Story and Method: Suh Nam-Dong,C.S. Song and the Making of Story Theology in Asia

Theology as Storytelling – Suh Nam-Dong (1918-1984)

For Suh Nam-Dong storytelling is his method of choice for doing theology, in the particular context of Korea in the 1970s and 80s, a country then divided between a ruthless communist regime in the North, and a military development dictatorship closely aligned with the United States in the South. Many of the Korean Christians living in the South, including most Minjung Theologians, had fled the communists in the North after World War II. Park Chung-Hee’s dictatorship had become ideologically based on strict anti-communism. Different from Latin American Liberation Theology, Marxist analysis therefore did not seem to be an option for first generation Minjung Theologians. Yet Suh is using materialist language and insists on sociological analysis. I will inventory the different genres of stories Suh is using and analyze how he is appropriating them in detail.

Minjung Theology on Story

Storytelling proves to be a core concept throughout Minjung Theology. I am focusing here on the contributions in the special issue of the CTC Bulletin in memory of Suh Nam-Dong. ¹² Hyun Young-Hack describes theology as rumormongering. ¹³ That is, in situations of oppression like that of the military dictatorship in Korea, rumors, or stories told in secret, became the preferred medium of communication, a strategy that can easily lean on the Bible. Hyun explains:

Jesus was the worst and the most notorious rumormonger, telling the people that the Sabbath was made for human beings, not the other way around; that the Kingdom belongs to the poor rather than to the wealthy, and that he would rise up from the dead. He drank, ate, and chatted with the sinners and prostitutes, and became the source of insidious rumors. He himself was the rumor. He had to pay for it with his life (47).

New Testament scholar Ahn Byung-Mu accordingly identifies different social groups of transmitters of the Jesus-event. ¹⁴ The stories of Jesus life and death have been communicated as rumors by the Galilean minjung (ochlos) that followed Jesus, while the ancient church interpreted his death and resurrection as kerygma. According to Ahn:

Therefore, the story about Jesus must have been transmitted secretly by those who knew him intimately. This type of tradition sociologically speaking, is rumor. Rumor expresses the effort on the part of the minjung of Jesus to transmit the real facts of the Jesus-event; and it is also the medium through which the minjung try to understand their own position in society. The political authorities, however, regard such rumors as an expression of rebellion, and consider rumor-mongering as dangerous minjung behavior (30f.).

Kim Yong-Bock points to the collective aspect of the shared stories as the social biography of the minjung. ¹⁵ He argues:

At present, the only way to understand the social biography of the minjung is to approach it through dialogue and involvement with the minjung and through the minjung’s telling of their own story [. . .] Social biography encompasses the minjung’s subjective experiences as well as objective conditions and structures and societal power relations (70f.).

David Kwang-Sun Suh in the footsteps of Suh Nam-Dong finally regards theologians and Christian social activists as the priesthood of han who resolve the suffering of the minjung by creating space for their stories to be told. ¹⁶ In his interpretation:

We are called into the priesthood of han to articulate the cries and groanings of the people in the language of theology, sociology, statistics, socio-economic analysis, and in poetry, drama, songs, paintings and sculpture (62).

The writings collected in the CTC Bulletin in honor of Suh Nam-Dong are good examples for the confluence of two traditions envisioned by him. The various authors read the Jesus stories in the light of their Korean experience and the stories of minjung and vice versa. While the minjung stories and the biblical stories are initially read contrapuntally, ¹⁷ sometimes they get intertwined or a minjung story becomes transparent for the Jesus-event.

Suh Nam-Dong and C.S. Song in Dialogue

Choan-Seng (C.S.) Song (1929-2024) ¹⁸ is certainly the Asian theologian whose name became almost synonymous with Story Theology and who has also been engaged in dialogue with Minjung Theology and Suh Nam-Dong in particular. While Suh might be the more systematic thinker of the two, Song was more productive. In his long career Song published numerous books according to the same pattern. He usually starts with the telling of a story, mostly Asian or biblical but it could even be fairy tales like “Alice in Wonderland” or “Cinderella.” He explicitly refers to the hunger of his two daughters for stories, ¹⁹ who even illustrated one of his books with children’s sketches related to the stories. ²⁰ Associating freely with his experiences in the ecumenical movement and his theological knowledge, Song references biblical stories with a strong predilection for Jesus. In the later part of his career the biblical story tradition even began to dominate over the Asian stories.

