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Timoteo D. Gener and Stephen T. Pardue, eds., Asian Christian Theology: Evangelical Perspectives, Carlisle, England: Langham Global Library; Manila, Philippines: Asia Theological Association, 2019. xvii + 354 pp., indexes, US$43.99 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1839731877; US$29.99 (paperback), ISBN 9781783686438; US$19.99 (ebook), ISBN 978-1783686728.
That most theologically inclined of all novelists, John Updike, once remarked that the task of theology is never finished. Each generation must reknit the discipline's basic fabric. For Updike, it is Kierkegaard and Barth who are of the greatest consequence when it comes to the refiguring of Christian theology.
As one digests the sixteen fascinating essays compiled as Asian Christian Theology: Evangelical Perspectives, one wonders at the influencers-whether there are any anchoring theologians to whom the essayists consistently turn. Yes, there are six references to Karl Barth in the Index of Names, but there are none to Paul Tillich. This is regrettable, as Tillich's famous aphorism about the interpenetration of religion and culture ("religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion") seems silently to march across each of these 354 pages. There is no mention of Tillich's 1962 Bampton Lectures in America, published a year later as Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions; there is nothing about Tillich's eight-week Japan sojourn in 1960.
Simon Chan, the theologian most prolifically listed in the Index of Names, contributes one of this collection's seminal essays: "Toward an Asian Evangelical Ecclesiology." As someone who has succeeded theologically in both East and West, Chan is uniquely positioned to offer harmonizing vistas as well as impossible chasms. For the most part, he chooses the former over the latter. If Asian Christianity is not yet able to cast off its "Evangelical" mantle, then at the very...