Majority World Theologies: Theologizing from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Ends of the Earth

By Allen Yeh and Tite Tienou

Theology to the Ends of the Earth and Back Again

As Christianity’s center of gravity has shifted to the Majority World, many younger churches in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are now coming of age. With this maturing comes the ability to theologize for themselves, not simply to mimic what they have been taught from the West. As theology is an attempt to articulate through human language, culture, and contexts the timeless truths of the eternal and transcendent God, Majority World churches have much to offer the West and the world, as they contribute to a greater understanding of God, discipleship, and mission.

Within this volume is an eclectic and fascinating sampling of theologizing from around the world, diverse not just in context but in content, dealing with everything from Christian education, to engaging Buddhists with the gospel, to engagement with Santería, to contextualizing native dance. As Christ’s message has gone to “the ends of the earth,” it has been received, but also incorporated, synthesized, and rebirthed in new and exciting ways that will benefit us all, wherever we live and serve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Carey Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780878080908

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Task at Hand

Missiologists are faced with a nigh-impossible task: to be an interdisciplinary expert on the entire world. Many Christian educational institutions may only have one missions professor,¹ but that faculty member cannot realistically be expected to know everything about every nation and culture, about every strategy and every organization, about how Christianity compares to every religion and worldview, about how ivory-tower academics and people on the ground think, about every subdiscipline (generally, missiology is comprised of the quintet of theology, history, anthropology, linguistics, and strategy), and on top of all this to have, under their belt, the basic requirements for such a position: to have earned the PhD degree and to have spent twenty-plus years on the mission field,² and still be of an age to have longevity in their career. Thus missiologists often are regarded as a jack of all trades, master of none. But on the other hand, a siloed discipline (which is how most other fields of study are conducted) is not tenable either. Academia’s nature is that it demands ever-increasing specialization the higher up on the degree ladder one climbs. But knowing one’s own subject in a vacuum, detached from the larger context of other disciplines, is a false sense of expertise. Thus, to be truly accurate, we really end up having to know both the forest and the trees—nowhere near achievable and yet it is the closest thing to knowing anything realistically. We have to try, even if we cannot actually succeed.

In the same vein, this book faces a monumental task. A book entitled Majority World Theologies promises the entire world, but at best it can only be snapshots. But what this volume offers is a side-by-side comparison of various world theologies. Instead of presenting to the visitor a forest which is overwhelmingly huge, this is like an arboretum in which a California redwood, a cedar of Lebanon, a Japanese bonsai, an African baobab, an Australian eucalyptus, and an Amazonian cacao tree are planted next to each other.³ The visitor can thus inspect closely, in one fell swoop, several samples of timbers from all around the world, drawing their own conclusions about the differences and admiring their diversity. None of the sample trees are representative of every plant from their respective continents, and thus the danger of such a model is making conclusions based on stereotypes. But as long as the observer holds that idea firmly in place—that each representative is simply one possible way that someone or something from a particular continent can manifest itself—then at least the task is accomplished: that we can grasp the main idea of a substance, while acknowledging a multitude of expressions, without losing the core essence. Just as there are many types of trees and yet each is still recognizably a tree (or many types of cats and yet each one is still unmistakably a cat), so Christian theology can take many forms multiculturally and hopefully still can be recognized as Christian theology. What we do not want to do is the equivalent of a tiger saying to a lion, You are not a cat because you do not have orange fur and black stripes! which is like a Western Christian saying to a non-Western Christian, "You are not Christian because you do not define Jesus using words like hypostatic union, imputed righteousness, eternally begotten, homoousios, and filioque!" At the core of Christianity (or at least evangelical Christianity) is the Trinity and the Bible,⁴ and those two things are the most important bases for all other Christian doctrines.

THE EPISTEMOLOGY BEHIND MAJORITY WORLD THEOLOGIES

This raises an important point: this volume is necessarily evangelical⁵ (not the least because it comes out of the Evangelical Missiological Society). But practically, why does that matter? Why isn’t mere Christianity sufficient? Because the shared evangelical bases of the authority of Scripture and the centrality of the cross and the impetus for mission/conversion⁶ are—more than tradition, reason, apostolic offices, the context/situation, etc.⁷—the common denominator of most Christians around the world. However, this a different, more robust, type of evangelicalism, one which incorporates all of the Bebbington Quadrilateral but also adds the other factors as secondary supports without discounting them as the Protestant Reformation was wont to do. The primacy of Bible and Trinity does not mean devaluing everything else.

