An Open Letter Theology, Part 1: Marian solidarity and Asian American ecumenism

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Asian American, Catholic, ecumenical, Evangelical, geopolitics, Mary, open letter, prayer, solidarity

I am writing this post for two reasons. The first is to begin a series of retrospective theological reflections on what happened during the Asian American evangelical open letter campaign after six months of the event and why it matters theologically more than anyone else thinks. The second is to convince you that Chinglicans can pray in solidarity with the Blessed Virgin without blinking an eye. As a Chinglican, I manage to do that simply by closing my eyes.

It has been way too long since my last post. My last two posts (here and here) focused on inviting Rick Warren to a conversation due to his Asian American faux pas last September 2013. Since that time, an open letter to the evangelical church has been issued, in large part inspired by the first Korean American woman to be ordained to the Episcopal priesthood, the Rev. Christine Lee. I do have some remaining comments about the dustup since that time, especially on how Asian American evangelicals seem confused about the word ‘schism’ and who is causing it. It has been six months since the open letter. It is time for a retrospective theological assessment.

But the doing of theology needs itself to be put into the larger ecumenical framework of how the Spirit is moving people like Archbishop Justin Welby, Pope Francis, Pope Tawadros II, and Patriarch Bartholomew into a new sort of oneness, and that in turn needs to be situated within geopolitical developments that we are all watching anxiously.

That anxiousness brings me to the Blessed Virgin.

For one reason or another, I have found it difficult to pray for the last two months. You could say that the reason I’ve had trouble in prayer is the same reason that I’ve had trouble blogging: simply put, life caught up with me. Prior to the last three months, I had a steady rhythm of daily prayer: the major offices during the day, the Angelus at noon, and the Ignatian Examen and the Rosary along with Compline before bed. But in the dustup of life itself, I felt as if I had been thrown into the secular fire. Suddenly, I became too busy to pray. I found myself mouthing the words, ‘Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people and kindle in them the fire of your love’ as the last bulwark against not praying altogether, and I think that may have saved my life. But secularity – what Charles Taylor calls ‘the immanent frame’ – has a way of making one too busy.

And so I became too busy and secular to both write and pray.

I was shaken out of my secularity on Monday evening. I don’t know how I found the impulse to pray. All I know is that I did. As I opened up to the offices, I discovered that the prayers prepared the church to celebrate the Annunciation. The words of the daily noon-hour Angelus came back to me:

V. The angel of the Lord appeared to Mary
R. And she conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death.

V. Behold the handmaid of the Lord.
R. Be it done according to your word.
Hail Mary…

V. And the Word became flesh
R. And dwelt among us.
Hail Mary…

V. Pray for us, Holy Mother of God.
R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Let us pray.
Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we to whom the Incarnation of Christ Thy Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His Resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Angelus is the prayer of the Annunciation. It identifies us, the one who prays together with the whole praying church, with the Blessed Virgin receiving the message of the angel. As Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it in his book Prayer: ‘Was not the Hail Mary first proclaimed by an angel’s lips, i.e., in the language of heaven? And as for the words uttered by Elizabeth, “filled with the Spirit,” were they not the response to her first meeting with the incarnate God?’ (p. 14-15). It is why there has been a long tradition of popes praying the Angelus with the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square.

You could say that prior to these last few months, the Annunciation already had taught me how to pray. But like a bolt of lightning – or perhaps by the simple appearance of the angel proclaiming that Mary, like all the prophets before her to whom the angel of the Lord had appeared, had found favour with God – I was called to pray on the eve of the Annunciation. I was reminded of who I am and what position I have in the church. I do not have a merely secular existence. I am not running a rat race. I am not to eat of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Simply put, as an ecclesial person, I am by default simply in prayerful solidarity with the Mother of God who says to the angel, Ecce ancilla Domini: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. I am the handmaid of the Lord: be it done according to your word.

I write this as a Chinglican with no intention to ‘convert’ to Roman Catholicism. I’ve said before that Roman Catholics have no monopoly on the Blessed Virgin; so has Captain Thin. I like to remind my friends who say to me, ‘Just convert already,’ that we also have a high regard for Mary in the Anglican Communion. Look no further than the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission’s Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ to get a feeling for how high that is.

As I hinted at the beginning of this post, the passage of six months since the Asian American open letter makes this finally a good time for theological reflection on what happened there and why it matters theologically. But I am writing about my prayerful solidarity with the Blessed Virgin before saying what hasn’t yet been theologically said about the Asian American evangelical dustup because if there’s anything worth saying, it should only be said with full consciousness of our ecclesial, prayerful existence.

That’s because the open letter was not about the open letter. We were – and still are – accused of using the open letter to advance a private interest in an American evangelical public. We were – and still are – accused of being divisive. We were – and still are – accused of failing to be Christians, for not forgiving our orientalizing brothers and sisters, for choosing to grind an axe instead of taking it to the Lord in prayer.

But seen in the context of Marian prayerfulness, the open letter was about the ecumenical movement of the Spirit. As the brilliant young theologian and historian Helen Jin Kim suggests, the open letter was a sign of visible unity in a theologically and ideologically divided church. And as geopolitical conflicts break out in Ukraine, Venezuela, Mexico, and Taiwan – among other places – the oneness that the Spirit is bringing is a sign that, as Mary later prays, ‘He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty.’ It turns out that prayer is how solidarity is done. It turns out that my secular busyness is that which has kept me from this solidarity. It turns out that prayer is not the opium of the masses – it is the fire by which the masses prophesy against injustice and schism. It turns out that the open letter is not about the open letter, but about being just one small part in a larger work of the Spirit in calling the church to be the church in a world crippled by the hawkish posturing of secular geopolitical insecurity. It was modest; make no mistake about that. But all acts of the Spirit, whether big or small, are events for theological reflection.

Justin Cantuar is fond of saying that there is ‘no renewal of the church without the renewal of prayer and praying communities.’ He walks the walk: he has invited a Catholic ecumenical monastic community, Chemin Neuf, to live with him at Lambeth Palace, and he and Vincent Cardinal Nichols have called on Anglicans and Roman Catholics to ‘walk together’ in prayer for social action during this Lenten season.

If the open letter sought to open up an ecumenical conversation about a racial schism in American Christianity, its aims can only be fulfilled by prayer. Just as a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, was fond of saying that Anglican theology is simply ‘theology done to church bells,’ the late German Protestant theologian Helmut Thielicke told his first-year theology students in A Little Exercise for Young Theologians that there was a possibility that they might come away from seminary with a diabolical theology. Making fun of the theological novice who thinks he or she knows it all because of reading a first-year textbook on dogmatics, he says that the know-it-all attitude of a merely book-smart theologian criticizing the kitschiness of the parish church is of the devil. A theology that is from God is a kneeling theology. It is a theology derived from immersion in prayer. It is to approach the Blessed Virgin as she ‘ponders all these things in her heart’ and to ask her, ‘Mary, what are you thinking about?’ It is a prayerful posture that positions the theologian in radical solidarity with the church, however nuts he or she might be driven by the church.

Thielicke’s short book was the first book given to me when I first got my feet wet in Chinglicanism. It has never left me. A Chinglican theology – one committed to post-colonial ecumenism – must be bathed in the prayer of the church, the Blessed Virgin’s radically prayerful obedience to God: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. It is only then that we participate in the prayer, ‘Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people and kindle in them the fire of your love.’

It’s with that in mind that we can finally proceed to an examination of what actually happened theologically and ecumenically six months ago among Asian American Christians. It is not passé. After all, if the Spirit has been at work over the last year toward ecumenical unity and has in his divine humour included Asian American Christians in this work, then we had better bet that the Lord has only gotten started.

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POSTSCRIPT: Some hasty readers may think that this post is motivated by the recent hastag #CancelColbert, in reference to Comedy Central’s satirical tweet from The Colbert Report about orientalization. While discussion about that hashtag is circulating through the blogosphere, I would seriously caution comparing the Asian American open letter to the evangelical church with these secular events. This is not to say that Colbert is secular; he is openly Catholic, though his show airs on a secular forum. While a theological reflection on his culpability in orientalizing processes may be warranted at some point, it would be categorically inappropriate to lump the two together, not least because the ecumenical implications would be obscured by such a careless move.

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Orientalization is an objective offence: answering our objectors

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Asian American, Benedict XVI, Chinglican, cross, cruciformity, epistemology, forgiveness, Hong Kong, Josh McDowell, objective truth, offence, ontology, orientalization, relativism, resurrection, Rick Warren, Saddleback, Theology

Last week, one of the big stories in evangelical news concerned a fairly heated conversation that Asian American and Hong Kong evangelicals have been having about Rick Warren’s Red Guard Facebook photo. Unintentionally, this blog participated in bringing this issue to a wider public. The story was also picked up by the news media, keeping the issue public even while Warren has deleted the photo, issued a response on one of the most visible bloggers’ blog, and apologized conditionally on his public Facebook wall.

The question that some have asked us is: now that there has been an apology, why have we left our blog posts up?

Our answer has been that it is important to maintain the integrity of the public record. But this is not enough for some who object to what we are doing. For our objectors, that sort of answer is a secular one, that to be public is to be ‘worldly’ (as opposed to being ‘churchly’) and that to be on the record is to fail to love Warren; after all, doesn’t St. Paul tell us that ‘love keeps no record of wrongs’ (1 Cor. 13.5 NIV)? Accordingly, their charge against us is that we are not being Christian. Here are some of the more popular ones that I hear:

• Rick Warren has done a lot of good for the kingdom. By leaving the posts up, you are damaging his ministry by tarnishing his reputation. He took down his post and apologized. Shouldn’t you take down your post before you wreck his ministry?
• I’m not offended. I’m sorry if you were. Even so, Rick Warren has apologized because you are part of the group of highly sensitive people that was offended. Shouldn’t you stop focusing on yourself and your pride and refocus on Jesus?
• If you keep the post up, all that the outside, non-Christian world will see is Christians bickering. That is a poor witness, and you are making it worse. How will the world understand us by our love? How will the church be able to reach the world for Jesus when all we do is fight?
• You need to reconcile with Rick Warren. Reconciliation can only happen when you forgive him. Forgiveness means that you have to wipe the slate clean, just like God does with our sin.
• I am not perfect. Rick Warren is not perfect. You are not perfect. Who are you to judge Rick Warren? You would never want to be judged like you judge him. That’s why Jesus says not to judge.

What our objectors want is a theological answer. This is it.

The short answer is: we have left the posts up because we are Christians, and our theology is orthodox.

In the late modern world, Christians who practice orthodox theologies have often felt themselves besieged by a world that no longer believes that truth is objective. Objective truth means that what is true exists outside of one’s subjective experience and remains true despite attempts to subvert it in favour of alternate ideologies, especially powerful political interests. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI called the modern loss of this sensibility the ‘dictatorship of relativism,’ the notion that in a world where truth is merely reduced to one’s individual perspective, then the stories that are told in that society will be co-opted by powerful individuals and institutions with the ability to stamp their version of truth onto the world and call that ‘the truth.’ For those of our critics who are uncomfortable with a Catholic citation, note well that this has also been a common evangelical complaint, one that is often heard in apologetics classes written by Josh McDowell, church-state relations seminars using the work of Charles Colson and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (oops, I did it again: another Catholic!), taught especially by the neo-Reformed tribe to defend their allegiance to the Gospel’s propositional truths, and generally complained about by culture warriors opposing abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, ideologized public education, and the encroachment of the state onto matters of religious freedom. Although the writers of this particular blog have often felt that the theological divisions between Catholics and evangelicals are becoming increasingly artificial, we grant for the readers of this particular post that they are still separate ecclesial entities. And yet they agree on one core contention: that truth is objective.

Without stating our position on the above culture war issues, we affirm as orthodox Christians that we believe in the objectivity of truth.

From Kathy Khang’s reflection on Warren’s public apology, we know that Khang believes strongly in the objectivity of truth. After all, she meant what she said when she wrote that she ’emailed Rick Warren and there is no “if”.’ She is saying that her being offended by the image is not merely a subjective feeling. Unlike Professor Sam Tsang, neither Khang nor her Korean American family had any connection with the Cultural Revolution. So too, Tsang, who spent the last weekend preaching at a retreat hosted by a pan-Asian American church whose origins are Japanese American, told me (and I quote with his permission), ‘I heard from my Japanese brothers and sisters when I preached this weekend. loud and clear, We’re with you!‘ These non-Chinese Asian Americans had no subjective reason to be offended. But they were. This is because the offence was objective.

What was objective about the offence was its complicity with a process of orientalization.  Orientalization is the process by which ‘orientals’ are made. ‘Orientals’ are a collective image of Asians and Asian Americans as collectively different from persons from the West, a set of images that regards them (as Edward Said famously put it) as static, backward, conservative, kinship-oriented, and immutably exotic. As theologian J. Kameron Carter describes it, orientalizing ideologies have been responsible for the problem of race in modern theology, including (as he fascinatingly makes the argument) the enslavement and subsequent subjectification of African Americans in American life. This is because modern orientalizing ideologies conveniently located those of different coloured skins from ‘white’ Europeans as inferiorly different, which meant that they could be colonized, traded as objects, and subordinated into inferior positions. Indeed, despite recent conflicts in the last twenty years between Asian Americans and African Americans, scholars and activists of race have long recognized that their common experience of racialization should have made it easy to develop solidarities between the two groups. That solidarity is hard to come by is a subject for another discussion.

The point, though is that orientalization was, is, and continues to be a process of continual offence, regardless of how it is received subjectively. This puts to rest the notion that the offensive Facebook photo could not have been offensive because some Asians and Asian Americans–perhaps even a large swath of them–were not subjectively offended by the post.

No, we believe in the objectivity of truth.

Accordingly, we observe that the initial Facebook photo post was offensive because it objectively objectified Asians and Asian Americans. This was an offence because it treated Asians and Asian Americans as objects, not as persons. There is a difference. A person is someone with whom one shares communion. A person has agency to converse, has the ability to either agree or to disagree, is capable of talking back and thinking and walking together with people with whom he or she can relate in the myriad of ways that persons can. An object has no agency. An object cannot be communed with. An object has no agency to converse, has no ability to either agree or disagree, is incapable of talking back and thinking and relating. Orientalization is the process of reducing Asians and Asian Americans from persons to objects.

Whatever one feels about being treated as an object and not as a person, and whatever one intends in even the accidental, ignorant proliferation of images and discourses that perpetuate this objectification, is irrelevant here. The objective truth that treating people like objects and not as persons is a violation of any person’s objective dignity as an imagebearer of God himself. In short, the objective truth that is declared by the Christian faith is that all humans are made in the image and likeness of God and thus have dignity as persons. To objectify another human–that is, to deny a human being his or her personhood and agency by reducing him or her to an object–is to offend against this objective truth. This objectification need not be subjectively intended; in other words, Warren did not need to have any malicious intent in posting the photo of the Red Guard. Neither does this objectification need to be subjectively received as such; the result was that, of course, some Asians and Asian Americans were fine with Warren’s humour. Instead, the process of objectification describes an observable, objective effect: objectively speaking, does the photo with its caption treat Asians and Asian Americans as persons with whom to be communed or convenient objects to be used as the butt of jokes? Was this the image of a person made in the image and likeness of God, or was it the image of an object that could be conveniently used to make a funny point?

Warren’s initial response suggests that the latter is true. That Warren then declared ‘it’s a joke!’ indicates, regardless of whether he was thinking this or not, that it was inconvenient for him that the ‘orientals’–the objects–were talking back as persons. He did not need to think this. Again, we are looking not at his subjective experience, but the objective, observable situation. His message was this: ‘orientals’ should not talk back; ‘orientals’ should be content to be the objects that they are; ‘orientals’ should not be listened to as persons. Those offended were framed as ‘orientals,’ suggesting that the ‘oriental’ image displayed on the photo should not be read as a Red Guard with whom communion can be shared. She was an object–an ‘oriental’ object–whose sole function was to make a funny point.

Our contention is that attempts are now being made to twist this objective truth. Warren’s initial defence achieved an interesting twist on the relationship between persons and objects. Warren then explained that the ‘disciples’ would have understood his humour while the ‘self-righteous’ would not have comprehended it. Perhaps unintentionally at a subjective level and likely without malicious intent, Warren was saying that Asians and Asian Americans are to be regarded by the disciples of Jesus Christ–the church–as the objects of jokes and those who would dispute this use of humour are the ones who are self-righteous, the ones that would in turn crucify the Lord of glory.

Understanding this theological twist is key to comprehending why it is that those who are arguing for the objective, dignified personhood of Asians and Asian Americans have been suddenly framed as the enemies of Christ. Regardless of Warren’s interior motives, the theological effect that has been achieved is that those who are defending the personhood of Asians and Asian Americans are framed theologically as the offensive aggressors, the ones who are now crucifying Warren for his use of humour. In so doing–again, regardless of personal motive–Christian theology has been rewritten. Defenders of personal dignity are framed as aggressors. Those whose actions (regardless of intent) result in the objectification of persons are described as Christ-like martyrs. The irony could not be more striking.

This theological twist is magnified by the attempts to erase and rewrite the public record. To advocate this is (according to our objectors) to advocate forgiveness and grace. From the deletion of comments on Warren’s Facebook wall calling for a public acknowledgement of the objectiveness of orientalizing offence to the vitriolic objections of our objectors pleading for us to delete our posts, attempts are being made to ‘wipe the slate clean.’ It is in this context that Warren’s response on Professor Sam Tsang’s blog and his conditional apology on his public Facebook wall should be read: they are attempts to wipe the slate clean without acknowledging the objective truth that orientalization is an objective offence against the dignity of human persons. As theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it in Discipleship, this is ‘the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.’

Although Tsang acknowledged Warren’s first response as an apology, it is better described as a responding comment. In this comment, Warren stated that the photo was ‘instantly removed.’ Whatever one’s subjective interpretation of the passing of two days might be, this is not objectively true. It is objectively true that Warren’s ‘instant’ response was to suggest that those who did not find his joke funny were ‘self-righteous’ whereas those who were giggling were like the ‘disciples.’ Moreover, Warren tells Tsang to contact him ‘directly.’ A better word choice here is ‘privately.’ Attempting to hide the objective truth that this incident began publicly, the response here wipes that slate clean and puts the blame on Tsang for not approaching him through a private channel. Khang then attempted to do exactly as Warren said: she sent an email to Warren ‘directly.’ It was met with a generic, indirect response. This suggests that ‘private’ is indeed a better word.

