanings. Berger suggests that culture is a kind of plausibility structure, which is constructed through three steps, namely externalization, objectification and internalization. For a detailed discussion on Berger's phenomenological cultural analysis, see Robert Wuthnow et.al. (eds) Cultural Analysis : The Work ofPeter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault andJürgen Habermas (Boston : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
50 Incidentally, the unåerstanding of culture as ideology is especially prominent in the works Of Marxist theorists, including Marxist anthropology. Arnong them, Louis Althusser's theory of Ideological State Apparatus is one of the most influential ones in concerning the operation of domination in modern capitalist society. In this theory, simply speaking, different cultural institutions are regarded as the tools, the Ideological State Apparatuses, for cultural reproduction of individuals, so as they conform to the dominating, unequal relations ofproduction. For a critical introduction of Althusser' notion of ideology, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology : An Introduction (London, New York : Verso, 1991), 128-58. For the relation between Althusser's theory and the post-structuralist understanding of signification and representation, see Stuart Hall, "Signification, Representation, Ideology : Althusser and the PostStructuralist Debates," in Robert K. Avery and David Eason (eds. ), Critical Perspectives on Media and Society (New York, London : Guiford, 1991). Marxist or neo-Marxist critical theories of culture is still acting as an active component of anthropological analysis of culture, We will touch upon some of their contributions to cultural analysis in sections follow.
creation of any human being. In his discussion of symbols and images,51 Song tells us that they are the created by artists who are 'endowed with uncanny power' and are 'the priests of images and symbols'. These words seems to be all right at the first sight. Are we not inspired and caught by those uncanny symbolic cultural production? Yet there is confusion here. Symbol is symbolic to us only because it is public in nature. What the artist can produce is only the object itself, it remains private. It is a cultural production only when it is recognized as symbolic by the public. Geertz says 'Culture is public because meaning is.' 52 Symbols are the media through which the members of a society communicate their worldview, value-orientations, ethos to one another, to future generations, and to outsiders also. Song has mentioned that a stone is sacred for the 'insiders' because 'it is now a stone bearing a meaning representing an awesome presence of a reality beyond itself. '53 But surely this process must be a public one. Symbol as conveyor of meaning is different from the object created by artist which can be employed as symbol.54
Secondly, we want to concentrate on the relationship between culture and human beings through the discussion of two of the above delineated characteristics of culture, namely culture as norms of and standards for behavior, and culture as ideologies. We shall take a detour to have a glance at the recent development of the theory of practice in anthropology started in the eighties. This detour is deemed necessary since it will help us to clarify a lot of ambiguities of Song's theology of Asian cultures as well as remind us to insert some significant but hitherto unnoticed issues in the agenda of Asian theology. Unless we learn from this important development, Asian theological efforts, among which Song's are regarded as master pieces, Asian theologies would still be moving around the periphery of Asian cultures.
In modem social theory, the relationship between st-ucture and 'agency'
51 See section 3.2.2 for a sketch ofthis.
52 Geertz, Interpretation, 12.
53 Choan-seng Song, 'The World of Images & Symbols' in Yeow Choo Lak and John C. England eds. A TESL4 Occasional Papers No.8 : Doing Theolog with People 's Symbols and Images (Singapore ATESEA, 1989), 9.
54 Incidentally, it is the task ofthe anthropology of Geertz to find out how symbols constitute the ways people as social actors see, feel, and think about the world and how symbols operate as vehicles of culture.
becomes one of the 'central problems'. Sherry Ortner calls this central problem the issue of 'practice'. What is practice then? Ortner mentions that although the term 'practice' signifies 'anything people do', 'the most significant forms of practice are those with intentional or unintentional political implications.' [emphasis added] The meaning of this quotation will be make clear in the following discussion. Early in the seventies, different anthropologists called for a more action based approach.
These calls are actually reactions towards the French structuralist view of culture and Parsonian system theory of society. The former sees all cultural actions as the manifestation of the universal Mind of humanity, while the latter considers social actions the carrying out of the norms of social systems. Against these views which regard human agents as puppets of cultural rules, Clifford Geertz, for example, points out the new genres for culture
The instruments of reasoning are changing and society is less and less represented as an elaborate machine or a quasi-organism than as a serious game, a sidewalk drama, or a behavioral text.
In the same manner, Pierre Bourdieu proposes a theory' of practice which is intended to exhibit the interplay between personal practice and the external social structures.58 Actually, there are two different directions of theory of practice. The older ones in which we find the symbolic interactionists and transactionists, was devised in direct opposition to the dominant view of the world as ordered by rules and norms. The theorists in this direction, although not disregard the existence of the institutional organization and cultural patterning, neglect the influence of them. In other words, human agents are considered as not determined by these institutional frameworks.59
Attentions should be paid especially to this direction, since the notion of culture
appeared in the works of Choan-seng Song sing a similar tune.
The newer direction does admit the determining and powerful effects of 'the system' on human action. Theorists in this direction thus do not deny or minimize this aspect of 'the system', and the issue that they consider weighty is rather 'where "the system" comes from - how it is produced and reproduced, and how it may be changed in the past or be changed in thefuture. ' [emphasis added]60 It should not be hard to see the political implication of this newer direction. The shaping power of culture or structure is no longer one-sidedly regarded as meaningful human construction, as in the sixties, rather, emphasis has also been put on the dark side, seeing culture or structure as a matter of 'constraint', 'hegemony', and 'symbolic domination'. The most important forms of action or interaction for analytic purposes are 'those which take place in asymmetrical or dominated relations, that it is these forms of action or interaction that best explain the shape of any given system at any given time.' [emphasis added162 Some elaboration on the notions of 'the system' and 'practice' have to be submitted here to facilitate further discussion on the mutual relationship between human actors and institutional systems.
