10 - Christian ethics in Asia

Summary

Christian ethical thinking in Asia has been contextually responsive and thus, given the diversity that constitutes the Asian context, necessarily multi-faceted. Yet, continuities can be discerned across the continuum of Christian ethical thinking that has emerged in various Asian contexts. This is because Christian ethical thinking in Asia, which is primarily reflected in its various contextual theologies, has consistently engaged two distinctive features of the Asian reality, namely Asia's multi-religiousness and poverty – the latter needing to be understood both in terms of economic deprivation and social discrimination. It has, so to speak, undertaken that ‘Double Baptism’ in ‘the Jordan of Asian multi-religiousness and the Calvary of Asian Poverty’, which the Sri Lankan Theologian Aloysius Pieris has famously described as being an essential characteristic of a truly contextual church in the Asian context. However, it needs to be pointed out that any ambitious project toward an overt generalisation of Asian Christian ethics runs the risk of contextual disembodiment or the eclipsing of identity-specificity. Therefore, it can be said that one of the tensions inherent in defining Asia concerns striking a balance between the politically necessitated construction of Asia as a unitary group and the concomitant dangers of oversimplification, stereotyping and homogenisation that have the potential to reify, constrain and denounce the complexity and diversity of Asian identity. It is with this recognition that this chapter seeks to provide specific examples of Christian ethics in the Asian context, focusing mainly on the Korean and Indian contexts, because Asian Christian attempts at Christian ethics can be discerned most pronouncedly in the different attempts made toward articulating contextually relevant theologies.