As Khang eloquently states, the effect of this maneuver (whatever its intent) was that she was ‘silenced.’ Indeed, that initial response generated three tactics by which the objectively existing public record has been fudged. In particular, the tactic that has been used is to turn the objective offence of orientalization into a subjective experience. First, Warren himself touted his credentials as someone who initially wanted to plant a church in Japan and then the doors were closed. Second, immediately after this comment, L2 Foundation’s D.J. Chuang (himself a member of Saddleback Church) then commented on each of the bloggers’ walls (including this one) reiterating, ‘That post was removed immediately and personally by Pastor Rick as soon when he learned how the photo was offensive.’ Third, Asians and Asian Americans themselves–likely without any prompting from Warren or Saddleback–began to accuse the bloggers of failing to represent the universal experience of Asians and Asian Americans, for many proclaimed themselves that they did not feel offended, that is, that they did not subjectively process the objective offence of orientalization as a subjective offence.

Note: though these photos are from the public conditional apology and have a later date than those described in these present paragraphs, they illustrate the types of comments that have occurred. As Khang notes, earlier comments that would have been available were deleted along with the original photo.

In so doing, the record–the objectively existing public conversation that exists outside of Saddleback’s private control–has been fudged. Warren declares his solidarity with all Asians by touting his missionary credentials. An Asian American himself comes to Warren’s defence on each of the blogs. Asians and Asian Americans unhappy with the bloggers declare that they are not subjectively offended. The problem is that none of these responses got at the heart of the objective offence of orientalization. To be missionary minded toward Asians does not erase an act of orientalization. To have a prominent Asian American evangelical come to one’s defence does not lessen the objectivity of this offence. To have Asians and Asian Americans declare that they did not subjectively receive the offence as an offence does not mean that it was not an offence. Orientalization is an objective offence. But this process of damage control has subverted the perception of orientalization as objective. It is now subjective simply because people now say it is.

And the result is that those who protest the objective offence of orientalization are silenced. Khang tells us that she ‘felt silenced.’ No, Kathy, you do not only feel silenced. You were objectively silenced.

Following the publication of a Religion News Service article, though, Warren then issued a public conditional apology on his Facebook wall. The apology was conditioned by an if: if we were offended, then the apology applies to us. What this amounts to, however, is the further subjectification of an objective offence. It suggests that the offensiveness of orientalizing objectification is conditioned by how it is subjectively received. It means that if someone is not offended, then an image that strips human persons of dignity by turning them into objects is not offensive for some people. Kathy Khang is right to object to the conditionality here: ‘Words matter,’ she says. Or to quote her in full:

There is no “if.”  I am hurt, upset, offended, and distressed, not just because “an” image was posted, but that Warren posted the image of a Red Guard soldier as a joke, because people pointed out the disconcerting nature of posting such an image — and then Warren told us to get over it, alluded to how the self-righteous didn’t get Jesus’ jokes but Jesus’ disciples did, and then erased any proof of his public missteps and his followers’ mean-spirited comments that appeared to go unmoderated.

I am hurt, upset, offended, and distressed when fellow Christians are quick to use Matthew 18 publicly to admonish me (and others) to take this issue up privately without recognizing the irony of their actions, when fellow Christians accuse me of playing the race card without trying to understand the race card they can pretend doesn’t exist but still benefit from, when fellow Christians accuse me of having nothing better to do than attack a man of God who has done great things for the Kingdom.

Khang is objecting to the process of objectification being framed as just another subjective experience. It is not subjective. It is an objective offence. There is therefore no ‘if.’

To resist this silencing, our objectors say, is to fail to forgive. In so doing, we are accused of being the ‘self-righteous’ who are crucifying Warren, tarnishing his reputation, and bringing shame to the church by continuing our bickering. To cease to be objects of orientalization, to assert ourselves with the personal dignity that is objectively ours by virtue of our creation, is to sin, according to our objectors. Our actions are described as prideful; our assertions are characterized as divisive; our call for Asian and Asian American agency is judged as judgmental. Our objectors seem, in short, to be able to wield the power to define what is good and what is evil. On the other hand, we as orthodox Christians committed to the objective truth of the person are not only incapable of wielding such strange sovereignty; we refuse to do so because we understand this seizure of truth to be eating from the very tree of the knowledge of good and evil for which our ancestors were cast out of paradise. And yet for not capitulating to our objectors’ theological rationality, we are labeled as the ones who should be cast out of the church. Indeed, this has already happened to at least one of us this week: Professor Sam Tsang has been asked repeatedly by our objectors whether or not he is a ‘born again Christian.’ Our objectors are powerful. They have, it seems, the power even to excommunicate.

In other words, the situation in which we find ourselves has degenerated precisely to the point where it could be called a ‘dictatorship of relativism,’ a scenario in which what is true is dictated by might and not by an objectively existing truth that cannot be bent by the powerful to their own interests. By calling this present situation a dictatorship of relativism, we in no way imply that Rick Warren is a dictator. We are saying instead that our communion with our brother, Rick Warren, has been co-opted by a relativist ideology. This is a sad state of affairs because relativist notions of truth hold no possibility for objective forgiveness and reconciliation.

They preclude it.

The objective of this practice of relativism is to return this present situation to a certain status quo, a situation in which Asians and Asian Americans are not in active conversation with Warren, the state of affairs that existed prior to Monday morning. In this status quo, however, Asians and Asian Americans will not have been reconciled to Warren as persons. We will still be objects, ‘orientals’ who cannot and should not speak back. But this ‘peace’–this constructed harmony in which there will be no more visible contestation–does not return us to the objective truth declared by the Christian faith that all humans are created as persons in the image and likeness of God. It leaves us with a situation in which the objectified are still objects and the persons are not reconciled.

An orthodox Christian theology bears witness against this dictatorship of relativism. An orthodox Christian theology insists on the objectivity of truth and insists further that that objective truth is to be found in the person of Jesus Christ. It is from Jesus, not from our objectors, that the cross is truly understood, that the forgiveness of sins is achieved, and that the communion of persons is realized and restored. It is because truth is objective–it exists outside of what anyone says it is–and it is objectively found in Jesus.

‘The light shines in the darkness,’ the Gospel according to St. John (1.5) begins, ‘and the darkness has not overcome it.’ The true light of Jesus Christ’s objective truth subjects this dictatorship of relativism to a crisis. While the discourse has fudged the objectivity of objectification, we recognize in Jesus, the very image and icon of God, that redemption means the restoration of all human dignity from processes of objectification. As St. Irenaeus puts it in his interpretation of the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of one like a son of man coming as the glory of God, ‘The glory of God is a human being fully alive’ (Adversus Haeresus IV.20.7). Confronted with the person of Jesus Christ, the subjectifying logic of orientalization crumbles. ‘The time is fulfilled,’ the Lord declares (Mark 1.15), ‘and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the Gospel.’

From Jesus, we understand that the cross was the last resistance of those who wish to pronounce for themselves what is good and what is evil. By challenging the logic of objectification, Jesus challenged the reduction of persons into objects by the powerful to preserve their own interests. For doing this, Jesus was betrayed, beaten, flogged, and crucified. Jesus was silenced. But in that process, that which was hidden from the foundations of the world was revealed. The challenge to objectification provoked the murder of the Lamb of God. Objectification is revealed as a process of violence, for its perpetrators and defenders must silence, must fudge, and must kill those who object to the reduction of persons into objects. But by killing Jesus, the power of such dark practices is broken, for the illegitimacy of their actions is revealed. As St. Paul says of the cross, ‘He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it’ (Cor. 1.15). The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

From Jesus, we then understand forgiveness to be the love that he shows us in his resurrection as an embodied person, seeking not vengeance but communion with those who abandoned him and crucified him. Having rendered the power of sin and death powerless by exposing its illegitimate core, Jesus does not return in vengeance. He rises from the dead to love the very people who abandoned him and killed him. He calls Mary by name. He breathes the Holy Spirit on the followers who abandoned him at the cross. He invites St. Thomas to put his finger in his nail marks and his hands in his side. He reinstates Peter with the words, ‘Feed my sheep.’ He sends the Holy Spirit on the church at Pentecost, from where the people that St. Peter accuses of crucifying Jesus grow into the first Jerusalem church. This is forgiveness: the maintenance of the cross on the public record as a moment when the things hidden from the foundations of the world were revealed and exposed, and yet the unexpected embrace of the crucified one toward those who did not know that they had killed the Son of God. In his resurrection, Jesus forgives, and the cross is transfigured–it is not erased–into an instrument of love. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

From Jesus, then, we understand the church to be a communion of persons, the very Body of Christ that lives out the objective truth at the core of our common existence: that we are made for communion with God and with our brothers and sisters. If orientalization has happened in this Body, it must be confessed, exposed, and forgiven. That it has no place in the church does not mean that it does not happen. When it happens, it must be revealed and not fudged; it must be judged and not excused; it must be confessed and not covered with fig leaves. As St. Peter writes in his first letter (4.17), ‘The time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God.’ The result, as St. Peter emphasizes in his entire letter, is that the church will perfect its communion in visible suffering, with its members clothed with humility. Indeed, the truth that would be manifested in the love that is shown would finally ‘cover over a multitude of sins’ (4.8). The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

And thus, if our critics have only the view that we must participate in their revision of Christian theology, then we must refuse for the sake of our participation in the objective truth manifested in Jesus Christ and handed down by his apostles. As St. John proclaims in his first letter (1.5, 7), God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. We must then walk in the light as he is in the light.

This, then, is what forgiveness entails. It is to call Rick Warren into fellowship with his Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters as persons, not as objects. This manifestation of communion must not be hidden from the world; it must be manifested in the full, visible unity between himself and those whom he mistakenly objectified. Warren must thus acknowledge that he, though likely without malicious intent, committed the objective offence of orientalization. He, as well as his followers, must commit themselves to a fuller communion with their Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters. In particular, he might himself accept the invitation to a public conversation about the lingering offence of orientalization in the church, seeking to discern with us all how we might live in the power of the Holy Spirit as ‘the holy catholic church, the communion of saints.’ That catholicity would be the sign that the kingdom of God is among us, that Jesus is present, and that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

It would not be funny if I said that Rick Warren was the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’

Tags

Asian, Asian American, Chinglican, Deadly Vipers, Eugene Cho, Evangelical, Lifeway, Mee Maw, mental illness, orientalism, orientalization, psychology, Rick Warren, Rickshaw Rally, Soong-Chan Rah, Southern Baptist, trauma

UPDATE: The contents of the following post concerned a post by Pastor Rick Warren that has been deleted on the afternoon of 24 September 2013. It also coincided with an apology on Sam Tsang’s blog, Engage the Pews, which Tsang has accepted and on which he has written further reflections. Following the examples of other bloggers such as Sam Tsang, Kathy Khang (More Than Serving Tea) and Wm. Darius Myers (Death Pastor), we will be leaving this post up in order to maintain the integrity of the public record. After all, contrary to the comment by L2 Foundation’s D.J. Chuang that appeared on all of our respective blogs that the post was ‘immediately and personally removed’ by Warren, we acknowledge that while the apology may have been personal and may indeed be encouraging for a catholic way forward, a response following two business days is not ‘immediate.’ Indeed, given this post’s attention to the historical genealogy of these Asian American interventions into the orientalizing practices of prominent American evangelicals, it is an imperative that this post, as well as the others, remain up as a record of this episode so that we can propel further conversation that would lead to a radical de-orientalization of American Protestant practice. As Tsang and Khang have said on their respective blogs, the apology may be accepted, but the conversation is far from over.

UPDATE #2: We recognize that Rick Warren has issued a public apology on his public Facebook page. We welcome this. Following the reflections given by Professor Sam Tsang and by Kathy Khang to this apology, we have also decided to maintain the integrity of the public record by leaving this post up.

The recent Facebook photo posted as a joke by Pastor Rick Warren describing the staff at Saddleback Church as members of the Red Guard at the height of the Cultural Revolution is a bit difficult to process. Indeed, its invocation of the Cultural Revolution has troubled many a Facebook friend of mine for what they are now terming ‘cultural insensitivity.’  I should thus post a trigger warning, for I have reproduced it here.

Indeed, that he then used the comments section to lecture this Thing’s good friend Sam Tsang on humour in New Testament exegesis makes the situation even more ironic. I mean, one would have thought that Sam Tsang’s composition of the foreword to the new Chinese translation of N.T. Wright’s New Testament and the People of God would position Tsang as the exegete. To the extent that our friend was then incensed by this reply, he wrote a response lambasting Warren for his culturally insensitive humour.

To defend Rick Warren as ignorant of the concerns of Asians and Asian Americans (and by this, I include the Asian Canadians who are posting all over my news feed, as i take ‘American’ to be indicative of the ‘Americas,’ not only the nation-state styling itself as all-encompassing American) simply because he is an older white pastor living in Southern California is no defence at all. Indeed, at least as he is cited in geographer Justin Wilford’s Sacred Subdivisions, he claims that his own church is largely composed of Asian and Latina/o Americans. In fact, Wilford points out that Saddleback’s whole idea of the ‘small group’ where members meet in homes to discuss Christian spiritual formation is drawn from Korean megachurch pastor David Yonggi Cho’s ‘cell group’ model; whatever one may think of such a model, the point is that Warren is no stranger to Asia-Pacific churches. Moreover, Southern California itself could hardly be described as an Asian American terra incognita; in fact, Metro Los Angeles boasts a high concentration of Asian Americans, and one of its cities in the San Gabriel Valley, Monterey Park, in fact served as the key case study for geographer Wei Li’s doctoral work on Chinese ethnoburbs in North America. Finally, Saddleback has itself planted a church in Hong Kong, which itself is no small feat, for The Purpose-Driven Church calls church plants to research their social surroundings in order to be relevant in their local evangelism. Indeed, Justin Wilford’s Sacred Subdivisions reveals that Saddleback itself is ingenious in its transformation of the postsuburban landscape’s fragmented geographies into purpose-driven sites through which God teaches Saddleback members how to reframe their scattered lives into purpose-driven ones. One would expect no less of its Hong Kong incarnation.

Any question that we ask about this situation, then, should not focus on why Rick Warren is ignorant of the concerns of Asians and Asian Americans. It should instead interrogate why he ignores them.

After all, this is not the first Asian American challenge to orientalization in American evangelicalism. Indeed, in light of previous excursions into evangelical antiracism, one might be able to illustrate how Warren’s declaration that Asian Americans are humorless because of a joke taken at our expense might be understood if Asian Americans were to make a joke at his expense.

That joke is: who would find it funny if Warren were the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’?

That I now have to explain this joke suggests that it is probably not funny. In fact, now that I have likely offended you, I need to explain to you why you have been offended.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Lifeway Publishers’ ‘Rickshaw Rally’ curriculum was but one of the episodes in contemporary Asian American evangelical challenges to the white privilege that has gone long uncontested in American evangelicalism. Published as the Vacation Bible School (VBS) material in 2004, the theme featured a white girl in a kimono with chopsticks in her hair, a karate-kid key chain, and name tags shaped as Chinese take-out boxes. As Soong-Chan Rah puts it in The Next Evangelicalism, Lifeway ‘caricatured and generalized all Asian cultures with various stereotypical images’ and was met with protests from Asian American pastors, some of whom were themselves Southern Baptist. However, instead of apologizing, Lifeway made a few minor changes and issued the material as its 2004 VBS curriculum all the same, all to the chagrin of those who decried the material both within and without the denomination.

Unsuccessful as the attempt to derail Rickshaw Rally may have seemed, though, it served as the first of several similar challenges that have propelled the conversation about orientalization in American evangelicalism forward. In 2007, Soong-Chan Rah wrote to Zondervan’s Youth Specialties for its book, Skits That Teach, that featured a skit similar to Rickshaw Rally, this one titled ‘Mee Maw.’ which featured a Chinese delivery person with a very demeaning accent as part of a church skit book. As Rah recalls, Zondervan recalled (to its credit) all of the extant copies and did away with them, issuing an apology on its blog. In 2009, Zondervan found itself again in hot water, this time over the publication of a book titled Deadly Vipers, a book for men that portrayed sins that men faced as ninjas sneaking up on them. Leading the charge this time was Seattle pastor Eugene Cho, whose campaign convinced Zondervan to again pull the book, destroy the copies, and have the authors remove their website.

What we should find hard to believe is that Rick Warren has not seemed to have heard of these high-profile cases, one of which affected his own denomination (the Southern Baptist Convention) and his own publisher (Zondervan).

But even more dumbfounding should be Warren’s inability to participate in solidarity with Asian Americans, even while many Asian Americans participated in solidarity with him and his family when they lost their son, Matthew, to a suicide due to mental illness. Contrary to popular perceptions that Asian Americans are unfamiliar with mental illness, the legacy of political and cultural trauma in the Asia-Pacific–including the Cultural Revolution–should itself be a signal that Asians and Asian Americans are all too familiar with mental illness, which is likely why we felt ourselves in such solidarity with the Warrens in the first place. The authoritarian rule of emerging nation-states in the Asia-Pacific were not the natural results of an ‘Asian culture’ that promotes hard work and obedience to authority. They were attempts at state formation whose efforts to dislodge these emerging nation-states from their traumatic pasts of European colonialism exacerbated the cultural trauma and psychological damage that began in the nineteenth century. If it weren’t from the direct trauma of elite state initiatives at nation-building–such as China’s Cultural Revolution, among many other similar projects in other nation-states–then there was the overwhelming sense that these nation-states and their citizens needed to catch up with the modernity of the West, resulting in authoritarian ideologies that framed citizens as patriotic hard workers whose objective was to make the nation modern overnight. While these efforts at subjectification led to some economic successes, one of the prices that was paid was the spread of mental illness; indeed, anthropologist Aihwa Ong argues that the frequency of demon possession reported on the Malaysian shop floor that she studied can be attributed to these efforts at capitalist state subjectification. The same could be said of the Cultural Revolution; in fact, my grandfather, who saw the decimation of his family in Shanghai through the double trauma of the Japanese invasion of China during the Second World War and the Communist takeover of his family’s property (not to mention the news of his surviving family’s treatment through the Mao years right on into the Cultural Revolution), was plagued with manic depression for the remainder of his life. Indeed, the first time that I ever learned as a kid that there were pills that you could take that helped you with your moods was from seeing him take them.

