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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 166-169



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Book Review

A Dictionary of Asian Christianity


A Dictionary of Asian Christianity. Edited by Scott W. Sunquist. Associate editors, David Wu Chu Sing and John Chew Hiang Chea. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2001. Pp. xliii, 937. $75.00.)

This is a unique work, embracing a vast area of Christian life in time and space, with 1260 entries, each accompanied by a bibliography for further reading. Its writing has involved almost 500 scholars, Asians or those whose primary work is in Asia, from many countries and has been ten years in the making. Its completion is the fruit of numerous regional meetings within Asia, generously supported by a variety of international foundations concerned with mission. That such a work could have been brought into being is a major achievement, and though this review will have occasion to point out an unevenness and some major and minor lapses, we still have a valuable work for church historians interested in Asia. Into the 1260 entries 464 other articles have been incorporated, in an effort to assure a certain symmetry among the different countries involved. Nonetheless, as will be pointed out, such symmetry is badly lacking in a few.

The three editors, all at that time faculty members of Trinity Theological College in Singapore, took up this project in 1990, and Singapore has remained the center of its compilation. It would not be unfair to say that the book bears evidence of its Protestant origins, though the editors made considerable efforts to involve Roman Catholic scholars, and even held a special consultation to decide on which of the many possible religious orders and congregations to include. In almost all cases, these particular articles have been written by members of the congregations themselves, and these generally approach a high level.

There are, however, some major omissions. The Sisters of St. Paul de Chartres, the second largest women's congregation in the Philippines, with missions in several other Asian countries, are mentioned only for Thailand. The Augustinian Recollect Missionaries, also one of the larger women's congregations in the Philippines, receives only a brief mention under "Indigenous Religious Congregations," [End Page 166] as if the latter were less important than the many minor Western congregations that receive extensive articles. Among male orders, the Passionists, long active in China and the Philippines, receive no mention of any kind. Similarly, the Augustinian Recollects, the largest order in the Philippines at the end of the Spanish regime, and with seventeenth-century martyrs in Japan, go completely unmentioned. The Marists are spoken of only under China, while the Capuchins and the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, both long active and in considerable numbers in the Philippines, only find mention under Indonesia, though they have been equally long or longer in the Philippines. The article on the Jesuits, not by a Jesuit, contains some dubious and irrelevant remarks ontheir European history, but has nothing on Vietnam, the Philippines, or Japan, the latter a considerable omission for an article that features St. Francis Xavier. It is true that the work of Alexandre de Rhodes and the Jesuits is treated in the country article on Vietnam (though nothing is said of the Dominican work in Tonkin, which produced canonized native and Spanish martyrs). It is also true that Xavier, Valignano, and the later Jesuits in Japan receive considerable treatment in the article "Kirishitan Evangelism," but in the absence of any cross-reference, who would know to look there?

The geographical scope of "Asia" has presented problems. Indian Christians today have close ties to those Christians who in the early centuries were to the east of the Roman-Byzantine empire, though in the modern world they are more oriented to the Mediterranean and Islamic world. Hence the decision was taken to cover the Persian area of western Asia until the Arab conquest of the seventh century, and from that point onward to limit the coverage to the area from Pakistan to the East, excluding Asian Russia and the Pacific islands. It seems...

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