How can Asian Americans think about how their identity intersects with their faith? What are some paradigms and vocabulary we should be using? In Doing American Theology, Daniel D. Lee just does that. He has written a book that helps Asian Americans to understand themselves so “we can actually bring all of ourselves to Christ.”
We are honored to host an interview with Daniel D. Lee. He talks to Aaron Lee, SOLA’s Editorial Curator, who also reviewed his book. We hope their conversation will be encouraging and edifying.
Editor’s Note: Below is a lightly edited automated transcript of their conversation. There may be typos or grammatical errors.
Aaron Lee: Hi, everyone. This is Aaron from SOLA Network. And today I am speaking with Professor Dr. Daniel Lee. Dr. Daniel, can you please introduce yourself? And we’re going to specifically talk about Doing Asian American Theology. Would you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your book?
Daniel D. Lee: I serve as the academic dean for the Center for Asian American Theology and Ministry at Fuller Seminary. I’m also the assistant professor of theology and Asian American Studies. And so the Asian American Center at Fuller, I helped founded, so it’s been a long journey of just being at Fuller and establishing the center, which I think is one of the most significant centers in terms of a seminary… like an Asian American Center at a seminary. So that’s basically what I do.
Aaron Lee: Yeah. Did the book come out of your time at the seminary?
Daniel D. Lee: Yes. So my book, I mean, so I feel like I’ve been researching this book for the last like, I don’t know, 25 years or something like that. It’s been a long journey. So in the book, I talk about it, it’s been a long journey to myself. Because as Asian Americans, it’s very difficult to kind of articulate what it means. What does it mean to be Asian American? And in the book, I talk about how I was kind of stumbling in the dark, trying to figure out: What is going on? What are these things? You know, is it race? Is it a culture? Whatever it is, right? All these different things, immigration, or whatever. And so I ended up developing this book in this class at Fuller. It’s called TM528: Asian American Theology, Identity and Ministry – and I’ve been teaching this class for almost 10 years, almost a decade. And the book comes out of that. Helping Asian Americans to understand themselves. So we can actually bring all of ourselves to Christ. So that’s actually what the idea is.
Aaron Lee: I love that. I think it was at the beginning of the book, where you talked about how Jesus was a Jew. And sometimes this gets lost in sermons when we’re talking about Christ. Now, that does have applications to Asian Americans. Can you work on that for us?
Daniel D. Lee: I mean, Jesus was not only a Jew, but he’s a Jew now. Right?
Aaron Lee: Yes, yes. Yes. And you did make a point of that in your book.
Daniel D. Lee: Yeah. Right now, right now for all eternity. Jesus is a Jewish man, right? Palestinian Jew. So I think that gets lost. And what’s interesting is that that aspect of it is not lost on God. Nor is it incidental in the Bible, right? We have genealogies to make sure that Jesus represents, you know, Israel, to people, people of God, the chosen nation. So that is not something on the side, it’s not marginal, it’s actually front and center. It’s so important. And what’s interesting is that people talk about their spiritual identity. Of course, our Christian identity is more important than everything else. I mean, in one sense, that makes sense. But the thing is, you don’t actually… you can’t separate your spiritual identity with who you are. I think people think, “Well, I am, you know, my spiritual identity is more important than other things.” And I’m like, that’s not how the Bible talks about it. Because Jesus is a human being. We talk about Jesus being fully human, fully divine, which I mean, I agree with it. But those are not… those are Greek philosophical categories. But this humanity, the Bible doesn’t talk that way. Because there’s no such thing in the Bible or biblically as an abstract humanity. Have you ever met an abstract human being that says, I’m human without particulars? No, it doesn’t exist. We’re all, we’re always human in our particular form. So for us to be in Christ, for us to be Christian, we cannot be in Christ without these things. I always have talked about the fact that Christians sometimes we say, “Hey, we’re in Christ, no matter who you are.” Right? No matter who you are, God loves us. And I say, it’s actually not true. It’s as who you are. God loves us as who you are, you are in Christ, when you look at, like our particular identities… And on the flip side we’re talking about that you want all these things to be in Christ, because Christ really is Lord over all of these identities, all aspects of who we are. So we don’t want these things to have a life of their own apart from God, which basically means we need all of this in Christ. Then of course, it’s basically what happens in Scripture. Paul says, “Oh, I am this, I am that, I’m a Benjaminite.” He was huge. “I’m a Pharisee.” But all of that is in Christ and God is going to transform us and all that for God’s kingdom. It’s not like these things will just be wasted in a sense. I think we talk about it as though we’re going to be Christian, like, separated from these things. And I think that’s more of a kind of narcissism, leftover ideas that really aren’t biblically rooted.
