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.

—-
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.

We Remember

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Arab Spring, biopolitics, Catholic, Catholic social teaching, Centessimus annus, China, Chinese, dissent, geopolitics, human dignity, ideology, indigenous, John Paul II, Liu Xiaobo, orientalism, orientalization, redress, state, Tiananmen

June 4 is a day for remembering. This year is no different, for it is now the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Tiananmen Incident, the event in which students who had occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing for over a month were brutally suppressed–the official term of protest from its observers is massacred–as they demonstrated for a new democratic regime in China.

It is thus a day to remember.

We remember that the fight for redress is not yet over. When a state uses military force against its own citizens and then attempts to paste over these events by denying their historical validity and diverting focus from them onto market reform, it is incumbent on all of us to remember that justice has not yet been served, that the state’s murder of people within its own borders is never just wherever it happens, whether in China in 1989, in the present in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Israel/Palestine, Syria, or Turkey, or even in the history of the Americas in American and Canadian treatment of indigenous peoples. We remember because we are calling for the state to acknowledge its own crimes and to bring to justice those who maneuvered the state to commit these crimes.

But we remember also that our memory can be corrupted.  We also remember that the remembrance that these atrocities happened have also been used in the service of othering exclusion. We must remember then that when memory becomes corrupted, it can be used for the service of greater evil.

And thus we must also remember that China is not a geographical foil for the politics of life. We have heard over and over of the issues of life in various sites in China–a little girl run over by a truck, the countless road accidents, the melamine lacing of baby powder, the unethical production of under-regulated automobile parts, the human rights abuses against ethnic minorities. Recently, we heard of a baby boy flushed down a toilet by a desperate mother, and we heard of school principals sexually preying on their own students in collusion with government officials. As we hear of these issues, we are tempted to frame China as the space of the other, a space where life is devalued, a space inhabited by barbarians and country bumpkins and industrial crooks and political Fu Manchu masterminds, a space where everything should point to the events of Tiananmen being just business as usual.

Even as we remember for the sake of Tiananmen redress, we also remember that we must not give in to the temptation to see China as a unified geopolitical bloc. We remember instead that China is vast, that its political system is complex, and that its vastness and complexity belies many avenues of dissent. We remember that dissent is not always on the side of justice simply because it is dissent, that people we hold up as democracy heroes like Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo supported the Bush Administration’s Iraq War with the anti-democratic, neoconservative rationale of pre-emptive warfare in the hope of forcibly enacting democracy in the Middle East for American imperialist interests. We remember that China is not the unitary other, that people and politics as complex as our own go on there as well, and that our pleas for redress are coupled with the complexities of human sociality.

We thus do not remember in order to frame China as the geopolitical other. We remember instead that history is littered with spectacles of violence as various individuals, parties, regimes, and imperial rulers have attempted to exert their sovereign power to make the meaning of ‘Chineseness’ uniform. We remember that these efforts at racial, ethnic, and national subjectification are themselves born of unjust impulses. For what, after all, was the point of the crackdown at Tiananmen, if not to exert the sovereign power of the state to make an international example of those who dared to dissent against an ideology of Chineseness?

So yes, we protest as we remember. But how we protest can never be done with the methods of exclusion. As John Paul II reminded us in Centesimus annus, our protest is not waged by deploying alternate ideologies as foils to injustice. Instead, a constant focus on the dignity of the human person is a protest against ideology itself, grounding our critique in the reality that we are not primarily cogs in a state or market regime, but embodied persons who live and eat and sleep and feel and play and work and laugh and weep and love. Yes, we remember, but our memory grapples with the will to power inherent in something as banal as saying that all ‘Chinese’ people should be a certain way. Those of us who are Christians who join in this protest are thus uninterested in developing a new ideology of what it means to be Chinese. We are looking forward instead to the day when our human community will be constituted by the recognition that we are all made in the image of God.

