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Major Issues in Asian Theological Education
Global Theological Education Conference, World Reformed Fellowship
Global Theological Education Conference
Jakarta, Indonesia
March 21-22, 2009
by
Dr. Carver T. Yu, President
China Graduate School of Theology Asia by itself is already a highly complicated place, with diverse cultures and religions as well as socio-political issues. Globalization has made it even more complicated. Different Asian cultures find themselves in rapid change, yielding to the onslaught of market capitalism and what comes with it as liberal humanism in the guise of democracy, and struggling desperately at the same time to maintain their cultural identities. Socio-cultural fragmentation is a common experience for many Asian people. In the midst of all these, we see totally unexpected phenomenal expansion of Christianity in Asia. Young churches in Asian countries like China, Nepal and Myanmar are wrestling with issues that are crucial to the integrity of their being. Issues are numerous in regard to theological education. I can only point to a few. I would not revisit issues that have been often discussed, I choose those are more of my concern.
The Challenge of the Magnitude of Needs
The first issue that comes to mind is the challenge of the sheer magnitude of needs in theological education. The Asian church has experienced phenomenal growth in the last fifty years. China is the case in point. In 1950, the Protestant Church in China was estimated to have a membership of less than 800,000. In a recent paper given at a conference in Beijing by a senior research fellow of the Academy of social Sciences in Beijing, it was recognized semi-officially for the first time that there are more than 70 million Christians in the House Church alone, with about 20 million in the Three Self Church alongside. The church in Nepal is equally astounding. 50 years ago, there were only a handful of Christians. In 2007, it was estimated to have 800,000, with 6,000 congregations. The church in Myanmar is another example of phenomenal growth, with more than 2.5 million Christians. Vietnam and Cambodia are also growing impressively. All these churches are very young, and they need to be solidly grounded in faith. Sound theological teaching is vital and urgently needed, not only for the training of pastoral leaders but also for lay Christians.
The magnitude will be appreciated if we look at China for a moment. With more than 90 million Christians, there are only 18 theological schools, some of which are not only small but also of rather low academic standing. Right now, the 18 schools cater mainly the 20 million Christians in the three Self Church. As for the 70 million House Church Christians, there are no formal theological schools. There are merely sporadic training centers giving ad hoc training. It would not be long when China allows the House Church to register as legal entities, and we can imagine how huge the demand for theological education would be. Setting up one hundred more theological school would mean one school for every 800,000. If we look at Nepal, the situation is not much better. With only a few theological schools and training centers, the leadership of the Nepal church suffers tremendously.
The sheer magnitude of the need is frightening. If we look deeper, there is another level of challenge. These churches are all very young. The good news is, they rely heavily on the Bible to inform their faith. The bad news is, they tend to read the Bible with their own spiritual experiences and cultural resources without being aware of it. There is the danger of their being insulated from the rich heritage of the Holy Catholic Church. False teachings or impoverishing theologies can spread like wild fire. The real challenge is to produce a new generation of theological faculty who can teach sound Biblical historical faith, while providing general theological training for lay leaders. To build a new generation of competent theologians and Biblical scholars, we need to improve the general theological environment of the church in order for theological scholarship to sprout and grow. How are we to do it? How are we to come up with enough theological teachers? Perhaps more challenging is demands for theological textbooks and Bible commentaries. Translations from the West can help for a short while, eventually we need to develop indigenous theological texts This is the real test for health and maturity of the indigenous church.
The other issue related to this is the uncontrollable sporadic and diverse theological educations Christians in China or Nepal or Myanmar are receiving. Out of this there are all kinds of theological confusion and tension. This can eventually become gravely divisive.
When the churches in these countries have been growing so rapidly in circumstances where theological schools have been unavailable, there is emerging in these contexts a tacit perception that theological trainings provided by formal theological schools are perhaps not necessary. There is in various parts of Asia an emerging trend for establishing church-based or ministry-based ministerial training.