Concerning 'the system', the theorists of practice consider it as the combination of the ethos, affect, and value with the more cognitive schemes of classification. The system constrains practice, and there are constraints of material and political sorts, 'there seems to be general agreement [of social theorists] that action is constrained most deeply and systematically by the ways in which culture controls the definitions of the world for actors, limits their conceptual tools, and
61 We will have more on symbolic domination in the section 4.3.
62 Ibid, 147. Ortner points out the Marxist influence on the political concern of the newer practice theorists here. But this Marxist influence is actually an interpenetration benveen the Marxist and Weberian framework. This interpenetration is necessary since, for historical reasons, the Marxist theories are rejected as 'materialist'. Now the affnity between the two models is being recognized and both are involved in recent practice-oriented theories. See ibid. for a more detailed discussion.
63 This is generally the concept of culture held by American as can been seen from the works of Clifford Geertz, one of the most influential and representative American anthropologists, For example, he considers the anthropological study of religion as a two-stage operation : 'first, an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up the religion proper, and second, the relating of these systems to social-structural and psychological process.' See Clifford Geertz, 'Religion as a Cultural System' in Interpretation, 125. In other words, both the analytical system of religion, the creed, for example, and the 'ethos' of the religion are to be studied.
restrict their emotional repertoires. Culture becomes part of the self.'g The system operates by shaping the actors' dispositions. Yet it does not imply the static view of cultural system. The system can be and is changed and shaped by practice as well.
We are not going to give an elaboration of how the system is shaped by practice. What seems to be relevant to be mentioned here is the relationship between the intention of practice and the outcome of social change. Ortner suggests that 'major social change does not for the most part come about as an intended consequence of action. Change is largely a by-product, an unintended consequence of action, however rational action may have been. '66 It is true to say that society and history are products of human action, but they are rarely the products the actors themselves set out to make, as Foucault says neatly : 'People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do
does- '
Now we return to the notion of culture revealed in Song's works. I would like to point out that Song holds a too romantic view of culture. Here I am referring to his understanding of the relationship between the culture as a social system and the agents living within it. Song surely does not neglect the asymmetrical power relationship between Asian local communities and the West as demonstrated by missionary history in Asia. The criticism of this history appears through the works of Song. What he neglects is the asymmetrical power relationship within the local culture, except that between the politically ruling group and the ruled. Due to this negligence, Song takes for granted the harmonious view of the culture of the people, as can be illustrated by his saying : 'In culture, we have to do with human beings - us hurnan beings. Culture is us - what we are, what we stand for, how we live and how we create meanings that transcend the present. Study of culture, then, is study of human beings.'6 This notion of culture sees the agents in culture as free of organizational constraints. They are the creators of culture of meaning and thus due attention must be paid to culture just because it embodies this human creation of meaning. This view does not cause much problem. What is problematic is the onesided presentation which is a serious deficiency that obscures us from seeing the whole picture of culture. Another half of the story is buried in Song's passionate affirmation of the value of Asian cultures.
It must be emphasized that the constraints of the system are different from the domination often mentioned in Song's theology. The latter points to the ostensive oppression of the political and economic realm and assumes the dichotomy of the ruling class and the ruled, while the former points to the unconscious reproduction of the institutional system as dispositions of agents- The definitions of the world of the actors are given by culture, the actors' conceptual tools are limited by culture, and even their emotional repertoires are restricted by culture. We must be fair to Song to mention that he is aware of the constituting power of culture, as he have said that 'We are all under the power of culture into which we are born. Our cultural heritage makes us what we are. Our views on life and the world are formed under the direct and indirect influence of our cultural traditions. '70 Yet even these sentences are for the contention of the value of culture and its intimacy to our lives. We seldom, if not never, see Song puts effort to elaborate and explicate the very constraining and even dominating nature of culture. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann describes the reciprocal relationship between the system and the actors in the following words 'Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product.' 1 Song is right to pay emphasis on the first part, but he surely missed the other two which are equally significant.
The one-sided emphasis of culture as a human product also conceal the dark side of culture, I mean, the culture of people. In order to correct the limited view of culture of Western missionary, emphasis on the positive values of culture is undoubtedly necessary. Overemphasis, however, leads us to miss the equally important 'evil' side of culture. With the above discussion concerning the reciprocal
70 Choan-seng Song, Third-Eye Theology (New York : Orbis, 1979), 6.
71 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, New York Doubleday, 1967), 61.
relation between human agents and their social/cultural system, the constraining power of the latter shall by then be clear. Song often asserts that Asia is full of women, men and children whose spirits have been in oppression, poverty, fear and despair, and they are in constant struggle to get themselves liberated. I want to point out that this notion assumes a too unanimous and romantic view of Asian people. Who are the oppressed? Who causes poverty, fear and despair? It is true that the ruling groups often cause calamities, but are the people free of responsibilities for the disasters happened? Are not the people, who are actually not unanimous but composed of different individuals, often at the same time the oppressors? He Guanghu, a Chinese who have suffered 'the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution' , reminds us not to romanticize the notion 'the People'. In the period of Cultural Revolution, what the tortures and destruction of tens of million of people demonstrate is just sin of human being that can expand to such an crazy extent that '"the people" can use the idolized label "the people" to torture "the people" when people tortured a person to death, the badge they carried on their chests containing the words "Serve the People" the motto put on the banners hoisted over their heads was "Serve the
„ , 72
People", the slogan shouted from their mouth was also "Serve the People !
