The perspective of Asia 4

3．Theology and Christian Studies

The theological department of Japan Lutheran College changed its name to the Department of Christian Studies for practical reasons. “Theology” is jargon for ordinary people in the non-Christian world so the name of department couldn’t draw sufficient attention. Conversely, the name of Christian studies is understandable for those who are interested in Christianity and the Christian culture, including literature, music, the arts, etc.. Because of this, “Christian Studies,” as you know, is a popular name of studies about Christianity in the non-Christian world.
Needless to say, theology is, in general, the study of self-reflection on Christian faith. In order to serve for Church and mission work and also to train pastors, it has four main disciplines: biblical theology, systematic theology, historical theology, and practical theology. These have been systematized and established as academic studies over a long period of time. The theological department, of course, had all these disciplines. For it was originally founded in conjunction with Japan Lutheran Theological Seminary for the training of pastors. A four-year college program and a two-years seminary curriculum together make up a six-year program to train ministers. So the department had been geared for Christians, especially Lutherans, who wanted to be pastors of the Lutheran church.
In reality, an average of only two or three students graduate and become pastors every year for a total of approximately 160 congregations of the Japan Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Japan Lutheran Church. So it is financially impossible to maintain both the college and seminary if these schools were open to only Lutherans. As far as the theological department is concerned, more than 20 years ago the college program began to welcome non-Lutherans and even non-Christians who really wanted to study theology, while the seminary was restricted to Lutherans only. Also, the theological department started to provide many courses for those who would like to study Christian culture in general, like Christian literature, Christian arts, etc..
For this reason, it was quite natural to change the name of the department from theology to “Christian Studies.” Faculty members of the theological department, however, thought that it was not acceptable to erase “theology” from the name of the department. It was because we were teaching theology as Lutheran pastors. So we struggled and finally decided to choose real achievement rather than empty reputation.
The name was eventually changed in 2005 as mentioned above. After that, we are now realizing that the change is not just nominal, but qualitative. This means that theology is facing a new task to rethink theological work in relation to the context where theologians serve God and church as theologians. Christian Studies takes Christianity itself as the object of study and sees Christian faith as historical phenomena in relation with culture, thought, and concrete political and economical situations in which people lived by faith in Christ. As a result, we become aware of our own cultural context in which we are Christian. That is, we are forced to take “Japan,” a non-Christian context, as an object of theology.
Of course, we already knew that theology has been always done in the actual context in which it was engaged throughout about two thousand years of Christian history. Nonetheless, as far as the theological program which the seminary provides is concerned, there is no formal structure arising from the context we are actually engaged in. Each discipline has its own order and sequence for study. But such an organized theological system was made in the western world. Within such a system, it was hard to rethink the system itself in which a theologian stood. Moreover there was no room to think about Japanese things in the established theological disciplines. Now by welcoming those who are not Christian into the theological circle as students of Christian Studies, we need to consider the peripheral things of Christianity and its context for the Christian faith.
It is not just matters of practical theology, though surely practical theology is a kind of front in which theological thinking is realized. In a practical sense, the problem has been how the Christian message communicates with Japanese people whose mind set is completely different from the western one. In order to accommodate the Gospel to the Japanese mind set, various means have been used: Japanese styles of music, metaphors, old stories, arts, rituals, architecture, and etc.. These are matters related to “translation.” Needless to say, these efforts are useful in order to bring Christianity closer to Japanese people. The question here we are facing is, however, beyond it.
The best way to carry out theology is being relativized. God does not change, but the way that we try to understand God must change over time and across cultures. Theology is being done by human beings who are always limited by time and space. When theology took place in the Hellenistic world, theologians used Greek language and thinking to express their faith. Surely in the Latin world, the Latin culture gave influence to Christian thinking. After the enlightenment and the age of reason, historical thinking has continuously relativized theological expressions. We all know these historical realities. Now the problem is how much we can adopt an Asian way of thinking in order to understand Christ’s salvation. Conversely, the problem could be how we can distinguish the core of the Gospel and the cultural expression of it.
The change of name of the “Department of Theology” to “Christian Studies” challenges us to do theological work in our present context.