Aaron Lee: I really enjoyed your book because it made me think hard about, “Yeah, what does it really mean that I am Asian American?” And you got technical in the book. And we talked about this earlier, where your book is a little bit technical, but then it does get to some practical aspects. The technical part is called the Asian American Quadrilateral. Or at least that’s what I saw as being technical. I want to ask you what motivated you to make that? What was the process? And of course, you can explain it a little bit because that really is the framework, right? Where you’re saying, “Well, how can we define Asian American?” There is obviously so much that goes into it. But if you had to narrow it, if you had to distill it, what is that?
Note: The Asian American Quadrilateral consists of Asian heritage, migration experience, American culture, and racialization.
Daniel D. Lee: Asian Americans have a serious problem, Asian American communities overall. And the problem is, it’s not our fault, right? It’s because there’s such an erasure of Asian American history in Asian American Studies in society. It’s very difficult for us, for ourselves, even in my class, you know, Asian American Identity and Ministry. I tell them, Asian American students, most of you know more about black history than Asian American history. We live in a society, right? Because Asian American history is pretty much erased. A lot of people think, “Oh, Asian American history started when my family came to the US.” That is not true. We have 70 years of Asian American history. And they say, “Well, most of us came recently.” I say, “Yeah, but why did most of us come recently? Because the US kept us out very actively, right?” The first immigration law was an anti Asian immigration law. Racist laws. So when you say what does it mean to think that the US has a muscle memory to kind of exclude us as a part being Asian and a part of being American? So that’s part of the issue. It’s very difficult for us to know, ourselves beyond our personal history. But the particular incident that basically helped me to figure this out, the Asian American Quadrilateral, was when I was taking a seminary class and one of the professors asked, “What is unique about Asian American identity and context? There’s nothing unique.” And I was like, wait a minute, this is nonsense. I said, no, there’s a particular place that we live that’s unique. And what I realized is that these four things in themselves are not unique. When you start overlapping them… We live at the intersection of these things, right? So all of us, actually, to some degree, are like Asian American categories. We’re a really broad people like, hey, it’s so broad it’s useless. I’m like, oh, no, it has its purpose. Now, it’s not everything, right. Like I consider myself Korean American and Asian American. There’s black people. Like I’m Jamaican, but I’m black as well. There’s multiple things. I’m white, but I’m also German heritage, there’s multiple things. So those things actually matter. When we talk about Asian heritage, Asian Americans have some kind of Asian heritage, but so do people in Asia, right? The question is, are we immigrated? We migrated over somehow, some of us came seeking the American dream, some people came as graduate students, some people came as refugees. But we came somehow. And those two things, again, already start becoming kind of specific. And then you say, American culture, because we’re all kind of part of American culture. And American culture kind of represents us in this particular way. And we internalize that representation, which can be good and bad. I mean, it’s good, more recently, but bad all the years before. And then the last thing is racialization. The fact that it doesn’t matter if you are Korean, Japanese, Filipino, you look east Asian enough. And then if something happens in China, it all impacts us. Now, we need a way of describing that. Is that everything? No, of course not. But that is part of our reality. So these four things: Asian heritage, migration experience, American culture, and my racialization… all these things kind of help us give us language to articulate our experiences so that we don’t, we don’t, you know, describe ourselves too stereotypically and crudely because that’s not going to be helpful.
Aaron Lee: The one that stood out to me the most was cultural representation. And maybe that tells us more about me than it does about the Quadrilateral, because that would stand out to me (laughing). Can you talk about your theology of cultural representation? Because in your book, you sort of have like a section there that’s specifically about that, which I think could actually be another book if you wanted to write about it, and I really enjoyed reading about that. How can we properly think through how non-Christians navigate a theology of cultural representation versus how Christians do? Because there should be a difference, right?