Therefore, cultural perspectives are incorporated in this book unapologetically. It seems that some people try to pit theology and culture against each other, as if culture taints theology. But the argument here is that true theology takes culture into account. After all, the first command that God gives humans after their creation is the Cultural Mandate (Gen 1:28)! We are trying to avoid the mistake of thinking that culture trumps theology, as well as the opposite claim that pure theology can be done outside of culture. We need to neither be beholden to culture nor ignore it. Culture is secondary, but it is necessary and unavoidable.

Finally, a note must be made about the task of theology: it is both micro and meta. One can talk about how to contextualize a theological term, or about how to conduct theological education. This is similar to how, in the discipline of history, one can do history as well as historiography (which is the history of history).

THE METHODOLOGY BEHIND MAJORITY WORLD THEOLOGIES

It seems that the task of producing and learning about majority world theologies is a collaborative effort by necessity. Even a jack of all trades cannot actually know all trades; therefore community is needed. The analogy of the body (1 Cor 12:12–27), where every member brings something, and nobody can ever say to anyone else I don’t need you, is apropos here. However, given that one out of three people in this seven billion-plus population of earth calls themselves a Christian, how do we choose a dozen or so people to give voice to this great mass?

Obviously, EMS membership was our starting point, which presupposes the epistemology outlined above. But the intersectionality of race, gender, age, geography, etc., was still a puzzle to piece together.⁸ I have tried to balance all of the following considerations:

•men and women

•North American and international voices

•whites and people of color

•geographical spread amongst the continents

•subject matter (biblical, theological, educational, arts)

•famous established authors and younger, newer authors

•professors and grad students

•EMS regions (Northwest, South Central, Rocky Mountain, International, etc.)

•people actually from those areas vs. people from elsewhere writing as outsiders about a particular region.

The opening chapter by Allen Yeh outlines not so much a theology of the majority world but a philosophy. Friendship, equality, dignity, and self-actualization are the necessary groundwork to be laid for a truly global church, articulated historically in the famous speech given by V. S. Azariah at the Edinburgh 1910 World Missionary Conference. Ultimately, theology must begin in relationship as we serve a relational God. In chapter 2, John Cheong incisively nuances the idea of polycentricity in global theology, looking not only at lateral interactions from place to place but also the micro/ macro dynamics embodied in the glocal (global + local) in high, middle, and grassroots levels.

Geographical subcategories help to frame the remaining chapters. For Africa, Kofi Amoateng uses a symbolic case study from Ghana in the West, and Diane Stinton uses a linguistic concept from Kenya in the East, to illustrate indigenous theologizing and theological education. Robert Priest has a pan-African approach, looking particularly at one vital word and how it is translated. All three authors attempt to remove the Anglophone hegemony in these countries by employing indigenous languages, the first two being Akan and Kikuyu, respectively, even if one is linguistic and the other visual. Stinton further takes this concept from Africa to other countries, such as Costa Rica and Canada.

Moving on to South Asia, Natun Bhattacharya takes the concept of Muslim insider movements and applies it to an Indian Hindu context. Sunny Hong takes us to East Asia, examining han (suffering) using biblical theology to parallel Korea with a Hebraic context. And James Morrison looks at Central Asia by extending the tripartite paradigm of gospel transgression (guilt, fear, shame) to a fourth category: pollution—using Tibetan Buddhism as the context.

Within Latin America, Jessica Brooks looks at the unique cultural ecosystem of Cuba with its Afro-Caribbean roots and Catholic influences, and how the expression of folk religion there is both helpful and harmful. Latin America’s diversity is on full display as we move from the Caribbean to the Andes: Tito Paredes discusses the opportunities and challenges of doctoral-level theological education at a seminary in Peru, in a continent that largely lacks such programs. And Rolando Cuellar bridges the Global North and the Global South, talking about the Latino diaspora and how their Christology dialogues with a North American understanding of the same.