That the rise of early Asian American studies at the San Francisco State College Strike in 1968 was done by Mao-jacket-wearing students from the Third World Liberation Front in solidarity with the Cultural Revolution does not blunt this point. For one thing, they were protesting the trauma of racism that ghettoized their communities in America; as Ling-chi Wang points out, Chinatowns were the result both of racist planning policies that kept Chinese people literally in their place and Chinatown elites who used this ghettoization to maintain their own power. The strikers protested both. However, to post a picture of a woman wearing a Mao jacket cannot be justified even by this fact, for though even members of mainline Protestant churches in Chinatown participated in these protests, migrants who had experienced the Asia-Pacific traumas transformed these churches after the strikes, bringing their trauma to bear on the real life experience of even the most liberal churches in these Chinatowns. By the 1970s and 1980s, then, counseling psychology became a field of great concern among Asian and Asian American Protestants themselves as they dealt with the traumas of colonization, state subjectification, racism, modern ideologies of Asians needing to ‘catch up’ with the West, and the resulting family dysfunction, and it has now become a commonly discussed stereotype that second-generation Asian American evangelicals seem to be disproportionately interested in psychology as a field of study because of how often these traumas are discussed in our churches and parachurch organizations.

In short, we as Asians and Asian Americans know mental illness intimately. That was why we really felt ourselves to be in solidarity with the Warrens when Matthew died.

If what I am saying is true, then, what is needed is not simply ‘cultural intelligence’ or ‘sensitivity training.’ It is an acknowledgement that just as we as Asian and Asian American evangelicals stood in solidarity with the Warrens when they confronted the abyss caused by mental illness in their family, so the Warrens stand in solidarity with us when we confront mental illness and the memory of trauma in ours. Indeed, it would not be funny if I called Rick Warren the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’ precisely because of this solidarity that we have with him. By the same token, the trigger for memories of cultural trauma should not be funny if indeed he acknowledges his solidarity with us. That he then complains that we do not find his joke funny is not only a failure of ‘cultural sensitivity.’ It is a failure of catholicity, a denial of his participation with the church catholic that is composed in no small part by Asians and Asian Americans. Indeed, that is what’s at stake in choosing to ignore the protests of Asian Americans who have challenged the orientalization that is latent in much of American evangelicalism: it is to deny that the Spirit is moving the people of God into greater oneness by shattering the ideologies that have long kept us apart. To reduce this to ‘political correctness’ on the one hand while calling for ‘sensitivity training’ on the other would fail to comprehend the movement of God in making his children one, even as he is one, that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son. To fail to understand that such reconciled unity–such ecumenical catholicity!–lies at the heart of the evangelical mission is to miss the purpose for which the church exists, for she is a prophetic witness to a modern world traumatically divided by racializing ideologies (among many others) that Jesus Christ has come to reconcile all into one in his body.

To put it plainly, waving the trigger of our traumatic memories in our faces on Facebook is simply not funny. But even more curious is that Warren is neither a stranger to Asians and Asian Americans, and it is hard to believe that he hasn’t heard of the debacles like Rickshaw Rally, Mee Maw, and Deadly Vipers. The only conclusion that we can draw from this circumstantial evidence is thus that Warren is not ignorant, but is willfully ignoring Asians and Asian Americans in order to make a joke at our expense. And yet, hope against hope, we do not believe that in his heart, Warren is malicious enough to be that much of a schismatic; after all, to fail to have even a flicker of love for his Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters would jeopardize his own place in the church catholic, for he that does not love does not know God, for God is love. It is thus for the sake of the healing of the catholic union and continual solidarity that we share in Jesus Christ that we demand that Rick Warren issue an apology.

Correction update: the original version of this post read that the woman in the posted photo was from the People’s Liberation Army. This was an error because she was part of the Red Guard. We thank the readers of A Christian Thing for their vigilance. I am also thankful for the presence of Not a Dinner Party on this Thing, for she is a China scholar and a truly competent one at that. See for yourself.

The Fire Next Time

Tags

African American, Asian American, Chinese church, James Baldwin, model minority, Noah's Ark, race, The Fire Next Time

When I was sixteen, I read a book titled The Fire Next Time. I figured that since it’s James Baldwin’s birthday today, I should put something up on the Thing in commemoration of this event. In fact, since I promised in a previous post on the George Zimmerman verdict that I would write about the immense impact that Baldwin’s work has had on my thinking, consider this a promise fulfilled.

When I was in high school, I did not know that the ‘model minority’ stereotype was the archetypal concept against which Asian American studies was positioned. The ‘model minority,’ for those who aren’t in the know, was a concept developed in the 1960s by white sociologists and journalists who observed that–in their view–Asian people responded to racism differently from black people. While black people were hitting the streets in civil rights protests and arming themselves with the Black Panthers, this stereotype considered Asian Americans to be a ‘model’ minority who focused on the integrity of their private spheres–their strict family life, their hard work in the private sector (usually mom-and-pop shops), their emphasis on education–to overcome racial barriers in America. While Asian American studies was formed through Asian Americans joining in solidarity with African American strikers on university campuses soon after ‘model minority’ articles hit issues in U.S. and World Report and Newsweek, the model minority stereotype was also embraced by a good many other Asian Americans, not least S.I. Hayakawa, the Japanese American university president against whom the black and Asian students were striking on the San Francisco State College campus. By the 1980s, Asian American scholars noted that an increasing number of their students were using the ‘model minority’ to construct their own identities, and many complained about the internal psychological contradictions, the apathy for poor Asian Americans, and the disdain for Chicana/o and African American populations that were the concrete consequences of buying into this stereotype. Indeed, one could say that the use of the ‘model minority’ ideological stereotype in the 1960s had succeeded in positioning Asian Americans as a wedge between white America and peoples of colour who were not Asian, often with devastating consequences for Asian Americans in late 1980s and 1990s urban race riots.

Not knowing any better at the time, though, I considered myself part of the model minority. I lived in California at the time, and if you know anything about the University of California system, what you know is that there are things called ‘UC credits’ that the university uses to evaluate whether certain high school courses can be said to prepare one for admission to the UC system. Intent as I was on getting into a UC school–for the record, I was admitted into four of them, but chose to move out of state, and indeed, out of country, for my university education–I decided to drop home economics. ‘Home ec,’ you see, was not a UC-credited course. But Twentieth-Century Literature was. So I replaced ‘home ec’ with ’20th-century lit,’ and ended up taking two English courses during that term, one an honours English course in which we studied American literature, the other this 20th-century lit course. Needless to say, I was very sleep-deprived during that semester.

I did not know that I would actually get much of what I mull over now out of 20th Century Lit. After all, if it weren’t for that course, I would never have read Thomas Mann, Nadine Gordimer, Dorothy Parker, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Salman Rushdie, or Flannery O’Connor. As we explored the 1920s, the teacher handed out photocopies of Alain Locke’s The New Negro, and we spent a month combing through the work produced during the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes became a household name. (I didn’t realize this until now, but during that same time, I was taking another course called ‘the Bible as literature,’ and we read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple there.)

It’s in that context that the teacher put a book on our desks quite late into the semester. It was James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

I remember reading it and having no idea what Baldwin was talking about. In the first part of the book, Baldwin writes a letter to his nephew, telling him that generations of black self-hatred should not be blamed on African Americans but on a system of segregation in America in which white America systemically induced a sort of African American subservience that, if undermined, would cause a radical shift in the nation’s constitution itself. As a ‘model minority’ Chinese American, I connected with none of that. After all, we Asian Americans weren’t victims of racism, I thought. We were doing quite well economically. And if we could do it, couldn’t everyone else?

It was to my dismay that the teacher announced soon after this book was assigned that we had to write a poem in response to this book. How was I supposed to write a book about a poem with which I had no connection? I mean, by this point, my father had already been ordained by the African American Progressive Baptist denomination. Unlike other Asian American families, ours was in contact with African Americans working for racial justice in Oakland. I had African American friends in high school who spoke out incessantly against racism in all of its visceral forms, and I actually listened to black gospel music. But I was not black. I was an Asian American, and a damn good model minority one too (I had a 4.39 GPA in high school, if you can wrap your head around that). My African American friends should be the ones writing the poem, I thought, not me.

It was then that I re-read the second part of the book. I must have really fallen asleep on my first time through; either that, or I was just really confused. Baldwin writes his autobiography in the second part, tracing his time as a teenage preacher in an African American Pentecostal church and then his being introduced to Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X in the Nation of Islam. The first time through, I must have been bewildered–given my encounters with black Christianity–that African Americans could be Muslim. I was probably so weirded out that I completely missed what Baldwin was saying.

The poetry assignment forced me to re-read part 2. Of course, I re-read part 1 too, but that was short–like 10ish pages. Part 2 is this monster of like 100 pages.

And then, just as Baldwin titles the first part, ‘my dungeon shook.’

Re-reading part 2, I began to see parallels to the Chinese churches in which I had grown up in both Baldwin’s account of his Pentecostal preaching and in his ambivalent relationship with the Nation of Islam. Writing of his preaching, Baldwin pretty much says that he was giving his congregation a Marxian ‘opiate of the masses,’ encouraging them as black people to embrace their subservient conditions while looking forward to life in the world to come, to not care about their material conditions and focus on the ephemerally spiritual. In the second part of the book, though, Baldwin issues a different warning about Elijah Muhammad. Baldwin writes of how he admires that the Nation of Islam wants to construct a sort of black nationalism that views ‘black as beautiful.’ However, this comes at one expense: Elijah Muhammad just keeps on throwing out epithets about ‘white devils,’ demonizing white people as the other just as they demonized black people. Baldwin says that that kind of thing insidiously reinforces segregation–keeping the white and black parts of America hating each other and thus dwelling in separate communities–and he says that if those forces of mutual hatred are not dealt with, there will be a racial apocalypse, a judgment on America in which the races will try to kill each other. That judgment, as he quotes the spiritual, evokes a visceral biblical image: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more water, the fire next time.’

In many ways, this paralleled my experience of Chinese churches. In private circles not too unlike Baldwin’s dinner meeting with Elijah Muhammad, anyone who was not Chinese was called a ‘ghost’ and a ‘barbarian,’ be they white, Chicana/o, or black. In fact, I heard some even speak of non-Chinese Asians as somehow inferior to the Chinese, be it the Japanese (for the events of the Second World War) or the Filipina/os (for their otherness to Chinese, probably starting with skin colour and then descending into all manners of stereotypes that I cannot bear to repeat on this blog). Hell, even the Chinese from the People’s Republic of China were demonized for being Communists. And yet, unlike the Nation of Islam’s focus on material conditions, our Chinese churches focused on becoming ‘truly spiritual,’ casting off worldliness for the life of the spirit. This had an ironic effect, of course, for our affluent congregations. In church, the focus was on being spiritual, but in the world, we had to get ahead: we had to have 4.5 GPA (mine was considered low, compared to some of my peers), we had to get a 1600 on the SAT I (in those days, there were only verbal and math scores), and we had to aim for economic success in practical careers. I found out later that there was theological justification for this sacred-secular divide: the longtime pastor at our Chinese church regularly declared from the pulpit, ‘Where Christianity is, there is prosperity!’ Focus on God and being spiritual, the ideology went, and you would become economically prosperous with God’s blessing. Opiate of the masses?

As I saw these parallels, I wrote a poem called ‘A Chinese Church’ that eventually became the first thing I ever published (I put it in the literary magazine I founded at the high school; yes, I founded it). I imagined that in the midst of all of this, I might be dating a white girl, and I called her ‘Abbey.’ I even posited that she was a missionary’s kid who spoke Chinese; I never imagined that I’d actually meet white women who could speak Chinese better than I (e.g. Not a Dinner Party), and for the record, I am happily married now to a Chinese woman who is a free-church evangelical. But anyway, for the sake of responding to The Fire Next Time, I imagined bringing Abbey to a Chinese church. She would get all kinds of strange glances as a ‘ghost,’ weird stares as a ‘barbarian,’ and a stream of people telling her, ‘This is a Chinese church; how can I help you?’ I ended the poem with a zinger: having left the church, gotten married, and gotten Abbey pregnant with a half-white, half-Chinese child, the speaker (well, that is, me) declared, ‘They were a Chinese church; could they help us?’

The poem was a hit. As I said, I got it published in the literary magazine (well, I was the founding editor, so it had to go in there, but it got some good responses). It was also awarded 100% as its grade, which helped my 20th Century Lit overall score and my 4.39 GPA.

But I never imagined that ten years later working on a PhD on Chinese Christians, I’d still be mulling over The Fire Next Time or that my poem, which was written with fairly instrumentalist motivations, would still be lingering in the back of my head. Of course, a lot has happened since then, my thinking on the Chinese church has (hopefully) matured, and I (thankfully) did not end up marrying a white missionary girl named Abbey.

But on this commemoration of James Baldwin’s birthday, I want to thank James Baldwin for shaking my ‘model minority’ dungeon.

Indeed, shortly after writing this poem, we were assigned in AP US History to do a project on a topic of interest to us. Having done some research and discovered a film by Justin Lin called Better Luck Tomorrow, I decided to research the ‘model minority,’ and that was the first time that Asian American academic names like Ronald Takaki, Sucheng Chan, and Roger Daniels came onto my radar screen. But I don’t think I actually got it until my doctoral work when I embarked into a sustained reflection on Asian American studies and its protest of orientalizing racialization throughout American history.

It was then that I discovered that the way that most people who criticize Chinese churches often misses the mark. Critiqued as bulwarks against racial integration and strongholds of conservative patriarchal ideologies, it has simply never occurred to most people that Baldwin’s analysis of both the black church and the Nation of Islam might have any application to Chinese Christianity. It does.

And here’s the application.

It is that ‘Asianness’–and ‘Chineseness’ in particular–has to be continually constructed within Chinese churches to preserve their place as the model minority within a black-white racial hierarchy. ‘Asianness’ and ‘Chineseness’ don’t imprison Chinese churches; Chinese Christians themselves actively construct a unitary ideology of what these things are in order to hang on to their wedge position as the ‘model minority.’ This is not just confined to America. A recent example of this is the attempt in Hong Kong by some Chinese Christians uninterested in making these constructs to hold others who are interested in these power dynamics accountable for their claims about trying to find Noah’s Ark in Turkey. For those who aren’t in the know, an organization in Hong Kong has solicited funds from Chinese churches over a decade in an effort to find Noah’s Ark as a silver bullet for convincing the world of the inerrancy of Scripture, which they claim will result in a major proselytizing harvest. In the process, dubious actions have been committed, especially the exaggeration of results from their Turkey expeditions (on which no credible archaeologists went). While my friends like Sam Tsang have been pressing for truth in this matter, the response tends to be that the dissenters calling for accountability will shatter the construct of a universal Chinese Christianity that needs to speak with one voice for evangelistic effectiveness. In other words, there’s too much riding on some Chinese Christians wielding the power to construct ‘Asianness’ and ‘Chineseness,’ so much that dissent is suppressed. Allow the dissent, and shatter the community.

Baldwin warns us precisely of this kind of thing. He reminds those of us Asian Americans who buy into the ‘model minority’ stereotype that, by corollary, this construct that from its very inception was meant to situate Asian Americans as a wedge between black and white America is designed to feed segregation and hatred, whether those of us who used it for our identity construction know it or not. In other words, buying into ‘model minority’ constructs may not be accompanied by known malicious intentions, but the structural social consequences of buying into it result in hateful polarization. The horror is not simple theological and organizational breakdown within Chinese churches and among Chinese Christian networks. It’s that they will feed the racializing processes that keep the races segregated from each other in mutual fear and hatred, a problem that, as we saw in the Trayvon Martin case, is just as insidious today as it was when Baldwin was writing. It’s those constructs that must be the target of any prophetic critique. Those of us making this critique love the Chinese church. We grew up in it. We were spiritual formed by it. Our closest friends and family are part of it. But we criticize not because we either hate the church and not because we are simply trying to save a structure that we, and no one else, care about. We speak because we pray that Chinese Christians would be shaken from our complicity with racial segregation and realize that the ‘Christian’ thing calls us to contribute our very selves to the church catholic’s ministry of reconciliation.

Indeed, as Baldwin concludes The Fire Next Time, reconciliation can only happen when the demonization stops and the power of love conquers the consolidation of segregated communities. To posit a heterodox reading of The Fire Next Time via a radically orthodox Christian lens, the fire next time can only be avoided by the Cursillo prayer: ‘Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people and kindle in them the fire of your love.’ James Baldwin has spoken to us, and his words are prophetic. We are called to repentance; we are summoned to examine our contribution to the impending racial apocalypse; we are beckoned to follow the way of love over against structures that feed hatred and division. Though James Baldwin left the pulpit early on in his ministry and thought that he left the Body of Christ, Baldwin calls us to follow the way of Christ, a way that shattered my dungeon and has moved me in a vocational direction that I never imagined I would take when I was sixteen. All I can say is that I am grateful to Baldwin for writing his book, and I hope that my work does his legacy justice.

Not a Dinner Party Is a Chinglican

Tags

Anglican, Asian American, Catholic, Celia Allen, China, Chinatown, Chinglican, complementarian, Donaldina Cameron, egalitarian, feminist, feminist theology, liberation, Mao Zedong, missionary, neo-Reformed, Not a Dinner Party, orientalism, Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessey, white missionary women

Some time ago, I raised the issue on this Thing that we need a feminist theologian. You could say that we now have one, although I’m sure that Not a Dinner Party’s views are not quite as radical as Mary Daly’s, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s, Rosemary Radford Ruether’s, or Rita Nakashima Brock’s. (Or perhaps they are, which would be very interesting indeed). Instead, Not a Dinner Party’s rant ostensibly places her in the same camp as those who have been labeled ‘evangelical feminists.’ What is striking about this is that even as Not a Dinner Party admits that she too has moved from a sort of Reformed evangelical confession to high-church Anglo-Catholic practice, so have some evangelical feminist bloggers like Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey, to some extent for each, at least in their personal contemplative practices. If there are two sides of the same reactionary coin with regard to complementarian and patriarchal models of gender roles, there may be two sides of the same feminist coin as well.

