REDEMPTION IN ASIAN AMERICAN CONTEXT
According to Paul, “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). Humanity’s resistance to God’s will brought about a brokenness in their relationship with God. God takes the initiative in Christ to mend this brokenness. The articulation of how this reconciliation happens is the Christian doctrine of atonement.
The church’s doctrines of atonement have pointed especially to Jesus’ death on the cross as the event of atonement. In recent years, however, theologians have begun to see Jesus’ entire ministry—including, of course, his death on the cross and the resurrection—as God’s work of reconciliation with the fallen creation. I will quickly review the traditional doctrines and point out the weaknesses of each doctrine as well as its meaningfulness, especially in the Asian American context. I will then proceed to outline my own understanding of the meaning of atonement within the context of the theological perspective thus far articulated.
The first well-known traditional atonement doctrine is the Christus Victor theory, which explains Jesus’ redemptive work on the cross as a cosmic battle (Col. 2:15) between God and the forces of evil. Shrouded in human flesh, the Son of God fools the evil forces into thinking he is an easy prey. Christ on the cross lets the “fish” swallow him all the way so that the victory of the resurrection would be complete. Admittedly, there are numerous problems with this theory: first, the fishing imagery, when taken literally, reduces Jesus to mere prey. Second, by positing coeval forces of opposition over against God, the cosmic-battle idea engenders dualistic implications. Finally, the whole redemptive drama takes places in abstraction from fallen humanity itself—it speaks of a drama in which humans have no role whatsoever.1
However, the idea of Christ’s complete victory over the evil forces, principalities, and powers that keep human beings in bondage to sin and marginalization is important and meaningful for those who live at the margins of society. As discussed earlier, racism is an example of cultural and social forces greater than the individuals who practice it. In their resistance to racism and struggle for justice, marginalized people can easily fall into feeling that their enemy is insurmountable and that their struggle is futile. The conviction that in Jesus Christ God has decisively defeated the evil forces and that their complete collapse will eventually follow gives marginalized people a fundamental hope without which they cannot continue to struggle against injustice.
Another influential theory of the atonement is the so-called Anselmian satisfaction theory. Based on the scriptural references to Christ’s “vicarious suffering,” this theory is typically articulated within the framework of the medieval system of law, offense, and reparations. Human beings’ disobedience to God dishonors God, and either satisfaction must be given or punishment must follow. Since finite humanity cannot make up for the infinite dishonor done to God, the Son of God himself had to take humanity’s place as a substitute, and Jesus suffers the punishment due to sinful humanity. In this way, the Lawgiver is satisfied and God’s mercy can now be shown to sinners.
The greatest problem with this theory, as has often been pointed out, is that it seems to set up a conflict within God between divine mercy and justice.2 Grace appears to be conditional. As Daniel Migliore has noted, this theory “draws upon the juridical metaphors of the New Testament in a way that brings mercy and justice into collision.” Karl Barth moves beyond Anselm and interprets “the atoning work of Christ as motivated solely by the holy love of God.” In this way, the Anselmian emphasis upon punishment satisfying the demand of justice quid pro quo recedes into the background.3
The third influential theory of atonement is the moral example or the moral influence theory, first formulated by Abelard, a contemporary of Anselm. This theory is usually understood as one in which the exemplary power of God’s love in Jesus Christ is intended to generate a response from fallen humanity that changes their lives. Abelard, in some passages of his writings, goes beyond the idea of the example of God’s love and refers to God’s love in Christ as a divine benefit and love that generates love in the hearts of sinful humanity. The usual criticism of this theory is that it underestimates the seriousness of the fallen condition by assuming that Jesus’ example alone can liberate humanity from its bondage to sin. The theory gains strength, however, if Jesus’ exemplary life is conceived of as possessing a creative power that brings about a real change in the human condition.4 The strength of the moral influence theory, understood in this sense, has the advantage of envisaging redemption as an event that deeply involves the inner subjects of those who are being redeemed.
