A Systematic Theology from East Asia: Jung Young Lee’s Biblical-Cultural Trinity

By Edmond Zi-Kang Chua, Murray Rae and Michael Nai-Chiu Poon

A Systematic Theology from East Asia: Jung Young Lee's Biblical-Cultural Trinity considers the Trinitarian theology of Jung Young Lee, a twentieth-century Korean American theologian, unique for being based on the Bible but also inspired by the Book of Changes, a classical text from East Asian culture with wide appeal. This monograph examines the Christian scriptural-traditional and cultural roots of Lee's doctrines of God and the Trinity as twin pillars of his systematic theological system bearing out God's nature, purposes, and guidance for humanity and the world. In addition, this book outlines the autobiographical milieu of Lee's theology, its contribution to three distinct fields of Trinitarian doctrine (immanent-economic trinitarianism, social Trinity theory, and Cappadocian trinitarianism), and culminates in an assessment of Lee as a systematic theologian from East Asia, comparing Lee with other Asian American theologians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666763218

Edmond Zi-Kang Chua

Edmond Zi-Kang Chua is an academic researcher in trinitarian, patristic, Asian, and systematic theology. He is the author of ‘God-ness’, ‘God-ity’, and God (2015; 2nd ed., 2022) on trinitarian coherence, as well as Experience, Culture and Religion in Systematic Theology (2023).

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Introduction

A contextual theology is an articulation of the different strands of the Christian tradition in the particular settings of a shared experience, culture, or social location.² Asian American and Asian theology are no exceptions. In line with the tenor of contextual theology, this opening chapter of an academic research monograph focusing on the trinitarian theological thought of Jung Young Lee, an Asian American theologian, will, in addition to setting out the purpose of the monograph, address itself to the questions of my theological and sociocultural context as a Chinese-Singaporean person, as well as provide a brief introduction to that of Lee as an Asian American, especially in connection with evangelical Protestant theology, in the course of which the validity will be established of drawing comparisons between Lee’s thinking and an evangelical perspective. Other objectives comprise a delineation of the contours of the monograph and an articulation of the value of conducting research on Lee’s theology.

Theological and Sociocultural Locations of Monograph Author and Jung Young Lee

In this section, we will consider my theological and sociocultural background as well as that of Lee himself, in the course of which we shall have occasion to draw a relevant point of connection between the two things. A fuller discussion of Lee’s personal-experiential context shall be deferred to the first chapter of the monograph; as far as this introductory chapter is concerned, only a brief reference will be made to Lee’s theological and sociocultural location. There will be occasion in the course of this particular section to proffer a succinct justification for the use of an evangelical lens at various points in the monograph to assess Lee’s theology as a whole.

It will be observed by means of the outline of my theological and sociocultural location that I have come from an evangelical church background. While this fact sensitizes me to certain core concerns on the part of members of an evangelical church stream, it is to be underscored that this in no way serves to impair my theological assessment of Lee, and that this evaluation is premised on a rather different ground, one to which explicit reference shall be made at a suitable juncture. With these preliminaries behind us, we adjourn to the substance of an examination of my theological and sociocultural situation prior to affording an initial reference to Lee’s own theological and sociocultural location.

I am Chinese-Singaporean, having ancestors who hailed from China and immigrated to Singapore during the formative years of the quondam British colony. Similar to Lee, therefore, I have East Asian roots. Raised in the cosmopolitan city-state in a Chinese religious household, I became exposed to the message of Christianity during my early adulthood. I was spiritually inclined and ever conscious or desirous of the existence and reality of divine beings, and I transplanted my desire to know about divinity into my newfound Christian faith. Since my initiation into the evangelical stream of the Protestant church, I have been on a lifelong search for greater clarity on the doctrine of the Trinity.

It is apposite at this point to cursorily describe the sociocultural and theological location of Jung Young Lee so as to allow for a point of connection to be clearly drawn between his personal circumstances and my own.