Mary is yours, whether you are ‘catholic’ or ‘evangelical’

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Anglican, apparition, Blessed Virgin, Catholic, Christian, ecumenism, Evangelical, feminist theology, Flannery O'Connor, geopolitics, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Justin Welby, liberation theology, Mary, Pope Francis, racism, secular, theotokos

We call this a Thing, as Churl says, professing to have a meeting of the ‘wise’ without being wise ourselves. But as Churl screams at the evangelical churches he’s been at, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he seems to have gotten a variety of responses. Some have shown a lot of love and promised quite a bit of prayer. But he has also quite a bit of criticism from those who don’t know him, precisely the disembodied voice he addresses in his first paragraph. For those of us who dared to share the piece, some of us were subjected to the whims of Protestant polemicists who wanted to debate papal primacy and the use of tradition with us. We were accused of having superiority complexes even as we shared a post that asked where all of our accusers were when Churl (and by extension, others of us on this Thing) were when he/we were wrestling with our faith. Some of us who experienced this also asked, ‘Where the hell were you?’ before we shared that post.

As an Anglican, I stand in solidarity with Churl, regardless of whether he swims the Tiber soon or not. But as a Chinglican, I’d like to give Churl a bit of a reminder. Though Churl doesn’t mention it, one of the common objections to Churl jumping communions is that over there, they pray to this woman called Mary, which means that they love Mary more than Jesus.

I disagree.

For one thing, no Catholic in their right mind prays to Mary; they do talk a lot to her, understand her to continue to dispense the graces of her Son, and venerate her as Queen of Heaven insofar as she is the foremost pilgrim in our journey toward the fusion of nature and grace. For another, this view of Mary, I submit, is neither Catholic nor evangelical. It is Christian, and it brings together the ‘catholic’ and the ‘evangelical’ that we in our small minds have sundered since the Reformation (and arguably even before that). So as a Chinglican, I’d like to give Churl a bit of a reminder: whether he stays on this side or that side of communion with the see of Rome, the Blessed Virgin Mary will be his mother either way. (I realize that this may be a bit of a Flannery O’Connor reading of evangelicals, but Churl thinks that too.)

The rest of this post, then, is addressed to Churl.

Churl, the Blessed Virgin stands beside you. As you cry out in consternation at the evangelical world that abandoned you, Mary is the perfect mother, the Immaculate Conception, the one that John Paul II says in Redemptoris Mater has gone ahead of the pilgrim life of the Church, fulfilling the perfect fusion of nature and grace, bringing the eschaton forward to the present. As much as there will be people who will attack us for having this Marian discussion on our Thing, this conversation lies at the heart of ecumenism, not the new modern ecumenism of the latter half of the twentieth century, but the old ecumenism, as in the ecumenism of the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus. There Mary was defined (contra Nestorius) as the theotokos, the God-bearer, the one who bears God for the life of the world and invites us to share in that divine nature through her human son. For those who might dispute this significance of Mary as it can’t be found explicitly in Scripture and thus seek to police our devotion to the Blessed Virgin, we might in turn ask them how it is that they hold it as orthodox that we believe in God as a Trinity of persons and Jesus as a hypostatic union of divine and human natures, for one finds these definitions precisely in the same set of ecumenical councils that produced the definition of Mary as God-bearer. That this radically ecumenical view of Christian theology may be scandalous to some might be a good thing; in time, we may finally reclaim the shock value that comes of all three of seeing God as Trinity, Mary as God-bearer, and Jesus as God and man.

And it was thus that though I, as an Anglican, once visited a Catholic nun (of the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, no less), and she told me, as we prayed contemplatively and extemporaneously together over the future of my life, that she saw the Blessed Virgin standing beside me. I, an Anglican, believed her. Beyond our institutional differences, we were able to see clearly then what we see now in Pope Francis and Archbishop Justin Welby, that is, we saw the Spirit moving to bring us together as one despite our the impaired nature of our respective communions. The Spirit also brought my wife into my life a month later. She, a self-identified ‘evangelical,’ shows me daily how to embody the ‘catholic’ spirit in her forgiving spirit, her patient forbearance, and her decisively uncanny ability to see the best in the other. I, who purport to be moving in a ‘catholic’ direction, am forced to live as an ‘evangelical,’ always seeking to frame our everyday lives with the prophetic truth of the Word of God. Appropriating free church theologian Miroslav Volf’s terms in Exclusion and Embrace, the Blessed Virgin is both ‘catholic’ and ‘evangelical.’