The Christian church has not designated any of the above theories as the orthodox doctrine of atonement. In fact, some truth about God’s reconciling work in Christ may be found in each of the theories we mentioned above. The variety of understandings of atonement in the history of the church gives us the freedom to articulate our own understanding of atonement based upon the Scriptures and Asian Americans’ experiences of being reconciled to God in Christ.
God’s act of bringing sinful human beings back into a right relationship with God occurs in the infinite space of Christ’s liminality in which sinners experience the redeeming communion with God in Jesus and the beginning of a new life. The Christ whom sinners encounter in that space is Jesus who loved people to the point of his death on the cross. Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection are pivotal points in Jesus’ life and ministry, but the Jesus that sinners encounter is Jesus in his entire earthly ministry: the way he loved people, the way he suffered, and all that he taught. The point is that what saves the sinner is the gracious God’s unconditional love as embodied in Jesus in the entirety of his life and ministry. Jesus embodied God’s unconditional love of people “to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8).
Between the believers and Christ in the infinite space of liminality of Jesus, the redeeming communitas emerges in the power of the Holy Spirit. In this redeeming communitas, believers experience the unconditional acceptance by God and a transformation for a new life. In that communion, believers become united with Jesus and with all others who are already united with him.
Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross has a particular significance in God’s redemptive work in Jesus in that his suffering and death make the way he lived all his life authentic and life-changing. But it is not Jesus’ suffering on the cross as such or his death on the cross as such that is redemptive and reconciling. As Wonhee Anne Joh puts it, “What is significant about the cross, then, is not that Jesus died on it but that because of his living out of jeung [love], he ended up de facto on the cross.”5
God’s forgiveness of sinners was not granted quid pro quo in return for Jesus’ death on the cross. If we say that it was Jesus’ death as such that made God’s forgiveness possible, we would be promoting violence and punishment and making God’s grace conditional. What saves sinners is God’s sovereign grace.
Jesus’ death on the cross, however, has a particular significance. Jesus’ suffering to the point of death makes it a testimony to the costly and serious nature of God’s love and forgiveness, and enables the communication of God’s love to forgiven sinners. Daniel Day Williams argues in his book The Nature and Forms of Love that the love of a lover which does not involve the lover’s self-giving and suffering cannot touch the heart of the one who is loved.6 Only a costly act of forgiveness can heal the guilty. The fact that Jesus’ love of the people was “to the point of death” authenticates that love. Jesus’ suffering and death do not pay for God’s forgiveness of the sinner, but make that forgiveness authentic and effectual.
Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). To lay down one’s life because of love demonstrates that such love is “greater” than any other kind of love. God has shown God’s love for and forgiveness of sinful humanity to the utmost point possible. So Paul’s statement that “we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son” (Rom. 5:10) is to be understood in light of his other statement two verses before that “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (v. 8). So God’s work of reconciling fallen humanity to Godself and to each other consists in God’s costly embrace of humanity with God’s unconditional love and forgiveness and thereby making a new life possible for forgiven sinners.
In addition to authenticating God’s love, there is yet another way in which Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross are significant for the redemption of fallen humanity. Jesus stands in the place of human beings to take upon himself the consequences of God’s wrath toward the sin of humanity. God cannot condone or overlook the sinfulness of human beings although God loves them. God’s wrath toward human sinfulness must be expressed. But human beings cannot bear the brunt of God’s anger and still live. So Jesus Christ puts himself in the place of human beings and accepts God’s punishment on behalf of fallen humanity. It is important to note here that Jesus does not take God’s punishment in order to make quid pro quo God’s expression of God’s mercifulness possible. Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross does not purchase human redemption. Rather, the cross is the expression of God’s love of sinful humanity. Out of God’s mercifulness toward humanity, God took the punishment Godself. So “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3). “But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities … and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:5, 6).
