Towards a Chinese American Ecclesiology: Why We Should Bother

Writing, they say, is thinking.  And although I don't know who "they" are, I agree.  Writing organizes our thoughts.  For some reason, the very act of scribing and seeing the words written often illuminates the darkest recesses of our minds.  Writing, I suppose, critiques us because we see ourselves in our words on public domain.  Writing, in other words, is witness.  Ergo, Ephesians 4:29.

I do not claim this task is a walk around the park.  Indeed, good writers know that one can never be proficient at the art.  Perhaps, I might suggest, original sin has included a limitation on the ability of human communication through the written word.  Thus, the necessity of the visual arts, the performing arts, the musical arts, etc.  Either that, or the fact that we are not God but mere images of God.

A dissertation, on the other hand, is a whole other animal.  It is a scary task.  It is not just reflection, but sustained reflection on a matter that I know I will not finish reflecting on in the course of a lifetime.  It is reflection on matters that only God (and maybe a few others in the single digits) would find useful, much less interesting.  Thus, it is a "quiet time" exponentiated.  In a world of instantaneity, impatience, and generally suspicious of the act of "waiting on the Lord," a dissertation is a worldly waste of time.  Yet, this is a reflection I was called towards, a task I was given to do by my professors and God.  And it is a reflection of who I am in the interstitiality between world and heaven, East and West, and a hope that in that interstitiality, God is waiting.  The Lord is my shepherd.

So what am I reflecting on in a sustained fashion?  The wider, grander project - one that only God and a single-digit number of others might find interesting - is a systematic theology from a Chinese American perspective.  What may surprise some readers is whether systematic theology can be done from a Chinese American perspective at all.  Isn't God, for instance, three-in-one, Holy Trinity?  How is theology "American", "Chinese", or "Chinese American" for that matter.  The rationale for this articulation is very simple: none of us have seen God.  We cannot encounter God on an empirical level.  None of us have touched God, felt God, elbowed God.  None of us can describe God with affirmative precision.  I have, however, encountered my mom.  She is 5'8, with dyed black hair, for instance.  This affirmative precision is impossible with God.

But, you may say, we have beheld Jesus.  Unfortunately no, we have not.  If we had, we wouldn't need the New Testament.  Our Christian forebears, however, had.  And they had the wisdom to write it down 200 years after Christ's death so the message can continue to be passed on through the generations.  The Jesus that tradition and biblical exegeses have described is told from certain cultural and theological vantage points.  The Scriptures, firmly stated, are not epistemological equivalents to a Calculus textbook.  If they were, there would not be denominations.  The fact is that everybody interprets Jesus their own way.  Some are contradictory and even silly.  (Jesus as homeboy?  As deliverer of football victories?  As bringer of wealth and health?  Seriously?)  But those that aren't attest to the amazing God who reaches out to all people wherever they are.  Jesus, in other words, is no longer a Nazarene from Palestine.  Jesus has become a Berliner, a Londoner, a New Yorker, a Tokyo-ite, a Beijinger, a Singaporean, a Delhi-ite.  Far from being "out there", Jesus allows himself to be such that we can say, Jesus is my Savior, not simply the Savior.

A Chinese American theology is something that cannot be done in a dissertation; I only have 750 pages with bibliography and footnotes, and my readers know that brevity is to me as perfection is to the state of the world.  However, I have always been members of Chinese American churches.  And I have found that it is often through these churches that Chinese and Chinese Americans know Jesus.  You hear it in baptism testimonies when people describe how they became Christians.  What you won't hear are, "My life is crappy, but then I walked down Stockton Street one day and the Spirit came to me and...'" You get the point.  What you usually hear is, "Someone brought me to this church, and I found the church to be [insert positive adjective here]."

This is not surprising.  Community has always been very much a necessity in Chinese polity.  But when the first immigrants come as strangers to a new land (America), Chinese churches end up being important centers for this community.  Americans, simply put, don't get Chinese ways.  As Confucian scholar Judith A. Berling noted once, many aspects of Chinese culture must be lived in order to be understood.  Furthermore, throughout Chinese American history, racism and discrimination were part of being Chinese American.  The church was a place where such racism and discrimination could not enter.  It was an oasis of familiarity in a desert of foreignness.  And it was in this oasis that Jesus met the first Chinese immigrants, and to this day, Chinese immigrants still find Chinese churches oases; Yellow Peril still exists, adapting itself to the 21st century.