The Virgin is ‘catholic’ because whether we are in communion with Rome or not, she is the eschatological fusion of nature and grace in the present. She doesn’t care what we call ourselves institutionally. After all, while the schism of institutions is often politically policed by ideologies (‘Catholics are bad because of x, y, z,’ or ‘evangelicals are bad because of a, b, c’), the Virgin, as James Alison reminds us, keeps our faith from becoming an ideology–precisely what you eloquently protested against in your first piece.  She reminds us that God is not interested in ideological police work, but in the redemption of the world in a plane suspended between nature and grace, what Henri de Lubac terms le surnaturel. This is no ideology; it is embodied reality. If it is a superiority complex to have such a mother, then so be it. We know, after all, that we are loved and take joy in that love.

The Virgin is also an ‘evangelical.’ She will draw you to that Word that you desire, that Word that you rightly note many of your evangelical friends protect as inerrant but fail to actually read and live. It is a prophetic word, a word that calls us to bear God in us with the Virgin as the church, to confess her fiat: Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. Be it done to me according to your Word.

Be it done to me, the Virgin prays. Balthasar taught me this one. He showed me that the Virgin’s prayer has never been about what she would do for the Lord, which is how many read the Word and attempt to live it out in their everyday lives. No, the way that the Virgin contemplates and lives the Word is to reflect on how the grace of the Lord is causing her to bear God into the world. It happens to her. It is thus that she reflects on the mysteries of the shepherds coming to the cave where her son is born, the old man and woman in the temple holding her child with joy, her son in the temple debating with the elders. She ponders these things in her heart as the word that is done to her. In many ways, then, the Word that is her Son is our hermeneutic for the Scriptures, but this meditation on Scripture can only be made real as it in turn becomes our hermeneutic for everyday life.

It is thus the Virgin who shows us how to truly be ‘evangelical.’ If ever there were an evangelical statement not co-opted by that movement styling itself as definitively ‘evangelical’ while defining itself as not Catholic, not ecumenical, not liberal, not neo-orthodox, and not fundamentalist, it is the Magnificat. As feminist theologian Rosemary Ruether reminds us, Mary is not a symbol of virgin church power; she is a figure of liberation for the wronged, the one who magnifies the Lord because the old order of powers and dominions is cast down, the poor are shown mercy, and the hungry are fed. Those who reject Mary because they purport to be ‘evangelicals’ fail to see that she is showing them precisely how to be an evangelical, one who proclaims that in her Son, the time is up, the kingdom of God is at hand, the Gospel is unveiled, God is visiting his people, reconciling them as he redeems the world precisely by drawing us into himself, his life suspended between nature and grace.

The Virgin is an evangelical because the Virgin preaches the Gospel, and she stands beside you. She is still preaching, you know, which means, as a Catholic friend I spoke with a few days ago put it to me, all Catholics should believe in women in ministry (the Holy Orders bit may be debatable, but in ministry? Well, yeah!). Those Marian apparitions that the Catholic Church have approved–there’s no monopoly on them, for this is the point of an apparition; it is a concrete embodiment for the life of the world, contra the very notion of an ideology. The apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Juan Diego brought the Americas together because by appearing as a little brown girl, the Virgin taught us that racism is of the devil, that skin colour is a stupid way to judge people, that there is neither European nor indigenous in Christ, but all are one, fused together in our collective redemption. The apparition of our Lady of Lourdes to Bernadette Soubirous radically challenged the secularization of the French Revolution, unmasking the powers of the secular as colonial through the voice of a destitute girl saying that she saw the Immaculate Conception without knowing what the Immaculate Conception even was. The apparition of our Lady of Fatima to the three children in Spain was a prophetic word against the destruction wrought by geopolitical ideologies in the twentieth century. The Virgin is an evangelical because the Virgin is a prophet, speaking the Gospel of life into a culture of death so that we all, whether self-identified ‘catholic’ or ‘evangelical’ might hear and live the life of her Son.

This is how it will be, then, regardless of on which side of the Tiber you wind up. We are thus more than merely praying for you to make a good decision. We are praying that you will feel the solidarity of the communion of saints that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of schism and the beautiful gaze of the Blessed Virgin, our mother who stands beside you and me in this hour and who will be your mother whichever side you end up on.

Be blessed.

Chinglican would like to thank one of his evangelical Anglican friends for reading this over for him before posting it.