Lee was born in 1935 in a village located in present-day North Korea, prior to the political division of the two Koreas ensuing from the Korean War which took place during the early 1950s. Interestingly, both Lee and I converted to Christianity during the year we would each turn twenty. Furthermore, both of us experienced such dramatic conversions that we felt an abiding call of God on our lives. Lee was groomed in a Western theological mode of thinking, from which he subsequently departed with the help of personal and social circumstances which pointed him in the direction of an exploration of Christian theology by means of a return to the philosophical and spiritual resources of his own birth culture.

With this in mind, I was inclined to study Lee’s trinitarian theology because of that which seemed at first glance to be the latter’s creative synthesis with trinitarian doctrine of elements of a worldview which I recognized from my own culture; namely, the symbols of yin and yang, which have ancient Chinese cosmological origins, and continue to be preserved and retain a degree of importance in East Asian cultures including my own Chinese cultural ethnicity. The combination of cultural factor and theological predilection made the study of Lee’s trinitarian perspective an especially attractive prospect for me. Asked to select among a series of works by writers who have engaged in the study of the doctrine of the Trinity, I experienced a strong and initially inexplicable impetus to focus my doctoral work on an engagement with Lee’s The Trinity in Asian Perspective, Lee himself, and his other works, in an endeavor to bring elements of my culture into conversation with my personal passion in the doctrine of the Trinity.

In terms of situating Lee and me along the trinitarian theological spectrum in the twentieth century and beyond, both of us stand on the legacy of a revival of Trinitarian thought sparked by the publication of Karl Barth’s Römerbrief in 1919 and which propelled a rise of cultural theology.³ According to Stanley Grenz’s division of the eras of the trinitarian theological resurgence of the last century along with a classification of their respective bellwethers, Lee as a non-immanentist trinitarian theologian, a position which will be worked out at a subsequent point in the monograph, may be situated within the regnant school of thought that gives priority to the economic as opposed to immanent relations of the Trinity, in a similar stream to that of theologians such as Catherine Mowry LaCugna and Philip Clayton.⁴

It is useful at this point to indicate the physiognomy and basic classification of Lee’s trinitarian doctrine vis-à-vis two recent theologians of central importance in trinitarian doctrinal development, namely, Karl Barth and Karl Rahner.

I have coined the phrase ontological-economic Trinity to express Lee’s understanding of the Trinity as having its full existence in the economic domain. In Lee’s conception, there is no immanent Trinity in the sense of three divine persons existing in a separate, eternal domain. The only Trinity, understood as entity, in Lee is the economic Trinity. As such, Lee’s idea of the Trinity is both economic and ontological, that is, expressive of the fullness of God’s being in the created order.

As to how this conception relates to Rahner’s dictum that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa, Rahner’s formulation brings to light a twofold truth; first, that any consideration of the nature of the triune God cannot leave out its economic implications, and, second, that divine action in salvation history reveals something decisive and truthful about the nature of the triune God. On these terms, the Trinity is seen as the mystery of salvation.⁵

Among the differing interpretations of Rahner’s Rule are Lee’s own reading of the rule as consistent with his articulation of the transcendent and economic dimensions of God as two aspects of one and the same thing in a single (temporal) plane of existence, God as subsisting solely in the economy.⁶ Indeed, in a bid to articulate the distinctiveness of the immanent and economic Trinity as not only mutually inclusive but different in a manner akin to yin and yang, Lee modifies the rule to read: "The immanent Trinity is in the economic Trinity and the economic Trinity is in the immanent Trinity."⁷ This expresses how the immanent and economic Trinity are neither one and the same thing nor two completely different things, but two things which complement each other: the immanent Trinity understood as nature is necessary as the source of the Trinity’s economic manifestation and the economic Trinity is necessary as the actualization of the immanent Trinity understood as nature.⁸

Barth, as well, is inclined to focus more on the economic sphere of God’s action, speaking of God as existing in three modes or ways of being, Seinswesen, and linking these to their respective and complementary epistemological functions. As far as both Barth and Rahner are interested in expounding God’s action in the dynamic realm of the created order in relation to God’s nature, Lee can be said, in these broad terms, to stand in a similar tradition.

It will be noticed that Lee’s exposition of God as Change with the use of terms such as becoming harkens to ideas of relativity and process found in process theology. Irrespective of this, and consistent with his emphasis on achieving complementarity between diverse views and things in general, Lee distances himself from the label of process theology in The Theology of Change.⁹ Lee sees himself rather as synthesizing substance-based and process theologies.