In the context of marginalized Asian Americans, we need to interpret God’s costly love in Christ also as an act of healing the wounds. Andrew Sung Park maintains that traditional Western theology has defined redemption primarily as the forgiveness of sins and has neglected the need for healing the oppressed peoples. Park goes further and asserts that “sin is of oppressors; han [‘the collapsed anguish of the heart’ due to unjust oppression] is of the oppressed.”7
I may not agree with Park on his sharp distinction between the oppressors (sinners) and the oppressed as victims. However, his assertion that Asian American theology must consider healing the wounds as an essential dimension of God’s redemptive work is an important contribution. Learning from Park, then, we must emphasize that God’s redemptive work through the communitas of Jesus is not only an experience of forgiveness and acceptance by God’s grace but also an experience of healing. Marginalized Asian Americans need the healing of their demoralized selves so that with renewed self-esteem and courage they may be empowered to exercise the creative potentials of their liminality which have been suppressed and frustrated.
Wendy Farley, in her Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy, offers a helpful discussion of the healing power of divine compassion. “Compassion is love as it encounters suffering,” says Farley.8 She also explains that because compassion is love, it is able to see through the wounds of the sufferer and recognize the goodness of the sufferer’s personhood. In this way, compassion communicates “respect” to the sufferer and considers what has happened to the sufferer as “alien” to the sufferer’s personhood.
Farley goes on to explain the healing work of compassion:
[Compassion] begins where the sufferer is, in the grief, the shame, the hopelessness. It sees the despair as the most real thing. Compassion is with the sufferer, turned toward or submerged in her experience, seeing it with her eyes. The communion with the sufferer in her pain, as she experiences it, is the presence of love that is a balm to the wounded spirit. This relationship of shared, sympathetic suffering mediates consolation and respect that empower the sufferer to bear the pain, to resist the humiliation, and to overcome the guilt.9
Compassion leads to a “communion with the sufferer in pain.” Such a caring communion does not merely “comfort” the sufferer but also “empowers” the spirit of the wounded. “Compassion labors to penetrate the darkness of pain and mediate to the sufferer the taste of love and the power of courage.”10 Compassion does something to the basic orientation of the wounded self and enables him or her to be and to act in a new way.
Rita Nakashima Brock interprets God’s power of healing as the power that works through the “erotic power” of the heart. And the “erotic power” of the heart,” according to Brock, is “the power of our primal interrelatedness.” For Brock, it is “the divine erotic power [that] liberates, heals, and makes whole through our willingness to participate in mutuality.”11 God’s power of love, according to Brock, heals the “brokenheartedness” of oppressed people through the concrete and actual “connectedness” that the community of Christ makes possible. In other words, the communitas of Jesus is the redemptive and healing experience only as a person participates in that communitas as a concrete connectednessness. I shall return to this point below.
Instructive also for our own understanding of the healing is Wonhee Anne Joh’s interpretation of God’s love as jeung, a concept she appropriates from Korean culture and life. Jeung, she says, means love, but is more “expansive and generous than love.”12 Between jeung and communitas, there seems to be a great deal of continuity, although the notion of communitas can also be enriched by Joh’s interpretation of jeung. Jeung, says Joh, “encompasses but is not limited to the notions of compassion, affection, solidarity, vulnerability, and forgiveness.” Jeung knows no boundaries or borders. Jeung even sees beyond the dichotomy set up between the oppressors and the oppressed. Jeung can even “recognize the brokenness and pain of the oppressors because of the fear that drives them to commit violence and mete out death toward others.”13 Joh also asserts that “jeung is the divine presence that nudges us not only to perceive but also accept the often negativized and shadowed parts of ourselves and thus ultimately to awaken to and practice the way of living in the fullness of jeung.”14 Like jeung, the experience of the communitas of Christ needs to be understood as an experience in which the oppressor–the oppressed dichotomy is transcended.
