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Introduction A D E C O L O N I Z I N G A SIA N T H E O L O G Y O F SP I R I T A S A C OM PA R AT I V E T H E O L O G Y O F SP I R I T- Q I Like many of the other tributaries to the ecumenical theology1 of world Christianity since the beginning of political decolonization in the 1950s, Asian theology has been grappling with the task of critically examining the history of Christian mission in Asia in order to decolonize the theology of the younger churches in the Asian continent from the implicit and explicit hegemonic control historically exercised by the theology of the Anglo-European churches in the North Atlantic world. With this task in view, like its African and Latin American counterparts, Asian theology has tackled the two intertwined issues of cultural indigenization—or “inculturation”—and social liberation in order to respond to the twofold postcolonial-neocolonial context of the cultural hegemony of the West, on the one hand, and the sociopolitical and economic reality of pervasive injustice, oppression, and poverty, on the other.2 The various inculturating theologies (such as the works of C. S. Song, M. Thomas Thangaraj, and Ryu Dong-sik) and the Asian theologies of liberation (most notably minjung theology in Korea and dalit theology in India) have been the products of this endeavor. Asian Theology: Cultural Indigenization and Social Liberation in a Postcolonial-Neocolonial Context Asian theologies of inculturation start out with the premise, shared with their counterparts in Africa and Latin America, that every theology is a local theology, being a contextual, historical product of a particular time under the influence of a local culture or local cultures.3 Accordingly, they try to articulate the Christian gospel in the symbols and concepts of local cultures and religions, so that the gospel would not always have to “speak 16 Introduction: A Comparative Theology of Spirit-Qi in Greek.” In particular, responding to the specificity of the Asian context of religious diversity, many put heavy emphasis on interreligious learning, regarding other religions as the storehouse of cultural symbols, linguistic tools, conceptual frameworks, and spiritual practices that can help Christian theology in Asia be truly Asian Christian theology.4 They challenge the usual charges of syncretism directed against them for masking the global pretension of hegemonic Anglo-European Christianity with its provincial Greco-Roman and Germanic cultural and religious heritage taken to be universal and timeless.5 For these inculturating theologies, the dominant model has been—in the words of Robert J. Schreiter—that of indigenization as adaptation or “sowing” (the gospel being the seed and the local culture being the soil) vis-à-vis the colonial model of indigenization as translation (the gospel being the kernel and the local culture being the husk).6 Against the essentially homogenous, static, and closed understanding of the gospel assumed in the translation model, which sees the essentially self-identical substance of the gospel merely taking on different linguistic garbs for the sake of more effective communication, the model of indigenization as adaptation accepts the notion of Christian tradition as a living entity that grows and changes by adapting itself to diverse environments. When driven to its logical conclusion, this model can go as far as to reject any attempt to carve out the unchanging transcultural core of biblical revelation from the cultural accretions of the Christian tradition and advocate more dynamic, historical, and relational ways of understanding the very notions of tradition and identity. The adaptation model, however, has also been criticized for presupposing often an asymmetrical, even unilateral understanding of the gospel-culture relation in which the gospel or the Christian tradition is the theologically creative agent of change and the local culture the largely passive object providing the ore of theological resources to be mined.7 In many versions of the model, the primary concern still lies in transmitting the received tradition effectively rather than engaging the local context so that the exigencies of the context shape the message of the gospel itself. One of the most radical of the Asian inculturating theologians, the Korean theologian of culture Kim Kyoung-jae, goes a step further to propose the model of “grafting,” according to which the gospel is the shoot and the local culture the stock onto which the gospel is grafted.8 This proposal envisions a more bilateral, dialogical, and context-centered...

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