Daniel D. Lee: Yeah, always a difference. I mean, as Christians, obviously, we use all these tools, whether it be Critical Race Theory, or whatever… We use all these different tools. But we always evaluate them. Because these tools aren’t perfect. I mean, like science or biology, as you know, evolutionary biology, we use these tools, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they all have logic on their own. We want to be careful, right? So in that sense, as Christians, we say, “Well, look, what is the point of cultural representation?” And I think the basis of it, of course, is the fact that we understand everybody, all of us being made in the image of God. And what ways do we produce and consume media and culture that helps humanize who people are three dimensional? Instead of two dimensional ways, not stereotypically reducing them? So if we are consuming media, or producing media that basically reduces people down to some kind of a stereotype, it’s dehumanizing them in a sense. So we don’t want to do that. And that’s basically, I think, the foundations of how we think about cultural representation. It’s when you have very few representation, I think, not when we’re thinking about things like, hey, we want to see ourselves and like, it’s great, because that is important. But I think that I do use the fact that we want to be in a place where we are able to really honor the image of God and all the people around us. And when culture only represents certain people, it’s people groups in a very reductive way. We realize, oh, man, these people are being dehumanized. Or maybe even for Asian Americans. We’re being dehumanized and we’re not going to be fully human represented that way. And that becomes really, really problematic. So that’s basically why I think this is the issue. And I’m it’s a discipleship issue for Christians as well.
Aaron Lee: I actually really appreciate that angle. Because it is important to see yourself and to be represented. But for the Christian, it’s not about you. It’s about the image of God. And that really is worship, and I really love that. Let’s talk about multi-ethnic churches. Okay, so what is it? You can preface this (laughing), we were talking about this earlier. Tell me about what you’ve seen and what you’ve heard, especially with your position at your school. Because the arguments for, the arguments against… how do you speak to these things?
Daniel D. Lee: Okay, I have a friend in Jersey, and I talked to him a couple weeks ago. And talking about this along with him and other people. Basically, that was an impetus for me to write this chapter because I, when we talk about Asian Americans… So the book is really helping people to have the right tools and concepts to do the work. I don’t do all the work in a sense, because that would be a different book. But I ended up with two chapters on integration. What does it mean for discipleship? Why does it matter? And then the last chapter is about do we need Asian American churches? Are our multi-ethnic churches the ideal? Is it a picture of heaven? If that’s a picture of heaven, then everything else fails? And what my friend said, was that one of the college students came up to him and said, “Are we doing something wrong? Because it seems to me that our churches aren’t diverse. And if the picture of heaven is supposed to be diverse, then maybe we shouldn’t exist.” And I was like, That’s a crazy idea. There’s so many problems with that. And actually, I will tell you right now, a lot of the modern ethnic-church ecclesiology books are not written by real theologians. They’re just like, the practitioner, which I mean, I respect. But I think even the idea of like, well, there’s a book called…. What’s crazy is the fact that the book talks about it as though the 80/20 doesn’t matter. I don’t think it matters, the fact that what the 80% is, like, like, you know, you think about what kind of nation we live in, like with the white dominance in a sense. Obviously, this has profound differences in how the church would navigate. So I think we, the church, have very high ideals, but we can’t live up to it. I think that there’s a place for it. But the reason why I could take it is because I want the multi-ethnic churches to kind of calm down from its high horse and realize, okay, you have your own set of problems. Asian American churches have their own set of problems. But we also have different kinds of missions in a sense. It’s not just the fact that it’s not just the problem of, you know, homogeneous unit principle. Because given the long history of white supremacy, an all white church is something very different than an all black church, historically speaking. They both have the same kind of problems, and even for Asian Americans to some degrees. So yeah, I think that’s part of the issue. I mean, if I can describe one of the biggest problems of multi-ethnic churches is the fact that… Korie Edwards, she’s written a great book, talking about the fact that, hey, even if multi-ethnic churches are led by people of color… to get white people in the church, you have to kind of make them happy, in a sense, because they have a lot more choices. Therefore, you end up getting to them in a sense.
Aaron Lee: There’s always the catering aspect, right?
Daniel D. Lee: Yeah, that’s really, really important. So for Asian American churches, I feel like what I always say is that we’re always saying, “So sorry, so sorry, we’re here.” And we’re apologizing, because so much of the Asian American church issues affected a lot of the people out there, who don’t want to accept Asian Americans as their spiritual authority. Sure, sure. Is it our problem? Is that our problem, the fact that people have racist, you know, bias, racial bias? And I mean, I don’t think that that should be something we should apologize about. That doesn’t make any sense to me. The only way we can solve that problem is if we don’t… if we don’t exist at churches. How would we fix other people’s racism? By us not existing? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s really identifying what the problem is, and targeting that instead of apologizing for other people’s racism. Which, once again, that doesn’t make any sense. We should address what the issue is, saying that that’s racism.
