Abstract
The term ‘Asian American’ was first popularised by Yuji Ichioka in the 1960s in the midst of the civil rights movement. Later to become one of the preeminent scholars of Japanese American history, Ichioka used the term to unify all Americans of Asian descent in a new political movement. At the time, there were no more than 1 million Asian Americans (0.5 per cent of the American population); by the 2010 census, there were about 15 million (5 per cent of the American population). Asian Americans are the fastest growing minority population in the United States. With 42 per cent of whom consider themselves Christians, there is a general consensus that theological education has insufficiently addressed the contextual concerns and opportunities of this diverse demographic.
The volume under review offers a valuable resource for reading the Bible as an Asian American. It is divided into three major parts: Contexts, Methods, and Texts. The first part begins by highlighting the heterogeneity within Asian American identity, before offering six chapters which profile each of the six largest subgroups that make up 85 per cent of the Asian population in the United States: Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese. Together, these chapters offer a good foundation for this handbook and, in fact, a suitable primer for any study of Asian American Christianity. They are written by very capable scholars in theology, ethics, or the social sciences; ironically for this volume, none of the authors was trained primarily in biblical studies and very few of them reflect on the Asian American relationship with the Bible. The main exception is a chapter by sociologist Jung Ha Kim, who conducted focus groups and face-to-face interviews to assess how Korean Americans (both churched and religiously unaffiliated) read the Bible. Kim’s findings were surprising: ‘The notion of “the canon within the canon”, if such (conscious) decisions take place in Bible-reading Korean American lives, does not seem to be influenced by powerful collective experiences of (im)migration, diaspora, or Sa-I-Gu as an ethnic people’ (p. 88). This demonstrates how important it is that the lived experiences of Asian Americans—or any other group—must be considered in critical tension with theoretical concerns.
Part Two surveys various methodological considerations of Asian American biblical hermeneutics. Mary Foskett offers a valuable analysis of historical criticism, which in itself has been contextually shaped by eighteen-century Enlightenment thinking and developing and dominating biblical studies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After surveying Asian American reassessments of the method by Gale Yee, Kwok Pui-Lan, and Sze-kar Wan, Foskett concludes that, despite the limitations of historical criticism, it still has ongoing relevance but needs to be performed ‘in a new key’ which is mindful of the racialised political realities of Asian American identity. Bo Lim’s chapter on the theological interpretation of scripture is likewise useful, advocating for an ecclesio-centric study of the Bible that draws upon Asian American ethnographic and congregational studies. Other chapters consider the usefulness of social scientific, literary, postcolonial, liberationist, feminist, and queer critical methods. Overall, these chapters signal a desire to rely on the well-worn tools of the trade but also to be attentive to new methods which may better respond to Asian American realities.
The final part, consisting of more than half the chapters of the volume, offer an assortment of studies on select biblical texts from a variety of Asian American perspectives. The chapters are ordered corresponding to the pericopes examined in the Bible; but as a reference work, this reviewer wonders if the volume would have been better structured around the methods discussed in Part Two. Many of these chapters engage passages dealing with migration and exile, and often reflect on what Homi Bhabha describes as hybridity, liminality, and the third space. Some are pieces which are rigorously expositional and yet deeply personal, such as Chloe Sun’s reading of Job to balance her Chinese diasporic identity ‘in this world and God’s larger purposes for His creation’ (p. 303), or Raj Nadella’s reading of the great banquet of Luke 14:15–24 as a parable for Indian Americans to negotiate their marginality and privilege, and to seek a ‘new paradigm for engaging the political and socioeconomic forces . . . that perpetuate dehumanization of vast sections of people nationally but also globally’ (p. 370).
This handbook is a tremendous resource for anybody concerned with biblical hermeneutics—not just Asian Americans, as it is a testament to the weightiness of serious engagement with both the text and the context.