There is much in Lee’s thought that agrees with process theology. For instance, he analyzes God from the viewpoint of a matrix of becoming, in the sense of the obverse of being. However, this change on the part of God is not development or evolution, in the process theistic sense, of the world as part of God’s being by moving from a primordial or conceptual pole of all possibilities toward the actualization of these possibilities in the form of a consequent or physical pole. This divine evolution in process theism takes place through a process in which God holds up ideal possibilities for free moral agents to choose from among other options. In this way, the process theistic God is capable not only of sympathizing with God’s creatures but experiencing their sufferings in God’s own being.

In the sense both of God being able to empathise with God’s creatures in their suffering and joy, and being dynamic rather than static, Lee’s conception of God agrees with process theism in this outward sense. While Lee’s thought includes the prism of becoming, he does not abandon the theology of being entirely. Therefore Lee speaks of God in terms of a settled entity, as the center and axis of the regular patterns of change in the world, as a dynamism-in-being. God as Change is a being in a particular, that is, loving, relationship within Godself and with the created order.

In this manner, God is not a being in search of a higher perfection but already, in Godself, God is a settled being, settled in the patterns and relationships along which God moves Godself and into which God seeks to induct God’s creatures in order that they, too, might, like God, move themselves in accordance with the way of God as Change.

Concerning my theological position in relation to the history of twentieth-century trinitarian thought and beyond, I may be located within a stream that seeks to draw both strands of the immanent and economic Trinity together, and may therefore be identified to a degree with a new wave of thinkers, including Thomas Forsyth Torrance, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Elizabeth Johnson, characterized by a gradual restoration of interest in the study of the immanent Trinity.¹⁰

This is the point at which we will consider the inclusion of an evangelical perspective as an orientation by which to assess the merits of Lee’s theological work. The intention is not to prop up evangelical theology as a standard or norm for other streams of theology, but rather, and quite simply, because Lee himself was an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church (UMC) in the United States. The UMC, being Methodist, has roots dating to the eighteenth-century evangelical revival and movement of which the charismatic English Anglican cleric John Wesley was a pioneering figure.

Having covered the ground of theological and sociocultural location of Lee and Chua, we shall proceed in the next section to furnish an outline of the monograph.

The Contours of the Monograph

The twentieth century saw the emergence of a number of theologians and seminal thinkers from Asia, such as C. S. Song (Taiwan), Peter Phan (Vietnam), and Sang Hyun Lee (Korea), among others, who for political and economic reasons took up residence in America. Among them, the Korean American theology professor Jung Young Lee (1935–1996) specifically analyzes the doctrine of the Trinity from the perspective of an East Asian-originated metaphysical framework.

In aid of his ambitious theological reconstruction of the cardinal Christian doctrine, Lee appropriates the dialectical paradigm of Change from the eponymous Yijing/I Ching (the Book of Changes), a collection of symbols originally used for divination but subsequently given philosophical meaning by imperial and Confucian commentators over many centuries. Lee makes the tenets of the Change metaphysic and its constituent elements of yin and yang the entire interpretive grid of his doctrinal system, which results from an attempt to read the Christian Scriptures from that framework.

On the basis of the comprehensiveness of the scope and intention of Lee’s theological enterprise, Lee can be assessed to be not just an Asian American but a systematic theologian in his own right. The aim of this monograph will be to make that case. In engaging in a description of Lee’s theological system, we will consider the personal, intellectual, and cultural context of Lee’s theology (ch. 1); expound his doctrine of God as Change with an outline of yin-yang philosophy (ch. 2); and articulate his reconstructed doctrine of the Trinity (ch. 3).