Beyond the big three majority world continents of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, there are marginalized geographical areas. One of them is the Middle East, and Yousef AlKhouri looks at a Christian Palestinian model of liberation theology in light of the political conflict with Israel. John Ferch approaches another often-forgotten group, indigenous North Americans. Particularly, he focuses on Alaskan Eskimo dancing and how that visual medium expresses worship. It is unfortunate we did not have a contribution from/about the Pacific Islands: Oceania (Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia) and/or Australasia. This section is subtitled From Jerusalem … to the Ends of the Earth in direct reference to Acts 1:8. Jerusalem is a nod to Israel and Palestine (AlKhouri’s chapter), which is often marginalized today even though that land, ironically, is the original center of Christianity; and Alaska (Ferch’s chapter) can rightfully be seen as the Ends of the Earth. So these two chapters provide representative bookends of that biblical verse.

THE TITLE

Most volumes of this sort use the singular "majority world theology."⁹ We are intentionally using the plural¹⁰ because it is not monolithic but diverse. There are certainly some characteristics which most majority world cultures share in common (e.g., underrepresentation in voice, recognition of a Middle Tier of reality), but many more ways in which they are completely different from each other. (I contend that the same logic should also be applied to Western theology: it should more properly be Western theologies, as there are many variances, and also not to privilege it as a single—and therefore normative—way of viewing God.)

Also, a note about the nomenclature majority world: it can variously be articulated as Global South or Two-Thirds World or non-Western world. These are all interchangeable labels, but majority world will be used most often because it is the most accurate (Global South leaves out Asia), the most concise (it is not as much of a mouthful as Two-Thirds World), and does not define something as the negation of something else (like non-Western world). It should be acknowledged that majority world is not a term recognized by the secular world; it is only used within Christian circles (e.g. the United Nations uses Global South).¹¹ As such, global theology may have been another way we could have titled this book. This would have had the added benefit of not othering the non-Western world as something exotic and non-normative. However, the EMS national conference theme of 2017 was Engaging theology, theologians, theological education in (or from) majority world contexts, so in order to honor that theme we have decided to keep the term majority world, with the understanding that Christians sometimes have discipline-specific vocabulary which will need to be translated whenever we speak to the secular world (e.g. missiology is sometimes replaced with the term intercultural studies). Also, majority world implies that the West is the minority world (a point John Cheong makes in his chapter)—not by value but by size of population, similar to the term ethnic minority in the West—which is perhaps another vocabulary modification we must make in orienting ourselves rightly to not privileging the West’s views.

The subtitle for the volume uses two key phrases: the Ends of the Earth evokes Acts 1:8 but also functions as a catchall to encompass regions beyond Africa, Asia, and Latin America which are too often forgotten, such as the Pacific, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Central Asia, and indigenous North America. The other important phrase, Self-Theologizing, hearkens to the concept of the Three-Self Church developed by Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson in the nineteenth century. Though often equated with the Chinese government church, three-self is actually a concept that is still necessary for proper independence of majority world churches, because the hope is that they will all become self-sustaining, self-governing, and self-propagating. However, Paul Hiebert champions the fourth self: that majority world churches also ought to be self-theologizing,¹² because ultimately without that majority world Christians can simply be mimicking the West even if they are doing the three selves. This book is merely one contribution to the overall global conversation of majority world self-theologizing. May we see more in the years to come, as the Lord ushers in his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Maranatha!

—Allen Yeh

Part 1 Majority World Theologizing

This chapter benefited from a research fellowship at Biola University’s Center for Christian Thought, which was made possible through the support of a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought or the Templeton Religion Trust.

Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince

C. S. Lewis’ The Four Loves includes a line that has intrigued me from the moment I read it: "To the Ancients, Friendship [philia] seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it" (Lewis 1960, 57). In the Christian world, I had always been taught (or perhaps I just assumed it due to the number of times I heard it emphasized) that God’s love is expressed as agape (charity, or unconditional love), not philia. And in the secular world, certainly eros (romantic love) rules supreme—not just in Hollywood but in literature and poetry and psychology and music. I would even say that, though Christians give lip service to agape, in practice they are also all about eros, except exhibited in the marital context. There is nothing wrong with that, of course; but Christian colleges have the infamous ring by spring mantra where marriage is the ultimate achievement to be rushed into as quickly as possible, and consequently singles often feel like second-class citizens in the church.