But there is one difference between the Chinese America of the 19th and the 21st centuries; in the latter, Chinese Americans are considered White.  White, as you will recall from my other blog posts on the subject, is not an ethnic identity; it is a racial identity, artificially created and imposed.  White is privilege.  White is supremacy.  Euro-Americans are not necessarily White, and Blacks can be White as well.  Yet, we are not White; we do not enjoy the same privileges as the Whites.  We need to work twice as hard to "compensate" for the fact that, in reality, we are not White.  There is no justice when Asian Americans won't be taken seriously in society unless they are productive cogs in the capitalist machine.  Admired for the productivity and economic output, but yet a source of anxiety for the possibility that they may overtake the Empire that is the United States... this is the White Peril of the 21st century.  And we see this today when President Obama declared a "pivot" towards Asia.  Asia's rise is anxious for a declining West.

And yet, the Chinese American church doesn't always fight back against such unjust structures.  We don't seem to be aware of it, more content to just "play along with the system," and not stirring the pot too much.  We accept a Jesus of privilege without question.  We accept a Jesus whose only preoccupation seems to ensure that "Thy will be done" involves the Trinity of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.  And the only Chinese American Jesus doesn't work as a carpenter in Nazareth - oh hell no! - he works as an engineer, a medical doctor, a lawyer, or a highly-respected professor.  Never mind, by the way, that the very people that incurred Jesus' rebukes in the New Testament were modern equivalents of the lawyer, the doctor, the engineer, and definitely the professors.  I wonder if that, perhaps, is why the prosperity gospel is so popular in East Asia.

We can, of course, voice from the perspective of the trenches of ministry that this requires pastoral courage.  We need, the "voice of Vashti," perhaps.  But the fact is that in playing along with the system, I think the Chinese American church will always keep playing along unless we rethink of what it means to be the church.  What does it mean to be a Chinese American church, or a Chinese church in America?  What does it mean to be people straddling the interstitial space of two Empires?  And in the midst of these sociopolitical locating, where can we find Jesus?  Where do we see Jesus call to us and say, "I am here - follow me"?

The first Chinese churches in the United States were Presbyterian or, in some cases, involved Presbyterians.  One of the reasons that Presbyterianism is attractive, perhaps, is its emphasis on order.  You will not find a Pentecostal Presbyterian church anytime soon; there is an order to worship, an order to the administration of the Church, an order to how God hath ordained the world. You may, perhaps, say we are predestined for order!  But yet, we enjoy the freedom of the will.  The Spirit works often outside of established order.  And so Presbyterian polity has always straddled the tension between Order and Freedom.  But what is Order?  What is Freedom?  Why are both theological necessities in the nature of the Church?  And why might Calvin have found these attributes necessary for God's mission through the church?

My claim is that what crossed the Pacific were not just Chinese, but Chinese culture. (No surprises here.)  Confucian thought has always prized order.  Heaven's will is accomplishable only when a prescribed order is assiduously maintained.  The well-being of the Commons is at stake!  And so for thousands of years, a feudal and socially hierarchical system remained unchanged.  China always saw itself as the "middle kingdom," with all other races as barbarians.  Thus, when the tendrils of Japanese and European empire entered China, it was insulting.  But it did nothing to change what is Han racism.  We see this in Taiwan where, despite the rhetoric on independence, the aboriginal Taiwanese remain some of the most oppressed people on the island.  We see this in China, where minority groups are often sidelined, privileging the Han majority.  We see this in the Chinese diaspora when Chinese churches split, not for theological reasons, but because Cantonese groups can't get along with Mandarin groups.  At stake here is this: the Order that "Heaven" ordained must be maintained.

Thus, Order and Freedom is a critique of the Chinese American church.  Let's face it: we are racist.  Multiculturalism works only when everyone else thinks like us.  When everyone is like us.  This is Whiteness.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ does not conform the world to fit into our versions of reality, but it frees us to be who God created us to be.  And sometimes, that means being not like us.  It is the ying/yang of ecclesiology; Freedom makes sense in the presence of Order, and Order can only be witness in the presence of Freedom.  A sense of order allows for a critical-syncretic (I am utilizing Kuan-Hsing Chen's term regarding East Asian regional politics) relationship between Chinese American groups, while releasing the Spirit to work through the church as a whole.  It frees us to ask questions with others, to seek God with others, to explore possibilities of witness in the resistance of Orientalist tendencies in White America, to show that God created Chinese Americans and God saw we were good (as good as the African Americans or Latin@ Americans, etc.)

From there, we are able to ask ourselves, What is the God that such a community worships?  Thus, I make another claim (one that might rile Vaticanistas): Chinese American theology begins with the Chinese American community.  How we live together attests to what God must be like.  That is why church politics is so pernicious; when church becomes so divisive, people will see God as strangely internally-divisive.  It's not like the church's witness can be excused by saying "God is perfect, the church is not."  No - in the Chinese American mindset, we know God only because the church was there.  Thus, the dissertation begins with a Reformed understanding of Order and Freedom in ecclesiology, which leads to us asking how these two attributes are important in the Chinese church, and allowing us to be rebuked and yet advanced in finding a new and more faithful way of being Church in a world self-destructing from its own individualism.