No, You Cannot Fence the Table with Orientalism

Tags

Asia-Pacific, Asian American, Asian American theology, capitalism, Douglas Wilson, Edward Said, feminist theology, Foucault, geopolitics, heterotopia, mystical theology, oriental monk, orientalism, postcolonial theology, Rachel Held Evans, Reformed

This morning, Reformed pastor Doug Wilson posted a response to a question from a friend about a recent tweet by Rachel Held Evans about how she would take communion with John Piper in a heartbeat. See for yourself:

I would break the bread of communion with @johnpiper in a heartbeat. We disagree, but he is my brother, and always will be.

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) May 27, 2013

Wilson’s interlocutor didn’t have the same ontological understanding of communion as Evans, though. His query to Wilson apparently focused on how because Evans taught feminist ideas both on her blog and in her new book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, she should be excluded from the communion table. To pull a Catholic parallel case, this was like taking Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s statements in The Ratzinger Report about ‘radical feminism’ being a ‘different religion’ from Christianity to its logical conclusion. Indeed, this is no mere parallel with Bishop Allen Vigneron’s comments that Catholics should abstain from communion if they believe that abortion and gender-neutral marriage should be legal. No, Wilson’s interlocutor goes for the jugular, pressing him to articulate a theology of excommunication on the basis that Evans taught feminist ideas and was thus a false teacher.

Characteristically, Wilson’s classically informed Reformed theology leads to a thoughtful response, though one that in fact justifies schism instead of leading to its healing. Abstracting the question from Rachel Held Evans, Wilson holds forth more generally on excommunication. Wilson argues that there are two parts to this question. The first is: who is doing the disciplining? Were it an official ecclesial excommunication, then Wilson says that the church should withhold communion from the offender, but if it is simply Diotrephes from 3 John shouting down competition, the claim to discipline should be ignored. This leads to a second issue: the state of schism in the church, in which withholding communion from someone from another Christian branch of communion can be justified as disciplining that entire branch. If feminism were such a communion branch (to my knowledge, it is not), then one might have to start weighing whether ideological non-adherence is justification for church discipline.

The complications that arise from this thought process leads Wilson to wax orientalist. Calling these practices of withholding communion from anyone who does not subscribe exactly to one’s beliefs as the making of a practical ‘ecclesiastical North Korea,’ Wilson goes on to delineate the interweaving of ‘grace’ and ‘discipline.’ Acknowledging that his readers might find his explanation arcane, he jokingly apologizes that he may have ‘veered into some kind of Zen Presbyterianism here,’ and clarifies the ultimate point of this backhanded swipe at Evans: Wilson would not excommunicate Evans, but would intentionally show her grace in order to deliver her from her feminism.

While I take issue with this flippant characterization of feminism as a unitary movement (it is not, and thus, I’d argue that you can’t brand the whole thing as ‘false teaching,’ but of course, he might come back at me with how Gnosticism was a complex movement, and we’d go on and on and on), there will be bloggers joining A Christian Thing in the not-too-distant future who will be addressing the question of feminist theologies and will be more competent to speak on this than me. So I shan’t.

Instead, as I’ve taken others to task for their orientalizing statements, I’d like to take Wilson to task for his flippant usage of orientalist terms. By ‘taking Wilson to task,’ however, I’m afraid that I’ll have to provide a bit of a prolegomena. You see, I suspect that Wilson–as well as many Euro-American Christians of a variety of theological persuasions, Protestant or Catholic–may be intellectually allergic to the critique of ‘white (male) privilege’ that I am about to perform. This, after all, may lie behind why some, likely including Wilson, are allergic to feminist theologies; after all, they might reason, it’s just a bunch of women unaware of their own will to power trying to shout down an invented bogeyman called ‘white male privilege’ to be able to join the institutional ranks and redefine entire organizations with their own pet agendas. In turn, these people who imagine themselves to be victimized should be subjected to ridicule–not exactly exclusion, mind you–but enough teasing to show that they do not have a sense of humour and that this lack of joy can be attributed to them wanting power. The same may go for African American, Chicano American, and Asian American theologies, in which ‘women’ might be substituted with ‘racialized minorities’ who allegedly talk a grand talk about liberation, desegregating the church, diversifying seminary faculty, and discovering indigenous ways of doing theology. Because of this, the logic may go, these people are always on high alert for the racist remarks of white privileged men, failing to see that the occasional remark about ‘race’ is just an off-hand funny remark that maybe they could have done without if they weren’t writing off-the-cuff on a blog or speaking extemporaneously in a sermon, but that is really just harmless and funny. The joke’s on the racialized minorities, then, for being offended at everything and looking for things at which to get offended. They should instead (the reasoning might go) get off welfare and get a job.

