Grassroots Asian Theology: Thinking the Faith from the Ground Up by Simon Chan (review)

It was Philip Jenkins (history) of Baylor University who showed that Christianity in the twenty-first century will be very different in that the majority of Christians in the world are found in Africa, Latin America, and Asia—the so-called “third world.” This is a major shift in the center of gravity from the first world in modern Europe and North America to the Global South. Hitherto seen as a religion of the West, Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere is quite different in that its adherents are mostly poor and that it will not be a mirror image of Christianity in the North. Schisms between Christians in the Northern and the Southern Hemispheres are many, over issues of gender equality, same-sex marriage, and many others that will challenge world Christianity.¹ China under Marxist-Maoism for the last half century, because of its huge population of 1.36 billion, will in fact be the largest Christian nation in the world, despite its avowed atheism. Sociologist Myron L. Cohen has said that being the heirs of the May Fourth Movement (1919) in China, both the Nationalist and Marxist as well as many urbanite intellectuals have all relegated Christianity (which is burgeoning, especially in the countryside with close ties to folk religions) to the category of “syncretism” and “feudal superstition.” It is Cohen’s claim that Christianity in rural China is a hybridization of faith and Chinese popular religion. This hybridity is embedded “in the very structure of social life, as in the family, lineage, or village community” (p. 104) that makes it an inherent part of Chinese culture.² More recently Pope Francis in acknowledging the cultural diversity of the Roman Catholic Church worldwide named fifteen new cardinals of whom “five are from Europe, three from Asia, three from Latin America, and two each from Africa and Oceania” (Los Angeles Times, January 5, 2015, p. A4).

Simon Chan (PhD, Cambridge) is the Earnest Lau Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Theological College in Singapore. His church is the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination. For a person of the Pentecostal faith, Chan is most unusual in that his theology includes both the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox traditions from which he readily cites the encyclicals of popes over the ages and the doctrines of the Holy See. Instead of presenting a systematic theology in Grassroots Asian Theology, Chan is only interested in showing how theology ought to be done. In short, the process of doing theology is just as important as the content; therefore his thesis is definitely “thinking the faith from the ground up.”

It is only by this wide inclusivity that he can critique the elitist theologians who tend to prematurely judge folk Christanity as “syncretistic and so much superstition” (p. 31), when in reality that is where people are in their different faith journeys. For Chan, much of what is known in the West as Asian theology are largely elitist accounts of what Asian theologians are saying, and they rarely take grassroots Christianity seriously. Proper of Aquitaine’s (390–455 c.e., a disciple of St. Augustine of Hippo) idea that theology should be the lived theology of a people (as expressed in their prayers), would be a better theology for the Asian church and perhaps for the global church as well, so he claims (p. 7).

Examples that Chan cites as elitist theologians are many, but we will only highlight two of them who are familiar to most Christians in the West, namely C. S. Song and the late Kosuke Koyama (1929–2009). Chan sees Song as being unduly optimistic about the achievements of the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–1976) in its emphasis on socioeconomic liberation. In reality, the Cultural Revolution was neither cultural nor revolutionary; it was ten years of chaos and turmoil, according to reports from China itself. For Chan liberation...