The tragedy of Cultural Revolution of China is not an isolated case. We often hear of and even experience the disasters as a result of the religious passions. Is not the recent event of sarin gas attack allegedly carried out by the Aum Shinri Kyo cult in Tokyo sub-way system a vivid illustration? Even after thousands of ordinary people were killed by this attack, the believers of the cult are still faithful to their spiritual leader Shoko Asahara. Can we not ask the reason why? Is not the sin of human beings, their very finitude, that pushes them towards the idolization of human beings? Here we may find 'the Protestant principle' highlighted by Paul Tillich illuminating. He argues that
[the monotheistic view of God] breaks through the demonic implications of the idea of God, and it is the critical guardian which protests the holy against the temptation of the bearers of the holy to claim absoluteness for themselves. The Protestant principle is the restatement of the prophetic principle as an attack against a self-
, 156.
absolutizing and, consequently, demonically distorted church.73
While we admit that the problem of commensurability of Western monötheism and
Asian polytheism and pantheism is an important question still to be probed, the
Protestant principle is without question one of the most valuable components of the Western theological legacy that we have to paid heed, especially in the light of the
'human-quakes' ofthis century which took many more lives than earthquakes!74
Thus, a too romantic view of 'the people' is as naive and disastrous as a too negative view Every human being can be at the same time a suffering person and one who imposes suffering on others. Even theologians, Asian as well, can be and are often dominant with respect to non-theologians! Further discussion is left to the later part of this chapter.
4.2.2 The Scope ofAsian Cultures
On the basis of the above discussion, we want to make a further step into the question of the scope of Asian cultures. The unsubstantiated choice of the scope of Asian cultures, which is a limited and vaguely drawn picture of the suffering people, reduces the qualifier 'Asian' to confusion. What do the terms 'Asia' and 'Asian' signiÜ? In Song's discussion of the relation between the West and Asia, Asia surely denotes a geographical area which is distinct from that of the Europe and North America. Yet in his mind, to be 'Asian', more qualification is needed — suffering, since
suffering in Asia has a particularly sinister and ugly face. "More Asians are hungry, homeless, unemployed and literate," it is reported, 'than all the rest of the world put together. More men and women are despised, humiliateå, cheated; more suffer the tyranny of governments and oppressive elites, and the fear and shame that tyranny brings, than all
n Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I (Chicago • The University of Chicago Press, 1951), 227. 74 'Human-quakes', used by Liu Mao-feng ( %lJ/JN-u) , refer to tragedies asa result ofNazism, Stalinism and Maoism (CUItural Revolution). See ( ßäfr±
: : ' 1989 ) , 143. 'The problem ofhumanity' is one ofthe main issues that haunted modern Chinese intellectuals, especially after the disaster of Cultural revolution. For a panoramic view ofthe recent discussion on this issue, see
(E) > 1993
(T) ) 1993
the rest of the world combined." This is the Asia betrayed by the prosperous Hong Kong, the orderly Singapore, the industrialized Japan, and by pseudo-democracy in most Asian countries. '75
Here 'Asia' is not just defined geographically but is an economic term referring to the poor portions of Asian people. The sympathy for the poor and suffered reflected in the above quotation is respectable. In fact, in the course of economic development, many people suffer as a result of inequality and exploitation, and theologians must pay attention and respond to this phenomenon. Notwithstanding this, to say that Asia is 'betrayed by the prosperous Hong Kong, the orderly Singapore, the industrialized Japan' is only to reflect Song's naive understanding of cultures. The well-off Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan cannot be regarded as representatives of Asia. But neither can the economically poorer parts of Asia. What I what to emphasize here is that : Asia is pluralistic! Even within the 'prosperous', 'orderly' and
'industrialized' parts of Asia, there are full of struggles for living.
In a modern society like Hong Kong, the social stratification is much more complicated than simple agricultural society and we see no one-directional oppression. If we only concentrate on the white-collar working middle-class, we see domination as well as struggles that can also be found in the lower labour class.76 Some students of popular culture also points out that the modern city is a field of cultural struggles.77 Here I want to substantiate my stance by a 'thick description' of the culture ofHong Kong by a sociologist of Hong Kong.
In his study of the culture and identity of Hong Kong, Chan Hoi-man chooses popular culture as the arena that provides the closest over-arching cultural framework, since for a place like Hong Kong, 'there is not much unified, coherent cultural foundation to speak of, whether in the sense of a high culture, a national culture, a traditional culture, or even a "borrowed culture".' The popular culture of
75 Choan-seng Song, Jesus, The Crucified People (New York : Crossroad, 1990), 8.
% Yeh Jen Chang( ), for example, calls for a 'theology ofhumanity' which can embrace the lives of the working class in the modem city. See his (É 4t : , 1992 ) ,191-202.
77 See, for example, John Fiske, Understanding ofPopular Culture (London : Routledge, 1992). 78 Chan Hoi-man, 'Culture and Identity' in Donald H. McMillen and Man Si-wai eds. The Other Hong Kong Report 1994 (Hong Kong : The Chinese University Press, 1994), 448.
Hong Kong is 'decidedly also the primary sphere of consciousness and sentiment where the concerns, anxieties, and foreboding of society as a whole find their expression. .. popular culture in Hong Kong must play the role — set the agenda of "culture" per se. '7 This culture, which is only superficially understood by Song, embodies the consciousness and sentiment of people that are, ironically, the very contents of culture that Song cherishes.
Chan draws our attention to the three discursive formation or constellation of popular culture in Hong Kong : cultures of affluence, of survival, and of deliverance. We shall have a glance at them.
