Theology without Borders

Essays in Honor of Peter C. Phan

Leo D. Lefebure, Leo D. Lefebure

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781647122423
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

Peter C. Phan's contributions to theology and pioneering work on religious pluralism, migration, and Christian identity have made a global impact on the field. The essays in Theology without Borders offer a variety of perspectives across Phan's fundamental work, providing an overview for anyone interested in his body of work and its influence.

PART I

WORLD CHRISTIANITY
AND MIGRATION

CHAPTER 1

Peter C. Phan and the Reconstruction of World Christianity

Dale T. Irvin

The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.

—Hugh of Saint Victor

Over the past half century, one has often heard a lament in the halls of theological schools that the “age of the theological giants” has past.¹ Any one making such a claim today has obviously not yet encountered the work of Peter C. Phan. Phan is without question a theological giant, with many of us already happily perched upon his shoulders.² His scholarship covers an enormous theological range, from earliest Christianity to contemporary culture, engaging the ecumenical spectrum of Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal traditions and perspectives. Along the way, he has touched constructively on almost every major area of Christian doctrine in the various traditions, from creation to eschatology. His work defies any easy classification. He is at much at home in Rome as he is in Washington or Hong Kong. Although acknowledging that all theologies are grounded in the particular context of their production and reflect a location, he has nevertheless demonstrated that one is never bound to a particular location or school of theological thought. In short, he embodies both polycentrism and multivocality.

The multiplicity that is found in his thought is in part a result of his experience of migration. Human beings migrate, both physically and intellectually. But such migration does not necessarily result in erasure of memory and identity. One of Phan’s great contributions to world Christianity has been to both study and undertake such migration, physically and intellectually, in multiple directions.³ He has done so while maintaining all his previous identities and commitments. As a result, he is someone who engages not only in what Thomas Tweed calls “crossing.” Phan equally embodies Tweed’s other kinetic religious moment, that of “dwelling.”⁴ Phan is someone who simultaneously moves through and inhabits what Arjun Appadurai calls multiple ecumenes,⁵ practicing what Namsoon Kang calls cosmopolitan theology.⁶ In this regard, it is not only that he is one of the world’s most important and influential Christian theologians of the past century. Unlike many of us who are, in the words of Hugh of Saint Victor, either still tender beginners or already strong, Phan is truly a world Christian theologian whose work approaches what Saint Victor called perfection, or completion. I will return to the theme of Phan being a world Christian practicing cosmopolitan theology in multiple ecumenes at the end of this chapter. But first I would like to locate him in the framework of the study of world Christianity.⁷

WORLD CHRISTIANITY AS A FIELD OF STUDY

Phan’s contributions to the field of study known as world Christianity have been enormous. His intellectual sojourn that brought him to the field has been as much a story of migration as the story of his life’s journey. A Roman Catholic who was born in Vietnam, he studied in Rome, where he obtained his first doctorate with a dissertation on the theology of the icon in the thought of a Russian Orthodox theologian, Paul Evdokimov, which brought him expertise in patristics and into dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox tradition.⁸ He obtained his second doctorate with a thesis on Karl Rahner’s eschatology, which secured his reputation as a significant contemporary systematic theologian.⁹ His third doctorate, the “higher doctorate,” was granted by the University of London on the basis of his works on mission, inculturation, and interreligious dialogue. It was his 1988 book on the impact of Alexandre de Rhodes on the development of Christianity in seventeenth-century Vietnam,¹⁰ followed by a trilogy of books on Asian American and Asian theology published by Orbis Books in an eighteen-month period in 2003 and 2004,¹¹ that brought him into prominence in the field of world Christianity.