The Impact of Globalization and Urbanization
Globalization in the most basic term is globalization of the market. Market-driven capitalism is taking off and accelerating phenomenally in Asia. Wherever the market is driving force, there functional rationality will become the measure of all things. With functional rationality as the highest value, traditional values are being marginalized right before our eyes in Asia. Even the sacred, the sublime is to be commoditized. In the West, the battle is not totally lost, for there are traditional spiritual and moral forces well in place to hold the marginalization in check. Chicago School Economists like Gary Becker and Richard Posner, who turns everything into utility, seeing marriage as nothing more than a stable rational sexual transaction not fundamentally different from transaction in prostitution, are vehemently opposed and capably refuted. There are constructive efforts in building a society where justice not only as fairness but also as social expression of love, as covenantal responsibility. But for a society like China, for example, the situation can be very different. Let me explain. For more than hundred years, China has been undergoing a process of cultural disintegration, first under the impact of westernization, then the Communist iconoclastic rejection of traditional values, and finally the devastation of the Cultural Revolution. China is now in a spiritual vacuum. Moral values have become extremely flimsy, the family which has been for centuries the core value of Chinese culture is now in fragmentation, Confucian nurture of moral character and inwardness in the Chinese soul has long evaporated. After a century of cultural disintegration, China is now a spiritual wasteland. The Nobel winning novel, The Soul Mountain, by Gao Xingjiang catalogs the chaotic fragments of past traditions being scattered into oblivion. It is a testimony to the death of the Chinese soul. In such a condition, China is to face the onslaught of market capitalism. Corollary to market capitalism is a culture of narcissism and consumer personality. Individualism is already a problem as the result of the one-child policy, the situation will be exacerbated by a form of liberalism that embraces a liberty of indifference and rejects any form of common social vision as a reaction against the Communist authoritarianism. The form of market capitalism and liberalism rising out of the ruin of communist social experiment will be much more blatant and aggressive than the form we are experiencing in the so-called postmodern west. The same can happen to communist states like Vietnam and Cambodia.
There is an urgent need to bring up a new generation of theological thinkers who can think in covenantal logic, to work out a theology of covenantal economics for developing a form of covenantal capitalism in which values are defined, created and redistributed in such a way that functional rationality, self-interest and competition are transformed in a new configuration of values. Theology of economics should transform the way we do systematic or dogmatic theology.
Theological education can no long be done as an academic exercise. It has to be done in the frontier of cultural confrontation. To drive back the onslaught of market capitalism is a real theological task in theological education in Asia.
For theological education to be contextually relevant in Asia, the issue of urbanization has to be taken seriously. The City, with its multi-level complexity, has to be taken into consideration for developing our theological curriculum. The gospel is not for academic analysis but for effective proclamation. How can the gospel speak forceful to city dwellers being imprisoned by soico-ideoloigcal framework they created themselves? There are also all kinds of unique problems in a city. These problems will eventually surface in congregations of God's people. How can we equip ministers who can address these problems Biblically in a competent and effective way? Problems like marriage and family is becoming insurmountable in China. Sex and gender is becoming confusing as well as explosive. How can we train our students to be clear headed, firm and yet sensitive?
Poverty is going to be a big theological issue that will affect our theological educational agenda. The gap between the rich and poor is is fast widening in various parts of Asia. Let us take China again as an example. With 4 times the population of USA, farmers in China have only 1/15 of the farmland that US farmers have, and that proportion is shrinking as China is in full speed of industrial and real estate development. The suffering among farmers is becoming unbearable. If the trend continues, violent revolts are likely. Under the facade of prosperity, there is a strong undercurrent of unrest.
The Challenge of Cultural Identity Crisis
The other sense of poverty is to be found in the fast disappearance of enriching cultural diversity in China. Cultural diversity in China is just astounding, with hundreds of dialects and distinctive ways of life, with tens of minority cultures cohered and cross-fertilized with the Confucian ideal of life and society, with the Green Circle as the breeding ground. In thirty years, due to the globalization of the market-capitalist culture, this cultural diversity will be severely endangered. The day when such richness in culture is replaced by monotonous shopping malls, it would be the saddest day for humanity. Soul Mountain by Gao is an elegy for the suppression of such diversity, now by the communist regime, and in the future by a monolithic market. A theology of social justice would not be difficult to come by. The more difficult would be the challenge to provide a theology of culture that celebrates and promote such cultural diversity, so that Christian action is empowered by deep theological insights. At the same time, the Chinese people is experiencing cultural identity crisis due to the onslaught of the market logic. The cultural tradition which had for hundreds of years been the life supporting system for the Chinese people is disintegrating right before our eyes. The same is happening in other Asian countries. How can we train students and theologians who can appreciate the grace of God in our culture despite all kinds of deformations there? How can we retrieve from our Reformed tradition spiritual resources that affirm our cultural tradition in the process of transforming it? How can we assure our people that the Christian faith can maintain the historical continuity of the Chinese culture while bringing it to a higher level of the fulfillment of culture as the promise from God?
