I’m very glad I read The Bible and Asia once, but I doubt I’ll read it again. Make no mistake, R .S. Sugirtharajah’s new book is an unambiguously impressive survey of contrarian hermeneutics in an Asian context. Here Sugirtharajah has assembled a motley choir of Asian authors who find themselves singing from multiple scripts: the text of the Bible itself, the holy texts of other Asian faiths, the scripts imposed by various foreign and local colonial powers, and of course the scripts of their home cultures.
The Bible and Asia: From the Pre-Christian Era to the Postcolonial Age
Harvard University Press
320 pages
$41.00
Postmodern biblical hermeneutics in this hypertextual environment yields (predictably) a cacophony: a result neither melodious nor harmonious but certainly instructive. Sugirtharajah himself is unapologetic about his agenda; he intends to assess the progress of self-consciously Asian hermeneutics so far, suggesting a path forward that increasingly values local contexts over and above any allegiance to the Bible itself and that simultaneously asserts itself as distinct yet fully equal to dominant Western modes of thinking and interpretation.
All this is a lot too much for a slim volume to bear and The Bible and Asia shows the strain at times. With the constraints of a 100-level introductory course in mind, Sugirtharajah has had to pick his Asian voices carefully. Aware he has no hope of covering the field adequately, he has nevertheless done his best to squeeze as many voices as possible into his book. The result is rather like browsing through a series of heavily filtered selfies on Instagram: one gets a blurred and tinted sense of a particular face and place before being rushed off to consider the next contrarian voice in Asian hermeneutics.
Helpfully, these voices are at least structured around chapter themes: Paul in Asia, the Bible in Asian fiction, traces of Asia in the Bible itself, and several chapters covering the hermeneutical projects of colonial administrators and the contrarian voices of colonized Asians. Grouping voices this way undoubtedly makes for easier reading, but it also allows Sugirtharajah to impose his own structure and perspective on the subject as a whole. In each chapter we are treated to a comparison of authors normally not considered together and of course to Sugirtharajah’s own perspective on the issue at hand.
All this makes entertaining reading for hermeneutics nerds to be sure, but whether Sugirtharajah’s effort succeeds in constructing a coherent and well-supported thesis is another matter. Quite frankly, Sugirtharajah’s own animosity toward what he calls the “innate colonial impulses” of the Bible make reading the book itself a bit tedious. More seriously, his antagonism toward the Bible itself more or less requires him to ignore Asian authors who don’t view the Bible his way and further tints the voices he selects for his book.
One of the voices chosen for inclusion in the chapter on Asian fiction is Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Catholic author known for his spare historical novels that strain to welcome Catholic faith and teachings into Japanese and Asian contexts. Endo’s characters are complex and angstridden, and his corpus cannot be easily and comfortably filed away as either orthodox or heretical.
Regardless of space constraints, I was quite surprised to find Sugirtharajah summarizing Endo on the Bible in one paragraph. After a single anecdotal reference from Yellowman, Sugirtharajah feels free to conclude that Endo saw the Bible as a “mean and merciless book” that “communicates God’s displeasure and judgment.” But Endo’s characters (much less his own attitude) cannot be pigeonholed so easily; in the end, Sugirtharajah’s cherry-picking approach colors over the complexity of Endo’s work and leads me to question the legitimacy of other authorial portraits featured in the book. Given the prominence of Sugirtharajah’s own agenda throughout, how often are we meeting the authors he selects under false pretenses?
With its heavy-duty title, I kept hoping that The Bible and Asia would feature not only heterodox stories but orthodox ones too. I wanted to hear from missionaries like Francis Xavier or from Bible translators ancient and modern or read about the experience of the Karelan church and their special relationship to the Apostle Thomas. More than that, I wanted to be introduced to a wider selection of Asian pastoral voices; besides the usual suspects like Watchman Nee or Jayakumar Christian, who else has written on the challenges of the ministry of the Word in Asia?
Unfortunately, Sugirtharajah’s self-consciously postmodern and anti-Western agenda seems to have kept him from including any of these voices directly. In The Bible and Asia, missionaries are mentioned only obliquely as opponents; they are portrayed as powerful and cunning adversaries who use all the tools at their disposal to subjugate the Asians around them. Given such a hostile perception of the missionary project, it’s understandable that Sugirtharajah completely ignores missionaries and their Asian pastoral successors, instead privileging only those voices who seem suitably focused on resisting the colonizer.