Since Not a Dinner Party raised the possibility of the patriarchal reactionary coin, I will leave her to address this hypothesis of the feminist coin in her further reflections on this Thing.

My aim in this post is instead to celebrate the arrival of our second Chinglican on this blog. I regret to have not been able to proceed further with the ‘What’s So Good About Being Anglican?‘ series before writing this post, for I do plan to write an exposition of the Anglican charism in part 4 and of Chinglicanism in part 5. But if my post on Justin Cantuar and the Cursillo Movement was a preview of sorts into the nature of part 4, consider this appreciation of what Not a Dinner Party stands for as a preview of sorts into part 5’s more drawn out discussion of what it means to be a Chinglican.

I want to write about Not a Dinner Party’s admission that she is interested in all things China. To make such an admission may put her into the ranks of white missionary women who were very interested in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these women did not make it all the way to China; instead, some like Donaldina Cameron (Presbyterian Church in Chinatown, San Francisco) and Celia ‘Debbie’ Allen (First Chinese Baptist Church, San Francisco) mentored youth, alleviated poverty, and combated domestic violence in American Chinatowns.

Donaldina Cameron as a saint

Indeed, there is a fairly clear trajectory that runs from the work of these white missionary women in Chinatowns and the liberation movements of Chinese American youth combating racism and Chinese segregation since the 1930s Tahoe Conferences, efforts that eventually culminated in calls for social justice from the National Council of Churches’s National Conference of Chinese American Churches (CONFAB) and the joining of mainline Chinese churches with the War on Poverty and the ethnic studies strikes in the 1960s and 1970s, through which seminal organizations like Self-Help for the Elderly, the Chinese Hospital, and the Mei Lun Yuen Housing Project were started.  While some Asian American scholars are somewhat ambivalent about the sort of imposition of whiteness onto Chinese spaces by these missionary women, many Asian Americanists themselves often laud these white missionary women as prototypical anti-racist feminists in Chinatown (see, for example, Peggy Pascoe’s Relations of Rescue, Judy Yung’s Unbound Feet, and Derek Chang’s Citizens of a Christian Nation; for a critique, see Henry Yu’s Thinking Orientals). That I know Not a Dinner Party to have worked in Chinese immigrant services and anti-poverty work on both the West and East Coasts may well indicate that she is following in this long legacy.

Yet even that is not the subject of this particular post, though we may well come back to these themes in the future.

What I want to discuss here is the influence that white Anglicans who study China, including Not a Dinner Party, have had on my thinking on Anglicanism. This is thus not an introduction to Not a Dinner Party, as if she needed one and had to work off a complementarian model where she speaks only under authority on this Thing. I am not introducing her. I am appreciating her.

As you will see from her more formal introduction on her Tumblr, Not a Dinner Party takes her name from Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong’s quip that ‘a revolution is not a dinner party.’ For some, this explicit invocation of Maoist ideology may be alarming, as it may suggest that there are some of us whose radical critiques may stem from secular socialist sources.

Yet if there is anything that Anglicans who study China, including Not a Dinner Party, have taught me, it is that we must categorically refuse to see China as the ‘other’ to the West. Timothy Cheek is one of these Anglicans. A scholar of Chinese intellectual history both in the Republican and Communist periods, Cheek writes in his introduction to relations between China and the West, China since 1989: Living With Reform, that especially those who do America-China relations often fixate on China as the ‘other’ without realizing that this binary geopolitical framework feeds deeply into how an American national consciousness is conceptualized. If this is the case, Cheek argues, then we need to understand China rightly. Throughout his work, then, Cheek makes the case that we need to understand that saying that ‘Mao is a bad man’ is not enough; we actually have to unpack who Mao was, who the intellectuals both for and against Mao were, who the intellectuals and the political leaders of the Republican era were, who the intellectuals and the political leaders of the post-Mao Reform era were, etc. Moreover, Cheek emphasizes that there is a ‘historical Mao’ who actually did things that were good and bad, as well as an ahistorical ‘living Maoism’ that endures today that places Mao as a mythologically good and evil figure in modern China. Seen in this way, China isn’t this big totalitarian land mass over there. Instead, borrowing from the Yale historian of China, Jonathan Spence, it’s a concerted ‘search for modern China,’ examining what we know as ‘China’ as a complex, modern political and economic set of systems whose activities are integral to international politics.

Cheek is not the only one doing such things, especially at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver’s Institute of Asian Research, where much of this complex political economic analysis of Asia-Pacific nation-states takes place in its various centres under leading scholars (both emeriti and contemporary) like Terry McGee, David Edgington, Abidin Kusno, Michael Leaf, Alison Bailey, and Tsering Shakya. To be sure, not everyone here is an Anglican. But the China scholars, like Tim Cheek, disproportionately are, for other scholars, such as Pitman Potter (a China law professor who has recently been ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada) and Diana Lary (an emerita professor of modern Chinese history, with interests particularly in Hong Kong, and who is a latitudinarian Anglican laywoman) certain are Anglican as well as leading China scholars. These scholars also take a similar view of China, refusing to frame it as a backward geopolitical ‘other’ but as a complex, modern apparatus with thriving public and private spheres and vibrant intellectual activity both for and against the state.

It’s here that Not a Dinner Party fits, and the fact that both her partner and I were both students supervised by Tim Cheek for our undergraduate history theses makes this point all the more poignant. (Parallels aside, however, her partner is much more mature in a Christian sense than I am–evidenced by his conversations with me when we were in history together–and whose emphasis on actually doing poverty work and working for social justice puts me to shame.) As a white woman interested in all things China, Not a Dinner Party’s command of Mandarin Chinese, both spoken and written, routinely makes me defer to her for translation, and her knowledge of the Chinese state apparatus and civil society usually means that it’s usually I who consult her for my knowledge of China.

But these people’s deep knowledge of modern China is not the point of this post. It is that this approach to China–one that emphasizes complex alterity in contrast to Cold War ideologies–seeps into their practice of Anglicanism and has deeply influenced the way that I understand Chinglicanism.

If anything, these sorts of approaches to China are far from anything orientalist. While Churl complains in a previous post that Catholicism may be Anglicanism’s ‘Orient,’ I’d like to propose that the alternative to that lies somewhere in Not a Dinner Party’s approach to China. Indeed, Edward Said made it clear in Orientalism that what he was critiquing was not that the ‘orient’ was being studied by ‘occidentalist’ scholars, but instead that ‘occidentalist’ scholars’ methodologies tended to frame the ‘orient’ as a monolithic whole without bothering to actually engage the region of the world called the ‘Orient’ in all of its complexity. The answer to Said is not to stop studying ‘Asia’ or ‘China’; it is to represent it as complex. And this is what these Anglican scholars of China do: instead of seeing the ‘other’ as a fascinating, exotic, but backward monolithic wholes, they examine China as very much a part of who we are and as a complex state apparatus straddling a very complicated economy with multiple publics and counterpublics vying for their voice to be heard. This is China; this is also Catholicism, with its very complicated hierarchy, its fascinating financial exchanges, and its various factions duking it out. What the Anglicans who study China have taught me is that while it may be geopolitically convenient to posit the ‘other’ as ‘wholly other,’ such an approach is neither a fair representation of the other’s complexity, nor an accurate view of how the ‘other’ constitutes our very selves, nor a good way to advance conversation that will lead to the ever increasing collegiality, communion, brotherhood, and sisterhood to which all Christians led by the Spirit are called.

This is what makes Not a Dinner Party’s initial rant on this Thing so on point. What she is pointing out to us is that Catholicism is not one thing. However, the reduction of the neo-Reformed converts running to Catholicism belies what she facetiously calls ‘orientalist’ bells and smells: they reduce Catholicism to one thing. She might declare to us that she herself is a ‘single issue voter’ on the subject of women’s ordination, but she goes on to say that ‘I think the trend is particularly troubling, beyond the gender questions, because the gender questions bring up something larger, i.e. things that become problematic when you go in this direction.’ One may read her as repeating the same ‘slippery slope’ arguments presented by John Piper in the Gospel Coalition video on complementarianism that she posted, only running in the opposite direction.

The only trouble is, a ‘slippery slope’ is not what Not a Dinner Party is talking about.

Not a Dinner Party is saying that it is troubling that when neo-Reformed converts go over to Catholicism, they reduce Catholicism via their narrow view of gender complementarity that only represents one wing (albeit the dominant wing, including in the magisterium) of the Catholic conversation. One wonders, for example, whether their Catholicism is big enough to include the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) or other conferences of women religious, to whom, by the way, Pope Francis went out of his way to say that they should keep doing what they are doing even if they are investigated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the same CDF formerly headed by a certain Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger who declared while still in office that whatever disagreements he had with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and her ‘radical feminist’ friends (which he unfortunately declared ‘another religion’), he considered her an important and thoughtful exegete. One wonders whether their Catholicism is big enough to recognize that liberation theology movements are now being vindicated by Pope Francis as part of the magisterium and that the Church has always had an ‘option for the poor,’ in which framework the free market advocates such as George Weigel, Michael Novak, Robert George, Richard John Neuhaus, and Paul Ryan with their subsidiarity arguments sound more neoliberal than Catholic. One wonders whether these people, instead of reading First Things, have been tempted by the free student subscription to Commonweal. If indeed there are single issue voters, Not a Dinner Party seems to be suggesting that it is these neo-Reformed converts.

And all of this can probably be traced back to Not a Dinner Party’s commitment to an Anglicanism that does not frame China as the monolithic other. In fact, one can only see that the neo-Reformed and conservative Catholic converts are two sides of the same reactionary coin from the vantage point of commitment to analyses that unpack modern complexity, for it is only from that perspective that one can point out reductionism in all of its insidious forms. Just as China should not be reduced to living Maoism (though that is certainly there), Catholicism should not be reduced to the magisterium (though it certainly has a place).

What do we call that vantage point in the Christian church? Well, Not a Dinner Party and I would call it ‘Anglicanism.’ Or better put, it’s called ‘Chinglicanism,’ because we realize that it’s a particular kind of Anglicanism that we are talking about here, one that is not interested in propping up the old colonial structures of the British Empire as it sets up racial hierarchies and segregated urban developments all over the world, but rather, one that realizes that the parish charism does not even allow for a strict spatial differentiation between the ‘church’ and the ‘world.’ It should, after all, be little surprise that the progenitors of ‘radical orthodoxy’ like John Milbank and some of their critical post-liberal allies like Rowan Williams and Stanley Hauerwas are also Anglicans who argue that that very spatial differentiation between the ‘church’ and the ‘world’ is itself a secular construct. As Milbank points out from the get-go in Theology and Social Theory, the saeculum as it has been traditionally conceptualized in Christian theology is not a place; it’s a time, a reference to the ordinary time between Christ’s first and second parousia. In this way, the spatial boundaries of the church are artificial, for the church is a display of an alternate but radically true ontology of radical communion, hospitality, and forgiveness in the midst of a violent world that erects and polices borders all over the place. It’s only in this context that Hauerwas’s mandate to make the church ‘the church’ and the world ‘the world’ makes sense: he is not talking about a physical spatial differentiation, but a radically ontological one in which the church and the world co-exist and where the church’s practices in the midst of the world threatens the world’s legitimacy as an ontological construct. That’s a deep articulation of the parish charism, that is to say, that the Anglican parish exists in the midst of a world that seeks to co-opt it because it doesn’t place those boundaries around itself, but where it ideally–and never completely successfully–displays an alternate mode of charitable social relations in the midst of a violent world.

Chinglicanism extends that parish charism and says that even imperial Anglicanism’s ultimate ‘other’–the ‘Orient,’ ‘Asia,’ or more precisely, ‘China,’ as well as ‘Catholicism’–must not be understood in the terms of colonial segregation or uncritical geopolitical posturing because that is a betrayal of the parish charism itself. It recognizes instead that a parish charism shows us what it means to be constituted by the ‘other,’ that our communion is deeper than we ever imagined, and that this communion is not easy and is in fact all too easily shattered by elitist political posturing. It requires us all to recognize that the ‘poor,’ the ‘Chinese,’ and the ‘Catholic’ are not others to be labeled and pushed away, but rather that we are all part of this parish together.

Not a Dinner Party is thus a Chinglican, for we both refuse to understand the ‘other,’ be it China or Catholicism, in static terms or even as apart from the constitution of our own existence, for doing so would be a violation of Anglican Christian practice altogether. Indeed, to the extent that I have committed these errors, Not a Dinner Party has often corrected me. In this way, she reminds me always that I must be a better Chinglican, for in practicing my Chinglican charism, I am contributing my share to the church catholic that we may all be irreducibly one.

Wong Fu For Life

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Asian American, Chinese American, Chinese church, Chinglican, Chris Dinh, Christine Chen, English ministry, ethnic, everyday, Kaba Modern, Korean American, life, love, nice girl, Nice Girls Crew, nice guy, Philip Wang, race, relationships, rigidity, romance, second generation, silent exodus, stereotype, Ted Fu, timelines, Wesley Chan, Wong Fu Productions, yellow fever, Yuri Tag

In a move that will likely annoy Churl to no end, I would like to take a short break from the Chinglican posts on Anglicanism (Part 3 is almost done, actually) and write something a bit more fun. When I first began blogging on A Christian Thing, I saw myself as a sort of Asian American voice on the blog, and it was my original intention to highlight how portions of contemporary Asian American and Asian Canadian arts and culture reflected the theological constitution of the world without the Asian American and Asian Canadian artists even knowing it. It was to that end that my first two posts on the blog were about Lynn Chen and Lisa Lee’s Tumblr blog, Thick Dumpling Skin, as well as on the Linsanity phenomenon in early 2012. At that time, Chinglican wasn’t going to write much about the practice of Anglicanism and about how certain major evangelical players were more ‘catholic’ than they made out to be. If you look carefully at how those posts originated, they were often provoked by some of Churl’s musings, say, about how Churl wished that Mark Driscoll were indeed Roman Catholic (to which I replied that Driscoll was more Irish Catholic than anyone has ever discussed him) while the more recent Anglican series is a reply of sorts to Churl’s desire to jump ship to Rome. I never intended to provide my analysis of the Anglican Communion, never wanted to address the neo-Reformed crew, and never thought that I would be speaking in my own Asian American voice to contest orientalizing voices within American evangelicalism at present. Indeed, I never thought that as Parts 3, 4, and 5 come out of the Anglicanism series, that I’d actually be doing Anglican (or better, ‘Chinglican’) theology on this blog. I suppose I had my own thoughts on these matters that I had personally worked out, but I never thought I’d be writing about them so publicly.

Three nice girls who have nothing to do with Wong Fu, at least not apparently. But they are (from left to right) Michelle Krusiec, Lynn Chen, and Sheetal Sheth. You should watch their stuff too.

Instead, I was supposed to be the happy voice on this Thing, still ridiculous to be sure, but happily ridiculous, blissfully looking at the most secular of Asian American arts and culture and finding good theological things to celebrate there. It was to that end that I wrote about how Thick Dumpling Skin’s address of body issues might appear overly individualistic, but Lisa Lee’s presumably Christian background (she says that her eating disorders hearken back to church potlucks) and Lynn Chen’s Catholic upbringing make them way too theologically thoughtful to end on an individualist note, even if they claim to be secular right now. On the same token, I also complained that while Jeremy Lin has been celebrated as the person to finally shine the spotlight on Asian American evangelicalism in the public eye, his theological assumptions have not been adequately interrogated, and we would be well-served as the church catholic if Lin were to tell us the painful story of how he was marginalized as an Asian American basketball professional as a theological reflection. For both, I wanted to celebrate the fact that we English-speaking younger generation Asian North American Christians (or at least, those with Christian backgrounds) aren’t simply making an alternative arts scene. We are actually doing theology, and doing an fantastically creative job at it.

It’s in that light that I’d like to celebrate Wong Fu Productions today. Wong Fu Productions is a small start-up film company started by three college friends who attended UC San Diego together, Philip Wang, Wesley Chan, and Ted Fu (they have also since added Chris Dinh). Currently based in Los Angeles, they have over one million subscribers on their YouTube channel and a successful business that sells T-shirts and plush toys, while they make film shorts (and aspire to make feature-length films) on YouTube. Over the last weekend, two of the co-founders of Wong Fu, Phil and Wes, visited Vancouver, along with Kaba Modern dance alumna Yuri Tag. Last week (June 8) was also the tenth anniversary of Wong Fu Productions. Because they’ve arrived on my home turf and because it’s time for me to appreciate them anyway, it’s time for an appreciation. (If you want to know what Wong Fu has to do with Yuri Tag, watch the entire series, ‘When It Counts.’ I’ve put the first episode down below.)

The appreciation that took place here in Vancouver treated Phil, Wes, and Yuri a bit like celebrities. Kept at a distance from the fans, the local Asian Canadian YouTube artists who hosted the festivities resorted to tactics that made the event seem quite needlessly formal, complete with raffle ticket draws, very formal and stiff interviews, and games through which the audience would purportedly get to know the Southern Californians. It wasn’t until near the end of the show that Phil broke the ice and reached out to fans, upon which he realized what the crowd control strategies were for, as someone shouted, ‘Will you father my children?’

It wasn’t always like this, though, and this is definitely not how I remember Wong Fu in the past, nor how I feel about them in the present. The Wong Fu guys are a bit older than me, probably by some two or three years. I know that that’s not much now that we’re all adults (but none the more mature, probably!), but in pre-university terms, that’s quite a bit. Not only would they have been seniors when I was a freshman in high school (thinking like that makes them feel old indeed), but in the Chinese church, we would have had to call them gege 哥哥 (older brother) and jiejie 姐姐 (older sister) simply because they were older. I mean, I’m sure that Phil 哥哥, Wes 哥哥, and Ted 哥哥 would chafe under their titles, but in a way, the fact that they have been able to carve out a path in Asian American arts and culture to the point that they’re taken seriously makes the attribution of older sibling ironically appropriate.

