The New Quest For Asian Christian Identity : Guidelines From The Pioneers Of The Past (A Summary) – Part 2

Georg Evers comes to one ‘ s mind when one hears the Jesuit General’ s invitation to the Jesuits in Asia to become Jesuits of Asia. Though European, Evers engaged both the Asian-Jewish heritage of Christianity and Asia’s contemporary realities, supporting Asian theologies and theologians. In response to the Jesuit General’s challenge, this essay highlights features of Asian Christianity which have been emphasize also in Evers’ life-time work. Also, in this essay, I seek to sift the stepping stones from the stumbling blocks in the path of those Christians in Asia who yearn to become Christians of Asia.

Lessons to Be Learned from the Nascent Church’s Westward Expansion The Jewish Christian Identity and Gentiles

The history of Christianity in its own continent is rich with daring experiments that can guide our search for an Asian Christian identity. I will highlight a few well-known cases and draw three basic principles which, in light of what we have learned from Christianity’s westward expansion, can help Asian churches truly become churches of Asia. For practical reasons, I begin with a 16th–17th century Asian experience of the “Western Missions” before moving back to earlier times. The Italian Jesuits Roberto De Nobili and Matteo Ricci, thoroughly schooled in Europe’s Renaissance humanism, genuinely became Christians of our continent by mastering Asian languages and cultures. Constantine Joseph Beschi (1680–1747) even adopted the Tamil name Viramamunivar and became a renowned poet in Tamil Language. Their example teaches us that only Christians rooted in their own culture can truly appreciate another’s and acquire a new Asian Christian identity (Axiom 1). This axiom has been proven beyond doubt in the Cultural Festival held in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on 29–30 October 2003. where artists from the Tamil north and Sinhala south shared their cultural achievements despite attempts at disruption by extremists. Their refinement in their own traditions enabled them to reach what is most human in all cultures. Amid ongoing racial tensions, poets, dramatists, and novelists from both sides communicated with ease, proving that true cultivation makes one transcultural without a loss of identity. The Renaissance Jesuits displayed remarkable cultural sensitivity, unlike many 19th-century missionaries shaped by European nationalism, who often failed to understand and support indigenized Asian churches, but rather created conflict such as the tensions with the Chinese church as Arnulf Camps stated. From De Nobili and Ricci, however, we also inherit two negative lessons. First, they assumed that Hinduism as a religion was evil, while its culture was neutral or good and could be adapted to Christianity. They tried to strip Christianity of European culture and re-clothe it in Indic forms, calling this “adaptation,” what we now call “inculturation.” Vatican II, however, clarified that religions and their cultures are inseparably bound within God’s Reign. As we search for our Asian Christian identity, other religions provide an indispensable part of it (axiom 2), implying there can be no true inculturation without some form of “inreligionization.” The other false assumption of the De Nobili-Ricci era was the identification of Asian reality with the culture of the elite. Believing God worked from top to bottom, they targeted the Brahmins and Mandarins, neglecting the biblical vision of a God who works from the bottom up, siding with the weak to challenge the powerful. They lacked a covenant Christology. In its seventh plenary assembly workshop (January 2000), the leadership of the Asian churches has been made aware that Jesus began His mission with the poor, the socially excluded, and that the universality of His message starts from below, breaking privilege. This is a non-negotiable element of Christian revelation in the Asian Semitic idiom, an irreversible advance that guides our search. Our identification with the Asian poor, Christian or otherwise, secures our identity as both Asian and Christian (Axiom 3).

Corollaries to the Three Axioms 

Brahmadat Upadhyay advanced beyond the De Nobili–Ricci model by living fully as a Christian within his Hindu Vedantic religiosity. He went beyond inculturation to adopt what we could restrospectively call “ inreligionization. ” Later, Swami Abhishiktananda (Le Saux), a French Benedictine monk, went even further by giving up everything to become a Christian Advaitin, a Vendatic Catholic. His experience was even more daring than Upadhyay’s, since it involved a radical continental shift in acquiring his Asian Christian identity. In light of this, we may add a corollary to Axioms 1 and 2: only those firmly rooted in their own tradition can venture into another’s. Like a creeper grounded in its native soil, they can rise to any height or reach any depth beyond their own habitat. Asian Christians who take this path cannot ignore Hindu Advaitin reformers like Swami Vivekananda, who reinterpreted the sacred texts in light of caste critique, or Hindu “liberation theologians” such as Swami Agnivesh. Their vision of a reformed Hinduism resonates with the biblical truth that social emancipation and inner liberation are inseparable. This prevents inculturation and inreligionization from becoming nothing more than brahmanization, as seen in criticisms of the “Indian liturgy.” This observation takes us to another unique form of Asian Christian identity. Tribal India has produced “Christian Asians” since Constant Lievens, distinct from the “Hindu-Christians” of the 19th century. Their cosmic religiosity, ecospirituality, and strong community-sense defies the individualism of metacosmic religions and show us where to begin our search for Asian Christian identity today—a principle confirmed at the 1995 Hua Hin Conference on Indigenous Peoples. Hence, we add the following corollary to Axioms 2 and 3: appropriating Asian identity through “inreligionization” requires absorbing the cosmic religiosity of the poor, as already affirmed by Bishop’s Institute for Social Action (BISA) VII in the 1980s. In fact, the whole of Asia, hopefully, a new form of Christianity will soon emerge among the tribal and clan societies, different from that shaped by metacosmic religions. The corollaries to Axioms 2 and 3, mentioned above, are becoming an obligatory policy in light of the Dalits’ struggle against caste discrimination, long justified by Hinduism and tolerated even within Christianity. By rediscovering the biblical God as covenant partner of the downtrodden, they present themselves as truly God’s people and offer a model that fuses the Semitico-biblical heritage with the Indic tradition. Their cosmic religiosity, stamped by resistance to socioreligious oppression, anchors us again in what is non-negotiable in biblical soteriology.