The way in which Joh relates jeung to liminality is also instructive. According to Joh, jeung “resides in” and “comes forth” within the “interstitial spaces,” “within the gaps and fissures,” and the “in-between spaces.” Jeung arises, in other words, in liminal spaces. But, for Joh, jeung also “creates” and “opens up” liminal spaces.15 Jeung and liminal spaces are in a two-way relationship. Communitas, in my view, is an egalitarian relationality that challenges the way societies are usually organized. One can easily see how a person with an experience of communitas could return to the usual social structure and “open up” gaps or liminal spaces in the usual ways of people’s thinking. Healing brings “wholeness” both in the sense of empowerment and also in the sense of becoming open to new ideas and realities.
So healing is an essential aspect of redemption and is not merely a symptomatic relief of the hurt of marginalized persons. Healing in Asian American theology has to do with the transformation in the way human beings are and act. Healing means to become “healers,” to have one’s “image of God” restored (Park), to become a “whole and compassionate being” (Brock), and to be a self without excluding others (even the oppressors) (Joh).16 Healing, in short, is an essential aspect of becoming a “new creation,” and, therefore, an essential aspect of the redemption of Asian Americans as a marginalized people.
BELIEVERS’ RESPONSE TO AND PARTICIPATION IN ATONEMENT
Thus far in this chapter, I have outlined an understanding of redemption as the experience of God’s unconditional love in and through a participation in the redeeming communitas that emerges in and through the liminal space of Jesus. In this experience, sinners experience forgiveness and are empowered to live a new life exercising the creative potentials of liminality in spite of the reality of continuing marginalization. Jesus’ suffering in his life, ministry, and on the cross is the consequence of Jesus’ risk taking and boundary crossing in his steadfast embodiment of God’s love of people. Jesus’ suffering and death make God’s love in Jesus authentic and effectual. Finally, I have argued that in the context of marginalized people, such as Asian Americans, healing is an essential aspect of being redeemed.
It must now be stressed that atonement, as I am articulating it here, is a process in which the human response is an essential part. The initiative in atonement is God’s grace. There is absolutely nothing that human beings can do to make atonement possible. And yet atonement involves human participation. Atonement is not something that happens apart from human beings. Atonement is actualized in and through communion between Christ and sinners. Human beings must enter into the liminal space of Jesus and be with him if there is going to be any redeeming communion between them.
Before a person enters Jesus’ liminal space to unite with him, that person must first have a perception of Jesus in all of his concreteness: his deeds, his words, his way with other persons, his death, and his resurrection. This perception, of course, is not an impersonal and detached knowledge but a knowing in which one is attracted, grasped, and moved by the figure of Jesus. One must then move into Jesus’ liminal space and meet him in that space. Such an act of “closing with” Christ in his liminal space, to borrow an expression from Jonathan Edwards, can happen as one participates in the liminality of worship or the Lord’s Supper in which Christ is the center of attention.17 One could also unite with Christ in an ordinary experience of liminality if the image of Christ is the center of attention. Liminality is the space in which one is freed from social and cultural structure and status. Being in a liminal space today can overlap and coalesce with the experience of being in Jesus’ space of infinite liminality. Or, to put it differently, our concrete experience of liminal space with Christ as the center of attention mediates for us now (connects us to) the liminal space that Jesus entered two thousand years ago.
In that liminal space of Jesus, a redeeming communitas can occur between God in Jesus and us, fallen but believing human beings. What is generated in that liminal space, in the power of the Holy Spirit working in believing human beings and through the dynamics of liminal creativity, is an experience of being unconditionally accepted and forgiven by God in Christ, who is the author of our life and the entire system of being and in whose hands ultimately lies the meaning of life itself. Communitas functions as that in and through which an unbelievable communion with the forgiving and loving God comes alive in and for the believing sinner.