Theological Education and the Ecological Crisis
The population growth in Asia potentially devastating. The population in China amounts to 1.325 billion in 2007. With the one child policy in place, China still experiences an annual growth rate of 0.6%. On the basis of this growth rate, by 2038, China's population would grow to 1.62 billion. Imagine when the one child policy is relaxed, the population growth will be much more. By that time, India will be catching up with China, with population well exceeding 1.6 billion. What does that mean? Mother Earth will be taxed beyond her limits. The need for a convincing theology of family planning and birth control has to be addressed. Related to the population growth is the growth of economic activities to sustain such a huge population. Maximillian Auffhammer of UC Berkeley and Richard Carson of UC San Diego projected on the basis of China's economic growth, by 2010, the estimated increase of carbon dioxide emission by 2010 in China over its 2000 level would be 600 million metric tons. This figure dramatically drawfs the 116 million metric tons emission reduction pledged by developed countries except USA in the Kyoto Protocol. Auffhammer and Carson extremely conservatively estimated economic growth in China in that period to be not more than 5%. But from 2004 onward, economic growth has been well above 8%, in fact up to 11% in 2007. Even under the conservative estimation, carbon dioxide emission by 2030 in China will exceed the total of emission of all the industrial countries combined. The greenhouse effect by then would be devastating. At the same time, due to improved living standard, the increase of automobiles in China is going to be frightening. In 2001, there were only 16 million cars in China, by 2010, it is estimated to be 84 million, and from then on, the annual demand is estimated to be between 13.7 million to 19.1 million. The oil reserve will be fast depleted, but that is a small matter in comparison to the problem of air pollution. Such anticipated ecological crisis demands responses not only in terms of theological reflection but also Christian action.
What bearing does this challenge have to theological education? We better come up with an answer real fast.
The Challenge of Buddhism
Young churches in Asia like China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and to a certain extent Nepal, have had strong Buddhist tradition. Buddhism seems to be making a comeback in these areas. This may have to do with the fragmentation of the self in postmodern culture that is pervading Asian countries.
The postmodern self is emptied of inner contents, with meaning and values evaporated. Flooded by advertisement, the so-called ‘private’ life is thoroughly invaded by consumer images, which have become the main substance of the self. German sociologist Wolf Dieter-Narr sums up the problem for us most vividly, “The change in behavior long observed by Riesman, Mitscherlich, Weber and many others consists in a destruction of ‘inwardness’, in a loss of the individual’s mechanism for reflection and for the process of experience… Our modern society has become a society of conditioned reflexes, a society where the individual is important only as a bearer of attributes—with reference to this or that attribute but not to what these attributes constitute: the person.”
Seeing the world as nothing but a construction of the consciousness, and consciousness as nothing but a bundle of unrelated sensations coming together by chance, or an accidental collocation of fragmented cultural codes, then the world is in fact an illusion sustained merely by human desires and attachment. The human self, likewise, has no permanent substance. It is also a bundle of sensations, or a bundle of desires. Attachment to the illusion that the self has a reality of its own drives itself into endless production of desires. Such a discourse is postmodern. Putting it into an Asian context, one can mistake it to be a Buddhist discourse. The Buddhist has long regarded any attempt to understand the world as futile, for the world has no “self” of its own (an-atman). There is no cosmic order as well. All there is, there is nothing but shadows moving in subjective consciousness. “Shunyata” (emptiness) is the key word. I need not rehearse Buddhist beliefs further to convince you that there is a lot of intellectual resonance between the postmodern nihilism and Buddhism. A Buddhist can comfortably speak the postmodern language. Not only is there intellectual resonance between Buddhism and the postmodern ethos, the spiritual vacuum that comes with it will generate a strong desire to find a new spiritual orientation. This coincides with the revulsion against the oppression of the market. The desire for a wisdom that sees through the emptiness and vanity of all the functional activities sustaining global capitalism is likely to lead one to a spiritual journey set out by the Buddhist tradition.
Such a challenge is not imaginary. It is real. In the last twenty year, there has been phenomenal growth of Buddhism in Taiwan and China.
According to a report by Thomas Yu, President of China Lutheran Seminary in Taiwan, there is a renaissance of Buddhism in Taiwan. According to a survey, Buddhism had experienced little growth from 1950 to 1980. “To our great amazement, however, Buddhism has changed dramatically in the past 20 years. Keeping pace with the rapid social changes in Taiwan, Buddhists have modernized their religious beliefs, becoming active participants in society and toiling for the betterment of the whole world through the purification of the individual.” With all these, the Buddha Light Temple led by Master Hsing Yun claims one million followers in Taiwan and 400,000 overseas. The Tzu Chi Foundation is even more phenomenal. It is a movement of compassion. With a humble start of a small hospital with 100 beds, the movement grows to claim 4 million followers.
