Two Principles Toward Ecumenical Liturgy

In this essay, I want to discuss two essential principles of Christian ecumenical liturgy, especially for the Asian American church: a) the principle of other-wise liturgy and b) the principle of culturally-conscious worship.1 These two principles will escort the way we approach different Christian traditions of worship and eventually the way we design and practice ecumenical worship. I owe much to works of John McClure and Kathy Back in figuring out and applying these two principles

Mysterium Tremendum Restored in the Life of the Preacher

What is your most unforgettable preaching experience? Did it happen just last week or last year? Or did it happen five or ten years ago? For me it happened immediately after my graduation from my M.Div. program. I had arrived in New Haven from Atlanta after a twenty-hour drive to attend Yale Divinity School. I am rather a slow driver, and it had taken me almost three days and about ten fast food hamburgers to get to New Haven. That very afternoon, I got a phone call from the deacon of a local Korean American Methodist church. He said that the senior pastor was on vacation, the usual guest preacher was out of town, and they urgently needed a preacher for the Wednesday night worship service. Would I come? There’d be only a few people there for worship, and all I needed to do was deliver a brief message and join them in fellowship

TV Review on ABC\u27s Fresh Off the Boat

For its first season, ABC\u27s Fresh Off the Boat, which has an Asian American family at the center of the story, made a lot of buzzes around pop cultural critics, both from professional pundits (e.g., a New York Times critic) and amateurs (e.g., my wife). Some voices are positive about the show while others are not. Yet still, the second season is highly likely to come back this fall and more talks are expected over the show, again from both sides. Why? Why should you like it, or why not? What brings the show to the second season? Any theological importance of the show? This review provides a commentary on that four-fold questioning

Book Review on From a Liminal Pace: An Asian American Theology

Sang Hyun Lee. From a Liminal Pace: An Asian American Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010. 200 pages. $19.89. In his From a Liminal Place: An Asian American Theology, Sang Hyun Lee, a Korean American theologian, presents his practical theological analysis of the Asian American context, especially its bicultural nature. Two concepts are significant in his wring; liminality and marginality. Based on symbolic anthropologist Victor Turner’s positive conception of liminality, Lee argues that being situated in two different cultures is a profound and complex experience. In other words, it would naturally create a kind of in-between situation for life, or what may be called cultural limbo. This in-between situation then pushes someone who is in the midst of it to a place of liminality where new or creative possibilities of life are born. Lee believes in particular that this experience of cultural liminality in the Asian American context can produce three invaluable benefits: 1) openness to the new or hidden potentials of society, 2) the emergence of communitas, and 3) a creative space for prophetic knowledge and subversive action. Lee realizes that since Asian American Christians live in this unstructured, open-ended liminal space, they have a certain potential to come up with very new spiritual ideas, social structures, and cultural expressions that can contribute to the breadth, depth, and width of the existing society’s cultural life. Besides, these new hybrid Asian American Christians can help the emergence of communitas where people from all racial and ethnic groups would, together, create a community of harmony, justice, and peace. Last, but not least, thanks to the freedom from and critical response to the existing social structure, the Asian American Christians living through liminality could possibly serve as the prophetic agents of God vis-à-vis the oft-unjust dominant culture

Homiletical Aesthetics: A Paradigmatic Proposal for a Holistic Experience of Preaching

The article is a proposal for a paradigmatic change in homiletical pedagogy. In North America today, most homiletical training at the seminary or divinity school is either text-driven or know-how-driven (or, at times, topic-driven). Thus, the homiletical training focuses on (1) how to exposit a text for a key topic, (2) how to structure a sermon, (3) how to deliver a message, and (4) how to analyze the text-driven sermon. While admitting the usefulness of this current textual or know-how pedagogy, the article suggests the addition of a holistic-aesthetic component of preaching, which I will later call numen-participatory education or a numinous pedagogy of preaching. This proposed pedagogical paradigm has two great advantages that the ecclesial situation today demands: (1) the spiritual formation of the preacher and (2) the holistic-aesthetic and multisensory exposition and experience of the text both by the preacher and the audience

Human Rights and the Bible

Do contemporary Jews see the Bible as a source for a modern language of human rights? At first glance, there are overwhelming differences between the thought world of the Bible and that of modern human rights. The HB/OT is essentially theocentric, whereas the discourse of human rights is anthropocentric. The very word “rights,” as it is used today, does not appear in the HB/OT. The nearest equivalent is perhaps the biblical word mitswah, a concept whose closest equivalent among modern secular concepts would be “obligation.