The faith response of the believer, then, is one action of the believing sinner but has two moments: (1) entering into Christ’s liminal space and (2) embracing or accepting God’s love in Christ in the experience of Jesus’ communitas. Jonathan Edwards also speaks of the two “moments” in the one response of faith. In a notebook on “Faith,” Edwards tries out many definitions of faith. One of those definitions reads: “Faith consists in two things, viz. in being persuaded of and embracing the promises (Heb. 11:13).”18 If one were not aware of, and, to some extent, attracted by the character and life of Jesus, that person would not take the step of entering Jesus’ liminal space. At the same time, it is in communitas with Jesus that a person experiences fully the unconditional acceptance of God in Jesus and accepts and embraces God’s acceptance. Perhaps the two aspects of faith we are speaking about here are in a continuum. The first act of entering Jesus’ luminal space is the initial or preliminary act of moving toward Christ with a sense of the attractiveness of Christ and his life. And the second phase is the proper and fuller experience of being loved by God and one’s accepting response to that love. Perhaps, just as Edwards, we cannot arrive at a completely satisfactory analysis of the human response called “faith,” which is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
The implication of this is the truth that, for those human beings who live today and did not have a direct encounter with Jesus, the redemptive experience of Jesus in his liminal space has to be mediated. There are two related but distinguishable mediations here. First, the figure of Jesus the Galilean has to be communicated to persons who live two thousand years after the time of Jesus. The Word has to be meditated, in other words. The gospel of Jesus to which the Scriptures bear witness has to be communicated. The church’s task, therefore, is to proclaim the good news embodied in Jesus’ life both in word and in deed. Sermons, worship, educational programs, and other appropriate vehicles must communicate to people today what Jesus was all about.
But the proclamation by itself would not be sufficient. Many people know a great deal about who Jesus was and what he did, but are not transformed by it. This is the point where the Holy Spirit’s work of inspiring the hearer of Jesus’ gospel is crucial. The Holy Spirit works in and through the natural functions of the human mind, affections, and the imagination and leads a person to see God’s presence in who Jesus was and what Jesus did. This perception of God in Jesus is not something human beings can bring about or acquire through human means. The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, does not work in the darkness. The Holy Spirit works with the Word that has been proclaimed to people today. The Word and the Spirit can never be separated. And the Word and Spirit work in and through the natural functions of human beings.
I said above that what mediates Jesus Christ to people today is the church’s proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ in word and deed. Persons living today do not have a concrete encounter of Jesus in a direct fashion. And without a concrete experience of the unconditional love embodied in Jesus, persons today would only have an abstract idea about that love. When someone says, “Jesus loves you and so do we,” Jesus’ love is abstract and does not really touch the heart and mind of someone who is alive today. This is the reason why members of the church must exemplify Jesus’ kind of love to other persons. When a church member does embody an unconditional love to someone, that love is concrete and will touch someone’s heart. Such a human embodiment of unconditional love will make Christ’s own love come alive to the beloved person. The mediating Word, therefore, is both in word and in deed. The Holy Spirit, working in and through the natural functions of a human being, enables him or her to experience Christ’s unconditional love. The Holy Spirit also enables the person to see God’s unconditional love and forgiveness in Christ. But the Holy Spirit does this in conjunction with the Christ who has been made concrete today by someone who embodies such love to another person.
Søren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth-century philosopher-theologian, insisted that those persons who were contemporaries of Jesus did not have any advantage over those living today.19 His point was that whether one actually encountered Jesus in person or hears about him today, it would require the same inspiration of the Holy Spirit if he or she is going to make a faith response to God in Jesus. Kierkegaard was emphasizing the all-important response of faith by the believer and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in that faith. In this emphasis upon the subjective response to Christ, Kierkegaard downplayed the role of the concrete history of Jesus that elicits the faith response. Thus, the concrete details of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection would have to be in the front of our minds if the Holy Spirit is going to work through a person and bring about that person’s faith response and his or her experience of redeeming communitas with Jesus.