There are few theoretical and methodological reflections detectable in Song’s writing. When it comes to terminology, he is also rather vague. Even though Taiwanese theologian Shoki Coe (1914-1988), ²¹ who, in a sense, holds the copyright on the term contextualization, is a sort of theological godfather to Song, the latter only mentions these discourses in passing. He develops his own private jargon when he speaks of “transposition” from “Israel to Asia.” ²² Song himself states:

theological method is something of an after-thought [. . .] For me theology is like storytelling. The story unfolds itself as you tell it. It moves in all directions. It may even stray into byways. But this is the excitement of telling stories. A story grows and expands. It leads to new terrains and depicts new scenes. If this is what our storytelling is like, how much more so is Godʼs storytelling! [. . .] the method of storytelling is in the telling of stories. ²³

At the same time Song, like Suh, is also interested in a “theology of history,” a predilection since his dissertation comparing Barth and Tillich’s view on revelation and man’s religion. ²⁴

Suh Nam-Dong has written an extensive review of C.S. Song’s early writings ²⁵ and a blurb for his Tell us our Names shortly before he passed away. His critique focuses on a divergent understanding of “revelation” that he attests to Song (12f.). Suh distinguishes between the “infra-structure” and “supra-structure” of revelation, a terminology with Marxist overtones (14). Theologically the relationship between revelation and history is at stake here, with the Exodus- and Jesus-event seen as socio-historical realities by Suh (infra-structure). Song on the other hand is more focused on the supra-structure of Zen-Buddhist enlightenment according to Suh. The latter is fairly conventional with his differentiation between general and particular revelation (12), taking a critical stance toward the inculturation project and Song’s entanglement with Confucianism and Buddhism while questioning the criteria (14f.). At the end of the review, he harshly challenges the Korean Methodist indigenization theology for not taking a stance on its socio-economic and political context.

The theology of indigenization in Korea has borne fruit and will no doubt have a new lease of life under the guise of ‘cultural Theology’. [. . .] However, a limited study that only operates at the level of the supra-structure of ideas without dealing with the material structure of historical revelation will be an illusion or a ghost. That kind of theology will eventually be taken over by the ideology of the rulers and prescribed as sleeping pills for the Minjung (15).

This divide within the Korean theological circles may have also influenced Suh’s perception of Song. The latter’s account of his participation in a 1984 conference on Minjung Theology in Seoul allows a fictitious dialogue between the two. With regard to the questions raised on the understanding of revelation he laconically qualifies this as a matter of emphasis rather than substance and problematizes the term “infra-structure” (17f.). Song interprets Minjung Theology as a theology of the cross in a very socio-historical way. His own “Tears of Lady Meng” is probably as close as one can get to Minjung Theology from another contextual background. ²⁶ Song is a strong advocate of a Taiwanese political theology and liberation theologies in general. At the same time, he deals not only with Confucianism and Buddhism, which Suh regards as “supra-structure,” but also with folk culture and folk religion like Shamanism. As a matter of fact, he refers several times to Korean minjung culture and religion in his writings. Suh Nam-Dong and C.S. Song are soul mates rather than antagonists, with Suh’s critique more an utterance of his own uneasiness with the inculturation project. Due to his strong materialist emphasis on socio-economic class analysis and historical dimensions he lacks a cultural hermeneutics. Yet his praise on the book cover for Song’s Tell us our Names is much more balanced and appreciative:

C.S. Song explores the folk tales of the world and depicts God’s answer to the thrust for the redemption of the people with ‘one stroke of an Asian brush.’ Here, the culture, religion, history and suffering of the Asian people is the medium of God’s redemptive revelation. Certainly, by this work he has contributed another ‘transposition’ of the biblical message to Asia, a monumental accomplishment in the formation of Asian theology. Reading this Theology of Folk Tales is exciting and illuminative. ²⁷

Reshaping Story Theology for the 21^st Century Through a Feminist Eye

In the second generation Kwok Pui-Lan (b. 1952) ²⁸ as an Asian woman theologian propagates a historical, dialogical, and postcolonial imagination. Applying the method of feminist New Testament scholar Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, Kwok reconstructs the stories of Chinese Bible women and demonstrates that there has been local female agency in spreading the Christian faith in China beyond the Western missionary project. In her work, Kwok skillfully combines storytelling with writing herstory.

The term dialogical imagination describes the process of creative hermeneutics in Asia. [. . .] It is highly imaginative, for it looks at both the Bible and our Asian reality anew, challenging the historical-critical method, presumed by many to be objective and neutral. ²⁹

‘Postcolonial imagination’ refers to a desire, a determination, and a process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome, which takes many forms and guises. ³⁰

Kwok regards the bible as a “talking book” that she wants to involve in a dialogue with the holy scriptures of other Asian religions and their hermeneutical traditions. An intervention that has to be taken into consideration is Gayatri Spivak’s famous article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” that raises the question of representation. ³¹ The contextual theologians introduced here try to create a space for the stories of the poor and oppressed to be heard. They rewrite herstory by pointing out their subjectivity and local agency.