In the second major section, we will assess and consider Lee’s theological system on the basis of four conditions he identifies as goals and guidelines in The Trinity in Asian Perspective. These are the system’s agreement with the testimony of the Scriptures (ch. 4);¹¹ its complementarity with existing theological systems;¹² its ability to comprehend the social dimensions of trinitarian thought;¹³ and its relevance to culture. In regard to the three latter points, we will explore how Lee’s theology serves to enrich social Trinity theory (ch. 5) and the classical trinitarian tradition as represented in the thought of the Cappadocian fathers (ch. 6) in a culturally relevant way. We conclude with a statement concerning the reason Lee should be considered to be a true systematic theologian from the East who brings Asian philosophical thought-forms to bear on present-day discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity (ch. 7).

Along the way, we will examine how Lee’s theological construction satisfies other self-identified conditions including balancing masculine with feminine aspects in the Trinity,¹⁴ not being dependent on Western validation, addressing the symbolic nature of theological conceptions of God, being cosmocentric in its approach,¹⁵ being able to reinterpret ideas about the divine persons, and holding practical implications. We will also examine theological consequences of Lee’s doctrine and its cultural reception. The object of this study, to establish Lee as a systematic theologian, is crucial given the relative lack of attention to Lee’s major works from the systematic theological fraternity.

In the final section of this introduction, we will explore the benefits of engaging in an academic study of Lee’s trinitarian theology.

On the Value of Studying Lee

Lee’s thought as an academic subject is essential in that it provides a powerful anchor in its paradigm of complementarity for further and wider theological engagement. This remains the case in his conception of the Trinity. This benefit of securing a new and helpful lens through which to view all of reality and systematize our observations from experience and interpretation of the Christian Scriptures in relevant and constructive connection to wider academia can hardly be overstated.

It holds the key to a resolution of an internal conflict predominantly experienced by Christian members of a non-Western culture and ethnicity, beyond the boundaries of the historic heartlands of Christianity, illuminating the way toward and modeling the development of a systematic theology that is truly global, culturally sensitive, and diversity oriented, as well as fully integrated, one that offers an olive branch to members of all cultures and other religious groups, and enables a theologian and Christian to embrace the value of both the Christian tradition and contemporary streams of cultural theology, in true respect for the spirit of the both-and and inclusive mindset and mood of Jung Young Lee, arguably a systematic theologian from East Asia in the non-Western world.

2

. Bevans, Essays in Contextual Theology,

2

.

3

. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God,

2

.

4

. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God,

163

–

64

.

5

. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God,

217

.

6

. Cf. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology,

330

–

31

.

7

. J. Lee, TAP,

68

.

8

. Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics

3.2

, §

46

.

4

, p.

398

.

9

. This is a place only to make a broadly brushstroked, physiognomic reference to process theology without engaging its details. A succinct summary is furnished by Feinberg, Process Theology.

10

. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God,

1

–

5

.

11

. J. Lee, TAP,

12

.

12

. J. Lee, TAP,

12

.

13

. J. Lee, TAP,

17

.

14

. J. Lee, TAP,

17

.

15

. J. Lee, TAP,

18

.

1

An Overview of the Life and Career of Jung Young Lee

An Intellectual Biography

¹

This will be a full-length study dedicated to an assessment of the late twentieth-century Korean American theology professor Jung Young Lee (1935–1996) as a systematic theologian on his own terms.² Lee applies the term Korean American to himself to give expression to the fact that he is neither completely Korean nor American but in a very real sense a product of two cultures, a tertium quid if you will, with its own cultural identity and distinctions. His full-blown thinking on this matter of his self-understanding, self-identity, and self-consciousness did not emerge until the summer (US) in 1991. Then, he visited North Korea after more than forty years, and the visit brought about the realization that as well as being not American though he lived in America, he was also not like a Korean person living in North Korea.

For Lee, personal experience is key to theology. This can be seen, as we will show, from the way he engages in a life-long struggle to bring Asian thought-forms to bear on the language of Christian theology, which has largely been shaped by thinkers around and within what has become known as the European region, so as to bring his theology more into conformity with his own culture and ethnicity—and this because he firmly believes that as an Asian, he inevitably thinks in an Asian way. Needless to say, he sees an autobiographical aspect to his theological thinking.³ As such, an attempt to situate Lee in the context of his personal background and encounters will yield fruitful insight. Therefore, I will present in this chapter an outline of Lee’s life and career and a brief survey of his works and the principal themes in his theological thought.