Aaron Lee: I mean, my church is very blatantly ethnic. But it did take me a while to come to understand what you were speaking about. Not from reading your book, but just on my own. Because this perspective is not the norm.
Daniel D. Lee: Right. It’s not the norm. Yeah, I think so much of the multi-ethnic church books have been written by black people, white people. I’m like, “Look, we have a different perspective on this.” And I’m like, “Well, you can save your perspective. But I mean, as a theologian, like, there’s the reasons why I see this.” And I said, just so what I talk about is the fact that there is a way in which all the churches function, and there’s a reason why we exist. Now, we do have to keep certain things in perspective, and we’re going to own where we are. Sure. Okay. I think you know, and also with… We understand the fact that we have our own weaknesses, where we have not been able… We have our own strengths as well, like, what can we do that the other just can’t? Because it’s definitely true, right? I mean, think about it, I laid all the Asian Americans here, who’s gonna reach them? You think like, waitresses were reached? No, that’s not true. They only reach a certain kind of Asian. The question is, who is going to reach all these different people? And what does it look like? I think people don’t really think about the broader ecosystem of how we reach out. That’s often what we think about multi-ethnic churches, is really driven by like liberal multiculturalism that talks about cosmetic diversity, which really is kind of being kind of toxic, right? It’s more for decoration. In a sense, it doesn’t really get to the real issues.
Aaron Lee: I want to bring it back to our own selves now, because we’ve been talking about the church as a whole. Are we talking about… kind of… big picture type of church as an institution type of thing? I want to bring it back to ourselves personally. Your book talks about integrating the fragmented self, in our Asian American churches. I want to know if you can elaborate on that or give some practical steps to doing that. Because we’re talking about how our identity should have a place, and it does shape our worship and our services. So how can we integrate more of that cohesive cohesively into our worship?
Daniel D. Lee: So I think my caveat is when I say this, like, I actually don’t think that the goal of a you know, Asian American theology and ministry or even what I do is not necessarily to make people more Asian. Like, what does that mean, that I make kimchi every day? Like, what does that mean? Well, I’m gonna speak more Korean every day. I’m gonna make sure that that doesn’t mean that I think that actually is kind of a orientalism that kind of abuses it and puts us in boxes. That’s not what we’re like. I think that the overall framework is not so much, you know, “embrace your authentic self” – which is actually more of a progressive agenda. I’m like, what are we trying to talk about? We want Christ to bring God’s Shalom to all aspects of who we are. So in one sense, we want all aspects of who we are to be integrated with each other. And the reason I say that is because we grew up in the US and you know, maybe if you grew up in like a majority Asian American.. You grew up in certain parts of the country, and you realize, there are parts of who you are that you’re like, I don’t want this. And I describe it as, like you, you kind of grew up and be like, and you had a bad experience. When you’re like, seven, you’re like, you know, you tell your seven year old self, like, stay in the closet, stay in the kitchen, I don’t ever want you to come out. Because this isn’t… you embarrass me. Right? And I feel like what winds up happening is that there are different aspects of who we are that we try to abandon. Because we don’t, we don’t know, do with this, it causes us harm, pain, it makes us vulnerable. But what I’m saying is Christ comes and says, “Hey, look, that self, that self will be healed in me as well. I’m gonna search for all these lost souls, because these selves have to be reconciled and healed and transformed. And they will all be used for God for my kingdom.” And that’s what we’re talking about, that’s what discipleship is. Now, I don’t know what the journey looks like for every single person. All of us have our own journeys, but it will bring more peace and God’s Shalom, healing to this thing so that we don’t feel like we’re in conflict with ourselves. I think one of the biggest issues with Asian American churches is that a lot of Asian American churches are all surely and socially Asian American. Okay. But I think we fail to do so theologically. I think about that. I feel like what does it really mean? And I don’t mean, like, we label our churches, Asian American, I don’t mean that, like, it’s, you know, it’s, you don’t have to do this, you have to do it this way. Like, oh, you know, like, talk about being Asian American on service or not. We see it when I preach. I do like, you know, Greek exegesis. I don’t always point out every single, you know, group, you know, Greek, Greek tense. You don’t have to influence how I do ministry. So I’m very aware of that. Right? When you are aware of Asian American issues, you know, those issues are there as you’re very conscious about how you talk about obedience, for example. Okay, about God’s Father, and I’m like, “Oh, be careful, that can’t be talked about lightly.” You have that thing you talk about, like I said, obeying God, or, or being faithful, those things are fraught, because we can easily make that into another way of performing and making sure that we’re being an upright citizen, the model minority or whatever. So those things are what you do. It’s not necessarily how much we label ourselves to be Asian American or not. So I’m saying that ministry, it doesn’t always have to be explicit. It can be implicit.