Intercultural feminist theologian Joo Mee Hur, a representative of fourth wave feminism, has revisited Suh Nam-Dong and his story telling method in the 21^st century. ³² Methodologically she is reshaping Suh’s plea for a confluence of two traditions with the help of postcolonial critic Edward Said and his concept of contrapuntal reading (83-86). Korea, “The Hermit Nation” dwelled for a long time on the myth of ethnic homogeneity. Yet, within one generation every tenth marriage is multi-cultural, often also multi-religious. The so called “mail-order brides” are at the center of her attention. In a subtle manner Joo Mee Hur parallelizes the fate of Korean women in the 20^th century as “sex-slaves” of the Japanese Army and later “military brides” of the U.S. Army or “picture-brides” of overseas Koreans with the life-stories of today’s migrant brides developing a hermeneutics of empathy. She engages with literature and film as sources and connects these fictional narrations with sociological data. From the perspective of these secular stories, the author reads biblical stories like the Book of Ruth in a new light and develops her theological reflections at the intersection of gender, human rights, minority and immigration issues. By reading the novels I am Sorry, Mr. Ho (2009) by Lee Soon-Won and Honolulu (2010) by Alan Brennert contrapuntally, Joo Mee Hur is interweaving the experiences of Korean Women as picture brides in the Japanese colonial period with that of Vietnamese migrant brides in Korea and Korea’s involvement in the imperialistic Vietnamese war (83-105). She further rereads the Book of Ruth through the short film “A Perm” by Lee Ran-Hee (2009). The tears of the Vietnamese migrant bride Loan in the film create space for Ruth’s tears we do not hear anything about in the bible (Ch. 5, 107-128). Joo Mee Hur opens a space of empathy for Korean women and migrant women in Korea who intergenerationally share the same fate (89f.;104f.; 153 153). In doing so she denies the usual paradigm of victimization and opts for subjecthood. The author describes the situation of Koreans as being colonized and colonizer. Beyond post-colonial theory she opts for a decolonization of the minds (101; 178). Joo Mee Hur exemplarily follows the aesthetic turn and practices Intercultural Theology as a form of cultural studies. She proves to be courageous in doing all this in the context of a country that is still captured in the bubble of the Cold War, where any kind of critical theology is quickly put under the suspicion of communism or syncretism, while conservative Christians publicly protest against progressive governments and promote impeached presidents from the conservative camp. Yet her approach is emphatic and dialogical and opens doors and bridges to overcome also intergenerational frictions among Koreans by sharing stories of suffering and hope.

Korean Minjung Theology, the iconic reformed liberation theology of the global South, seemed to be a relic of the dark years of the military dictatorship. In spite of the interpretation of the 2014 Sewol Ferry incident, when more than two-hundred school children, coming from mainly poor family backgrounds, drowned in the sea, as a minjung event, Minjung Theology did not really gain new momentum. ³³ While first generation Minjung Theology with its slogan “people as the subjects of history,” content-wise, still belonged to the project of modernity, its methodology already shifted into the direction of “The Postmodern Condition.” ³⁴ The famous title of Jean Francois Lyotard’s (1924-1998) report to the Canadian government is of interest here mainly because of the language game he created. Lyotard postulates the end of modernity’s metanarratives, such as Enlightenment and Marxism, and propagates the power of local narratives instead. Storytelling has long proven a valid method of doing theology in Asia and beyond; by living in and by their stories, human beings constitute their identity. ³⁵ A good story is already theology in itself rather than the raw material of theology. ³⁶ Marshall McLuhan’s (1911 - 1980) famous catchphrase “The medium is the message” first of all points to form rather than content. Yet, stories can be interpreted theologically by identifying the plot and points of comparison as well as the generative themes they contain. In contextual theology the issue at stake is pointing out the link between stories of human life experience and biblical stories. Story here at the same time goes with social analysis and cultural hermeneutics. The stories told constitute a form of social biography: in her reappropriation of Suh’s methodology with the help of novels and film regarding migration and women issues in the Korean context, ³⁷ Joo Mee Hur not only has overcome the gender bias of Minjung Theology but also has breathed new life into it by demonstrating that stories remain subversive to dominant discourses and metanarratives.