I’d like to assure Wilson from the outset of this critique, then, that I was not looking to be offended (nor, I might note, do most feminist, postcolonial, and racialized minority scholars actually go looking to be offended). In fact, I hope that my comments will have some substantive value for his discussion of communion and excommunication, and indeed, I’d like to propose to Wilson that feminist, post-colonial, and minority theologies have an awful lot to contribute to the ongoing work of making the Body of Christ one, even as the Father and the Son are one, that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son. Finally, I’d like to note that if you title your post ‘Some Kind of Zen Presbyterianism’ (emphasis mine), regardless of how much orientalist substance your post actually has (there are after all, only two, if we were to really exegete it), then you are asking for a response of this kind.

Indeed, following the advice of feminist theorist Saba Mahmood to not (as St. Paul would have it) despise all statements wrought by white male privilege but to examine fully ‘the force that a discourse commands,’ let me begin by congratulating Wilson on what must feel like a significant departure from the usual fare of classical Western education and his devotion to a unitary Eurocentric canon in his educational advocacy. In fact, this departure is quite courageous because he picks up on a post-structural tactic at the end of the piece described by Michel Foucault as ‘the heterotopia,’ that is, if you want to know what the norms are in any given place, interface it with a radically different space that can act as a mirror, and ‘the order of things’ in any given site will be clearly revealed. That heterotopia, you might say, is the geopolitical alignment of the contemporary Asia-Pacific region: churches that only take communion with people who believe exactly as they do are like an ‘ecclesiastical North Korea,’ which in contrast makes all the churches conducted by grace non-isolationist and thus connected to the global capitalist political economy like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and (to some extent) post-reform China. While these strict ideologically-driven churches are like North Korea, in other words, the rest of us in the evangelical world are more or less like the other capitalist Asia-Pacific regimes. I leave it up to your imagination to figure out who’s who on this geopolitical map.

However, to describe the state of theological malaise in this Asia-Pacific geopolitical map that stands in for the fragmentation of American evangelicalism, those interested in fine theological distinctions (as Wilson presumably is) have wandered into a sort of ‘Zen Presbyterianism,’ that is, if you are a Presbyterian (as a proud Chinglican, perhaps I might be configured as a ‘Zen Anglican’). As Jane Iwamura puts it in her startlingly incisive book Virtual Orientalism, Wilson is invoking the figure of the ‘oriental monk,’ a wandering contemplative sage who says wise things about nature and social relations that simultaneously confronts the excesses of Western capitalism while being lodged in capitalist processes as the monk has to be marketed to people as the new, hip thing in which to be interested. This is, after all, #2 on the list of Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like: ‘religions their parents don’t belong to.’ Appropriating the identity of the oriental monk for careful theological thinkers like himself, Wilson wants to tell us two things. Following the East Asian capitalist geopolitics playbook, he’d like to tell us that like South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, parts of Indonesia, and parts of China, the evangelical world has capitulated to the shallowing influence of capitalism, at times deploying, as anthropologist Aihwa Ong notes, ‘Asian values’ (or in the evangelical world, ‘Christian values’) as bumper-sticker justifications for capitalist lifestyles and flexible families. Not so Wilson, though: keeping to the ancient traditions, Wilson the oriental sage is still interested in fine theological intricacies where true wisdom is to be sought. That’s where he flips the primacy of discipline over grace to grace over discipline, arguing that if that’s the case, he and Rachel Held Evans (my goodness, a feminist) could still take communion. This grace is profound, mysterious, almost impenetrable, almost like Zen.

As Edward Said noted long ago in his classic Orientalism, the space of the ‘Orient’ has long served as a heterotopic space to the occident (here, Said also thanks Foucault for the insight, though he then follows to take issue with Foucault’s anti-humanism), which in turn suggests that my earlier congratulations to Wilson might need to be qualified. After all, perhaps Wilson is simply doing what his Western canon would tell him to do, that is, when stuff gets difficult to explain, use a heterotopia, and all will become clear. The most convenient heterotopic space is the Orient, and Wilson deploys it skillfully.