A Three-fold (Homiletic) Lesson from Dr. King’s Pastoral and Prophetic Preaching on Violence

In 1992 when Walter Wink stated in his Engaging the Powers, “Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world,” he was more than right.1 Nowadays, we experience violence everywhere we breathe, walk, and look, even though not every violent case is visible or directly felt. In his statement, Wink was referring specifically to two aspects of violence that make us particularly uncomfortable or sad living in the twenty-first-century North American context. He made the statement in 1992, twenty-four years after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. A great deal had changed over those two decades, yet violence itself had not changed all that much! Violence still remains violence. Though when Wink discusses the violent ethos of the modern world, he does not have the Civil Rights Movement foremost in mind (yet still, he mentions King several times in his writing), his critical observation that our time and place is more permeated with violence is valid and helpful. The second thing that makes us sad is that Wink observes that human violence has become a more acceptable spirituality of the modern world. That is, with violence being a real part of our souls and lives, now we not only accept violence as a natural part of our life, but also in many cases approve the use of violence. Of course, in the twentieth century, including King’s era, violence in various forms was sanctioned in many ways, but now we see this tendency more elevated in everyday life. Indeed, the most dreadful thing about violence is that once we start accepting and approving violence as a natural or inevitable part of our lives, there is no remedy for violence except for more violent actions against another violence. Given the circumstance, we (must) ask. In a culture with such a violence-saturated ethos, where do we find hope and what message should be proclaimed? Specifically, what hope or message do we preachers have and will proclaim? When these urgent questions come to visit our troubled hearts, gratefully we may find King’s homiletic practice or his pastoral and prophetic message still applicable today for many a great benefit. I see at least three benefits or lessons from King that we can adopt in formulating the message of hope, justice, and reconciliation for our context

Hagiography

Jon Boorstin proposes three purposes for film production – voyeuristic, vicarious, and visceral (Boorstin). Scrutinized in light of Boorstin’s proposal, hagiographical films are most likely to have three purposes imbedded in three generic types: investigation, verification, and veneration. In most cases, hagiographical films make biblical references, either textually or visually, in order to maximize each type’s purpose

King, Kingship

Biblical films make use of several different images and related perceptions of kingship that are found throughout both Testaments: 1) king as absolute tyrant, 2) king as disapproved servant of God, 3) king as ideal head of the nation, 4) king as ironically subversive clown, and 5) God (or Christ) as ultimate king of kings in the universe. Films have been quick to adopt and depict these five images following biblical accounts and through creative imagination. First and foremost, the concept of a king as an absolute tyrant is the earliest overture image of king in the OT/HB, particularly in Exodus. The Pharaoh as king of Egypt, self-declared god-king, appears as the ruthless oppressor of Israelites and stiff-necked opponent of YHWH God (Exod 1–14). When his kingship is threatened by the high birth rate among enslaved Israelites, the Pharaoh is quick to kill all newborn boys among them. The Ten Commandments (dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1956, US) and Exodus: Gods and Kings (dir. Ridley Scott, 2014, US) adroitly project this dual conception of king as violent tyrant and opponent of God onto their depictions of the Pharaoh. In the latter, the Pharaoh’s arrogance culminates when pitted against Moses, who represents God. He declares, “I’m a god, I’m a god!” This image of human kings as absolute tyrants sets up the ultimate negative background against which the Bible’s other images of kingship are better understood

Out of Silence: Emerging Themes in Asian American Churches (Book Review)

Fumitaka Matsuoka. Out of Silence: Emerging Themes in Asian American Churches. Wipf & Stock Pub., 2009. 178 pages. $20.00. The issue of cultural marginalization and forced retreat is one of the key focal points in Fumitaka Matsuoka’s Out of Silence: Emerging Themes in Asian American Churches. In that double cultural jeopardy, he points out, the Asian American church has served two functions for the people who are part of it. First, the church has been the reservoir of the original Asian cultural and linguistic heritage. In these churches the people celebrate their own culture and practice their own language that, outside of the church, cannot be celebrated or practiced properly. Second, the church has helped the people’s cultural integration into the American society and local community. The church not only teaches American culture and language, but also provides any physical (e.g., providing a ride to the remote hospital), economic (e.g., monetary transactions among people), or informative (e.g., information about cheap rental property) help. Fumitaka finds these two social functions very helpful and necessary, yet not enough. For him, these functions or roles are too passive to make real social or spiritual changes in or out of the Asian American church, in the light of the larger American society. Because of their passive retreat, the Asian American Christians and Asian Americans in general have been silent or silenced, in the broader culture. Fumitaka encourages the church to get out of its own ethnic and cultural enclave in order to 1) demonstrate its legitimate social place in the wider dominant culture and 2) more importantly, envision and strive to achieve a new American social reality of racial reconciliation, political equality, and socio-economic justice based on the lessons of Christian scripture or the message of Jesus Christ. Fumitaka contends that Asian Americans can envision this new kind of transformed American reality because they are now living in the creative space of the “state of liminality.” (61) That is, although Asian Americans seem to live in a fixed reality defined by the powerful dominant culture, they are wide open to new ideas. Especially when based on the vision of the Kingdom of God, they could possibly serve as the transforming agents of God in American society. Fumitaka is not naively optimistic in believing that Asian Americans are the only legitimate agents of this social transformation or the only ones fully capable of it. Rather, his optimism lies in the power and authority of the Christian faith in Jesus incarnate, who once served and still serves his people in concrete human history as a realistic hope for the broken world