He entered a field in which ironically there is a considerable lack of consensus in understanding what exactly is being studied. This lack of agreement is evident in a 2005 volume edited by Lamin Sanneh and Joel Carpenter, The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World. Patricia Harkens-Pierre, in a chapter titled “Religion Bridge: Translating Secular into Sacred Music—A Study of World Christianity Focusing on the US Virgin Islands,” writes: “Within the wide-flung geographical and cultural region of the Caribbean, a dynamic concept of world Christianity is revitalizing the twenty-first-century church. This reality is becoming increasingly evident in one Caribbean community—the US Virgin Islands—where Christianity in its Western colonial form has been rejected by much of the population.”¹²

From this, it would appear that world Christianity is something other than Christianity in its European or Western colonial form, which world Christianity is intent on rejecting. Yet further on in the same volume, in another chapter titled “Shall They Till with Their Own Hoes? Baptists in Zimbabwe and New Patterns of Interdependence, 1950–2000,” Isaac Mwase writes, “The case I wish to argue is that world Christianity implies interdependence. Mutual reliance, not unilateralism and isolationism, has to win the day in cross-cultural Christian relations and inform mission policy.”¹³ In this case world Christianity is not something that is set over against Western Christianity, but would seem to entail the possibility at least of mutual reliance and interdependence between Christians from all parts of the globe, including its Western colonial form.

In a brief essay posted on the web page of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at the Boston University School of Theology, Gun Cheol Kim writes, “Simply speaking, the phrase [world Christianity] describes the global presence of Christians from diverse backgrounds, including race, nationality, culture, gender, etc.”¹⁴ It would seem from this definition that world Christianity includes the study of Christianity on six continents.¹⁵ Yet the web page for the Centre for the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh explains its mission to be “advancing scholarship in Christianity outside the Western Hemisphere.”¹⁶ What this means is not exactly clear. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines “the Western Hemisphere” as consisting of the continents of North and South America and the surrounding waters.¹⁷ This would not seem to be the definition that the Edinburgh center has in mind, because this would mean that the center is not concerned with advancing scholarship regarding Christianity in Latin American, which it has done. The Encyclopedia Britannica also acknowledges that the Western Hemisphere could be defined as that part of the Earth west of the Greenwich borough of London to roughly the 180th meridian on the globe, but that would include some areas of Europe, Africa, and Oceania. Is world Christianity the study of Christianity in Asia, and in parts of Europe, Africa, and Oceania? Some of the history behind the Centre for the Study of World Christianity helps clarify the issue a bit. It was founded in 1982 at the University of Aberdeen, and its original name was the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World. But even this remains somewhat confusing. Is Latin America “non-Western”? Are Australia, New Zealand, and even Hawaii part of the “West”?¹⁸

This divide can become even more confusing when it is seen from the North American side of the Atlantic. In 1997 the American Theological Library Association established the World Christianity Interest Group. According to its web page, this group “provides a forum for discussion and research related to World Christianity. This group defines ‘World Christianity’ as Christianity practiced outside of the United States and Canada. Also included in this definition is Christianity practiced within the United States and Canada whose participants worship or otherwise express their faith in languages other than English.”¹⁹ Christianity in this case is reduced to English-speaking North America, while world Christianity is everything else, including French-speaking Quebec and the Spanish-speaking South Bronx.

In all these descriptions, what emerges as a common theme is the assumption or assertion that there is a global geographical divide, often mounting to the ranks of opposition, between Christianity in something called “the West” and Christianity in what Stuart Hall termed “the rest.”²⁰ The roots of this divide are easily located in the modern world’s colonial configuration, in which, beginning in the fifteenth century, European nations that were predominantly Christian in their religious identities to varying degrees colonized other regions and peoples of the world politically, socially, and culturally. The colonial project of the modern era was launched from Iberia, where Catholic Christianity dominated. The Northern European nations of the Netherlands, which was predominantly Reformed, and England, in which the Anglican Church was established but where other branches of Protestantism were flourishing, joined the endeavor early in the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century, these Northern European powers were dominating the global colonial landscape. At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States, which was predominantly Protestant, joined the ranks of colonial powers, thereby entering into membership in the colonial club called “the West.”

Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant churches rode the colonial waves of the modern era to send first chaplains and then missionaries to the regions of the world where European and then North American colonial reach extended. By this means, Christianity in its modern European cultural forms of Catholics, Anglicans, or Protestants was spread to other regions of the world. In the process, the power imbalance between colonizer and colonized was reinscribed in terms of church and mission or, in more general cultural terminology, between “Christian lands” and “mission lands.” The construction was not without its own precedents in Latin Christendom ...