Showing whether and how Lee manages to express Christian theology from an Asian point of view constitutes the burden of this study. In our attempt to address these questions, we will consider the type of interpretive framework Lee brings to his theology and how it qualifies to be called Asian; show the manner in which he integrates this into his theological conception of the Trinity; compare his method with those of other theologians, particularly, the Cappadocian fathers with whom, I shall argue, Lee shares some common concerns; and articulate the substantive theological contribution he thereby makes. In this way, we will embark to do more than produce another book on Lee; indeed, we will seek to show how Lee makes a genuine contribution to Christian theology as a whole.

In the following section, we will outline major moments in Lee’s life that may have contributed to the development of his theological thinking. We will begin with Lee’s birth in what is today North Korea, trace his life from childhood to being an adult, follow important events that took place with his move to the United States, and highlight key points of his later life in America.

An Autobiographical Account of the Emergence of Lee’s Korean American Theology

Born in 1935 in a village called Hyangbong-Ri in Suncheon, Pyeonganbuk-do, near Pyongyang in what is today North Korea⁴ during the Japanese occupation of the then unified country, Lee was raised in a strict Confucian family. He perceived his father as a distant figure who could not be approached directly but required a mediator in the form of his mother, who played the role of gentle caregiver. Lee was exposed early on to an experience of Christianity during his younger days in his village.⁵

By his own account, he did not gain the conviction to become a Christian until he attended a revival meeting on Mount South in Seoul, a few weeks before he went to the United States for his studies. Twenty years of age at the time, in early July 1955, at around 4 a.m., Lee had an ecstatic olfactory experience during the well-attended and lively Christian meeting while worshipping and praying with thousands of other people in a tent over a sustained period of time without food or drink, which put him mystically and intimately in touch with the divine through the media of different smells and, in this way, convinced him of the truth of the Christian faith, led him to his personal conversion, and contributed to his decision to become a Christian minister.⁶

Lee’s warming up to the Christian faith and his ever-deepening involvement in his spirituality as a Christian took place and can be better understood in the context of his escape to South Korea for his safety, the time he spent there, and his subsequent move to America. During the unpredictable and very difficult war years from 1950 to 1953, it was the United Nations military that came to the rescue of South Korea, countering an invasion from the North.⁷ Here, the association between the American army and the missionary movement in Korea would have played a role in creating a favorable impression of Christianity for Lee as for many others.

Lee’s Christian affiliation, however, would engender in later years, when he was considering ordained ministry, a straining of the parental tie with his father. Lee’s father was strongly resistant to the prospect of his son becoming a pastor in view of the fact that he felt that Christian ministers tended to be dishonest.⁸ Lee was compelled to choose between his ministerial calling and his father, and endured a fraught relationship with his father and also his brother when he eventually went ahead to become a minister with the United Methodist Church in America in 1961.

Lee fled to South Korea as a refugee of the Korean War and lived there for five years. His time in that place was by no means easy. During the last three years of the war—Lee and his father crossed the border between the two Koreas on January 1, 1951⁹—Lee reported tremendous suffering on his part due to a constant need to find food and shelter.¹⁰

Lee recounts in an essay published after his death how he welcomed with great enthusiasm and optimism the opportunity to move to the United States in 1955 as an economic refugee of the Korean War. He was among only a small number of students who were selected for tertiary education in America, and he compares his relocation to America to the Israelites’ entry into the promised land of Canaan, further describing the educational opportunity in a rich and peaceful land as the highest aspiration of my life.¹¹ He fondly recalls how the head of a family which sponsored his stay in America as a foreign student was a Methodist minister who showed empathy toward him and helped him to make a difficult adjustment to life in America.¹²

It was with deep hope that Lee went over to America. Just as he welcomed his educational opportunities in the United States, he also lay himself open to the possibility of becoming an ordained minister within the Christian church in America. When Lee travelled to the United States, he settled down first in Ohio. His first degree was not in theology but chemistry: a bachelor of science degree from the University of Findlay, Ohio, conferred in 1957. He obtained a bachelor of divinity degree from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1961, and that year was ordained an elder with the Ohio Conference of the United Methodist Church at Lakeside, Ohio. In 1968, he earned a doctor of theology degree from the Boston University School of Theology, with a concentration in systematic theology and comparative religion.