The first constellation of cultural discourse refers to the 'easily visible facade of material affluence here in Hong Kong.' This material affluence necessarily has its impact on the growth and development of Hong Kong culture, since it is due to the extraordinary economic development that Hong Kong is known to the world. Moreover, the material affluence is not only reflected at the level of socioeconomical institutional change, but also affects the formation and development of the popular culture industry as epitomized by the expansion of the consumer culture and the general phenomenon of individualistic hedonism- With the development of this culture of affluence, greater cultural freedom and potency can be achieved, as illustrated by the development of the television industry in Hong Kong, which has its golden age in the 1970s, as well as by the popular cultural activities such as karaoke and concerts of popular stars.81
The discourse of affluence gives a strong impression of materialism, hedonism and superficiality. This picture is only an incomplete first impression. Another 'less obvious but perhaps more hard-boiled' culture discourse can be discovered, if we move further beyond. This is the discourse of survival which embodies the anxieties, uncertainties and other probable traumas. The cultural discourse of survival 'focuses upon how the problematic vicissitudes of social life must also be embodied in cultural terms.' 82 Different cultural imaginations, such as the cultural movement as
79 Ibid., 449.
80 Ibid., 450,
81 Chan regards the ending of the golden age of the television industry as a signification of the emergence ofthe state of 'more mature disenchantment' of Hong Kong culture. See ibid., 452.
Ibid.,
the 'new wave movies' in the early 1980s and the popularity of romance fictions, actually provides sentimental fantasies for survival struggles in 'a city of unceasing tribulations'. Chan suggests that the culture of survival manifested in both the individual and collective levels.
At the personal level, individuals struggle for self-actualization in the apparent ament society, since while 'the affluent society of Hong Kong can be rightly deemed an arena of resources, of possibilities and hopes, yet there is little guarantee that these may be readily realized for everyone even after dire struggles.' Thus, ironically, 'the culture of affluence deepens the culture of survival.' At the collective level, the cultural discourse concerns the future ofHong Kong society with 1997 as the most prominent issue. The sense of fragility of collective survival has even been enlarged by the June Fourth movement.
The cultural discourse of survival, embedded in the scenario sketched, articulates realism. This realism, on the one hand, represents the 'direct and honest' acceptance of 'life as it is' by Hong Kong people, while, on the other hand, can be used as a discourse for the disclosure and demystification of the apparent affluence of the city. Therefore,
if the discourse of affluence pertains to fanciful glamour and charm of the growing metropolis that is Hong Kong, the discourse of survival would pertain to hard-boiled realism of varied intensity.
In the midst of the tension between the two discourses, we find the relief afforded by the third cultural discourse — the discourse of deliverance which can 'lift its audience out of their embedding, exasperating context, albeit temporarily or fleetingly. '8 The articulation of this third cultural discourse can especially be found in the widespread comic movies in the 1980s and 1990s. The proliferation of comic movies may be reckoned as the resistance and negation of 'the fundamental senseless of social life'. The 'mindless' movies flourish in the 1990s can be seen as an important variation of the third kind of cultural discourse. Chan argues that there is an absurdist outlook in this 'cult of mindlessness', and in this 'cult of mindlessness' we found subversion of and defiance to the senselessness of social life that 'can no longer push further. ' The mindless cultural discourse, in Chan's view, is the rejection of the historical fate of Hong Kong, as reflected by the fruitless series of 'Hong Kong talks', in disguise.
Using this framework, Chan continues to make an in-depth analysis of the identity of Hong Kong people, which he coined 'the fate of the Sojourners'. We cannot pursue this interesting and insightful analysis here, and I think the above simple but rigorous discussion can provide us with a strong enough substantiation for our rejection of Song's terribly simplified view of Hong Kong culture. Hong Kong is prosperous, no one would object. Nonetheless, prosperity is not the totality of Hong Kong culture. Song's thin, if not mistaken, description ofHong Kong is most likely due to the fact that he is an outsider of Hong Kong who never does any rigorous study of its culture.
Song often emphasizes that Asian culture is actually pluralistic, and thus he called for the using of the plural term Asian cultures instead of the singular Asian culture. However, in practice, he never upholds this claim. In this respect, anthropologists are doing much better, since m recent years, more and more anthropologists are accepting the relativistic view of cultures, and frying to understand local cultures in the their own terms (the so-called emic approach, as contrast with the etic approach, which analyzes a society or its culture from the preestablished categories of the anthropologists)- As a consequence, every culture is considered to have its own worth and anthropologists tried hard to exorcise the ethnocentrism inherent in the cultural analyses of the past. This endeavor of dissolution of ethnocentrism is really a result of self-critique of western culture, of which Song never thinks.
4.3 Reflexivity and Symbolic Domination
4.3.1 Reflexivity of Theory
The last assessment shall be on a recent developing issue in social theory, namely the issue of reflexivity. In fact, reflexive consciousness can, as we shall see shortly, ensure self-reflecting efforts to be applied to one's own theory, This selfreflexive consciousness is the most important and essential element that has thus far been left out in the construction of Asian theology, including the works of Choanseng Song. This absence is, on the one hand, an inconsistency of Asian theologian, as they seem to suppose that the Shermeneutic of suspicion' is applicable to theologies of the West but not theirs, and, one the other, a detrimental weakness in the course of constructing Asian theologies, as improvement can only be the result of selfcritique.
One of the major exponents in the notion of reflexivity is the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who is at the same time an anthropologist, who carried out anthropological researches in Algeria in 1960s.87 Together with his initial training in philosophy, he can surely be reckoned as an inter-disciplinary scholar. His contribution in the area of theory and practice as well as that of symbolic domination will become the backbone of the following discussion.
