The American Academy of Religion 2013 Annual Meeting in Baltimore

The American Academy of Religion (AAR) is the premier academic meeting for scholars of religion/theology.  It has always met in conjunction with the Society of Biblical Literatures (SBL) and usually meets in some city with a big convention center (that means, Amarillo TX is not on the list).  This year, the AAR/SBL annual meeting is held in Baltimore, MD.

Of interest to me are two sessions.  The first was the ANARCS session, scheduled at the ungodly 9:00 am time slot. (I had to leave my home in Jersey at 5:30 am for this....) ANARCS is the Asian North American Religions, Culture, and Society group.  This year, "North American" meant largely Canada.  Which is fine; I enjoyed hearing Asian Canadian perspectives on Christianity since we Americans like to dominate any scene we're on.  To be sure, this is not necessarily an Asian North American theology group; and indeed almost all of the papers are ethnographic studies.

There is perhaps a reason for it.  Asian North American (ANA) theology requires a definition of ANA cultures.  As one of the panelists shared with me after, ANA theology needs to be based on a broad-enough context to have general implications, but needs also to be specific enough to avoid essentialism.   This is a tough balance to achieve, particularly since "Asian" is not an Asian term at all!  It is a White orientalist term (see previous posts for how I use White vis-a-vis Euro-American.).  Thus, my tendency is for "ANA" to be a critical-syncretic term for different ANA theologies.  I do want Indian-Americans, Chinese-Canadians, Japanese-Americans, etc. to construct their theologies.  We all are not Han-ridden.

Without this firm context, theological construction is exceedingly difficult.  And that is why I think a lot of Asian-American theology has been either watery or built on very specific contexts.  Sang Hyun Lee's work, for instance, clearly identifies him as a Reformed Presbyterian Korean patriarch living in Princeton, New Jersey.  That is why it's not hard to read his narratives and go, "Uh... that's not my context... are you kidding?"  Or, for me, "A seminary professor can attain Premier Executive membership on United?" (And an ancillary question: how did he do it?)  So the context is important.  This is true of all theology; we cannot read Augustine, Aquinas, Schleiermacher, Barth, Tillich, Moltmann, as if all of them were writing mathematics; they all wrote from unique contexts and understanding their thought requires taking them into account.

Thus, good theology requires honesty in contextual location.  When we neglect context, we will end up excluding people from the grace of God.  What, then, results is a contradiction; we declare the grace of God where mercy triumphs over judgment, and yet, we pre-empt that grace with a silent proviso that this applies only after an initial "pre-judgment."  Thus, Evangelical Christianities, only until quite recently, has always maintained an exclusionary yet inclusionary posture.  God loves the world that he sent God's only Son... but you can only be saved if you do X, Y, and Z, commensurate to that love.  We can't have it both ways; we either extend the love of God to include all the sinful, with room for gradual sanctification within. Or, we exclude the love of God to include only the sufficiently sanctified.

The second interesting panel was the World Council of Churches panel on a recently issued convergence document.  To date, the WCC has only issued one convergence document: the Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (BEM) document.  This document is entitled The Church: Towards a Common Vision. (TC) Now, a "convergence" document is not a declarative statement in the sense of, We are now one church.  No - by definition, a "convergence" statement focuses on the agreements between denominations.  It aspires (eschatologically?) towards a state where churches can truly be one in reality.  But in the meantime, the idea is to begin with agreements and move towards the disagreements.

I confess I was there for Roger Haight, a Jesuit ecclesiologist (who is also unfortunately silenced by the Vatican)  whom I respect very much, both for his work and also for his witness.  He is a theologian whom I regard is very rooted in the Word while, at the same time, desires for theology to attest to the present existential situation the world finds itself in.  When he was silenced, he could well have given the Vatican the middle-finger, published more books, etc., but he chose to obey the Vatican's directives.  When the Vatican commanded him to stop teaching, he did, even though he was teaching at the Protestant Union Theological Seminary in New York (who would very much preferred to have Haight continue as full-time faculty instead of obeying Vatican directives).  This humility is something I admire.

In any case, the document is worth a read and, being a convergence document, cannot be exhaustive of all ecclesiologies.  As one of the panelists noted, whenever church finances are strained, the first commissions usually to be disbanded are "faith and order" or ecumenical ones.  There becomes this fortress mentality of trying to preserve one's own plot of land instead of banding with others to renew the entire system.  The Church then ceases to be missional, and becomes preservationist; it becomes all about the "inside" or all about the "outside" instead of enjoying an "inside-outside" dialectical existence.  It becomes an insular, exclusive community or a marketing-disguised-as-outreach operation.  In either of these cases, we get one of two situations.  (1) In the insular model, the church becomes so detached from the world, in becomes increasingly irrelevant because it operates within its own system of logic that is proved true by its own system of logic.  A friend of mine once noted that she was on a train to New York City when she encountered an Amish runaway man staring at her; apparently, it was the first time he had seen an Asian!  Of course, this is laughable to most of us who are more cosmopolitan.  But if the church becomes increasingly insular, it becomes captive by its own internal logic and operations.  The church dies by irrelevance to the world; and this is important because subsequent generations of the community will want to be relevant to the world, even if they don't want to go along with all of its aspects.

 (2) In the exoteric model, the church simply tries to market itself as palatable to the world to the point where it no longer seeks to live out the Gospel, but the message of the world.  I must direct my fire at the prosperity gospel temples that are cropping up in Southeast Asia.  This church will be very inclusive, yes.  It will be very open, yes.  It will present a message that anybody will love to hear, yes.  But the church is not built on the solid foundation of Jesus Christ, but on the tastes and preferences of the world.  To claim that if only you give to the Church, Jesus will give more financial resources back is nothing more and nothing less than a LIE.  It presents the gospel of the free market, and turns Jesus into a cog in its large engines.  Such denigration of the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ is a double-heresy!  Any church that participates and veers close to this prosperity theology is, in my view, not a church in a proper sense.

Having said all that, the TC document strives to make the inside-out dialectic known.  I appreciate Haight's comments on the emphasis on theological and cultural pluralism within the church that is in the document.  It is, I think, a good introductory text that would start a good discussion on the nature, calling, and operation of the church, especially in a world of increasing theological diversity.

The AAR is an important venue for aspiring theologians.  It was fun walking by theological heavyweights like N.T. Wright (casually chatting with a colleague in the main lobby with everyone just walking past him), James Cone - chatting happily away with Dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, Emilie Townes, Kwok Pui-Lan, Jonathan Y. Tan, Roger Haight, Benny Liew, Stephen C. Russell, and others.  Overall, this was an excellent weekend.  Plus, the book sale can't be beat.  I look forward to attending the 2014 Annual Meeting in San Diego.