As a member of a mixed ethnic-national minority group in the United States, Lee was confronted with numerous instances of discrimination to which he would have to develop a personal response in the context of his interpersonal interactions as well as academic engagement, for instance, on the identity and role of culturally marginalized groups in a society dominated by a majority group. Lee’s journey toward a deeper self-identity and cultural self-understanding and belonging would begin not long after his arrival to the United States. Three incidents he shares in his writings afford a glimpse into the brushes he faced in relation to the dominant cultural group as a member of a cultural minority.

Around 1960, while serving as youth minister at a United Methodist Church in Toledo, Ohio, Lee encountered a ten-year-old boy outside a shopping mall who shouted, Hey, Chinaman! The child pointed at Lee in the presence of a crowd. Feeling shamed in public, Lee gently corrected the boy, informing him that he was not Chinese but Korean. The boy dismissed the clarification: Korean! It doesn’t matter. You are a Chinaman to me. He felt marginalized and discriminated by the remark, because he was not understood and respected as a member of his own ethnic Korean community.¹³

Lee had another unpleasant experience in June 1961. He had completed his seminary education and was due to be ordained an elder of the United Methodist Church. He passed the final review of candidates by the Board of Ministerial Qualifications, but the chairman informed him that no church in the conference wished to have him as their pastor, in view of his ethnicity. Naturally, Lee reacted angrily to the decision and discriminatory perception of the chairman, whose remarks implied that he did not regard Lee as a full member of the local American community.¹⁴

Earlier than 1970, when he had started teaching theology at Otterbein College in Ohio, Lee was posed a question by a freshman who asked him how much he knew about Christianity being an Asian person.¹⁵ The student refused to see Lee as a member of the American community; instead, he recategorized Lee in such a way as to imply that he had nothing to do with the American culture, referring to him as just an Asian. There and then, Lee perceived the question as a clear sign of an obtrusion by a member of a cultural majority group upon his self-identity. He conceded that he had thought of the student as an outrageous racist, though eventually he came round to the view that the student meant no harm, and was simply speaking out of his uncritical perspective that a non-European and non-American person could not truly understand Christianity. The overarching and questionable assumption, of course, was that Christianity has to be based on Western cultural presuppositions.¹⁶

Lee’s project of theologically defining the identity and role of culturally marginalized groups began in earnest in the late 1970s. The date of his self-realization of his true cultural identity can be determined based on Lee’s highlighting, in his work on the theology of the experience of the culturally marginalized, that he developed a sense of being between the American and Korean cultures when he landed himself a permanent teaching role in Seoul, because even though he sought to find solace by returning to South Korea, he realized that his naturalization in the United States led to his becoming an outsider in Korea.¹⁷ This was possibly 1977, the year he taught at Seoul National University and Ewha Women’s University for a year. Although it was a permanent job, Lee said he had to return to America after a period. After that time, Lee began designating himself Korean American. This first occurred in a sermon preached to a small church in North Dakota, the Concrete United Methodist Church. He was involved in the ministry of this church during his teaching stint at the University of North Dakota, where he taught from 1972 to 1989.¹⁸ Yet the sermon collection was published in 1988. As such, the sermon would have been publicly delivered no later than 1988 and no earlier than 1977.

Lee as Writer, Communicator, and Thinker

Among the first observations that will be made of Lee’s writings is that although prolific as an academic and theological author and intentional in his relentless efforts to arrive at a relevantly structured presentation of his theology, he does not write in a technical or conceptual manner but communicates his thought primarily and mostly in a pithy, proverbial fashion in sentences pregnant with meaning and often symbolic significance. As a case in point, he writes about the concept of God as Change without actually providing a formal definition of the concept.