There are different conceptions of reflexivity. Anthony Giddens, for example, suggests the reflexivity in both the agency as well as the social science of study. Subjects are considered reflexive as they possess the ability to 'turn back upon' themselves and oversee their own actions. Social science is reflexive if the knowledge it constituted affects and changes the reality it studied. Bourdieu, on the other hand, suggests three types of biases in sociological study that has to be clarified. Wacquant gives us a summary of them. The first one refers to the social origins and coordinates (class, gender, ethnicity, etc.) of the individual researcher. This is the most obvious one among the three, which is more easily monitored by means of mutual and self-criticism. The second one connects to, in contrast to the broader matrix of social structure in the first case, the academic field in which objective space of possible intellectual positions offered to the researcher at a given moment.
s? See Cheleen Mahar, 'Pierre Bourdieu : The Intellectual Project' in The Work ofPierre Bourdieu, 3743.
88 Loic J. D. Wacquant, 'The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu's Sociology' in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociolog (Chicago : University ofChicago Press, 1992), 39-40.
This academic field is actually one of power. All theorists define themselves by maintaining 'their difference and distance from certain others with whom they compete.' The third bias is the intellectualist bias which entraps theorists to construe the world with a perspective that considers 'the world as a set of significations to be interpreted rather than as concrete problems to be solved practically.' It is always a temptation of collapsing practical logic into theoretical logic.
It is the second bias that is material in the following discussion, and we are going to elaborate it. To begin with, it appears suitable to quote Bourdieu's reflection on his own anthropological research on Algerian peasants and workers. Concerning his research, he says .
The idea behind this research was to overturn the natural relation of the observer to his universe of study, to make the mundane exotic and the exotic mundane, in order to render explicit what in both cases is taken for granted, and to offer a practical vindication of the possibility of a full objectification of the object and subject's relation to the object — what I call participant objectification. But I ended up putting myself in an impossible situation. Indeed, it tumed out particularly difficult, if not impossible, to objectivize fully without objectivizing the interests that I could have in objectivizing others, without summoning myself to resist the temptation that is no doubt inherent in the posture of the sociologist, that of taking up the absolute point of view upon the Object of study — here to assume a sort of intellectual power over the intellectual world. So in order to bring this study to a successful issue and to publish it, I had to discover the deep truth of this world, namely, that everybody in it struggles to do what the sociologist is tempted to do. I had to objectivize this temptation and, more precisely, to objectivize the form that it could take at a certain time in the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
through this reflection, Bourdieu understands the reflexivity as a call of 'return' that extends beyond the reflection of subject to encompass the organizational and cognitive structure of the discipline. 'What has to be constantly scrutinized and neutralized, in the very act of construction of the object, is the collective scientific unconscious embedded in theories, problems, and (especially national) categories of scholarly judgment. '92 Bourdieu points out that sociologists are particularly skilled in objectivizing the others, that is, the social agents in sociological study, but more than often neglecting the objectification of themselves, the objectivating subjects.
This objectification of the sociologist, as a cultural producer, however, requires more than finding out the sociologist's class background and location, 'race', and gender. What is still to be done is to objectivize the sociologist's position in the universe of cultural production, which is the academic field in this case. Thus, for a sociologist, the subject of reflexivity is ultimately the whole social scientific field.
This reflexivity is the important component lacked in Song's theological project as well as the whole Asian theological enterprise. This absence of the reflexive component results in the misunderstanding and confusion of the nature of the Asian theological movement and the role of the theologian within the Asian community. We postpone the discussion on this reflexivity of Asian theology to the end of this section.
One particular reflexivity to be maintained is that refers to the academic world. For Bourdieu, the academic world, like any social universe, 'is the site of a struggle over the truth of the academic world and of the social world in general. '94 This is a revelatory statement that needs more exploration. To do so, the notions of symbolic capital and symbolic domination suggested by Bourdieu will be sketched below.
4.3.2 Symbolic Capital and Symbolic Domination
In Bourdieu's sociological schema, every agent or institution is situated in a
'field', which is a network of relations. In a social world, there are a number of fields (for example, artistic, religious, economic), 'all with their own specific logics and generating among actors a belief about the things that are at stake in a field. '95 The field is, on the one hand, partially autonomous field of forces which places constraints on the agent by its structure, and, on the other hand, an arena of struggle
92 Wacquant, 'The Structure and Logic', 40 93 Bourdieu and Wacquant, 'The Purpose', 69.
94 Ibid., 70.
95 George Ritzer, Sociological Theory (New York : McGraw-Hill, 1992), 3rd ed., 579-80.
for positions within it. The occupants in a field would seek to safeguard or improve their position within the field by employing and deploying various kinds of capital.
Bourdieu suggests that besides economic capital, there is also cultural capital (professional qualifications, education received, forms of language used) and symbolic capital (prestige, status and authority)%. The various types of capital can be exchanged for other types, thus capital is 'convertible'. 'The most powerful conversion to be made is to symbolic capital, for it is in this form that the different forms of capital are perceived and recognized as legitimate. ' 97
Bourdieu suggests that the objects of the social world can be perceived and expressed in different ways, since they always include a degree of indeterminacy and vagueness. Together with the time-dependent categorization used, plurality of worldviews result, and simultaneously, there are 'symbolic struggles for the power to produce and to impose a vision of the legitimate world. '98 This symbolic power is a power to 'conceal or reveal things which are already there.' In a nutshell, symbolic power 'is a power of "worldmaking".' Thus, through struggles, the social authority, symbolic power, is acquired and is based on the possession of symbolic capital.