Asian Christians Working in other Asian Cultures: Two Examples

In the 1960s, during the Vatican II era, I found a clue to Asian Christian identity in Fr. S. G. Perera’s Life of the Venerable Father Joseph Vaz, Apostle of Ceylon (1942). Unlike the Portuguese who came with grandeur but later on has been obsessed with wealth, and the Dutch who were initially disciplined but also fell into greed, this Goan priest came poor and weak, seeking only to share the Word of Christ. In him, our people encountered not the colonial Christianity of the Portuguese or Dutch, but the Meek Brown Man of Galilee. Abandoning the Brahmin caste privilege and rejecting the Portuguese padroado Sytem, he lived as a true Sannyasi, living the life of the poor, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and serving the weak. Though trained in the West, he gained his Asian Christian identity from the poor he lived with and served, letting God in their suffering shape him—a model for forming youth for the presbyterate and consecrated life in Asia. Obviously St. Joseph Vaz was a man of his age, long before Vatican II opened the Church to interreligious dialogue and ecumenism. Like De Nobili and Ricci, he inherited the Western Church’s theology of religions. The divisions and rivalries of that era, marked by wars and absolutism, left little room for tolerance of Asia’s religions. This, unfortunately, constituted one of the identity marks of the Church of his time!  To fill this particular lacuna in this Indian saint, Christian seekers of Asian identity must turn to the non-Western churches of the East, which began missions as early as the late second century, distinct from Greek and Latin standards—an Asian Christianity that sprang forth before Europe and the Americas were Chritianized, though ignored in the Christian histories today. In my prolonged discussion with Norman Tanner, I refused to call the Greek Councils “Asian,” insisting they were at most Eastern. The earliest Asian churches, however, rejected these debates as speculative and instead used their own Antiochene and Semitic idiom. Despite extremes, they produced many saint-ascetics engaged in missionary and secular life, advocating an apostolic mysticism within Asia’s religious context. Here a dynamic relationship can be seen between prayer, fasting, scholarship, service of the poor, and missionary work, along with bold efforts to engage other religions. These churches evolved monastic life in continuity with early Christian asceticism, even influencing the West. Seeing no contradiction between marriage and priesthood, they affirmed monasticism as an essential mark of Asian Christian identity. While admitting their limitations, ecumenism must begin with an empathetic study of Asian churches—their spirituality, mission, service to the poor, and encounters with other religions

Concluding Observations

These great pioneers have done the spadework for us by their daring creativity in trying to reconcile their love for the Lord with their loyalty to their land. Reviewing their journey, we arrive now at a better understanding of the tension, if any, between our Christian identity and our Asian identity, a dilemma enunciated more clearly today than ever before. We owe it to their pioneering efforts that we have a hindsight which they did not have. They have made things easy for us. Besides, we have two important gains in the contemporary Church which makes us better equipped to handle this question than they could ever do. The first is a more profound non-literalist and non fundamentalist apprehension of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures; the second is the theological recognition of the legitimacy of religious pluralism. These two must go hand in hand. In other words, the comparative study of various religions-a theological imperative for the church today-has helped us to identify what is non-negotiable and essential in every religion, and a fortiori, what is non negotiable in the Hebrew-Christian Bible. There is and there must be a unique element that imparts an unrepeatable identity to every religion, which we Christians should respect and learn from and even appropriate judiciously, while preserving the Christian identity that is already couched in the Asian idiom of the Semitic culture, an identity that should not be lost in the process of Asianizing Christianity. We must keep these two poles in a healthy tension when seeking what is both Asian and Christian in our faith, faced as we are with an unprecedented challenge of a globalized monoculture now invading our continent, paling the panhellenism of the first Christian centuries and the Western colonialism of the last millennium into insignificance.