Editorial: Sin, Secularisation and Theologies of Reconstruction

Abstract

The expanding field of world Christianity is now well populated by historians and anthropologists. Theologians are a rarer species within the territory, at least within the university sector. This may be because theology is one of the disciplines in which the hegemony of the European intellectual tradition remains largely intact, in contrast to the discipline of world history, which has been shorn of its previous ‘imperial’ trappings and been significantly transformed by the adoption of a new, post-colonial, set of clothes. It may also be because the establishment of departments of theology and religious studies has not been a high priority on the agenda of those who have founded the new universities of the global south (or, for that matter, the new universities in the northern hemisphere). The four authors in this issue of Studies in World Christianity are, however, all theologians, and their articles pose questions that are more or less theological in character. Alexander Chow tackles one of the most awkward challenges that Christianity has encountered in East Asian contexts, namely its doctrine of sin, which has often appeared to East Asian peoples as demanding that they shamefully brand themselves as criminals before they can be admitted to the fellowship of the Church. Chow explores the resources provided by a non-Augustinian, Eastern tradition of theological thinking about sin as a possible answer to this problem. Chow’s argument that Christian theology in East Asia needs reconstructing using Orthodox models raises some far-reaching questions that we may be able to explore further in a subsequent issue.