Like many, the first short I ever saw of theirs was called ‘Yellow Fever.’ Do yourself a favour and watch it below if you haven’t. The central premise of the short is that while white guys can get Asian girls, Asian guys can’t get white girls. Created prior to YouTube, the short became a hit, downloaded by many of my friends and shown to me at many a party at someone else’s house. We got the sense that these guys were big; they had struck a nerve with all of us relationally challenged, younger, single Asian Americans because they were able to articulate our relational frustrations without actually naming the cause. Instead, they made it funny without explaining anything.

But what really caught my attention was ‘Just A Nice Guy.’ (I’ve put it down below for you.) Again, Wong Fu pinned the relationship challenges of Asian Americans to a particularly corny answer that many Asian American (and arguably non-Asian American) guys give for the reason for the one that got away: ‘I’m just a nice guy.’ (This is why you have to watch ‘When It Counts’ above: Yuri Tag is a ‘nice girl.’ What a spin.) Again, the explanation is just ludicrous to be unbelievable as a non-explanation. Phil plays a ‘nice guy’ seeking the affections of a girl in his study group, but because he is a nice guy, he always gets ‘friend zoned’ by the women to whom he is attracted. It never occurs to him till the end to actually say something about his attractions and affections, which only goes to show that the ‘nice guy’ category is something in which he put himself in the first place. It’s not because he’s Asian that he’s a ‘nice guy.’ It’s not because he’s shy that he’s a nice guy. He’s a nice guy because he said so himself, and that’s what’s keeping him from pursuing relationships.

Since ‘Nice Guy,’ Wong Fu has been making fun of the categories we conservative Asian Americans from the suburbs have set up for ourselves. I say ‘conservative’ and ‘suburban’ as qualifiers because obviously, Asian Americans range the political and geographical spectrum. If you look at the shorts, though, there are a disproportionate amount of suburban scenes (for a new hilarious one, watch ‘Meet the Kayak‘), and the rigidity of stereotypes suggests that while Wong Fu itself is no conservative organization, they may have had fairly socially conservative backgrounds (and they are seeking to transcend it, which means that it’s nice that they got to meet with Barack Obama at the White House). What this means is that Wong Fu doesn’t speak for Asian Americans; how could they? (They certainly don’t represent any of the Asian Americans in poverty or who aren’t privileged enough to get higher education because of fears that they might be deported.) But for those of us suburban Asian Americans who grew up socially conservative (for a great complaint about us, see Glenn Omatsu’s ‘The Four Prisons’ paper), many of us grew up imbibing stereotypes of who we should be as a model minority focused on our own education and careers, and we proceeded to execute that prescription for our lives with rigid timelines and entrenched categories for how our lives should be. As we executed our lives with the instrumental rationality that we lived ever since we learned that we should be a model minority, we applied those same tactics to our personal relationships, leaving emotional carnage in our wake.

Wong Fu is a look in the mirror. One particularly poignant short is ‘Strangers, again’ (see below). If ‘Nice Guy’ is about the hard-and-fast categories in which we place ourselves as conservative suburban Asian Americans, then ‘Strangers, again’ is about the rigid timelines we set for ourselves. On a cursory view of the video–which, unfortunately, is how most viewers saw it–the film seems to be almost hyper-Calvinist in its stripping away of agency from people in a relationship. It’s almost predestined that every relationship will start with some form of excitement, degenerate into apathy, and then disintegrate into a fighting match that ends in two people, once in love, becoming strangers again. But this is not the way that even Wong Fu sees it. Spoiler alert: the final scene has the guy in the relationship (Phil) thinking about if he were to do it again, he’d apologize to his girlfriend (played by the fantastic Cathy Nguyen) halfway into the relationship, cutting off the ‘stages’ right in the middle. Relationships are not predetermined, the film is saying. You can do something about them. (If you want a view of relationships where these stages are but a dream, check out Wes’s Cannes selection, ‘At Musing’s End.’)

Wong Fu also has a variety of comedy sketches that take apart these stereotypes. The ‘Technology Ruins Romance‘ series takes apart the ‘nineteenth century’ notion of long lost love, showing how predetermined conclusions about hopeless romance are simply unrealistic in contemporary everyday lives. There’s also ‘Rick’s Man Tutorials,‘ a parody of Asian American men who attempt to show off their jock sides and look insensitive while falling apart emotionally on the inside. ‘Funemployed‘ delivers a blow to the idea that unemployment is simply failure, while also delivering to us in the midst of the unemployment story a classically creative Wong Fu music hit, the purposefully inane and vapid ‘Dance to This Song‘ that is a parody of every other club song to which to dance.

Put succinctly, Wong Fu Productions demonstrates time and again that the hand-wringing over what constitutes Asian American identity is so painfully silly that it should be laughed at. Instead, life should be lived. This is why they have also produced a variety of music videos for fellow Asian American YouTubers, a task that has culminated in them filming a music video for multiplatinum Taiwanese American artist, Leehom Wang. The music is where you can’t make the stuff up about life and love, where it’s impossible to put everything into a categorical grid or a rigid timeline, where artists must deal with mystery. That’s why Wong Fu now sponsors the International Secret Agents concert series that brings Asian American artists (many of whom are practicing Christians) to the stage to sing not about Asian American love, but their personal experience of love.

In other words, the notion of Asian American identity seems only to be a secondary concern for Wong Fu. If there’s anything to be said about Asian American identity, it’s that if we tell the truth about life and love, we find ourselves constituted not by some category we’ve imposed on ourselves. Instead, we are constituted by the ‘other,’ in that special word in younger Asian American circles called ‘relationships.’ Many of Wong Fu’s videos explore dating relationships in particular, but what’s increasingly striking is the way that their relationships are not merely sexual in nature (some, say, ‘The Last‘ and ‘To Those Nights‘ have slight hints that something subtly sexual might be going on). The overarching framework is not sex, though. It’s friendship.

The sort of friendship that Wong Fu portrays is a desire for deeper knowledge of the other for the other’s sake, to the point of critiquing one’s obsession with one’s own identity. When this is fulfilled–when that longing to know and to be known, to love and to be loved is fulfilled–then that’s what Wong Fu calls ‘home.’ Home is not only a place: it is a place if it’s filled with memories of relationships and times gone by, but it’s not just some physical space devoid of meaning. Home is not only one’s family by blood: it’s not the old stereotypical Asian American argument for traditional family values where the only people you should trust are those with whom you’re related by blood. Home is not even a place where everyone is of the same race; it’s not that Wong Fu is colour-blind (far from it), but race is not a relationship, and there’s no obsession with Asian American identity to make race a deciding factor for social relations. No, home is where your friends are, where the imposed categories and rigid timelines are stripped away and you can simply be with your friends. It’s in this context that we finally find what the Wong Fu holy grail of a dating and marriage relationship is: it’s one where one is loved because one is known and one knows the other. (For Wong Fu’s radical experiment with how far this idea can go, see their short-lived attempt at a television series, Home Is Where the Hans Are.)

Somehow, somewhere, there has to be something theological here.

It’s here that it’s easy to be stumped. After all, what’s so theological about all this? To be honest, there’s nothing really at the surface, although there’s plenty underneath. I mean, I could pin it to my sighting of a cross in an engagement video that Wong Fu did for a couple whose relationship spanned Los Angeles and Taipei, and in the interest of full disclosure, I have mutual friends with Wong Fu who are card-carrying Asian American evangelicals, some of whom were in their very early videos when they were students at UC San Diego. I also happen to remember that on an early version of Phil’s biography on the Wong Fu site, he said that his mom was a deacon in his church in Walnut Creek.

But I won’t go there because the films don’t go there.

You could say that there’s hardly anything worth our theological notice in Wong Fu aside from the occasional YouTuber that Wong Fu works with mentioning ‘God’ (say, Yuri Tag). Other than that, the Wong Fu shorts have really nothing to say about God.

But that’s where you’re wrong.

You see, if we can move this whole discussion to Asian American churches struggling with the ‘silent exodus‘ of their second generation to greener pastures, these shorts are an amazing resource for Asian American English ministries struggling to put their finger on what it is that their people struggle with in their everyday lives. I’m sure this could be said about a variety of non-profits and sundry dedicated to Asian American services. But English-speaking ministries in Asian American churches are notorious for trying to name what it is about Asian Americans in an effort to define their people and then move in to solve their problems in the name of Jesus. You have parents who tell you to be over-achievers. You are over-achievers. You are too much of a good Asian. You need Jesus. Note well: those are already the good ones. Some, of course, are worse, and may be downright racist: We are Asians, and we are superior to white people because we work harder and have stronger family values. So we are better Christians too.

It’s these stereotypes that are currently the plague of Asian American evangelical theology, and Wong Fu shows us another way. Perhaps ‘naming’ something that’s already there is not a defining action.

Maybe it’s a comic action.

It’s comic because once you bring up the categories with which Asian Americans have been defined and have set out to define themselves, they are funny because they sound so ideological that they’re just ludicrous. Why is it really that Asian guys can’t get white girls while white guys get Asian girls? Is there anything more to a ‘nice guy’ and a ‘nice girl’ that makes them so relationally hapless? Does anyone actually go into a relationship looking to become ‘strangers again’? Well, no, and the people who do should be given a sympathetic look in the mirror. This is what you’re doing to yourself, the Wong Fu shorts say. Get over yourself, and live for a change. There is so much more to life than your tidy categories, pressing timelines, and lame excuses for why you’re relationally challenged. Get out there. Live. (And if there are racist people in the way, tell them to get with the program and do something good for a change, like get to know someone personally.)

That’s a remarkable theological service done for Asian American English ministries. In answer to what exactly defines an Asian American that they can be targeted for ministry, Wong Fu wants us to know that we are not merely Asian American. Let’s get our theology right. God is not out to define us because we are not categories. We are not simply made of timelines. We do not exist to be defined for your next pet ministry project, and those of us who fit all of the stereotypes in the shorts are very funny people indeed. We are people, and we have everyday lives, and those lives are worth making fun of and turning into dramas. In fact, even if we defy the notion that our lives are stories lived comically before God, even if we insist that the categories define us and the timelines rule us, even if we purport to be a model minority because we have something about being Asian American to prove (of course, to the chagrin of progressive Asian Americanists), people like Wong Fu can still tell our stories as comedies, sometimes even at our expense. After all, the entire tradition in which we find ourselves is in fact a story, and it is a comic one, one that ends with us coming home to a place we did not expect with friends who have forgiven us for our instrumental rationality, even as we have forgiven them and have been forgiven by God himself.

And so, I’m just going to say it: Wong Fu for Life. Thank you, Phil, Wes, Ted, Chris, and Christine, and everyone else who works at Wong Fu. Your videos really do make my day better. Thanks.

What’s So Good About Being Anglican? (Part 2)

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Anglican, Anne Hathaway, Asian American, baggage, Batman, bishop, Book of Common Prayer, British Empire, Catholic, Chinese, colonial, courtship, Dark Knight Rises, dating, denomination, Episcopal, Evangelical, Fantine, Global South, Global South Anglican, John Shelby Spong, Julie Andrews, latitudinarian, Les Miserables, liberal, marriage, neo-Reformed, post-colonial, Princess Diaries, Protestant, racism, Rowan Williams, Susan Howatch, television, Theology

I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted. Over the night after I posted my first post, Churl read it. The suspense is now killing him, and he is now describing my talents as made for television miniseries, such as ‘The Real Anglicans of Canterbury, Jordan Shore, The Amazing (G)race, and Survivor: The Evangelical Church, to be followed by Survivor: the Neo-Reformed Church (in which we don’t bother to vote anyone off the island because the matter is predestined anyway).’  For my part, I’m still thinking of something that includes Gordon Ramsay or Guy Fieri. Regardless, though, my wife has been calling me a ‘naughty Chinglican,’ so to say the least, I am quite satisfied. (Ew, Mark Driscoll, get your head out of the gutter.)

Anne Boleyn? Or Irene Adler? And if the latter, then whither Moriarty?

This second post will not satisfy any of Churl’s frustration. It is in fact intentionally designed to make it worse. By returning to the question, if Anglicanism is as bad as I described it in my previous post, then how did people like me enter it in the first place?, it’s like I’m rubbing it in. How on earth did we get in? Why the hell did we do it? What in God’s name were we thinking?

Since all theology is done through analogy anyway, let me begin my case by analogy. In fact, I’m going to try to make my analogies as shallow as possible in order to maximize Churl’s frustration. I recognize that the answer to this question will be very complicated. That’s why the post is so long.

It seems to me that most evangelicals who wind up Anglican (like myself; unless you were raised Jewish, in which case your name is Lauren Winner) found the Anglican Church in some kind of whirlwind romance. As the stories often go, Anglicanism is like that person to whom said evangelical was very physically attracted (oh, oh, see what I did? I made that gender-neutral!). As a result, said evangelical’s evangelical friends who have read I Kissed Dating Goodbye cautioned him (or her; I like evangelical feminists) against basing his or her relationship on sheer physical attraction. Indeed, they often ask, Doesn’t Anglicanism have a lot of baggage?

But we are in love, or as Stanley Hauerwas would put it, in lust. For every insecure Mark Driscoll masculinity quote about priests who ‘wear a dress’ (one wonders who is more insecure about their masculinity: the dress-wearing priest or Mark Driscoll?), we reply that the attraction is too powerful, too magnetic, to resist. Oh, that was so spiritual, we evangelical liturgical hipsters say about the liturgy. I’ve never had something that structured before, except when I planned out that perfect worship set three weeks ago that I executed with ‘rehearsed spontaneity.’ Through the liturgy, I really feel closer to God than I’ve ever been. It was so poetic. (I read somewhere, by the way, that this is actually how Rowan Williams became an Anglican.)

Yeah, I know, shocking that that’s how Rowan Williams became Anglican…

In some ways, this is my story, except mine is more along the lines of the Princess Diaries. There, Anne Hathaway begins the movie as a rock-climbing geek with glasses and very frizzy and oily hair (hey, sounds about how I look!), and not only does she not return her crush’s affections, but the crush of her life does not return her affections. After discovering from Julie Andrews that she is in fact princess of Genovia, she gets an ultimate makeover, and by the end of the movie (spoiler alert!), she is kissing the guy who had a crush on her (as opposed to the guy on whom she had a crush) and lifts her leg as she squeals.

Of course, I am certainly nowhere nearly as attractive as the guy on whom Anne Hathaway had a crush or the guy who had a crush on Anne Hathaway, but I think it’s quite apropos to say that Anne Hathaway is my Anglicanism. In fact, the real Anne Hathaway (I’m still talking about Hollywood, not Shakespeare) did once upon a time consider becoming a nun (Dolores Hart, round 2?), but when she found out that her brother was gay, her whole family became Episcopalian. While she now considers herself ‘spiritual but not religious’ (paging Lillian Daniel!), I consider her as the Beatrice figure in my story of the Anglican Church, which is (admittedly) my own idiosyncratic version of the Communion. (Let me note here, however, that everyone’s version of the Anglican Communion is personal and idiosyncratic. That’s probably why there is a crisis.)

You see, when I first entered the Anglican Church, I hated it for the same reasons the teens with whom I worked hated it. The liturgy was stale, the traditions were geeky in a very uncool way, the vestments were reviling, and the songs they sang sounded like three variations of ‘All Creatures of Our Bugs and Pigs.’ The kids hated it, I hated it; we just couldn’t see any beauty in it.

In fact, the funny story of how I became an Anglican begins with my defection from non-denominational circles to the realm of a man I like to call the ‘topless bishop.’ He wasn’t a bishop at the time, but he wanted me to work for his parish. For my part, I was looking for an escape out of the evangelical churches of which I was a part, mostly for political reasons: I was a very outspoken child in a conservative Chinese evangelical congregation with a congregational polity, so while the church’s congregational polity meant that I could hypothetically say whatever I wanted, that I had spoken too many times and with too little tact at several annual general meetings meant that it was time for me to go.

The ‘topless bishop’ saved my life. He called me while I was at work at a summer job doing industry manual labour, and he said over the phone, ‘Meet me for breakfast at a restaurant called Topless.’

Thinking that the machines around were making his words unclear, I yelled, ‘Where?’

‘Topless.’

‘How do you spell that?’

‘T-O-P-L-E-S-S.’

That was my introduction into the Anglican Communion and its sexuality struggles. (The restaurant was called ‘Tops,’ by the way, which only makes one wonder about what the origins of the bishop’s derivative were.)

From there, I was coaxed into the Anglican Church with a combination of the encouragement of Anglican clergy who wanted new blood in the system and the overwhelming promise of my own ego. This, by the way, is why I first hated Anglicanism. If I were to be the saviour of the church, I needed to save these kids from boredom, to catch them before they all secularized and went the way of the ‘silent exodus’ (Asian American evangelical terminology…I’ll explain separately!). The liturgy, the organ music, the status jockeying, the unpoetic Cantonese elements: these were all unhelpful. The kids would tell me that they were bored; I used to pass notes to some of them in service, asking if the ones who bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and nodded through the sermon whether they were ‘praying hard or hardly praying.’ The kids needed excitement, a burst of their religious affections (remember, I was a Piper fan), a kindling of the Holy Spirit, and a new hip (or as one of my colleagues put it, ‘high octane’) presentation of the Gospel.

As I looked harder, though, I saw with the rest of the liturgical hipster defectors to the Anglican Church that I could give Anglicanism an ultimate makeover. Because the rubrics in the Book of Common Prayer really aren’t that strict, for example, we could have our worship team insert Hillsong, Vineyard, Passion, and Soul Survivor music between the readings. The sermons didn’t have to be drawn from the lectionary, because the lectionary was just a suggestion; we could make up our own sermon series and attempt to exposit whole books of the Bible the proper (neo-Reformed) way. The Eucharist could be very intimate, especially if you strummed an acoustic guitar while everyone was communicating. After all, with the rest of the evangelical liturgical hipsters, I saw that the Book of Common Prayer articulated Reformed theology in brilliantly poetic terms. Confirming this understanding were evangelical and Reformed books by Robert Webber, Marva Dawn, and Jamie Smith that argued that liturgy is the way that we’re formed, that we are made for poetry (we are, after all, God’s poema), and that because Anglicanism has such a rich tradition, liturgy, history, and spirituality, this is the perfect place to become formed into the image of Christ. This Reformed thing was admittedly dampened a bit by the Alternative Service versions where you don’t get to talk about ‘oblation, satisfaction, and propitiation once offered,’ but it was like the Eucharist could replace the altar call, which for us evangelicals was a big deal. In short, Anglicanism could save evangelicalism.

