The Church As Theological Method (1)

Takeuchi Yoshimi was an eminent Japanese scholar of Chinese literature and is an authority of the Chinese author Lu Xun. During WWII, he was one of the few who disagreed with the Japanese imperialist project and was a "voice in the wilderness" in the Pacific theater of WWII.  One of the few East Asian critical theorists around, Yoshimi was likewise perturbed by the identification of the West with modernity. Thus, Japan's modernization was more accurately described, perhaps, as Japan's Westernization. Even though he claimed China's modernization was more "pure" the fact remains that this modernization still is rooted in the Western intellectual tradition, be it Communism or capitalism.  And thus, the question: how can we preserve something that is uniquely Japanese?

In a presentation, his strategy is interesting.  He notes that it was not as if the West was some sort of utopia.  Values that were typically Western, such as freedom, were historically built on the shoulders of slavery and imperialism.  Thus, what we see in modernized countries is not only a repetition of the mistakes of the West, but also one in which the West sees the darker side of Western modernization because someone else (right now, it's China) is using the playbook and doing better.  This is, I suppose, a prefiguration of Walter Mignolo's The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011).  What, then, can be done?  He says:

The Orient must re-embrace the West, it must change the West itself in order to realize the latter's outstanding cultural values on a greater scale. Such a rollback of culture or values would create universality.  The Orient must change the West in order to further elevate those universal values that the West itself produced... When this rollback takes place, we must have our own cultural values. And yet perhaps these values do not already exist, in substantive form. Rather I suspect that they are possible as method, that is to say, as the process of the subject's self-formation. This I have called "Asia as Method," and yet it is impossible to state what this might mean.

This may seem surprising.  Wait - by resisting the West, one must "re-embrace" it?  My reading suggests that if the freedoms of the West were so great, then it should embrace it by allowing other countries to develop freedoms in their own contexts (as opposed to enforcing a certain version of freedom with no regard to context).  This can only happen when the Orient critiques the West.  "As iron sharpens iron, so do people sharpen others," as the Proverb goes.  But in the void there must be efforts for subject formation.  That is what he was getting at in proposing an "Asia as Method."  A method is a process for subject formation (I will hereafter refer to this as Method).  Yet, he does not elaborate on it further, leaving it as an open question.

My thesis seems to be this: that Chinese-American ecclesiology is in that sense also a Method.  But this is more importantly a theological Method.  Where Asia as Method seeks to ask "What does it mean to be 'Asian'?" the Chinese-American Church as Method asks, "What does it mean to be a Chinese-American in the Church?"  How does, in other words, ecclesiology inform cultural identity?  Now, I do not wish to enter an extended discussion on the cultural underpinnings of Christianity.  But there are those who seem to view Christianity as some objective reality in the same vein as a mathematics textbook.  I answer in two ways.  (1) Culture is not sin.  It is, rather, something to be celebrated.  Yet, culture is not perfect, and so we do not want to romanticize culture such that it is somehow divorced from its pitfalls.  Some cultures treat women as second-class citizens, and so theology must critique that in serious terms.  Some cultural practices are horrific (e.g. female circumcision) and theology must call that practice out.  (2) Christianity is itself cultured.  A theological conception of Christianity as somehow "beyond culture" is, at the same time, a very "within culture" view, because Christianity is not possible outside of practice, and that practice is always done within a specific cultural framework. 

So how is ecclesiology a theological Method?  I begin with an example: one by way of Calvin's ecclesiology.  John Calvin makes the claim that the church is the community of the Elect - "true Christians" and those who have entered into Resurrection.  In this sense, the Church is called by God; it is elected, so to speak.  This is what Calvin calls the invisible church.  The visible church is the institutional church living in the world.  One is baptized into it, and is fed by the elements of the Eucharist.  But inside this visible church include the dreaded hypocrites, those who just go to church because.  It includes people who were "not really Christian."  Cafeteria Christians.  This, so far, is ecclesiology.  But note what happens that transforms ecclesiology into a subject-formative community.  Reformed theologian John Webster has argued that "the visible attests the invisible."  If that were so, the temptation exists, then, to ensure that the visible (which attests the invisible) is in accordance to the ideals of the invisible.  This is not a matter of inside-out, but an "outside-in because inside-out".  If giving alms attests to already-existing charity in the community, then the temptation exists  to ensure that this almsgiving continues in order that the community can be assured that it is charitable.  Do this enough, and a culture of almsgiving exists.  At the same time though, if we assume that charity is constitutive of election (it is not) then one can give alms without charity but with Kantian duty, thus betraying one's own un-election!