In Bourdieu's argument, these symbolic struggles occur in the field of opinion, which opposes the field of doxa, that is, the commonsense world. In a commonsense world, 'what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying.' [original emphasis] lOO In other words, the objective structures is fully reproduced themselves in the agents' dispositions, their internalized structures. The worldviews of the agents are considered natural just because they are unquestionably accepted as natural. Bourdieu calls this unquestioned acceptance 'misrecognition of
, 101
arbitrariness for the very question of legitimacy is unaware. This is the case until
96 Symbolic capital 'is nothing more than economic or cultural capital which is acknowledged and recognized.' See Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words tr. Matthew Adamson (Cambridge : Polity Press, 1990), 135. See also the discussion follows.
97 Mahan Harker and Wilkes, 'Theoretical Position', 13.
98Bourdieu, In Other Words, 134. Symbolic struggles over the perception ofthe social world, Bourdieu indicates, may take two different forms. 'On the objective level, one may take action in the form of acts of representation, individual or collective, meant to show up and to show off certain realities.. On the subjective level, one may act by trying to change the categories of perception and evaluation of the social world, the cognitive and evaluative structure.' See ibid., 134fffor a detailed explication.
99 Ibid, 137.
100 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of A Theory of Practice, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge . Cambridge University Press, 1977), 167. 168.
the competition for legitimacy appears with the creation of field of opinion. The situation can be explicated by the help of a diagram supplied by Bourdieu.102
The field of opinion is an arena of the confrontation of competing discourses, ewhose political truth may be overtly declared or may remain hidden, even from the eyes of those engaged in it, under the guise of religious or philosophical oppositions.' 1 In this field of discourse, competing groups are defined simultaneously and complementarily. The theses implied in the undisputed way of living is now brought into practical questioning 'by "culture contact" or by the political and economic crises correlative with class division. ... The critique which brings the undiscussed into discussion, the unformulated intoformulation, has as the condition of its possibility objective crisis, which, in breaking the immediate fit between the subjective structures and the objective structures, destroys self-evidence practically. It is when the social world loses its character as a natural phenomenon that the question pfthe natural or conventional character (phusei or nomo) of social facts can be raised.' [emphasis added] 104
Through the 'discussion' of the undiscussed and 'formulation' of the unformulated, the doxa is passed to orthodoxy, which exists only in opposition to heterodoxy (hairesis, heresy originally means 'choice'). Each complementary partner
[bid.
103 Ibid
168-9.
attempts to impose their own mode of thought and expression as the legitimate ones.
The struggle, in Bourdieu's words, is then one involves
the delimitation of the universe of discourse, that is to say, the universe of the thinkable, and hence to the delimitation of the universe of the unthinkable; as if euphemism and blasphemy, through which the expressly censored unnameable nonetheless finds its way into the universe of discourse, conspired in their very antagonism to occult the "aphasia" of those who are denied access to the instruments of the struggle for the definition of reality.
After the struggle, the symbolic capital imposed by the winner is acknowledged, and 'the symbolic power relations tend to reproduce and to reinforce the power relations which constitute the structure of the social space.' At the end of a long process of institution, an authorized spokesperson will be chosen, who receives from the group made the power to form the group. This spokesperson is the 'personification' and 'incarnation' of the group. 107 This single agent is 'entrusted with the totality of the capital which is the basis of the group, and to exert over this capital,' collectively owned by all the members of the group.
By objectifying the accumulated social capital (both material and symbolic), domination imposed by the winner group once again has 'the opacity and permanence of things and escape the grasp of individual consciousness and power' and this objectification forms the structure in which the relations of domination and dependence is reproduced. 109 Of course, the symbolic resources is once again partially or totally monopolized. 110
One of the field where the symbolic struggles take place is, of course, the academic institution. Intellectuals in academic institution are always employing and
9.
deploying symbolic strategies for symbolic domination. In his analysis of the literary field, which is valid for other academic fields as well, Bourdieu gives us a clear picture of the permanent struggles occurring there. These struggles are actually ones seeking 'the definition of the limits of the field, that is, of legitimate participation in the struggles,' 1 and are carrying between the ever-emergent participants in the field and the recognized orthodox ones, with both have their 'force', that is, the capital, of struggle acquired through previous struggles. The new entrants, of course, question and revolt against the previously set-up orthodoxy by the effort of the redefinition of the subject matters and the perspectives of the field. Both sides of participants are trying to exclude their counterpart from the arena of the game, by judging the other as talking something which is just not up to the standard of the field. This definition of legitimate practice will be eventually imposed to everybody within the field, as well as the consumers of the cultural products, who, in most of cases, the readers of the works.112
Intellectuals, who are cultural producers, hold a specific power of showing things and making people believe in them. They can change the world-views of people, upset the latter's minds by means of symbolic revolution. They 'are a dominated practice of the dominant class', as 'they hold the power and privileges conferred by the possession of cultural capital and even, at least as far as certain of them are concerned, the possession of a volume of cultural capital.' 113 This kind of domination is, Bourdieu emphasizes, not exercised through personal relations but in a form of structural domination, through the very general mechanisms, such as those of the market. That means, intellectuals are at the same time dominant and
114
dominated.
With above analysis of the academic field, a critical assessment can be made on the politics, in the broader sense, of the theological project of Song.
In the theological field, Asian theologians put forwards their theological vision, which is undoubtedly a fresh and uncompromising effort appearing in the theological
Bourdieu, In Other Words, 143. m Ibid, 144. Ibid., 145.
Ibid. Bourdieu argues that the autonomy of the fields of cultural production, 'a structural factor which determines the form of struggles internal to that field, varies considerably depending on different periods within the same society, and depending on different societies. ' Ibid
theater. Song points out that Asian theologians should try to get near to the feelings of the Asian people, hear their voices. But as has been mentioned in the first part of this chapter, Asian theologians may not be Asian at all. Theologians living in the academic environment is having a completely different life experience from that of the outsiders. They have different concerns, and are the dominant group of the society in terms of their possession of cultural capital since they are cultural producers ofthe society.
