Abstract
In Beyond the Academy: Lived Asian Public Theology of Religions, David Moe sets out to encourage all of us, but especially Asian academics, to listen to, dialogue with, and recognize the lived practices of Asian grassroots Christian communities as the primary source for creating a relevant Asian public theology. This he accomplishes with great skill and significant depth of insight. He challenges the reader to “integrate and overcome the dichotomies between public and private, vertical reconciliation and horizontal reconciliation, social justice and social charity, personal sin and structural sin, the social ministry of Christ and the cross of Christ, spirituality and social engagement” (pp.150-151). Moe explores the question of, “What does it mean to be a faithful Christian in the context of political oppression and ethnic persecution” (p.5). The author’s ethnographic research and missiological reflection focus on Myanmar, where Christianity is a minority religion and Buddhist nationalism and ethnic conflict dominate the cultural and social context. Critiquing that “an Asian public theology of religions and liberation has been developed. . . for the grassroots Christians rather than with them” (p.7, emphasis in original), Moe sets out to correct this imbalance and does so admirably using an ethnographic methodology.
In five chapters, Moe begins by exploring the significant gap between the Asian academics who appear to write for each other and the actual experience of grassroots Christians in Asia. For example, he notes that the academic Asian theology of liberation is relevant for political liberation of the oppressed, but grassroots Christians focus more on personal sin and liberation from spiritual powers.
Chapter 3 gives the results of his ethnographic interviews to help the reader understand grassroots expressions and practices. His interview schedule is included as an appendix. Chapter 4 is devoted to exploring past and present Asian theologians, noting their strengths and weaknesses, beginning with Indian M. M. Thomas and Taiwanese Shoki Coe.
Moe’s book is very Asian in the sense that he eschews dichotomistic either/or thinking and looks for harmonizing, synthesizing, and balancing different perspectives, and for this reason, he is partial to the concept of shalom or holistic salvation. As a missiological anthropologist, I appreciated his ethnographic methodology and his “bottom-up” approach instead of the dominant “top-down” approach to an Asian public theology of religion.
The only weakness I found in this stellar study is that the text would have benefited from better copyediting to deal with the typos and the references that appeared in the text but were missing in the bibliography. Otherwise, I highly recommend this book for multiple uses and audiences.