The two volumes under review here represent very different approaches to a similar end, which is to broaden and to further historicize the idea that Christianity is not only a Western religion. But they also take an important additional step to show us that Christianity can assume surprising incorporations, reinterpretations, and rejections once it has been localized into an Asian context. The volumes take as their focus the reception of Christianity in South Asia and East Asia, as well as in Asian America. While they are grounded in different fields (biblical studies in one; history and East Asian studies in the other), they both provide useful explorations and can serve as starting points for new research on Asian Christianities in all their variety.
R. S. Sugirtharajah, now an emeritus professor at the University of Birmingham, is probably best known for introducing the category of postcolonial criticism to traditional biblical studies. The Bible and Asia forms part of that larger project and offers an eclectic and tantalizing hodgepodge of stories related to the book's title and subtitle, impossibly broad that they are. Perhaps the best way to characterize the idiosyncratic character of his material is to provide a short account of its seven brief chapters.
The first concerns the presence of Asia (and especially India) in the Judeo-Christian Bible, claiming not only that Indian things are frequently mentioned (ivory, monkeys, pomegranates), but also that the influence of Eastern theological notions can be found throughout the text, in both Old Testament passages such as the Song of Songs and in a variety of New Testament phrases and moral concepts. The second chapter covers two radical-minded Western colonial administrators (one French, one English) in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India, both of whom attempted to show that the Bible, hardly the center of human religious belief, was in fact influenced by even older sacred texts of China and India. Chapter 3 surveys three Asians, two Indians and one Chinese, who provided defiant, indigenous rereadings of the Bible in order to combat colonialism and Western prejudice. The fourth chapter tells the story of an early twentieth-century Sri Lankan Buddhist who spent his life in the struggle to defeat colonialism and the Christian mission that supported it, but he ironically ended up privileging some Sri Lankan groups over others and thus demonstrating that Asians, too, can end up thinking along the same exclusionary lines that they set out to undermine. Chapter 5 is a survey of some Asian readings of Saint Paul, stressing the complicated way that he has been seen as both collaborator and liberator with respect to oppressive imperial attitudes. The sixth chapter is something of a survey within a survey, highlighting newly discovered minority voices in Asian religious contexts, Asian diasporic biblical interpretations, and recent postcolonial readings. Chapter 7, finally, surveys the use of the Bible in Asian fiction, showing how the text is often sparsely cited, except to emphasize the way in which it has been a tool of an oppressive established church that, more often than not, needs to be flatly rejected.
This is the kind of wide-ranging and dabbling book that only a senior scholar can get away with successfully, and while it provides an impressive variety of enlightening examples, it also suffers from being rather cursory with all of them and often provides little more than a summary of people and places. Second, while the volume purports to be inclusive of all of East and South Asia, most of its material concerns the latter, and the observations are more compelling when Sugirtharajah stays closer to his main area of expertise. These caveats will probably mean less to more traditionalist theological readers, who might well be discomfited by the overwhelmingly negative valence that the Bible can take once it has been imported into Asian contexts.
The book concludes with a call to explore Christianity from the fresh perspective of Asian histories and Asian archives, but not merely to give voice to an “alternative discourse” as if a standard Western one remained predominant. Such work, Sugirtharajah hopes, might give rise to more complex social histories of Asian Christianities and, perhaps, offer a renewed spirit of toleration and mutual coexistence.
One might say that the second book under review here, Encountering Modernity, represents a certain kind of answer to Sugirtharajah's call, although the case studies included in this volume are rather more positivistic in spirit, in the sense that these are not essays about readers in Asia who call Western Christianity into question so much as stories of believers who have adapted or contextualized the religion to make it more applicable to their local needs. The term “modernity” here refers to the historical challenges faced by East Asians when they were incorporated into Western capitalist and imperialist systems beginning in the nineteenth century, and the volume's editors argue that (Protestant) Christianity actually helped many in East Asia to negotiate the problems caused by this shift to Westernization. Such contact could inspire new visions of local society and new conceptions of national identity.
This collection of eleven essays, written mainly by historians and sociologists, is divided into four themes: religion and economics, the social aspects of religion, social activism, and national identity. As in most edited volumes, these thematic boundaries are somewhat forced and arbitrary, but they do give some idea of the breadth of the collection, which enjoys as one of its main strengths a distinctly transnational outlook, particularly about Korea (the field of its two editors, Albert L. Park and David Yoo), which is often ignored or relegated to Korean-studies materials only. The first essay, for example, argues that the Protestant Church helped to expose late nineteenth-century Koreans to the ideas of Western capitalism, while its companion essay looks at contemporary Korean megachurches and their means of marketing themselves in a postindustrial world. Other pieces about Korea include two on the Japanese colonial period (1910–45), one that examines the appeal of Western Christianity as a means of combating Japanese colonialism, and the other on the history of a Christian hospital that with respect to both the Korean and Japanese colonial governments had to frame health care as both Christian and secular in a largely non-Christian society. Finally, there is an essay on problems faced by early twentieth-century Korean Christians in the United States and their publication of a student magazine sponsored by the International YMCA.
On Chinese subjects, there is an essay on rural Christianity in Guangdong Province, which utilized indigenous social networks and rituals and remained largely outside of the mainstream (Presbyterian) missionary influence, as well as a piece on the rise of Protestant Christianity in post-Mao China, particularly the House Church movement that is less subject to government control.
Regarding Japan, there are three essays, all concerned with Christianity in the first half of the twentieth century: one on the career of a progressive Japanese Christian leader who studied in the United States and called for a global Christianity rather than simply a Japanese one, one on Protestant Christianity during the period as a force for nation-building that often went against the grain of the official government position, and one on a new breed of Japanese religious leaders just before World War II that clashed with an older generation that had been raised under very different cultural circumstances.
Finally, an essay on Protestant conversions among Taiwanese living in the United States rounds out the volume, arguing that many of these converts were more attracted to the religion's practical and social benefits than any of its theological tenets.
Variety is certainly the key in both these volumes, and the historical research throughout is of a very high quality. One thing that I found confusing on occasion, however, was how Christianity itself was being defined. This is particularly common in English-language works that seem to forget that Catholicism (for instance) is part of Christianity, too, even though the term “Christian,” as it is generally used in these two volumes, refers to Protestantism only. In other words, both works are attuned to the important notion of Christianities in a global context, but what about Christianities even in the West? Park and Yoo's contributors are careful to use the qualifier “Protestant” throughout, but then what of the word “Christianity” in the subtitle? I was equally surprised to find a separate entry in the index for Catholicism, and Sugirtharajah's index lists Roman Catholicism in much the same vein. Perhaps this bias does not undermine the research of either volume, as both are composed of case studies taken from the Protestant world, but other forms of Christianity have also existed in East Asia and have played equally interesting and important roles. Sugirtharajah, perhaps, faces an even more difficult set of problems since his subject is the Bible, and those with a Protestant bias often overlook the fact that the Bible as a text—and a text to be (re)interpreted—has always been a much less central aspect of the Catholic faith.