The question, then, is how do we reform the invisible without using the visible as a metric?  This is the goal of Method.  Nobody goes around in China asking people to prove their Chineseness - it is a matter of course because what they do naturally attests to their "insider" status.  The only time this "proof" becomes necessary is when one does something that is not Chinese, thus eliciting doubts of identity.  That is partly why Asian America racism is a problem.  The only visible and external metric that separates us from American is our skin color/biological looks!

One way is for the Church to simply be culture-resistant in the sense that its culture simply is the anti-culture.  Thus, its existence is itself a critique of culture and a counter-culture.  It is this counter-cultural embodiment that comprises Christian witness.  The capitalistic worldview dominating thrives on rabid, self-interested individualism; the Church responds by embodying a community of character.  I am not per se against this idea of witness.  But what I am concerned about is that culture is not static.  Thus, what is counter-cultural yesterday may not be so tomorrow.  Thus, the church is merely "following" in the footsteps of culture.  To avoid this, the church can stake herself within Tradition.  But which Tradition?  And let us not forget that traditions are itself culturally-rooted, and one rooted in ancient Greco-Roman cultures.  That is not to say Greco-Roman cultures are per se bad, but if the Church is looking for a "Church culture" that is dissociative from the cultures "of the world," it will not find it.

The other way is for the church to define the culture.  This is not the same as being counter-cultural.  A Chinese-American church, in this view, articulates a conception of Chinese-America, but one that does not go with the flow with racist ideas of Chinese-America, nor does it endorse a romanticized version of Chinese-America.  This argument would work well with Black churches, Latin@ churches, etc.  Because the fact is, Chinese-Americans are not always in charge of their subject-formation.  How might this be possible?  To answer this, we look at Kuan-Hsing Chen's quest to articulate what Yoshimi meant by "Asia as Method."  I have done it in other blogs (see here and here.) and so I direct you there to learn what is meant by deimperialization, de-Cold War, and decolonization.

The short of it is the simple contention that subject-formation is a bilateral process.  Decolonization alone is not useful, because colonialism is not merely about the colonizer physically leaving the colony.  It is the colonizer's hold on the former-colony's imaginary.  To use Kuan-Hsing Chen's example, if Taiwan wishes to really employ independence rhetoric, then it needs to reckon with the fact that it is entrapped within two imperial power spheres - the American and the Chinese.  If it desires to establish a unique Taiwanese identity, it must ensure that the USA breaks the colonizing ties, and the same would apply with China.  This would mean no claims over Taiwanese territory, but also no selling of weapons to Taiwan in order to avoid a sense of dependency.  Taiwan cannot simply just "declare" independence.   In a way, Club 51's aims are more real to the critical situation of Taiwan, except that instead of eschewing Empire, they advocate total cooperation with its project, with the self-declared benefit of allying with the higher bidders should the winds of global power shift.

So how can the church be a theological Method?  The key word here is location, because ontology proceeds from location.  If I am located in socio-political centrality, within the nexus of power (e.g. I am a member of the Kennedy dynasty.) then my identity will never be mistaken for that of a blue-collar worker.  Asia can be a Method because it is not a self-defined, self-formed space.  Let us be clear: Asia was a Roman name.  This is not to say what we should do is to come up with a list of what constitutes "Asian" and then use that as a rubric of identity-determination.  No.  One cannot clearly identify what it really means to be American; in fact, it may well be that America is in need of a Method.  But, if we think of England, or France, we see nations that have no need for a Method.  To be English or French is quite clear-cut, and it is not merely to be able to speak English or French.  That's because the English and French are located centrally in anthropological space, where identities, rôles, habits are clear cut.

Continued in second post.