And that’s where I discovered Anglicanism’s baggage.

The baggage that I discovered in Anglicanism’s family wasn’t that she was the princess of Genovia with Julie Andrews as the queen mother. It was that Anglicanism was Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises.

There was quite a bit of baggage that I had ignored as an evangelical liturgical hipster and that I simply didn’t know about when I didn’t like Anglicanism and didn’t care to learn more. While I knew, for example, was that Anglicanism was founded by Henry VIII when he wanted a divorce from a political marriage (only to manage to get through five more women over the course of his life), I didn’t know about the political crisis in Tudor England and the consolidation of the state that those actions caused, as well as the political upheaval leading up to and past the reign of Elizabeth I. As a result, I also did not know to read Anglicanism as pretty much the state religion of the United Kingdom that was probably more interested in advancing the interests of nation and empire than I’d like to admit. This means that while I thought that someone like Bishop J.C. Ryle and his very Calvinist leanings were signs of ‘good Anglicanism,’ I thought I could ignore the crazy Anglo-Catholic and broad church cousins.

Actually being Anglican–and at one point, being on ordination track–meant that my pretty Anglicanism was devastatingly challenged.

As I worked in those Chinese Anglican parishes, I slowly started to notice that not all was as it seemed. There was definitely some wishy-washiness that went on, which, when challenged, would receive very wishy-washy theological justification. On top of that, I was privy to a few strange backroom political deals, some of which happened in the past and people told me a variety of versions about them, some of which happened behind my back to marginalize me in ministry, and some to which I was privy to marginalize others in ministry. (Come on, I can’t tell you more than that. They were backroom deals, for cryin’ out loud. I can only tell you that some were surprisingly ethical, with the only thing ethically questionable about them being that they were backroom deals.)  After the backroom deals, of course, we’d all pretend that whatever church split was on our hands wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Generally, we did not use the corny evangelical line about ‘God calling people to different seasons in their ministry’ to explain away people leaving. But we did come up with a variety of stories and explanations for people that were often so unconvincing that people would start to imagine their own versions of stories, which, layered over time, made the truth that we knew to have actually happened in the backroom to sound increasingly implausible. Add to that the involvement of a few out-of-town bishops whose actions must remain completely off the record, and you’ve got a story juicier than anything Susan Howatch could concoct for her Church of England series. (More on Howatch in Part 3.)

And so, at the parish level, I was ushered into the world of Anglican politics, the world in which Anne Hathaway is not princess of Genovia, but Catwoman trying to eke her way through Gotham.

And thus, to magnify Churl’s utter frustration and consternation about just how ugly the state of Anglicanism is, let me dish out some of the general dirt, that is, bits of intentionally vague data that I’ve collected over my time working in Anglican parishes and interacting with bishops and senior clerics (some of whom were very senior, let me assure you), and then using all of those experiences as a hermeneutic while reading Anglican theology.

The first thing I discovered was that racism is pretty much built into the lifeblood of modern Anglicanism. With no Virgin of Guadalupe appearing to refocus our attention, the racism that Anglicans have imbibed since the dawn of modernity seems to focus around reinforcing the sovereign power of the British crown at the expense of colonized, coloured populations worldwide. If indeed John Bossy is right about the ‘migrations of the holy’ from the church to the state in modern times, Anglicanism is a model for how a church got completely subsumed under the state, which proceeded to attempt to subjectify all of its citizens/parishioners into theological uniformity during things like the Elizabethan Settlement.

This subjectification under the crown became a sort of interesting colonial model. Since I’m a Chinglican, let me take Hong Kong as my guiding example (you can fill in all the blanks with Southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, the African colonies, the Middle Eastern colonies, and the American colonies). As the British won the Opium War in 1841, there was a sense in which Hong Kong became the British crown’s chance to experiment with the creation of an Anglo-Chinese site (see Christopher Munn’s fascinating book, Anglo-China, for all the lurid and scandalous details). Within this colonial subjectification framework, Anglicanism played a very interesting role. As Anthony King shows in his work on colonial urban development, the idea of a ‘colonial third culture’ emerged precisely out of the segregation of the British colonizers from the colonized natives. That is to say, in the colonies, there were separate sections of colonial cities for the British colonizers–often working-class and lower-middle-class people from Britain looking for class advancement so that when they got to places like Hong Kong, they were the elites–and the colonized populations that they were attempting to subjectify (in Hong Kong, convert to ‘Anglo-Chinese’ citizens). In Hong Kong, St. John’s Cathedral functioned as the church in the colonizer territories. While the Cathedral currently (and commendably) serves as a hub for social justice especially for foreign domestic workers, it was the site of a lot of class conflict in the nineteenth century. In fact, if you read the early records, there was a big fight over who sat in which pews and whether you could put pews between existing pews (thus screwing with the class-stratified order of the space) in the 1850s, leading to a massive split in the church and the reconstruction of the pews.

What I’m trying to say is that in many places in the British colonies, Anglicanism was the religion of the colonizing elites within the segregated part of the colonial cities reserved for the colonizing Europeans. In turn, it generally wasn’t the Anglicans who first ran the schools and did missions among the colonized populations: those were Baptists, Union Church, Lutherans, and Methodists. The Anglican entry among the colonized populations came quite late in the game, which meant that the colonized populations (say, the Chinese) who became Anglicans also became attached to a symbol of colonizing power, i.e. if you were an Anglican, you were more European than the other Protestant plebs. Of course, throughout the early twentieth century, this dynamic sort of changed in parts of, say, East Africa where there was a revival. But argue this point as you might, the recent transition of the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA) from the Province of Rwanda has a telling story. The new Primate of Rwanda, Onesiphore Rwaje, had an exchange of letters (read them here yourself) with the province’s dean, Bishop Bilindabagabo Alexis, about the financial accountability of the AMiA and whether money that was promised to flow in from the Americas had actually arrived. As if the financial scandal that caused ‘the transition’ weren’t bad enough, Alexis point-blank takes notice in a letter dated 9 June 2011 when Rwaje fails to acknowledge his title, and thus his status: ‘Also, in your reply to my letter, you failed to recognize me as the Dean of the Province. Was this intentional or simply an oversight?’ Facepalm. Revivals replaced status? Hm.

This, by the way, is why I find the central geographical claim of the current Anglican realignment–that the Global South Anglicans whom we in the West evangelized during the missionary movements of the nineteenth century are now returning to evangelize us–completely ludicrous. Again, this is like Hong Kong. By all accounts, the early British attempts to colonize Hong Kong turned out to be a complete failure, and it was not until the development of a Chinese merchant elite that the semblance of order took shape in the 1870s. But by the time the British left in the 1990s (and with some colonial political maneuvering since the 1970s), the narrative that was left over was that the British had done a wonderful job with Hong Kong as a ‘borrowed place on borrowed time.’ The idea that we in the West evangelized the Global South is already a problematic notion because one wonders how effective the missions that came alongside the crown actually were, especially if these were Anglican missions catering to European elites. Instead, as was often the case, there was a breakout of charismatic revival among the Anglican parishes quite late in the game, which made for quite a bit of indigenous revival, to be sure. And yet, these revival movements often didn’t often lead to the development of a new indigenous theology (Archbishop Paul Kwong in Hong Kong pretty much admits this in his fascinating book, Identity in Communion), but a recycling of the old colonial theologies in charismatic garb, partly because the church still needed to function under the auspices of first the colonial empire, and then the developing post-colonial nation-state. That these supposedly ‘post-colonial’ Anglicans whose identities are still heavily tied to their nation-state’s political regimes are now returning to evangelize us is a bit of a ridiculous claim in terms of Christian orthodoxy, then. It’s more like they’re rebuking ‘the West’ for shedding the old colonial theological frameworks that used to underpin their imperial regimes, for (to put it crudely) failing to be the good, strong white people that we used to be. There should be no celebration that race has been overcome in this new Anglican re-alignment; it should rather be the lament that race has been refashioned with post-colonial clothes.

What I’m saying here is that in the Anglican Communion, everything within its polity that has been touched by the British crown is subsumed under the rubric of class, including race. Anglican racism is about class hierarchy in a political regime. It’s about British colonizers being superior and segregated from the natives. It’s about the native converts being superior to the plebs. It’s about climbing the ladder of race for class advancement. It’s about class advancement for increasing political influence toward the established national regime. Class, and thus, race, are in many ways built into the fabric of the modern Anglican Communion. Modern Anglicanism, in short, is little more than a political theology for the colonizing state.

The second thing I learned was that most every other English-origin denomination is a church split from Anglicanism, which means that Anglicanism can be taken validly as a proxy for all that’s wrong with Anglophone Protestantism writ large. Think about it. Presbyterianism: split off from Anglicanism to form presbyteries with Calvinist theologies. Methodists: split off from Anglicanism based on missionary methodologies. Baptists: split off from Anglicanism over the credo-baptism thing. Even the separatist Puritans (sorry, J.I. Packer): split off from Anglicanism for a more pure form of religious practice.

This has two implications. First, if Anglicanism was the religion of the state, these church splits were no mere private backroom poobahs; they were political splits that challenged the authority of the crown. What we have in the various Protestant denominations is not simply the debate over fine points of theology; it’s also a debate over what it means to be English, what it means to be under the British sovereign, what it means to be part of a British colony, what it means to do theology for the state. If indeed Anglicanism is a political theology, then splitting from Anglicanism implicates all the other English-speaking denominations also as alternate political theologies to Anglicanism at the core.

Second, then, this means that Anglicanism has a very special and schismatic relationship to the other Protestant denominations. You can see this in the current Anglican crisis. Since the late 1990s and the early 2000s, it was like all the other denominations were waiting with bated breath over what would happen regarding LGBTQ+ clergy, LGBTQ+ bishops, and the recognition of gender-neutral unions and marriage within Anglicanism. Now if all the other denominations were really independent of Anglicanism, then you wouldn’t think they’d feel the need to do this. But they did. If I might steal from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s title as ‘first among equals’ among the primates, I’d speculate that this suggests that Anglicanism is first among equals in terms of the Protestant denominations, partly because all of them take their Protestant cues from the Anglican Communion. In fact, I know the English denominations do this. Go find a Presbyterian book of worship, a United Methodist hymnbook, or a Baptist manual of service, and tell me what you see. I see the wholesale importation of prayers, baptism services, wedding services, funeral services, Good Friday services, Easter services, Christmas services, and even some Eucharistic prayers straight from the Book of Common Prayer.

In short, I hate to be disappointing to the evangelical liturgical hipsters, but if you were looking to escape Protestantism by becoming Anglican, you have simply jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Modern Anglicanism is all about Protestant identity. All the Protestant identities. Too many of them.

Which brings me to my third point…

The third thing I realized was that this whole crisis about sexuality is not really about the authority of Scripture or the divinity of Christ, but about the conflicts among the various theological factions of Anglicanism finally coming to a head after the last five hundred years or so. What I mean to say is that the factions in Anglicanism are not simply theological disagreements about this or that articulation of God; they are deep fissures over what theology is, period.

Allow me to illustrate. A very senior Anglican cleric with whom I spoke (I should not reveal what his position was) told me that when he had worked in the Global South, he was in fact good friends with Rowan Williams when he was Bishop of Wales and had enjoyed a thriving Global North-Global South partnership with him during those years. However, as both of them were promoted into even more senior positions, they discovered that their different actions in the Anglican Communion caused their personal friendship to drift apart. My senior Anglican friend had supported a Global South excommunication of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, which had in turn led to the consecration of alternate bishops with alternate provincial jurisdictions. These were actions that neither George Carey nor Rowan Williams (both Archbishops of Canterbury) could support, for they felt that these cross-episcopal consecrations fractured the Communion.

I then asked my friend what he thought of Rowan Williams. He said this: ‘Rowan and I both have a line. I draw the line here; he draws the line there, and so if Rowan doesn’t like me anymore, I suppose it’s because we draw the line in different places. But I know Rowan has a line. When Jack Spong said that he denied the resurrection, Rowan went ping! like that to Jack Spong.’

What my senior Anglican friend was telling me was more profound than I realized then, for in that moment, all bets were off. My friend was within the evangelical stream, Rowan Williams in an Anglo-Catholic stream, and Jack Spong in a very extreme latitudinarian stream. That my friend emphasized ‘drawing lines’ demonstrated what he as an evangelical Anglican thought orthodox Christian theology was: it was about keeping within boundary lines that fenced in what the truth of God was. This was, after all, the logic of the Anglican Communion crisis: several bishops had crossed theological lines that should not be crossed, and thus, their provinces should be excommunicated and those who are faithful to historic Anglican orthodoxy, i.e. those who stayed within the fence, should find alternate orthodox episcopal jurisdiction.

Imagine my utter surprise and consternation when I actually went to read Rowan Williams’s book on Arius. As an Anglo-Catholic, Williams had come to a radically different understanding of orthodoxy. He argued that it was Arius who was drawing the lines for God while Alexander and Athanasius had to use their creativity in relation to the tradition to articulate orthodox formulations of God, articulations that eventually became known as the Triune Personhood of God. For Williams, orthodox theology had nothing to do with drawing lines; that was Arius, for crying out loud. Orthodox theologians had to use their creativity to find truly catholic solutions to sticky doctrinal problems. Orthodoxy wasn’t about drawing lines; it was about tapping into what Williams has long called ‘the mind of the Communion.’

I imagine that theology is even different still for Jack Spong. My evangelical friend told me that Williams had a line that Spong crossed. But in Williams’s actual open letter to Spong, Williams (as an Anglo-Catholic) asks, given Spong’s desire to change everything in orthodox Christian belief: why does Jack Spong even bother to stay? Williams wasn’t appealing to Spong’s boundaries; he was appealing to his sense of catholicity. This in turn probably puzzled Spong, whose latitudinarian tendencies had led him to conceptualize God as a progressive revelation that could be experienced through modernity. As a result, this liberal theology might cause him to see my friend’s boundary-drawing and Williams’s catholicity as too conservative and not open to the progressive revelation of God. As Spong might say, both put too much emphasis on tradition and the institution and in turn might be seen by him as heretical because they denied God’s ongoing work and revelation in the present.

You see what just happened there? My friend, Williams, and Spong don’t simply disagree about theological positions; they are deeply divided over what theology actually is. Get ‘sexuality’ as a catalyzer, and bam! you have an Anglican crisis with no one who actually even agrees on what theology is. Is it boundary-drawing? Is it creative catholicity? Is it progressive revelation through modernity? Who knows?

What we do know is this, of course: of these three theologies, only one of them is really accepted in the Catholic church, as the evangelical one sounds a bit Jansenist and the latitudinarian one was the subject of Pius IX’s fulminations in the Syllabus of Errors. And thus, back to the Protestant point: yes, Anglicanism is Protestant. It’s so Protestant that it has two streams of Protestant theologies called anathema by Rome and one stream for catholic theologies, none of which currently get along because none of them agrees on what theology actually is.

Now take all this insight from the level of global communion, and plug it back into parish life. That was my brief Anglican apprenticeship experience. Those backroom deals and private conversations that I was talking about was all about this stuff: class advancement and maintenance, racial hierarchies, Protestant identity, relations with other evangelicals (some of whom began working in the church and decided to introduce elements of congregational democracy, which caused a bit of a rebellion against the rector that was kinda fun while it lasted), potshots thrown at liberals without any knowledge of what liberal theology actually was (take that, Jack Spong, although we have no idea how you do theology!), reading other people’s theologies through your own theology, having parish members go to evangelical/charismatic/liberal/catholic events and coming back wanting to change the church into their image, etc. Of course, I’m sure you can say this about non-Anglican churches (I grew up free church most of my life; I definitely know that you can say this in non-Anglican settings), but within Anglicanism, you could read all of the political problems happening at the parish scale within ever larger diocesan, synod, provincial, and communion-wide scales.

The honeymoon was over, the beauty dissipated, the communion turned into infighting. Selina Kyle Anglicanism. Got baggage?

Stay tuned now for Part 3, on why I’m not about to call quits on Anglicanism, or, for that matter, Anne Hathaway.

Sure, life killed the dream I dreamed too.

What’s So Good About Being Anglican? (Part 1)

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Anglican, Asian American, baptism, Baptist, Book of Common Prayer, bourgeois, Cantonese, Catholic, Chinese, hypocrisy, natural theology, neo-Reformed, post-colonial

A comment thread that has been an extremely civil conversation on Churl’s post on evangelicalism via Flannery O’Connor (thank you to all the participants involved) now has got me reflecting on: what’s so good about being Anglican? I suppose that following my last post on Anglicanism (is Anglicanism strategic?), this is a bit of a natural follow-up. (Churl and Lelbc43, did you see what I did there? I used the word ‘natural,’ like ‘natural theology’ natural).

What is so good about being Anglican? Or put differently, if Churl is so dissatisfied with it–to the point that he’s letting out a scream about the whole Protestant enterprise, it seems (the big scream sounds so much broader than its particular focus on evangelicals)–then why am I reveling in being a Chinglican?

Honestly speaking, I really don’t know. I used to work in Chinese Anglican churches where the teens and twenty-somethings with whom I worked asked me the same thing. If there was anything they hated, it was Anglicanism. They detested Anglicanism because being ‘Anglican’ was only something that uncles and aunties who were Anglican from birth in Hong Kong cared about. It was a status thing: they went to St. Stephen’s Girls School, St. Paul’s Boys School, Diocesan Boys’ School, etc. and sang in the choir at Holy Trinity, etc., so they were really proud of being closer to their British colonizers than all of the other Chinese plebs. In other words, there was a sort of pride in being Anglican insofar as they could be proud of being elite colonial subjects. (I’ll bet this will absolutely thrill my post-colonial friends.) Indeed, if you look at the current discourse, there’s this idea in the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) that the Global South Anglicans, i.e. the ex-colonial Anglicans, are going to save Anglicanism by doing what the (colonizing) missionaries did, except in the developed Global North: they’re going to re-convert (that is, re-colonize) the world. Thanks, guys, the collective amnesia about racialization is totally my sarcastic idea of what racial justice looks like.