Then, of course, there is the least-known Greek word for love to be mentioned, namely storge, translated as affection and often manifested as parent-child love (though it can also be used for love of a pet). This is also highly valued in Christianity—perhaps as an offshoot of marital eros—but it sometimes made me wonder why Christianity becomes so much about Focus on the Family when Paul exalted singleness (1 Cor 7:7ff) and Jesus said to hate your parents and your siblings (Luke 14:26); otherwise we are not worthy of him! Those verses are not often preached on in evangelical circles, though to be fair these ideas are taken seriously by Catholics.

The Bible does seem to suggest that friendship is the greatest of the loves, as Jesus said in John 15:13, Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends (ESV).¹ But I remember quoting this to a non-Christian one time, and he replied: I would think that laying down your life for an enemy would be more loving than laying down your life for a friend! I did not have a good reply for him at the time, and it has stuck in my craw ever since. This chapter endeavors to address and answer that objection. Could the Ancients actually have been right?²

My thesis is that philia is, indeed, the greatest of the loves, and that Christians would do well to aim for this. Though agape may seem like the greatest of the loves in Christian theology, and while eros and storge are most often expressed in Christian praxis, philia is the most encapsulating of the nature of the Christian faith. All of those other loves can be one-sided—especially agape—but it is impossible for philia to be unilateral. One may object, Doesn’t it seem more noble to give without expecting anything in return? This is the same kind of thought that drove my non-Christian friend to object to John 15:13. The fact that philia is the only love that demands reciprocity makes it seem self-serving. But I want to argue that reciprocity is the best and truest of loves. One-sided love is deficient, but reciprocity gives dignity and agency and honor and responsibility to the other, and as such makes friendship the greatest of the loves, because it is the greatest leveler and is the only one which has true partnership and with-ness.

PHILIA AT EDINBURGH 1910 AND V. S. AZARIAH

Historian Mark Noll wrote a book called Turning Points in which he cited the twelve most important moments in church history (Noll 2001, 7).³ The last of the twelve is the Edinburgh 1910 World Missionary Conference (Stanley, 2009). This was considered the birthplace of the modern ecumenical movement, but unfortunately suffered from an overly Western presence. Considering the year was 1910, this was unsurprising; but basically, out of some 1,200 people, there were only 17 Asians in attendance and no Africans or Latin Americans.

However, the most famous speech delivered at that conference was by an Asian, namely V. S. Azariah, the first bishop of the southern Indian diocese of Dornakal. He spoke boldly about the condescending attitude of Western missionaries toward non-Western Christians. His speech included these words: I do not plead for returning calls, handshakes, chairs, dinners and teas as such. I do on the other hand plead for all of them and more if they can be expressions of a friendly feeling, if these or anything else can be the outward proofs of a real willingness on the part of the foreign missionary to show that he is in the midst of the people to be to them not a lord and master but a brother and a friend. … Too often you promise us thrones in heaven, but will not offer us chairs in your drawing rooms, clearly wanting equal partnership that goes beyond paternalism.

Azariah concluded with his famous quote, You have given your goods to feed the poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love. Give us FRIENDS! Those last three words, Give us friends! have echoed throughout time as the hallmark of Edinburgh 1910 and what it means to be in ecumenical partnership with other Christians (Robert 2011).

Unpacking a philosophy of philia can help us see how this can apply to Azariah’s injunction for missions and the future of world Christianity.

GREEK WORDS FOR LOVE

Just as Eskimos have many words for snow, the Greeks have several words for love. Though this may not be the reason why Greek was the language chosen for the New Testament,⁴ it does make Greek a more effective linguistic tool for understanding the theology of love than the English language.