We should bear in mind that the whole theological movement propelled by Asian theologians is in fact a struggle for the definition of theology. In the case of Song, he proposed that theology is not dealing with abstract concepts but is concerned with for the lives of Asian people. Traditional theology is not only 'inadequate but counter-productive' since it is ignorant of the Asian cultures. If this proposal is placed under the light of the framework of Bourdieu, it is not hard to figure out the symbolic struggle for the legitimacy of theological discourse upon this redefinition of theology. The imposition of the definition of legitimate practice of theology by Asian theologians like Song is actually an exclusive claim on theological practice. In fact, this definition excludes not only the traditional theoloy of the West, but also any other definitions of local theology for Asia. As has been stated before, in Song's eyes, only poor Asians are really Asian, middle-class people of Hong Kong are by definition not Asian. Although Song contends that Asian culture is pluralistic, but theological discourse can only be an exclusive monotone.
Of course, in the course of establishing the right of Asian theologians for discourse in the theological enterprise, this exclusion of other theological discourses is understandable. In actuality, Bourdieu maintains that the struggle for recognition is a fundamental dirpension of social life. 115 What the above long discussion intends to clariW is the very practice of academic theological practice. Theologians, no matter Western or Asian, are, consciously or unconsciously, in their course of accumulation of symbolic capital. The possession of symbolic capital enables theologians, including Asian ones, to occupy dominant positions in a society, relative to those people living outside the academic field, who have little cultural capital in their
Mahar, Harker and Wilkes, 'Theoretical Position', 17.
hands. Concerning this, one may well ask : Who are theologians? Are they not welleducated ones? What lives are they living? Are they not mostly middle-class people? Who have the right to make discourse? Asian people? Or Asian theologians, including those living in the prosperous West?
It must be emphasized that we are not here undermining the efforts and contributions of Asian theologians and their concerns for the Asian people. What we want to address here are the necessity of self awareness of Asian theologians of their own roles in their theological practice. 'Asian people' if used as a unified term will tantamount to the erasure of variety of lives of Asian people. Asian theologians should be cautious of the simple dichotomy of the people as oppressed and oppressing. What they should be mindful of as well is the romantic notion of the identification of themselves with other Asian people. Bourdieu points out that the homology of positions of the intellectuals as dominant-dominated with the dominated 'are always more uncertain, more fragile, than solidarities based on an identity of position and, thereby, of condition and habitus [i.e. the dispositions].,116
Theologians can direct themselves to transcend their own personal interest in order to be nearer to ordinary Asian people, they should, however, be aware of their difference from the latter. Thus, we must emphasize that what the theological project of Song leaves out is just this very important reflexive component, and, as a consequence, the very relation between Song and the variety of people of Asia remains unclear and misleading. It is appropriate here to quote once again the words of Bourdieu
To throw some light on discussions about the 'people' and the 'popular', one need only bear in mind that the 'people' or the 'popular' ('popular art', 'popular religion', 'popular medicine', etc.) is first of all one of things at stake in the struggle between intellectuals. The fact of being or feeling authorized to speak about the 'people' or of speaking for (in both senses of the word) the 'people' may constitute, in itself, a force in the struggles within different fields, political, religious, artistic, etc.117
The 'people' may become the force in the struggle in the theological field! This
Bourdieu, In Other Words, 146. Ibid, 150.
penetrating insight shall push Asian theologians to recognize their role within the Asian community. For This should be an alarm especially for Asian theologians who are educating and living in the West like Song to wake up from the romantic slumber.
4.4
In this chapter, we have made a critical assessment of Song's proposal of doing theology with resources from Asian cultures. Firstly, we have assessed the understanding of culture revealed in the works of Song. We argued, one the one hand, with the help of the philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer, that although Song admits the presupposition in any understanding including the theological one, he never reflects critically on his own presupposition and seems to neglect the great difference between his own situatedness and that of other Asians. This negligence causes him to regard himself erroneously as located in the vaguely delineated 'Asian' tradition. On the other hand, by emphasizing the dialectical relationship of the two moments of interpretation, explanation and understanding, explicated in the interpretation theory of Paul Ricoeur, we contended that although Song's interpretation of texts is often interesting, it is certain not rigorous. Secondly, we have concentrated on the general notion of culture and the narrower scope of Asian
118 The realization of the role of intellectual is actually a major concern of the academic field. Anthropologists, for example, have begun to deal with the problematic relationship between the one who write culture and the one who is written. In the anthropological field, there appears a 'postmodernist turn' in ethnographic writing, which aims at dealing with the problem of representation of the non-Western 'other'. This postmodernist turn emphasizes on the literary nature of anthropological writings, and the postmodernist anthropologists recognize their ethnographies as 'always caught up wigh invention, not the representation, ofcultures.' Here, the relationships among the writer; reader, and subject matter in anthropology are problematized, since in this age, the native informant may read and contest the ethnographer's characterizations. The main effort is to expose the power relations embedded in any ethnographic work and to produce a text that is less encumbered with Western assumptions and categories than traditional ethnographies have been. See James Clifford, 'Introduction : Partial Truth', in James Clifford and George E. Marcus eds. Writing Cultures : The Poetics and Politics ofEthnography (Berkeley '. University Of California Press, 1986), 1-26. This book is a collection Of works concentrating on the issues of new ethnography. For a feminist reaction, see Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe and Colleen Ballerino Cohen, 'The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology : Cautions from a Feminist Perspective' in Signs, vol. 15, no. I I, 1989, 7-33. For a review ofthe book by a neo-Marxist, see Bob Scholte, 'Review Article : The Literary Turn in Contemporary Anthropology', Critique of Anthropoloo, vol.7, no.l, 1987, 33-47, Regardless of how great the differences these different approaches to anthropological writing, the necessity of political implication is indisputable necessity accepted by all ofthem.