Of course, the teens with whom I worked had no concept of this sort of colonial pride and elite status. Instead, they’d ask, Why on earth do we have to have a liturgy? Who cares about the liturgy if no one can understand it? Now, you also have to understand that I currently attend an English-speaking Anglican church where the service is taken from the 1662 prayer book, and most of my Asian North American church friends there complain about how, ‘It is meet and right,’ is simply not part of their vocabulary. But when I was working, I worked at Chinese Anglican churches, where the liturgy was done in Cantonese. And believe me, it was not only incomprehensible to second-generation English-speaking Asian North Americans; it was done in disgusting Cantonese. The offertory versicle–‘All things come of thee, and of thine own do we give thee. Amen’–translated into the Cantonese version of the classical Chinese (because, you know, that’s what the colonizers did: translate 1662 Elizabethan English into classical Chinese), put it into chant, and add an organ, and it sounds like, ‘All bugs go to the pig and we give the bugs from the pig back to the pig. Amen.’

Add to that what seems to be our theological wishy-washiness. I mean, I was on the conservative end of the Anglican breakaway, and I’m saying that I’ve experienced this sort of Anglican wishy-washiness. Sure, the conservative Anglicans split with their dioceses over stuff like gender-neutral marriage blessings and interfaith relations, but as far as I as a neo-Reformed charismatic Baptist was concerned (because, you know, that’s what you are if you’re a John Piper/Wayne Grudem fan), they were pretty wishy-washy. People who weren’t known to be ‘saved,’ or who weren’t living (sexuallly pure) Christian lives, did stuff all the time around the church, e.g. a guy who likely had gender-confusion played piano at one church; at the other church, an auntie invited some random family friend to work the sound system to ‘give him something to do so that he’ll come to church.’ Little kids who were baptized as babies and who (gasp!) did not have cognitive knowledge of their faith in Jesus Christ that wrought their justification were taking communion. You ask the rectors of these churches what their theology about all this was, and they’d say some mumbo-jumbo about being ‘pastoral’ and being ‘patient with people.’ Wishy washy. I can only imagine what the liberal side was like. (Little did I know that I was already in touch with some liberal Anglicans. Lovely people, by the way, and probably just as loose as the conservative end.)

But there you have it: if one is a Christian and wants to tell people what’s wrong with the contemporary church, one usually describes things like doctrinal illiteracy, irrelevant language, an obscene obsession with political gain, internalized racism, class superiority, bourgeois hypocrisy, etc. I hate to break it to you, but if that is your description of Christianity gone down the toilet, you have just described Anglicanism.

Put bluntly, Anglicanism sucks. Why would anyone want to be part of it?

Of course, that’s not the genuine question. The real question has two parts. First, how did we become part of it? Second, why do we stay? I’ll answer the first part about how I got blown into the Anglican Communion in Part 2. To answer why Churl is leaving and I’m staying, and why we’re OK with each other’s choices, I’ll make a Part 3. I can probably be pressured into a Part 4, where, if there’s enough interest, I can explain the post-colonial Chinglican thing.

So stay tuned. Because in spite of all of this, I happen still to be a confirmed Anglican layperson who actively practices an Asian American politics and is not about to jump ship.

*UPDATE: Part 4 will now deal with Anglican lay practice. Part 5 will deal with Chinglicanism.

Preaching Elijah

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Anglican, Asian American, Ba'al, Catholic, Chinese, Christian, Christology, Deuteronomistic History, Elijah, Faith, feminist, feminist theology, Hebrew Scripture, hermeneutics, historical criticism, homiletics, Karl Barth, Kierkegaard, lectionary, liberal, liberal Protestant, modernity, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Old Testament, Old Testament studies, Protestant, sermon

In the Revised Common Lectionary, today is the third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 5.  The church catholic meditates on the Jesus story in Luke 7:11-19 where Jesus raises the widow’s son from the dead at the town of Nain and is pronounced a prophet. (This theme is certainly brought out by tonight’s Vespers canticle antiphon: A great prophet has arisen among us and God has visited his people.)

I preached today in a young second-generation Chinese evangelical congregational context and set myself up for a challenge. Instead of using the Gospel reading, I tried something that I’d never done before: use the first reading from the Hebrew Scriptures to construct a homily for the lectionary themes for the week. Today’s reading was from Elijah’s visitation to the widow of Zarephath in Sidon.

Drawing inspiration from Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber’s weekly postings of her sermon texts, I’ll post mine here too, though she is a far, far better preacher than I could ever hope to become. (This is not because she is a good performer, though she is that as well. It’s rather because her pastoral gifts seem way off the charts.) Two prefactory notes to this Chinglican homiletical rendition of the passage, one hermeneutical, the other homiletical.

The hermeneutic I’m using here is a typically Chinglican one: typically catholic, typically feminist, and typically positioned between church and academia. Because I don’t read Hebrew, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Aramaic, or German with any level of competency, I decided to do a light review of Hebrew Scripture studies in the last week by poking around the various journals. This literature troubled me on some levels because in the wake of historical criticism going into crisis, there seemed to be a few anachronisms, especially claims that religion could be ‘private’ in an antique text (I felt like throwing Talal Asad at them). However, there were also some gems: in the wake of the historical critical method undergoing some level of crisis since the 1980s, the most interesting historical readings of the text have been feminist materialist ones that probe the political economy circumscribing the text (props to Gale Yee and Alice Keefe for brilliant analyses of the Hosea narratives that were methodologically useful for the Kings text, and props to Phyllis Trible on her analysis on the Elijah narratives themselves). From these readings, it has become apparent that where an older generation of Deuteronomistic History scholars posited a series of binaries particularly between Ba’al and Yahweh (and also Elijah v. Jezebel), these binaries break down upon a close reading of the text itself, a typical task of feminist analysis itself (no, feminism is not just about ‘gender’; it’s about breaking down conventional binaries that uncritically prop up unwarranted hierarchies). Theologically, then, it seems much more convincing to analyze ancient Israelite ‘religion’ (I prefer ‘state cult,’ thank you) as viewing Yahweh as part of the Ba’alic cult, with monolatrous prophets and monotheistic editors during the Exile inserting their own theological analyses that posited a Yahweh that stood out from the Ba’alic cult.

This was helpful for the reading of the text for two reasons. First, it helped me get out of my modern habits, which would have been to read the text anachronistically as one where Elijah and the widow take a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ into the hands of the unknown God, and God delivers because he’s their Tillichian ‘ground of being.’ These studies helped to situate the political context of the text, helping me to see the political dynamics going on between Elijah and the Omride dynasty, between Yahweh and Ba’al. However, second, these feminist analyses cautioned me against taking a strictly dichotomous view between Yahweh and Ba’al, to acknowledge how interconnected they were in the Israelite state cult and to examine deeply the original theological contributions of monolatrous prophets issuing polemics to extract Yahweh from the Ba’alic cult. They also helped me to see parallels between Jezebel and the widow of Zarephath without positing either as ‘good woman’ or ‘bad woman,’ but as very interesting and complex theological actresses in their own right.

Where I depart from the feminist analysis is where I depart from the comparative religion enterprise altogether with a sort of catholic twist: this is the theological move I’m developing from the above hermeneutical method. Reading the feminist analyses, there was a sort of polemic against Yahweh as himself a god of terror, at least as revealed by the prophets. But if we are to take the catholic development of doctrine seriously (one posited by Peter himself when he says in his second epistle that the prophets longed to look into the things of partaking of the divine nature), even someone like Elijah might have been revealing Yahweh through only a glass dimly. Certainly, this is borne out by other interesting analyses in Hebrew Scripture studies where scholars currently note that the Elijah narratives seem to be schizophrenic (or in Charles Taylor’s terms, ‘deeply cross-pressured’) on Elijah’s theology: Elijah is himself a bit of a bombastic character (declaring a cessation of rain on Israel, staging a contest of the gods, slaughtering the prophets of Ba’al, telling Jezebel that dogs will lick up her blood, sending fire down on Amaziah’s army), but the narrative’s portrayal of Yahweh is that of a still, small voice, a gentle God who sounds nothing like Ba’al. If that’s the case, then what’s revealed in this passage is a God who cares for the widow, even if she is from the land of Jezebel, a portrait of Yahweh whose contrast to Ba’al is not one of power, but one of love, certainly foreshadowing the God who reveals himself as love in Jesus Christ, almost despite the prophet’s own over-the-top moments and the authors’ and editors’ ideological agendas.

Of course, I know that this may not be a kosher move in biblical studies; my friend Sam happens to have a fantastic post detailing why bad christological moves in interpretation shut down the congregation’s ability to participate in worship. But the remedy for this might not be to forego talking christologically in a Hebrew Scripture text–we are, after all, Christians; it’s what we do, and why we were considered heretical in the first century–it might be to display a fuller christology than the pet christologies in our traditions. This is a bit of a catholic move, joining these texts in a lectionary that includes the Hebrew Scriptures, the psalter, the epistles, and the Gospels that is read by the church catholic to all speak as a choir of different parts about Jesus (sorry, I got the choir thing from the second reading in today’s Office of Readings from the epistle of St. Ignatius to the Romans).

That ‘choral’ canonical reading is the catholic move that I think is liturgically important, even if it might be viewed with a bit of suspicion from the academy (which is why this sermon is positioned between the church and the academy). There are plenty of passages from which I can draw to make these comparisons, but responding especially to Sam’s point about how these moves should be cautiously made to avoid doing violence to the text, I think in a homiletical setting, these moves should be governed by the lectionary. For example, I could have used Luke 4 where there is a direct reference to the widow of Zarephath. But that would have taken this sermon in a radically different theological direction from the move via Luke 7, which is what the lectionary prescribes. With Luke 4, I would have had to make the sermon about radical inclusion. But the Luke 7 reading makes the piece about Yahweh’s radical self-revelation to the widow as a God of love whose character is radically different from that of Ba’al, a point that probably neither Elijah nor even the Kings writers and editors had fully worked out. Replying to Sam, then, these christological moves need not always be a disservice to the congregation if they are governed by the lectionary; in fact, they can be opportunities for theological creativity.

These hermeneutical and theological moves transition me to homiletics, the delivery of today’s sermon. Here’s where the Chinglican moves come in full form: I was preaching to a group of English-speaking second-generation Chinese Canadian evangelicals whose company I really enjoy. They sing loudly in worship, they allow themselves to crack the most hilarious jokes during worship, they actually laugh at my jokes (brownie points for that), and they are just a fun group to be around. With their lives situated among their generally conservative Chinese families (‘Chinese’ does not equate conservatism, which is why the qualifier is needed), their fledgling second-generation ministry at church, and their secular lives in either school or work, the question became how to sharpen the text’s punch while speaking to this particular segment of the church catholic, even while at the same time keeping the church catholic in mind.

In terms of packing a good homiletical punch, I think Karl Barth has always done a particularly good job (I also said, ‘Now I can preach again!’ after reading Romans), so you will see a lot of ‘God says, “No,'” in this sermon. This especially includes saying ‘no’ to the notion that we as younger-generation Chinese Canadian evangelicals need to develop an exclusionary identity. These identity politics are a fraught issue within the current conversation in Asian North American evangelical circles, but if Yahweh is so inclusive of a widow in Sidonian territory, then the politics of developing a distinctive identity cannot be pursued via the politics of exclusion. Asian American Protestant historian Timothy Tseng and radically orthodox theologian Jonathan Tran have helped me see this very clearly: our second-generation identity politics can be premised on exclusion, especially by orientalizing our parents. These exclusionary impulses should be homiletically countered: because Yahweh reveals himself to the widow as a gift, we too must reveal the Lord Jesus as a gift, as the Bread of Life come down from heaven to give himself for the life of the world, not to consolidate our distinctive identities. (I didn’t develop the eucharistic theme, though, because I didn’t want to get into a debate about the Real Presence, though as you’ll see toward the end of the sermon, there’s a brief mention of the Holy Spirit, which I think is crucial: the thoughtful charismatics I have encountered tend to be quite drawn to a high Mariology, a high Eucharistic theology, and a high ecclesiology.)

Here’s the sermon, then. It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. But I suppose it’s a good record of where I’m at so far in my wrestling with how I might read the Hebrew Scriptures as a Chinglican Christian.

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Elijah
A Sermon for Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Proper 5
1 Kings 17:8-24; Psalm 146; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17
This sermon focuses on the Old Testament and Gospel readings.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

The Elijah reading is one of those passages where it looks like the take-away message is, ‘Don’t you trust God?’  It looks like one of those passages where the point is that the really good Christians are the ones who trust God, and the bad Christians who don’t have enough faith or the non-Christians who have no faith just live a lower order of existence.  If you’re not like this, then you should educate me as to how you think. But most of the Christians I hang out with occasionally make these sorts of off-hand remarks, like, Oh, that person is not a Christian, she doesn’t have any faith, and that’s why she has no hope in life.  Sometimes we mean well—we might think that we want to go evangelize those lost people if we get a chance—but this seems to be the way that many of my Christian friends talk.  That annoying colleague at work is annoying because he’s not Christian and because he has no faith, so he takes out his psychological imbalance on us (we think that God can fix him psychologically).  Those politicians of that particular party don’t know God, so they support immoral positions that don’t align with our Christian values; we must battle with them in the cultural arena because they will corrupt our society and our next generation.  Those friends who betrayed us by not taking our side when our lives were going rough—well, maybe they’re just not Christians because obviously if they had faith, they’d have the emotional security to stand with us.  This is even true among second-generation Chinese Christians of our age.  I don’t know if you think this, but whole books have been written titled Following Jesus Without Dishonoring Your Parents and The Chinese Way of Doing Things, where the premise is that because our parents are Chinese, they hold on to these cultural values that stunt their faith so that they end up controlling us, stopping us any time we say we want to become a missionary or a pastor and forcing us to become doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, and accountants (not that there’s anything wrong with that…my wife is a pharmacist, and we’re quite happy about that!).

It becomes easy to read the Bible like this.  As we read and do our Christian thing, we criticize people we think are losers, or people who annoy us, people who don’t share our values, or people whom we think want to control us.  We say that they either don’t having enough faith to trust God or maybe just have no hope because they’re not Christian.  It’s very tempting to read the passage on Elijah like that. God tells his prophet Elijah to go to Zarephath, a town north of Israelite territory, and to trust him to provide food through a poor widow who only has a handful of flour and a drop of oil in a jug.  It seems pretty straight-forward.  The passage is about trusting God, like if we were in Elijah’s shoes and God called us to go to a far distant land to maybe be a missionary, reach out to the poor widow, and fulfill his purpose for us in our lives.  The widow also has to take a leap of faith, trusting God’s prophet that when God says that the flour and oil won’t run out, they really won’t: do you have enough faith, brothers and sisters, to believe that?  The leap of faith, we think, is what makes us different from our non-Christian friends or from our bad Christian brothers, sisters, and parents who just don’t have enough faith.  In fact, we tell ourselves that non-Christians or bad Christians have little hope because they don’t have a God to believe in; that’s why they have no purpose in life.  Unlike our non-Christian friends, then, we say that we should be secure in our life, our future, our education, our careers, our family values, even whether we’ll meet that special someone someday and date them with biblical principles, and if we don’t have that kind of security, maybe it’s just because we don’t have enough faith.  We tell ourselves that we need faith in God to hear his calling and find out what his will is, just like Elijah heard God’s calling and found out that his will was for him to go north to feed the widow.  What makes us Christian, we might think, is that we take these leaps of faith because we believe in a god and we think we should obey him, leaping into the unknown, letting the invisible God give us a purpose and provide for us while we do his will.

The only trouble is, that’s not what the passage is about.

The whole reason that God is telling Elijah to get food from a widow in the first place is that Elijah is on the run from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel.  Ahab and Jezebel believe in gods—in fact, they believe in too many of them—which means that they happen to have a lot of faith.  Just to give you some context: if you grew up in church, you might know the name Jezebel, and you might associate her with this evil witch-queen straight out of something like Game of Thrones who does like black magic and seduces weak men.  That’s not quite it: the real Jezebel was a princess, the daughter of the king of a fairly wealthy merchant city north of Israel called Sidon (actually, that still sounds like Game of Thrones, but whatever).  Jezebel’s dad and probably Ahab’s dad arranged for them to get married to cement the trade between their two wealthy kingdoms.  The trouble is, once Jezebel becomes queen of Israel, she gets Ahab to start worshipping her god, build an altar that god, build a house for that god, and host some 450 priests to that god at their dinner table (which means she was pretty rich).

That god was called Ba’al.

If you’ve been in church for a while, you might recall hearing this name Ba’al (some people pronounce it ‘bayle’).  Ba’al seems to pop up in every Old Testament story where there’s another god that the real God doesn’t like his people worshipping.  It’s like all these gods get called Ba’al.  They all get called ba’al, because technically, all that ba’al means is ‘lord,’ like some kind of sovereign god, king of the universe, powerful over everything, probably the guy to pray to if you’re a farmer and you’re hoping for some rain.  And for sure, there was a major Ba’al that people prayed to, but there were lots of ba’als (ba’al place names, people named ba’al, subgods that were ba’alish).  In fact, because Ba’al was so generic, some people even thought that worshipping Ba’al was the same thing as worshipping the God of Israel, who went by a name called Yahweh, the God who told the prophet Moses back at the burning bush that his name was I AM WHO I AM, Yahweh.

But here’s the point.  The issue was never that Elijah believed in a god who gave him a purpose in life and everybody else didn’t believe in a god, so they had no purpose in life.  The issue was more like, who is this God that everybody says that they trust and who gives them a purpose in life?