JUSTIFICATION OF THE MARGINALIZED
The purpose of God’s redemptive work in Jesus Christ is the transformation of the fallen world into a new creation. The first moment in sinful humanity’s new existence in Christ is the justification by grace through faith. The justification of “the ungodly” is completely an unmerited act of God’s grace and means the forgiveness of sinners and the restoration of their relationship with God.
The Pauline doctrine that sinners are accepted as righteous through the imputation of Christ’s righteousness and not by the sinners’ adherence to the law constitutes a fundamental rejection of human achievement as the ground of salvation. The doctrine of justification therefore relativizes all finite principles as the ultimate source of the worth of human persons before God. Neither condemnation by the law nor disparagement by any finite power can be the cause of a person’s ultimate loss of his/her worth as a person. As Paul declares, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39).
Justification by God’s grace gives a person an identity and a sense of dignity that cannot be shaken and is, therefore, good news for Asian Americans. The doctrine of justification says that Asian Americans are God’s children even when they are invisible to white American society. Justification doctrine says God accepts Asian Americans when white Americans judge them as “not American enough,” and Asians in Asia judge them “not Asian enough.” Justification says that Asian Americans belong to God and to the family of God when they feel as if they do not belong either to America or to Asia.
In the marginalized Asian Americans’ context, justification means acceptance, belonging, recognition, and inclusion. The author of 1 Peter expresses well the meaning of justification for people who are treated as strangers by the society in which they live. Writing to Christian Jews living in Asia Minor, the epistle’s author says, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.… Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Pet. 2:9–10).
The objective reality of God’s act of justifying the sinner through God’s grace, however, becomes a personal reality only through the sinner’s act of faith. If the sinner’s life as a “new creation” is going to be realized, the sinner’s act of faith must be followed up by the process of sanctification. In other words, justification and sanctification are inseparable. The salvation of the sinner does not mean only being forgiven; it is also a real change in the sinner’s life.
Both justification of sinners without any merit of their own and a real change in their actual lives have the same foundation: namely communion with the loving God in Christ. There can be no justification without sanctification and there can be no sanctification without justification. The one-sided emphasis upon justification as forgiveness and imputed righteousness leads to a neglect of the real change in the sinner’s life. An emphasis on forgiveness without equal attention to sanctification leads to an individualization of salvation and to an apolitical piety. A marginalized person can revel in the euphoria of his or her personal salvation and totally neglect his or her responsibilities for other persons and the world. Jesus did not just want to forgive people; he also wanted to restore the marginalized people’s physical health, social well-being, and political justice. Jesus healed the sick and in doing so restored their standing in the community. Jesus stood up against the Roman Empire and the Jerusalem Temple, both of which oppressed people. For marginalized people such as Asian Americans their justification before God, therefore, has to be accompanied by a new direction in all aspects of their lives.
Andrew Sung Park, as noted above, has sharply challenged the traditional formulation of the doctrine of justification by faith. Park insists that the needs of the oppressors (the sinners) and the oppressed (the “sinned against”) are different. Sinners need mercy and forgiveness, while the sinned against need justice and vindication. Park refers to Old Testament writings such as Habakkuk where faith means to “wait for God’s judgment upon the wicked.” Park writes, “Trusting in the faithfulness of God for the restoration of justice is the gist of Habakkuk’s faith.… Since the church has treated the faith of the sinners, it needs to balance the view by lifting up the faith of the sinned against in the Bible.”20 For Park the faith of the oppressors (sinners) is in justification and forgiveness, while the faith of the sinned against is a faith in God’s vindication of the oppressed through the establishment of justice. Justice, according to Park, will lead to the healing of the wounds of the sinned against.
Park’s point that justification for the oppressed must include the establishment of justice and the healing of their wounds is an important contribution to Asian American theology. But one wonders whether Park’s sharp separation between justification for sinners and justice for the sinned against is really necessary. For one thing, all have sinned, both the oppressors and the oppressed (Rom. 3:22). Sin includes more than oppression. Sin is also self-centeredness, pride, and idolatry. Justification in the sense of God’s acceptance of sinners solely by God’s grace is for both the oppressors and the oppressed.