Now, of course, all this is not so much offensive as much as it ultimately undermines Wilson’s case for communion where grace takes primacy over discipline. Here, Foucault might actually be more right than Said: these orientalist off-hand remarks don’t originate from Wilson, but are part of a longer epistemic movement within what can be called ‘Western Christianity.’ In two church history classes I’ve taken (I suspect this might be a common experience), for example, we were taught that arcane figures like Pseudo-Dionysius with his ‘Mystical Theology’ and via negativa were uniquely products of the ‘East’ and that the controversies between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church over the filioque clause, the primacy of Rome, and the value of negative theology were ‘cultural’ as the ‘East’ went more contemplative and the ‘West’ went more propositional. In his devastating critique of this sort of logic, J. Kameron Carter retorts that this goes all the way back to the earliest times of distinguishing Jesus from the Jews so that ‘Jesus’ became ‘Occidental’ while the ‘Jews’ became ‘oriental’ or ‘semitic,’ forcing a wedge between Christianity and the East from the get-go. The framing of Eastern Orthodoxy as ‘Eastern’ in turn is a justification of schism precisely on the grounds that the ‘East’ is heterotopic to Western Christianity.

These problems haven’t gone away in the contemporary period. Jesuit theologian Peter Phan, for example, was investigated by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith because it was alleged that he taught an ‘Asian negative theology’ contrary to the received teachings of the Church. This investigation’s orientalist claims still have yet to be decisively addressed by Asian American theologians who should be appalled that ‘Asian’ and ‘negative theology’ were unproblematically lumped together by Phan’s ‘occidental’ accusers, chief of whom has been the Archbishop of Baltimore, William Lori, whose Fortnight for Freedom deserves to be examined side-by-side to his inquisitorial stance toward Phan’s work. Or take another recent example in the evangelical world: the Deadly Vipers Case, a situation that surrounded a blog-based book published by Zondervan that framed sins as ‘deadly vipers’ to be attacked by the mixed-marital arts of the mortification of sin. Evangelical pastor Eugene Cho successfully launched a campaign to oppose the book’s continuation on the shelves of Christian bookstores, clarifying that this was not a vendetta against its authors, but that framing Asian Americans as the sinful ‘other’ would exacerbate racialized tensions in evangelical churches. So too, the discussion within Asian American evangelical circles around loving one’s parents without dishonouring Jesus continues to frame the conversation around orientalizing one’s Asian parents while occidentalizing the Christian faith, a premise that Baylor theologian Jonathan Tran pointed out is ultimately untenable if Asian American Christianity is to develop its own catholic expression of the faith.

In other words, Doug Wilson is not alone in using these orientalist frameworks to frame his argument; it is instead a problem that plagues much of Euro-American Christianity even within Asian American Christian circles, and its roots lie far back in the history of the church. The question one may pose, then, is this: is labeling ‘Asia,’ the ‘Orient,’ or whatever ‘other’ you might have to Western Christianity as a heterotopic space ultimately helpful for Christian communion?

My answer is no. And this, if those in positions like Doug Wilson’s have ears to hear, might be the way forward in answering the schisms that have plagued our churches. Instead of hearing the complaints of women, post-colonial peoples, and racialized minorities as emanating from a will to power and born of an unsanctified lust for immanent liberation, perhaps our cries for justice are in fact cries for communion, complaints that this table where the sacraments impart the grace of God to us remains a space of division and exclusion. If Wilson is reading this, the answer following the reading of this post is not to debate internally whether you owe Asian Americans an apology for colonizing our space to make your point, though if you were to issue this apology, we’d be happy to hear it. The proper response, however, is to critically and contemplatively reflect on our shared Christian tradition, to examine if this thread of orientalization actually has any proper place in our discourse, and to begin the long overdue process of healing schism, that the world may know the Father has sent the Son.

**Correction: an earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Wilson was a ‘homeschooling advocate.’ This error has been corrected to ‘educational advocate,’ as Wilson’s primary task has been to advocate for classical Western education in a school setting. We are grateful to our careful readers for pointing this out.