It was his dissertation supervisor who awakened him to his distinctive way of thinking when he commented on the first draft of his thesis: Your style of writing is quite different from ours. You have a tendency to repeat, but you repeat in such a way that your repetitions are not repetitious.¹⁹

Lee admits that when he arrived in the United States as a young student, he devoted himself to the study of Western theology. Despite his best efforts, however, he was unable to reform his internal mode of thought, which was Asian.²⁰

The effect of his dissertation supervisor’s remark about his first draft was to draw his attention to his origins and inaugurate a conscientization on the part of Lee in relation to his ethnic distinctiveness, bringing about a conscious endeavour to more fully cognize his Asian mode of thought.²¹ Set on a new course to return to his roots, Lee was assisted by his opportunity to teach Asian philosophy and religions at a liberal arts college and state university for nearly two decades.²²

If the seeming lack of clarity in Lee’s writing is due precisely to his style of expression rather than any actual imprecision of his ideas, there is room for a more precise and rational systematization of Lee’s thinking. Furthermore, his unique manner of expression does not lend itself easily to a reading which attempts to latch onto statements as vital signposts, much less semantically decisive repositories of ideas. Instead, it will be necessary to read Lee’s published theological output fully and meticulously if adequate comprehension is to be achieved.

Like much of the Christian Scriptures, Lee’s theological works are characterized by an occasional tenor—that is, they are more often than not directed at particular situations, settings, and contexts—and he appears to be communicating, as a pastor or preacher does, to the individual reader, in an attempt to gently nurture both an understanding of the mind and an acceptance of the heart rather than remaining at the level of cognition. This is as such not a flaw but a different, and no less effective, mode of communication which permits of conceptual systematization.

Moreover, the heavy use of yin-yang symbolism in Lee’s thinking means that his writings have to be read in accordance with their own canons of interpretation. Some of the most significant features and assumptions of his thinking are the connectedness or synchronicity of all reality,²³ the capacity of yin-yang symbolism to produce an integrated understanding of the world, and the prime need to relate Asian symbols like yin and yang to the Bible and theology so as to deepen comprehension of meanings that might be latent in the latter.

Lee can be said to be an integrative thinker in the best and literal sense of the word, always trying to bring together all aspects and different perceptions of reality, even and especially apparently conflictual ones. His writings have to be felt mystically and grasped according to the appropriate rules of interpretation in order to be properly understood; as he notes, the rules of interpretation for religious language are quite different from those for scientific language.²⁴ Lee advises in respect of theology: In meditation the concentration of mind and heart in the single reality is possible.²⁵

In all of this, Lee is surely not out to exclude any viewpoint for to do so would be to run contrary to his culturally relevant, integrative and, by implication, inclusive approach. When he seems to reject civilization,²⁶ the transmission of original sin through procreation,²⁷ or Western theology in general,²⁸ sometimes with a less than nuanced style, what he is really doing is simply taking issue with the faulty or, to him, unacceptable, assumptions that he thinks have led to a lopsided view of life and its purpose. Some of these presuppositions, respectively, are that the way to succeed in life is to dominate and exercise power and control over others and pursue a position of authority; that sex is evil; and that God is unable to share authentically in human pain because God is not genuinely at a loss, knowing everything. To combat these dominant paradigms and convey these difficult and inconvenient ideas in an effective manner, Lee resorts to the use of an anti-exclusivist rhetoric and frequently adopts a homiletical style. Lee was after all an ordained minister who served in at least two churches,²⁹ and not just a preacher but a self-conscious one who was concerned about clarity of communication and tried to ensure that in his own way. He often writes not merely for the specialist but frequently also for the untrained member of the church.³⁰

A Brief Overview of Lee’s Theological Output: Principal Themes and Developments

A prolific author, Lee wrote some fifteen books and fifty articles during the course of his academic career. Most significant for determining his theology are his treatments of the Trinity in The Trinity in Asian Perspective (1996); of what it means to speak of God in terms of the concept of Change in the Book of Changes in his Cosmic Religion (1973); of the theology of the suffering of God in God Suffers for Us: A Systematic Inquiry into a Concept of Divine Passibility (1974); of his anthropology in The I: A Christian Concept of Man (1971); of what he calls a theology of Change as informing Christian doctrine in The Theology of Change: A Christian Concept of God in an Eastern Perspective (1979); and of the theology of marginalized people in Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology (1995).³¹

Collectively, these books were written over twenty-five years, the earliest being The I, published in 1971, and the