Second, justification is unthinkable without the establishment of justice and the healing of the wounded. The principle of the inseparability of justification from sanctification would seem to include Park’s legitimate concern that redemption for the oppressed is meaningless without the establishment of justice and the healing of the wounds.
Andrew Park’s emphasis that justification for the oppressed must mean justice and healing is a valuable reminder that the justification-by-grace-alone doctrine has sometimes been abused and misunderstood in such a way that the practice of justice is ignored. As I mentioned above, however, justification doctrine has sometimes been abused as the basis of a do-nothing complacency and also of a one-sidedly individualistic faith.
The justification doctrine, rightly understood, as Harold Wells explains, has “the power to undermine the moral smugness and superiority that feed so much human hatred and conflict.” Wells points out further that “the doctrine of justification is a reconciling doctrine if both victims and their perpetrators cease to claim a righteousness of their own and acknowledge their own need for forgiveness and grace.”21
One of John Calvin’s creative insights is that repentance follows faith instead of preceding it. Calvin writes, “Repentance not only constantly follows faith, but is born of faith.” Calvin explains further, “A man [sic] cannot apply himself seriously to repentance without knowing himself [sic] to belong to God. But no one is truly persuaded that he belongs to God unless he has first recognized God’s grace.”22 Calvin’s point is that only when sinners know how deeply God loves them and therefore values them do they truly realize how serious a matter their rebellion against and distrust in God was.
According to Calvin, faith is followed not only by repentance or turning away from one’s sinful self but also by a new life in Christ or turning toward God. Calvin calls these two aspects of repentance “mortification and vivification.” So, for Calvin, repentance in its broad sense means both turning away from sin and also beginning a new life by turning to God. “If we are truly partakers in his [Christ’s] death,” wrote Calvin, “by virtue of this our old man is crucified, and the mass of sin remaining in us is mortified.… When we participate in his resurrection, we are thereby revivified in a newness of life which corresponds to the righteousness of God.”23
Why do I talk about the repentance of Asian Americans? If one works with liberation from oppression as the ultimate goal of Asian Americans, oppressors would indeed be the sinners, and the oppressed would be more victims than sinners. But here I am working with the belief that there is an ultimate goal which includes but also transcends liberation. As mentioned earlier, the end for which God created the world and intelligent creatures is to repeat in time and space the internal communion of the trinitarian God. If one takes this larger framework for theological reflection, what is wrong with human beings is defined by a principle higher than the criterion of liberation and the oppressor–the oppressed dichotomy.
Sin or what is wrong with humanity, then, is defined in terms of whether or not human beings are in line with what God is doing in history. Sin in our context is the people’s resistance to God’s end in creation and failure to promote and participate in what God is doing here on earth. In this scheme, both the oppressors and the oppressed can be sinful to the extent they are alienated from God’s own project in history.
The first sin we Asian Americans have to repent of is our attempt to avoid facing up to our liminal and marginalized predicament. It is disorienting and painful to face a situation of being “in-between” and of being marginalized. And it is almost human nature to try to run away from such a reality. Asian Americans’ attempts to avoid their predicament take either the form of “nativism,” in which we try to cling to our ethnic culture or enclave, or the form of “assimilationism,” in which we try to think we are white. Nativism leads to self-ghettoization, which risks dangerous social and political isolation. Assimilationism can end up in severe disillusionment and despair. God calls us Asian Americans to be faithful to our Christian calling wherever we are actually located. If we avoid an honest awareness of where we are, we are avoiding our sacred calling.
We Asian Americans must also repent of our sin of self-hatred. The lowered self-image either about oneself or about one’s ethnic group is, of course, the result of the internalization of the dominant group members’ treatment of the members of one’s ethnic group as inferior and deficient. When this happens to us Asian Americans, we are victims and not perpetrators. Nevertheless, to the extent that we Asian Americans let this prejudice become our own attitude and act out this self-hatred in relating to other Asian Americans, we are responsible for what we do. As Paul Tillich reminds us, sin is always tragic and also voluntary.24 We are influenced by outside factors in our sins, but sins are also our own acts. We must repent of thinking that we as Asian Americans are somehow “less” than white people.