This is a really important question in this passage, because Yahweh and Ba’al really seem to hate each other’s guts.  With Elijah running from Ahab and Jezebel, you could say that Yahweh and Ba’al were sort of duking it out.  It’s pretty clear in the text that Yahweh didn’t really like Ba’al, because when Ahab started worshipping Ba’al, it says that he ‘did more to provoke the anger of Yahweh, the God of Israel, than had all the kings of Israel who were before him’ (16:33).  Yahweh is pissed (am I allowed to say that in church?): he doesn’t like being in competition with this Lord Ba’al.  So Yahweh tells his prophet Elijah to tell King Ahab that it won’t rain until Yahweh says it will (take that, Ba’al).  This means that, as the passage is starting out, we get the sense that Ba’al and Yahweh are both sort of rain gods. This means that they controlled the agricultural economy of the time by making it rain.  By getting involved in this sort of mean-spirited competition, humans become their victims: while they’re duking out their god powers, the humans get a drought.  We get the sense, at least initially, that Yahweh and Ba’al are pretty similar in character: they both like to be worshipped, they both like to control the world, they both have human pawns like prophets and kings and priests who tell people what God wants them to do.  In other words, it’s no surprise that some people thought that worshipping Ba’al and Yahweh was the same thing because it really was, you know, same difference.

And that’s where Yahweh, the God of Israel, begins to surprise us.  He’s nothing like Ba’al.

Yahweh tells his prophet Elijah, who’s been hiding by a creek living off bread and meat that ravens have been sending him, to go up north, up to Zarephath which belongs to Sidon, the same city where Queen Jezebel is from.  Elijah is going to Jezebel country.  There, Yahweh says, a widow is going to feed you.  Now this still sounds pretty mean and exploitative.  It’s like Yahweh saying that in this epic battle with Ba’al, he’s sending Elijah to Jezebel ‘Ba’al-mama’ country, and there, they’re going to exact revenge on Jezebel by making the poorest of the poor, a widow, pay.

The widow seems to read the situation like this as well.  Elijah gets up there and sees this widow gathering sticks, and he says to her in the middle of this drought where there is no water, ‘Hey, get me some water in a jar so that I can drink it.’  You get the sense that this widow goes like, Oh fine, but while she goes off to get it, Elijah demands more: ‘Oh, bring me a piece of bread too.’  The widow has it up to here.  She goes, ‘OK, I get it.  You and that Yahweh your God with your drought thing, you win. You’ve defeated Ba’al. I don’t have anything baked, I’ve only got a handful of flour and a little drop of oil in my jar, so I’m gathering sticks, going to take it home to my boy, we’re going to bake that last crumb of bread, and we’re going to die.  The end; you win.’

This is when Elijah surprises her.  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ Elijah says.  Sure, go home and do all that stuff you said about dying if that’s what floats your boat, but first bake me a little cake and then make something for yourself and your son.  See, the thing is, Yahweh isn’t interested in exacting revenge on you and exploiting you.  We aren’t here to pick on Jezebel country.  In fact, Yahweh’s message is that your jar of flour and your jar of oil won’t go empty until it rains again and you can grow new crops.  I’m not here to exploit you.  I’m here as a gift.

And so they start living off the gift.  They live the good life in the middle of this drought, Elijah with the widow and her son, with the infinite supply of flour and oil.  Life is good.  The widow comes to believe that maybe this Yahweh is not so bad.  Maybe he’s not as vengeful as she thought he was.  Maybe he’s not duking it out with Baal after all.  Maybe he’s a good guy, a good God.

And then her son drops dead.  In anger, the widow confronts Elijah, ‘I knew life was getting too good!  So this is your god after all!  What do you guys have against me?  All you want to do is to drudge up my sin, our sin, the sin that Jezebel caused when she put Ba’al in competition with Yahweh.  And what happens?  Your Yahweh takes it out on my boy.  The little people always suffer for the politics of the gods!  I knew it!  All the gods are the same!’

Elijah then carries the boy up to his upper chamber, puts him on his bed, and cries out to Yahweh: ‘Oh, Yahweh my God, is this what you’re really like?  Like, you’ve got to be kidding me.  Are you really going to take out your conflict with Baal on this widow by killing her son?’  He stretches himself on the boy three times and cries out, ‘Oh, Yahweh, my God, let this child’s life come back into him!’  Yahweh listens.  The boy revives.  Elijah takes him down and gives him back to his mom.  And in that moment, the widow says, ‘Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of Yahweh in your mouth is truth.’  In other words, now I know intimately for myself that you truly speak for Yahweh when you say things like Yahweh is not in competition with Ba’al, that he’s not going to exact his revenge on us, that he has given you to us as a gift, that instead of exploiting the poor, he’s always on our side.

I said at the beginning of this sermon that many of us might think that what makes us Christian is that we believe in a god.  But as Elijah’s encounter with the widow of Zarephath shows us, there’s a big difference between Ba’al and Yahweh, between the gods as we normally think of them and who the living God really is.  Yahweh is not Ba’al: he is not a sovereign dictator who exacts revenge whenever we place other gods in competition with him.  Yahweh is a gift, loving us, giving us life, giving us himself.

Putting our faith in Yahweh, the God who gives himself to us, is what makes us Christian because this God is the God ultimately revealed to us in Jesus.  Here’s a Jesus story.  In Luke 7, Jesus is traveling with his disciples when he comes across the funeral of another widow’s son.  The similarity to the Elijah story couldn’t be more striking.  Jesus sees the widow weeping as the funeral procession marches out of the city, her only son, dead.  It’s as if he hears the cry of the widow screaming at Elijah, ‘Is this what God is really like?’  Jesus stops the procession and calls to the man, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise!’  The young man gets up, and just like Elijah gave the son back to the widow, Jesus gives the son back to his widow mom, and the whole town declares him to be a prophet, one who brings God’s favourable gaze to his people.  Now I know that you are a man of God, and the word of Yahweh in your mouth is truth.

But Jesus is more than a prophet, greater even than Elijah.  Elijah reveals to the widow in Jezebel-country that Yahweh does not the exploit the poor as a sort of vengeance for being put in competition with other gods.  Elijah shows the widow, and through the widow, shows us, that God is a gift-giver: he gives bread that never runs out; he brings the widow’s dead son back to life.  So does Jesus.  Jesus comes breaking bread with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, and feeding thousands of people in one go; on more than one occasion, he also brings dead kids back to life to their rejoicing parents.  But Jesus does more, because where Elijah shows us that Yahweh gives gifts, Jesus is himself the gift.

As one greater than Elijah, Jesus doesn’t just bring sons back to life; he is the Son of God who comes back to life.  Elijah challenges Ahab and Jezebel about their Ba’al worship and then runs for his life.  Jesus also challenges the established picture of God during his time, a picture that saw God as taking revenge on behalf of his people against enemies who conquered them and currently ruled them, a God who will rightfully enthrone God’s people to take over the world and make the unbelievers pay for their crimes.  Jesus said, No, to that picture of God; he showed us that the way of God is not the way of conquest, but the way of the cross, loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, blessing those who curse us, praying for those who mistreat us.  But where Elijah runs for his life after he makes challenges Ba’al, Jesus gives his life to show us that God really is love.  Jesus gives himself into the hands of those who hang on to the Ba’al version of god for their identity and the preservation of their power.  As he hangs alone and abandoned on the cross, he cries out, ‘My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?’ but because it’s in Aramaic (Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani), the people around the cross go, ‘What? Elijah?’ and they mock him, ‘Ha! Let’s see if Elijah will come save him now!’  Jesus the Son of God dies, Elijah does not show up, and the disciples go into hiding, screaming just like the widow: I knew it! All these gods are the same.  They’re just out for their own power, and the ones who suffer are the little people.

And that is when God speaks a word that rings clearer than any word he had ever spoken through Elijah: God raises Jesus from the dead.  God says, No, to the version of god that’s vengeful and evil and powerful at the expense of the little people.  God says, This Jesus who is raised from the dead, this is my Son, this is the man of God in whose mouth the word of Yahweh is truth.  Listen to him.

And Jesus, the Son of God raised to life in whose mouth the word of Yahweh is truth, remains consistent to the truth of the God that he reveals, the God who is a gift, the God who is love.  When Jesus says, ‘Do not be afraid,’ to his disciples, he tells them that he has not returned from the dead to seek vengeance.  Because he appears only to his disciples, he does not seem to care about confronting the political people who put him to death.  Because he eats and drinks with his followers, he shows them that he won’t punish them for ditching him at the cross.  No, he says to his disciples the exact same thing that Elijah says to the widow in Jezebel-country, the widow who thought he was there to take out God’s wrath on her: Do not be afraid.  But as one greater than Elijah, Jesus does not only provide flour and oil that won’t run out.  Jesus gives himself to them, to us, as the Bread of Life.  He sends the Holy Spirit on us, his church, joining us with the life of God, to his risen life, so that as he lives forever, we will also live eternal life.

That’s what makes you and me Christians: it is that we have received the life of Jesus as a gift.  This changes everything.  This means that believing in a generic god who controls our life and gives us purpose does not make us Christian.  What makes us Christian is that we have received God’s gift of life.  It means that we have come to realize that the living God is not a god who demands us to give him stuff, sucking us dry by putting time commitments on us and guilt-tripping us when what’s on our mind is not him, but school stress, family problems, workplace politics, unemployment depression, dating agonies, or just the boredom of an unexciting life.  It means that we don’t set ourselves up as superior to non-Christians and that we don’t even exact revenge on the Ahabs and the Jezebels who come after us with their sovereign, controlling lords.  We simply love everyone, even our enemies.

And that stops us right in our tracks when we start to say things like Christians have a purpose in life and non-Christians don’t.  That is just not a Christian thing to say.  The Christian way to live is to realize instead that much of what passes for ‘god’ in the world is the version that is angry, vengeful, competitive, demanding, and arbitrarily powerful.  In contrast to that, Christians embody in our everyday lives the surprise of God’s love, because we are the people who say, Do not be afraid.  God is a gift.  If Elijah can enter Jezebel country and say this to a widow, if Jesus rises from the dead and says this to the disciples who abandoned him, then we must say this in how we treat colleagues who annoy us, parents we think are controlling our lives, politicians with whom we disagree, friends who have betrayed us, and people for whom we think we don’t have time.  Instead of criticizing them and excluding them, we say with our lives, Do not be afraid.  God is a gift.  After all, that’s what Jesus says to us, and we have received his gift of life.

Amen.

Yes, I’m a Chinglican Who Celebrates Corpus Christi

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academia, Anglican, Asian American, Audrey Assad, baptism, Catholic, charismatic, Chinese, Christian, communion, Congregation of Holy Cross, Corpus Christi, Eucharist, Flannery O'Connor, forgiveness, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius of Loyola, Jesuit, neo-Calvinist, neo-Reformed, Pentecostal, Real Presence, reconciliation, sacred heart, social science, Tobit

Today is Corpus Christi Sunday. The evangelical Anglican church that I attend probably doesn’t care very much, but I do. In fact, I care quite a lot, even though, unlike Churl and Audrey Assad down below, I actually don’t feel much need for myself to actually become Roman Catholic, much as I hunger and thirst for greater catholicity and for the Anglican and Roman Catholic communions to keep getting blown together by the Spirit. But still, I do believe in the Real Presence, I am looking forward to Pope Francis’s worldwide eucharistic adoration, and I celebrate Corpus Christi Sunday.

Why? especially because I’m not planning on becoming a full-blooded Catholic, remaining instead as what Churl calls a ‘knock-off Mars bar’ (don’t you worry, Churl, no offence given, no offence taken). My answer: Corpus Christi Sunday changed my life.

About four years ago, I was in a very similar predicament that I am currently in: I was doing a graduate degree in the social sciences while longing to study Christian theology. I hope I’ve made progress in both, especially in bringing the two together, but as it happened, my journey–in the middle of thesis writing that time, no less–took me to a retreat at a Congregation of Holy Cross house of studies in Berkeley, CA. I knew the house superior, as he was my creative writing mentor when I attended a Holy Cross high school in the Bay Area, and as soon as I got there, he piled on the Balthasar, O’Connor, and Hopkins and told me to read it all. I was very obedient, or so I think I was. I also read some Michael Ramsey during that time, I think, but shh.

In any case, during those two weeks, I had to do something I’d never done before: attend daily mass. I had served as a pastoral apprentice for three years at various Chinese Anglican churches before that, so I had some vague idea of what the liturgy was going to be like (not that I could do it from memory, like my pre-new rites Catholic brothers and sisters). Those two weeks, we read through the Book of Tobit for the first reading; though the Thirty-Nine Articles (#6) knocks off St. Jerome to say that it’s a book that ‘the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine,’ I have to say that the story of Tobias and Sarah, the demon Asmodeus, and the archangel Raphael made for a lot of good fun at 8 AM every morning, especially among people who saw the book as part of the canonical Hebrew Scriptures. One of the mass attendees, a staff worker at the Jesuit theological school across the street, told me after mass one day, ‘I love it every time we get around to Tobit. It’s such a thrilling story, don’t you think?’ (Confession: I then went and read Judith to see what that was like. Even more scandalous.)

I also wore a black hoodie to mass every morning to see if I could be mistaken for a Franciscan monk and given communion; I was asked if I was an ordained Anglican priest (I’m not, and don’t plan on being one), but no, unfortunately, it didn’t work. But it did get me, good evangelical Anglican that I was, exposed to Corpus Christi, a solemnity I’d never heard of (OK, at that point, I hadn’t heard of a lot of stuff; I had no idea, for example, what the heck the ‘sacred heart’ was, even).  I was exposed to Corpus Christi because the last Sunday I was at this retreat was Corpus Christi Sunday that year. Yes, I know that Corpus Christi is usually celebrated the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, but like many Catholics, the Holy Cross Center did it on the Sunday.

I didn’t actually go to mass that day, and I didn’t take part in any procession (true story: the first Corpus Christi procession I ever saw was in The Godfather, Part 2). Instead, I went to a Chinese charismatic church (gasp!). My fifth-grade Sunday school teacher was a children’s pastor at that church, and come to think of it, it was pretty meaningful that I got to see her on Corpus Christi Sunday because she was the first to teach me a high view of communion. She even advocated (unsuccessfully, unfortunately) for us kids to be able to go downstairs whenever the adults had communion and to simply observe if we weren’t baptized yet (we were credo-baptists, and I was baptized when I was nine, but that’s a long story–the short version is that my best friend was getting dunked, so I wanted to as well). She told us that communion is a sacred moment that we should get to observe and even partake of, as it’s a moment of being very close to the Lord. If my charismatic auntie didn’t know how close she was to the Real Presence, I hope she finds out some day that she set me on a sure course toward acknowledging the Real Presence in the Eucharist.

In any case, that year was a particularly difficult year for me because three years in the ministry apprenticeship meant that I had made a lot of enemies. This is not to say that everyone who does ministry makes enemies this early on in their career, but in case you couldn’t tell, I can be fairly outspoken, and I was confused on where I stood in relation to the neo-Reformed tribe, so that made for a fairly combustible combination. Suffice it to say that I lost some friends, managed to alienate others, had others alienate me, and suffered a few dating rejections too (as the kid in Love Actually says, there’s ‘nothing worse than the total agony of being in love’). As Corpus Christi Sunday was coming to a close, this charismatic auntie took me into her home for a session of healing prayer.

Yes, now that I’ve said the two words ‘healing prayer,’ you now know how deep in the bowels of Pentecostalism I was at this point. I saw my priest friends at the Catholic house of studies the next day and tried to explain why I had missed not only mass, but pizza and movie night, and I said that it was some kind of Ignatian thing where you imagine rooms and people who have hurt you, etc. etc. The priests looked at me really funny, like I had gotten involved in some kind of crock science, and if you know what ‘healing prayer’ is, I’ll bet at least one eyebrow has gone up on your face in both curiosity and ridicule. Let me confirm for you your worst fears. ‘Healing prayer’ is indeed sort of like the Ignatian exercises, except that you never get out of the first week and you focus on sins done to you, which is why you need ‘healing.’ Most people I’ve seen come out of ‘healing prayer’ thus have this sort of euphoric feeling of having dealt with everything bad in their lives, only to sink into a complete malaise and paralysis the week afterward because you just raised your awareness of stuff, given it a hurtful hermeneutic, and said that you dismissed it when you really didn’t. As a warning to the wise, then, if anyone ever approaches you to do ‘healing prayer,’ just go find a proper Jesuit spiritual director.

I had no such warning, but God is both humourous and gracious. I won’t describe to you in lurid detail what I imagined or saw or confessed, but suffice it to say that while my charismatic auntie wanted to keep taking me to the agony in the garden because my ministry experience was apparently very agonizing (it was, to be sure, but that’s a different post), I didn’t want to leave the Upper Room. I think as I described what I saw in the Upper Room and all the people I wanted to forgive (turns out, in hindsight, that I should probably have been asking for their forgiveness…OH WELL), she was like, ‘OK, can we finally go downstairs now? What’s with the Upper Room?’

It takes time to reflect on these things, but as I think back on that healing prayer session now, I think I was just basking there in the Real Presence, at least virtually speaking. Indeed, during those two weeks, a lot of eucharistic things happened. Yes, I was introduced to daily mass, the sacred heart, and Corpus Christi. Yes, I couldn’t get out of the Upper Room during healing prayer. But probably the most significant thing was this: the week prior, on Trinity Sunday, I returned to the church of my childhood after years of not having darkened its doors, after its multiple scandals had devastated many of my childhood friendships, and in an act of forgiveness and reconciliation, I took communion there.

It was in that act that I learned what a schismatic I had been for so long. Having left that childhood church after my friendships were devastated by Toronto Blessing crazies, a sex scandal, a leadership crisis, and the ostracization of our entire Cantonese congregation, I had been wandering, looking for a home, a place that I could agree with and a place where no more bad political stuff would ever happen. I never found it. So I wandered from church to church, even working at some of them, and in time, I also took on a sort of neo-Reformed persona to be able to articulate a theology of why I wasn’t about to stay at a church that failed to preach the Gospel. As my theological system lay in tatters, my social science thesis in disarray, and my personal church history littered with skeletons, I finally realized in that moment of deep forgiveness that I was the schismatic.

And that is why, as a Chinglican, I celebrate Corpus Christi.