Some biblical scholars, however, have questioned the validity of parsing out the specific meanings of these words too literally. For example, in his book Exegetical Fallacies, D. A. Carson said that the four most common fallacies are word-study fallacies, grammatical fallacies, logical fallacies, and presuppositional and historical fallacies. Regarding the first one, Carson says that an example of a word-study fallacy is to make too fine of a distinction between the Greek words for love. He writes:

Although it is doubtless true that the entire range of ἀγαπάω (agapao, to love) and the entire range of φιλέω (phileo, to love) are not exactly the same, nevertheless they enjoy substantial overlap; and where they overlap, appeal to a root meaning in order to discern a difference is fallacious. … The false assumptions surrounding this pair of words are ubiquitous; and so I shall return to them again. My only point here is that there is nothing intrinsic to the verb ἀγαπάω (agapao) or the noun ἀγάπη (agape) to prove its real meaning or hidden meaning refers to some special kind of love. (Carson 1996, 31–32)

Carson uses the example of Peter’s reinstatement in John 21:15–17 to show that though, in the first two times that Jesus asks Peter, Do you love me? he uses agapao, and the third time he switches to phileo (Peter uses phileo all three times in responding, You know that I love you), there really is no intended distinction and it is making too much of something to think that the word switch is anything significant. This argument is further strengthened by the fact that, in the same passage, Jesus also switches between "Feed my lambs [arnia] (v. 15) and Feed my sheep [probata]" (v. 17) without any discernable difference in meaning (ibid., 51–53).

This allows for an escape clause from an objection about John 15:13, when Jesus says, Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends (ESV)—because the word used there is agape, not philia! Using the word-study fallacy, one could make the case that it is agape, not philia at all, that is representative of God’s love. But it seems the Apostle John likes to use the two words interchangeably. The thrust of the verse is clearly toward friendship love, especially shown two verses later in v. 15: No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you (ESV). Jesus’ elevation of the disciples’ status from servants to friends is a switch from agape to philia, from a lower role to a peer role.⁵ So even though the word agape is employed in v. 13, the concept of philia is the operative one. It is about friendship that Jesus says, Greater love has no one than this.

The sisters Mary and Martha exhibited this distinction of which is better. Gary Thomas, in Sacred Pathways, says that "Servant is a ‘doing’ word; friend is a ‘being’ word. What do servants do? They cook, clean, and so forth. A friend, however, is something you are, not something you do. A servant is Martha; a friend is Mary" (Thomas 2010, 192).

All this being said, though it is true that many biblical scholars do make too much of the distinction between the two Greek words, perhaps Carson swings the pendulum too far in the other direction. It may be entirely accurate that in the passage about Peter’s reinstatement, agapao and phileo are synonymous; however, in other passages they are not. Probably the truth is more like a Venn diagram: as Carson himself states in the quote above, the two words enjoy substantial overlap. But this implies that, at points, they do not overlap at all. The non-overlapping definitions of agape, philia, storge, and eros are ways I will be using these terms in the remainder of this chapter. When I use the word philia (or its verb form phileo), I am talking strictly about friendship, just as agape will be referring to charity, storge will be about affection, and eros will designate romance.

EROS VS. PHILIA

Sigmund Freud popularized the psychological theory that humans’ strongest urge is toward eros and the libido. Even though he has been largely debunked, it seems that he may have been right, at least as far as how society expresses itself today. Tim Keller, in a sermon about friendship, said:

Every culture will be putting friendship on the back seat, and yet it’s irreplaceable. … A liberal, individualistic culture like ours always puts erotic love, romantic love, sexual love, first. Take a look at our culture: Do we have all these glossy magazines, you know, plastered across the front of these glossy magazines: Who’s best friends with who? No, it’s Who’s sleeping with who? … [As another example,] in this stack, let’s put all the CDs of songs about romantic love, and over here, let’s put all the songs about friendship. Or, you know, interesting, for just a quick example: the one blockbuster trilogy, the one blockbuster set of movies that has ever been made, not about romance, not about family, but about friendship, is The Lord of the Rings. The beauty of friendship is the main theme of it. However, if you read the book you’ll know, the romantic stuff is in the appendices. But of course, for Hollywood, we had to pull that out of the appendices and we had to stick it center. We have Aragorn and Arwen, the love affair had to be right in the center. It wasn’t in the book. Why? Well, you see, our culture isn’t turned on by friendship; it’s not the most important thing. To Tolkien, that’s what the book was about!

In a liberal, individualistic culture, romance is the most important relationship. In a traditional, conservative culture, family—father, mother, sibling, brother, sister—that’s the most important. In a socialistic, communitarian culture, it’s the civic relationship; it’s your relationships with your neighbors. But every culture will always put friendship into the second [place]—into the back seat. Why? Because friendship is not a biological or sociological necessity. It’s the only love