cultures. In the first area, we found that Song assumes a too private notion of cultural symbols. Moreover, he pays little attention to the reproductive constraints imposed by culture on human agents and grants the latter a too active and free role to play. This far too romantic view causes him to neglect, whether consciously or unconsciously the 'demonic' possibility of the people. In the second area, we appreciated the pluralist view of culture advocated by Song. Yet his stance is not consistent, for while he acknowledges the plural nature of Asian cultures, he does not pay much attention to more industrially developed Asian cultures. We tried to demonstrate, with a substantiation of a in-depth study ofHong Kong culture, that his rejection of the latter is a result of his ignorance of them. Lastly, we have explored the problem of reflexivity and symbolic domination. Due to lack of self-reflexive moment in his works, Song never makes explicit the role he is assuming. This absence obscures us to see the possible symbolic domination he is imposing. Playing the role of cultural producers, theologians may exploit of the term ethe people' as a force in symbolic struggle within the academic field.
5. CONCLUSION
In the past chapters, I have reconstructed the conception of Asian theology held by Choan-seng Song and have given a critical assessment of it. I have tried hard to point out the explicit and implicit problems associated with the project. Yet little has been said concerning the positive side of it. It may therefore be a right place here to give some appreciation.
I fully agree with the contextual direction of doing Asian theology. It is absolutely correct to reject the past theology as full of domination of discourse, which came out of the Euro-centric mentality. What should be appreciated as well is the respect given to local people shown in Song's works. He contends to shift the centre of gravity of theology from the game of abstract concepts to the real lives of ordinary people. This contention is undoubtedly an important contribution to theology at the methodological level. Thus doing living theology is certainly a wellchosen route to embark. I must admit that many of the methods devised by Song for constructing theology are insightful and can lead us to discover more. Telling interesting story should be easily accepted by ordinary people, and theology is thus made relevant.
Yet more rigorous works are in want. Passionate slogans can surely be accepted easily, but too loose an argument can result in contradiction and confusion, and these are what I sometimes find hard too accept when coming across the works of Song. For example, while on the one hand he defends with all his efforts for the plural nature of Asian cultures and asks Western theologians to take note of that, it is also he who on the other hand upholds a singular nature of the cultures of Asia. This too obvious self-contradiction shows not only his ignorance about those cultures, but the absence of a well-thought theory of culture. Unless living within a culture, one has not the right to criticize and comment on it. Song should be no exception. No impression obtained in the arm-chair can produce fruitful results. Common-sensical argument can easily be embraced because it is common sense; and it often result in contradiction because it is common sense.
The assessment offered in the last chapter may seem too harsh and demanding. Under the scrutiny by drawing together different critical theories, few works can come out with no defect. However, I do not think anyone will expect someone to produce to us perfect products. Yet without criticism, no defect can be discovered and work be improved. Disappointedly, this material self-critical moment is what is left out by Asian theologians.
Many Western academic field are now constituting a very strong self-criticism, and extensive debates are carrying out and great effects on past theories are being produced. Song is correct to ask theologians to learn from Western theorists, especially social scientists, but we, including Song himself, have to make more efforts to have this request realized.
Asia is in her way of modernization, no matter we like it or not, it is an oneway road as far as we can see. Actually for most of the people, improvement of living standards is surely what they want, as can be demonstrated by the economic reforms carrying out in mainland China. There is no suggestion of accepting modernization with no reservation. It is a fact that modernization does cause problems and suffering, and it is just because of this that more rigorous social analyses of the complicated city-life is called for. And we are waiting for Asian theologians to incorporate more recent findings of other fields into their works of theology that the latter can be enriched and strengthened.
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Works of Choan-seng Song (C. S. Song) Cited in this Dissertation
Song, Choan-seng. 'From Israel to Asia : A Theological Leap' in Gerald H. Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky eds. Mission Trends No.3 : Third World Theologies. New York : Paulist Press, 1976.
Song, Choan-seng. Third-Eye Theolou. New York : Orbis, 1979.
Song, Choan-seng. The Tears ofLady Meng. Geneva : WCC, 1981.
Song, Choan-seng. 'A Bowl of Rice with Green Bamboo Leaf Wine' in East Asia Journal ofTheology, vol.2, no.2, 1984, 182.
Song, Choan-seng. Tell Us Our Names : Story Theoloufrom an Asian Perspective. New York : Orbis, 1984.
Song, Choan-seng. 'I Touched the Theological Heart in Japan' in East Asia Journal ofTheolou, vol.4, no. 1, 1986, 10.
Song, Choan-seng. 'The World of Images & Symbols' in Yeow Choo Lak and John C. England eds. ATESEA Occasional Papers No.8 : Doing Theolou with People 's Symbols and Images. Singapore : ATESEA, 1989.
Song, Choan-seng. 'Freedom of Christian Theology for Asian Cultures : Celebrating the Inauguration of the Programme for Theology and Cultures in Asia' in Asia Journal ofTheolou, vol.3, No. 1, Apr., 1989.
Song, Choan-seng. 'Christian Theology : An Asian Way' in Yeow Choo Lak and John C. England eds. ATESEA Occasional Papers No. 10 : Doing Theolog with God's Purpose in Asia. Singapore : ATESEA, 1990.
Song, Choan-seng. Jesus, The Crucified People, New York : Crossroad, 1990.
Song, Choan-seqg. 'Culture' in Nicholas Lossky et.al. ed. Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement. Geneva : WCC Publication, 1991.
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