This is a pity, because Asia’s pastors are by no means so in thrall to Western modes of thinking that they cannot articulate their own perspective on the ministry of the Word in the Asian church. Works like Waterbuffalo Theology by Kosuke Koyama and God of the Empty-Handed by Jayakumar Christian offer glimpses of the role of the Word in Asia that are simultaneously compelling and deeply discomforting; they articulate a deeply orthodox biblical hermeneutic that is not afraid to be severely critical of Western theology and hermeneutics where necessary. Sugirtharajah does his readers a disservice by overlooking these voices in favor of exclusively contrarian hermeneutical interpretations.
Beyond authorial selections and interpretations, I found myself disagreeing with Sugirtharajah over a more fundamental question: is the Bible an Asian book or not? In his introduction, Sugirtharajah suggests that precolonial Christian history in Asia was dominated by a “gentler and less triumphalist” Christianity that came complete with its own set of Scriptures: the Jesus Sutras, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Acts of Thomas.
Sugirtharajah sees these texts and their associated precolonial faith erased with the advent of colonialism and the modern Bible, which he sees as “a very European book” that has “lost all its oriental traits.” For Sugirtharajah, the codification of the Bible itself is a significant problem, since it prioritizes certain voices over other allegedly more Asian perspectives.
In his first chapter he sets out to right this wrong by recovering Asian perspectives and influences on the biblical text itself. Unfortunately, Sugirtharajah is so eager to “shatter the West’s pervasive presence” in biblical studies that he is quite willing to support a violent hermeneutic that rips the biblical text apart if the result is a reading that is somehow more Asian.
One example will suffice: Sugirtharajah enlists Rudolf Otto, a 19th-century German comparative theologian, to make his point that certain core theological ideas about Jesus may be essentially Asian (and specifically Aryan). Sugirtharajah repeats Otto’s assertions that the linkage between “Son of God” and “Son of Man” has no Old Testament antecedent whatsoever and should therefore be regarded as an idea with “no Jewish equivalent” that is therefore ripe for categorization as an Asian borrowing. Ignoring the amply supported Jewish Messianic context of both terms, Sugirtharajah credits Otto’s theory that the terms are essentially about a mysterious, semi-divine figure of “Aryan” origin. Unfortunately, Sugirtharajah supplies no other evidence for this re-reading of the term and is content to make the point and move on to a discussion of Pauline resurrection and its supposed origins in the Kausitaki Upanishad.
It’s a shame the book includes hit-and-run hermeneutics like this. The Bible and Asia is already chock-full of Asian voices, nearly all of whom are suitably critical of all things Western and to all appearances fully aligned with Sugirtharajah’s anti-colonial thesis. Given the impressive hermeneutical choir he’s assembled, it’s not clear why Sugirtharajah feels obligated to go further and surface a seemingly random collection of voices convinced about the Asian origin of one idea or another in the Bible. Even in a brief survey, this sort of cavalier treatment of the biblical text seems crude; Sugirtharajah has plenty of voices who can make his broader point without resorting to ripping apart biblical texts themselves in search of some sort of ill-defined distinctively “Asian” influence on the Bible.
And yet, despite all this, The Bible and Asia is well worth a read. Here Sugirtharajah and I are in lockstep: the near total dominance of Western thinking in biblical hermeneutics means any new voices, however heterodox or seemingly cacophonous, are welcome onstage. Whether we agree with them or not, hearing the voices collected here by Sugirtharajah can make us better and more attentive readers of our Bibles, softening our inevitable and often unconscious Western biases and opening our ears to the perspective of other Bible readers around the globe.
Perhaps in reading books like The Bible and Asia, warts and all, we westerners can be reminded of the value of listening to others first and talking second, particularly since after two millennia we still sit at the head of the common Christian table. In this context, I am reminded of Jesus himself leaving his place and washing his disciples’ feet one by one. In the same way, westerners might draw closer to the Savior by spending time away from our own place at the table so that we might honor those in less powerful positions. Though he might take issue with the metaphor, surely R. S. Sugirtharajah himself would appreciate the value of such a project!
Nate Jones was born and raised in Indonesia and the Philippines and reads Asian theology around the edges of a career as an internet marketer and entrepreneur.He lives in Seattle with his wife, Charity.
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