I have a personal anecdote to add here. In 1999, I went to present a paper on ecological justice from the Christian perspective in the Taiwan Normal University. On the same platform was a professor presenting the same theme from the Buddhist perspective. He shared his own story. He was a Christian from a Christian family with pastors and elders in it. He left the Christian faith to enter the Tzu Chi foundation. After a few years of spiritual discipline, he was entrusted the task of environmental protection. In less than 10 years, using the ecological movement as a tool, he managed to generate a following of 400,000.
Both Hsing Yun and Tzu Chi have extended their work into China. Buddhism has been spreading so rapidly as to cause concern among the Chinese leaders. In 1995, Ming Pao, a daily newspaper reported an interesting story: Chairman Jiang visited a Buddhist temple. To his dismay, he found in the temple a young Buddhist monk barely 21 years old. He asked the young monk why he would throw away his exciting future and retreated to a monastery. The young monk replied, “The world is sinking into corruption…I cannot hope to save the world, I can only hope to save myself.” Jiang subsequently asked the Party to reflect on this. There is a sequel to this story. In 1994, we organized an international conference on Christianity and western literature in Beijing with tremendous success. We planned for the next one to be held in December 1996. Preparation was underway when all of a sudden, our counterpart in Beijing, a top university, called the preparation to a halt. Religion policy had been tightened. Why? The Party leadership was quite concerned about the spread of Buddhism in China. The resurgence of Buddhism in the Chinese context under the forceful impact of global capitalism is real.
How are we to respond? The response cannot be a quick fix by responding to Buddhism as a competing faith or intellectual system. That approach will be completely misguided. We have to look at the issue from the broad cultural perspective. Why are people responding so readily to a tradition that seems to be utterly out of place in modern life? Does this reflect the desperate spiritual needs in our global capitalist context? How have we been responding to the onslaught of global capitalism and the spiritual devastation along its path? Theologians may have been talking about the issues of global ethics like the gap between the rich and poor, the environmental problems, and the problem of local cultural identity. Those issues are of highly significant. But what about the spiritual condition of the individual human person? What about the way he/she understands himself/herself and the world? The loss of inwardness, the fragmentation of the human person, the spiritual devastation of the vortex of competition in the market, are the real test whether our gospel is truly relevant. This is something we need to think hard about.
Does theological education need to take Buddhism as a serious challenge? Or can the church continue to shield herself within the four walls, and focus on self-definition, preoccupied with fine delineations in our doctrinal formulation and preaching for self-affirmation? Or, with the challenge of Buddhism, we are awaken to the fact that we are being engaged in fierce combat for the Kingdom?
The Relevance of the Reformed Tradition—A Personal Note
For the last 30 years I have been trying to work out the socio-cultural implications of one of the central themes of the Reformed theology—the covenant. My doctoral thesis (later published as Being and Relation—A Theological Critique of Western Individualsim and Dualism) was on the covenantal perception of reality in contrast to metaphysical constructions centering around ontological concepts of physis and ousia. The spiritual predicament and cultural crisis in the West we are experiencing now has its ontological root in this metaphysical construction. Fifteen years ago I started to retrieve Calvin's social thoughts for the critique of market-driven capitalism. In several essays (in Chinese) I tried to explore the possibility of developing some form of covenantal capitalism. One of my students developed my idea and wrote an article called “Creative Destruction—the Covenantal Crisis of Market Capitalism,” which was published in Theology Today three years ago. I have also written two related essays in the last few years. “Covenantal Rationality and the Healing of Reason” (published as a chapter of a book called Reason and Reasons for Faith). In the essay I argued that reason in Western philosophic tradition is sick. It needs healing. Covenantal rationality is the answer. In another essay, “A Theological Critique of Liberal Humanist Concept of Freedom,” I critique Berlin's concept of liberty as well as Rawls' conviction of human autonomy, precisely with the covenantal concept of freedom—freedom that would truly liberate us, the freedom to love.
Why is a Chinese theologian so obsessed with developing a covenantal theology? It is my conviction that covenantal theology of the Reformed tradition is going to be a major contribution for the reconstruction of modern culture which is now in devastation. Such devastation began in the West, but is spreading rapidly to Asia. In the struggle for cultural reconstruction in many Asian countries, the Reformed tradition can be a guiding light. We can only do this when we are willing to take the cultural relevance of our Reformed theology seriously. That I think is one of the most fundamental issues in theological education in Asia today.
 
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