We Asian Americans also must repent of our own prejudices against African Americans and other minority groups. I can never forget witnessing an African American man being flatly refused service in a Korean restaurant. Some years ago, I entered a large Korean restaurant in a major U.S. city for a quick lunch. Almost as soon as I sat down at a table, a waitress came and took my order. Soon a well-dressed African American man came in and sat down at a table near me. I soon noticed that no one was coming to wait on him. This man waited over ten minutes and still no one came. Finally, he quietly got up and walked out. I still think I should have run after him and apologized to him for what had happened. I, of course, do not know how widespread such racist practices are in Korean American communities. I am not forgetting that many Korean and other Asian Americans, especially some churches, have made attempts to express a sense of solidarity with African American and other minority groups. Furthermore, I am aware of the highly complex nature of the relations between Asian Americans and other minority groups.25 But still we Asian Americans must repent of any prejudice we may harbor toward persons of color.
In addition, we Asian Americans must confess our sin of worshiping idols and golden calves in this American wilderness. Asian Americans’ lives are often driven by a materialistic version of the American Dream. Trying to send our children to Ivy League schools no matter what and other obsessions with worldly success are on the top of the list of golden calves we have been worshiping. Sending our children to good schools and achieving other forms of success are in themselves not wrong. But if we let these goals become obsessions, they overtake and control our lives.
Andrew Sung Park reminds us not to forget the sin of sexism in Korean American communities.26 In spite of some gains in the status of women in Korea and other parts of the world, remnants of the age-old ideology of patriarchy and the consequent subordination and exploitation of women are still strongly present in Korea as well as in the Korean immigrant community. The situation is, of course, exacerbated by the frustration and anger Korean immigrants especially experienced in their early years in the United States due to their lack of cultural adaptation, the loss of the social status they had back home, and other difficulties.
Many Korean immigrants find it more convenient engaging in family-run small-business operations than looking for and maintaining jobs in American firms. Consequently, women become heavily engaged in their family stores and subject themselves to many hours of back-breaking labor. In addition, studies indicate, these women also do most of the housework with minimal assistance from their husbands.27
Another most shameful expression of patriarchal domination is spousal violence against women. A 1987 study of Korean immigrant women in Chicago showed shocking statistics. Of the 150 women who completed interviews, ninety (60 percent) reported being battered by their husbands. In terms of frequency, twenty-two (24 percent) of these battered women suffered from violence at least once a week, and thirty-four (37 percent) had been abused at least once a month. The women in this sample averaged thirty-six years of age and their average length of residence in the United States was five years. This study, therefore, does not indicate the degree of domestic violence among more settled Korean immigrants. But even by itself, this limited study is deeply disturbing.28
In churches also Asian American women face the barriers set up by patriarchy. They work in the kitchen and take care of many of the “small” chores while men hold the most powerful positions and make the official decisions. The most scandalous manifestation of sexism occurs at the time of the Lord’s Supper. Usually, more than half of the congregation are women. Most of the time the ones who distribute the bread and wine are all men in white gloves. This happens in broad daylight and in the presence of many copies of the Bible which shout out the fact that it was usually women who served Jesus during his earthly ministry. Until the churches clean up their act, they can not say very much about the injustices in society.
Asian American churches must also repent of their failure to welcome and embrace persons of lower-income families and persons who are ostracized in their communities for some reason. Fumitaka Matsuoka remarks in his book Out of Silence: “Perhaps the severest critique we can direct upon Asian American churches is that to a certain extent they have co-opted into the very racist structure of society and thus have come to neglect the most alienated people in society, the poor and underclass, even among our own Asian Americans.”29