Aaron Lee: It sounds like you’re saying just to have a general awareness of your culture, right? I mean, not necessarily, like pinpointing every single thing. As a whole, what can we bring?
Daniel D. Lee: One example is that we need a lot more robust theology of how we think about family. Western Protestant theology doesn’t even include family. It’s not only think about God as a parent, but it’s also thinking about, what does it really mean? And often, the biggest conflict in Asian American churches end up not being church and state, but church and family. So nobody talks about that, because there’s a long history of people talking about church and state, you know, long and we get it from Augustine. But there’s no, there’s no in the theological tradition, talking about church and found now in the Roman Catholic tradition, there’s a longer tradition talking about them, okay? For Asian Americans, we need this. And if, if we address these issues, and I think it’ll easily serve our neighbors as well. Oh, Hispanic neighbors, they need that too. So when we embrace and struggle with our own issues and engage them, we will be able to offer our gifts and serve the neighborhood better as well.
Aaron Lee: We’re running out of time, but I want to put you on record because you wave the reformed flag, but then you’re very aware that sometimes the ideas sound progressive, right? Because you’ve mentioned that to me before. You might think this is liberal, but it’s not progressive. Can you just set the record straight on it as we end this podcast?
Daniel D. Lee: Yeah. I think it’s great. And obviously some say I’m progressive on a lot of things. But I think I distinguish between progressive and having a present progressive, as kind of ideology, or any kind of ideology is dangerous. Conservative ideology or a progressive ideology or liberals. I think the question is, I think fundamentally, I consider myself a reformed theologian, because, I mean, this is actually how I understood, I think contextually, and everything else. And I talked about it in my book, you know, I hadn’t liked this stuff. I was like, you won’t really need contextual anything. I should just all be reading Luther, Calvin, I’m perfectly happy with that. Reading Bavinck, or whatever, you know, I appreciate it. So what I realized is that these people are taking their context very seriously. And it’s part of, you know, in the reformed tradition, there’s a whole tradition of kind of confessing, writing confessions for a particular context. And there’s a whole reason why confessing Christ in certain context matters, it’s is because they’re trying to articulate what the gospel looks like, and how do you clarify what the issues are? I think contextualization, or contextuality, gets a bad name because people think we’re watering down the gospel. And I say, oh, no, it’s the flip side as well. I kind of find that what the gospel is, we’re actually clarifying what sin is even more specifically, trying to make sure that there’s something that gets, you know, people you can pile it on as a good virtue. If you can say, oh, contextually, this is actually how we sin, how we miss the gospel. So in that sense, for me, this idea of internal critique, and having that kind of theology of the cross, Lutheran terms, I think, has been a core of how I think about theology. So in that sense, I think that what I’m doing is, I’m really emulating all my reformed theory, theology, tradition. I think all of them were trying to think about, what does it really mean to take the gospel seriously, and really make that sharp edge of the gospel, the critical edge of the gospel come and be manifested in a particular context? You don’t follow Reformed theology or theologians by copying them in theology… that doesn’t really work. Because their theology for them was in their own contexts. You have to do your own work, you can’t copy somebody else’s homework. What does it mean to do your own work? So in that sense, I consider this to be fundamentally part of the tradition.
Aaron Lee: Dr. Daniel, thank you so much. I appreciate your seriousness in terms of shaping our faith and making it real for who we are, and really bringing our identity to Jesus. Thank you so much for the time and thank you for your book. I’m happy to share it.
Daniel D. Lee: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. And it’s a pleasure to talk to you and your audience about this.
Read Aaron Lee’s review of Doing Asian American Theology.