Continuity and Transformation: Religious Synthesis in East Asia by Sang Jin Ahn (review)

320 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 by contrast, starts with Genesis 12, not Genesis 1. He features the story of Abraham, who, guided by God=s promise, migrates westward from Mesopotamia to inhabit a new land next to the sea and to found there a new nation. Merkley argues that this notable particularizing of the tale is really a universalizing act, joined as it is to the divine promise that the new nation will become a great blessing to all the families of the earth. The second surprise is the role he accords in his Christian view of world history to the establishment of state of Israel in 1948. When dealing with history after the ancient period which produced the Hebrew Scriptures, Christian interpreters almost invariably move to the life of Jesus Christ as presented in the Gospels, then to the inauguration of the Christian Church in the Acts of the Apostles, and onward to the role of the Church, divisions notwithstanding, as emblem of the work of God in the world as a whole to the end of time. Merkley, by contrast, keeps his eye on the nation promised to Abraham, as above, and draws a line from Abraham to 1948. The via universalis of the book=s subtitle presumes that all the peoples of the world relate to that line in one way or another. He writes, >we say that the Restoration of the State of Israel in our own time is the best proof of the Sovereignty of the God of History, proof of history=s authority to tell us the largest things about life.= The Church does not figure significantly in his Christian view of history. Merkley=s view of world history depends on the notion that universal history is necessarily linear as well as cumulative, and best articulated as narrative, indeed a single narrative. This notion leads him in chapter 1 to assert the priority of Europe in world history, to affirm the tradition which locates the ancestry of European civilization in ancient Mesopotamia, and to appreciate European and American domination of the peoples of the globe in recent centuries. It is not at all clear how he collates this universalizing claim for Europe with the similar claim he makes for Israel in chapter 6, noted above. Nor is it clear how he can credit Christianity for the linearity he claims is essential for the construction of world history. Christian understandings of history have been flexible enough to posit Jesus Christ as central to world history while still honouring the multiplicity of peoples, cultures, and Christian communities throughout the world over long periods of time. In any case, the Chinese today claim a continuous civilizational history of five thousand years which makes the story linking European civilization with distant and ancient Mesopotamia sound positively tortuous and artificial. Any view of world history, including especially a Christian one, would need to take that point into account. (C.T. MCINTIRE) Sang Jin Ahn. Continuity and Transformation: Religious Synthesis in East Asia Peter Lang. xii, 212. US $54.96 humanities 321 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Readers of this book should feel touched by its concern with common people=s suffering as essential to theological reflection. Sang Jin Ahn advocates >reciprocal praxis= as the methodology for doing theology today. He proposes to put into dialectical interaction the past with the present, the text with the context, in a practical concern for the liberation of common people from their socio-political situation of suffering. He takes Donghak, founded by Choe Je-U (1824B64), and Minjung theology, which emerged in twentieth-century Korea, as two examples which have concretized this methodology. Donghak, which literally means >Eastern learning,= is a religious movement launched for the liberation of people from their suffering. A reader might feel shocked when he reads that, for Choe Je-U, >Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism were Adead@ since they had lost the spiritual power to defend Korean people from the assault of Western nations.= On the other hand, Christianity was considered as part of Western domination, not only because it did not...