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Few of the books on my bookshelf are as marked over and scribbled on as Davis' Poles Apart? It is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book written from an articulate, self-consciously evangelical perspective to the end that evangelicals might more faithfully and effectively communicate the Christian message in Thailand. In the process of making his case, Davis carefully considers perspectives usually considered inimical by evangelicals and even comments favorably on some of those perspectives. He is not afraid to draw on useful insights from them, and he challenges his evangelical audience to adapt a more open, accepting stance towards other viewpoints and towards the larger process of contextualization. I have "heard" that some evangelical missionaries in Thailand have felt ambivalent about Poles Apart?, and it is not hard to see why.

I must confess that I actually share their ambivalence albeit from an entirely different perspective. As a set of discrete "thought experiments," Poles Apart? spurs one to reflection. As an extended argument for contextualizing the Christian message in Thailand, however, it is fatally flawed by a number of hidden assumptions, which in the end provide yet another example of Western evangelicalism's inability to accept anything that isn't Western evangelicalism. If Poles Apart? is at all creative or innovative, it is in the fact that Davis takes a slightly broader view of what is safely evangelical than do most other evangelical missionaries in Thailand. In the end, it is much less innovative than it appears to be at first blush.

One has to balance a critical evaluation of Davis, however, with a serious appreciation for his willingness to think about what some, perhaps many other evangelicals reject out of hand. He takes his positions with integrity, and he does wrestle with issues that he himself acknowledges admit to no easy solution. He is also aware of the dangers of Protestant evangelicalism's tendency to epistemological arrogance. He sees some of the strengths of Buddhism and truly hungers after expressions of the Christian faith that will "reload" the Buddhist world view with what he considers to be biblical Christian truth.

To go to the heart of the matter, the central failing of evangelicalism in general and Davis' Poles Apart? in particular is that both are fundamentally out of sympathy with the openly syncretistic, comfortably pluralistic Thai religious consciousness and world view. People in Thailand repeat endlessly the mantras that every religion is good and that every religion has the same basic purpose of teaching people to be good. People in Thailand also value smooth, accepting relationships based on mutual respect embedded within a society that loaths overt personal confrontation (subtle personal confrontation being another matter entirely). Within the Thai socio-religious context, Protestant evangelicalism is inherently combative and abrasive. It necessarily denies the premise that all religions are good and builds its personal relationships with people of other faiths around its evangelistic agenda, an agenda that takes a heavily, overtly negative attitude towards people of other faiths.

Davis tries to be different, but at heart he is not—not in any meaningful sense. He clearly believes that Christianity alone saves, and he takes a generally negative and unsympathetic attitude towards classical Theravada Buddhism, his chief protagonist. He echoes nearly two centuries of Protestant missionary complaints against Thai Buddhism in his contention that it is a dreary, hope-less faith that cannot meet the real spiritual needs of its adherents. As but one example, in his particularly anti-Buddhist chapter on "The Nature of Suffering," he writes, "Whereas the Buddhist tries to disavow self and negate its importance, the Christian can enjoy God and His creation to the full as well as celebrate his selfhood." (page 66) Sentences like this

Davis cannot help holding such views, so long as he maintains the integrity of his evangelical faith, for at the heart of that faith stands Jesus Christ, the world's Lord and Saviour. At the end of his chapter on "Local Theologies," Davis writes, "To infer that there is another way in which to resolve the problem of guilt, effectively reduces Christ to a mere Teacher of Religion, rather than the Saviour of the World." (page 54). Davis also contends that if Buddhism offers viable solutions to any of the important spiritual problems facing humanity, the Christian claim that Jesus is the divine Son of God is necessarily negated. In this and other related ways, he requires that contextualization must preserve the divinity of Christ and other essential Christian truths, which means that contextualization is first and foremost defensive and only secondarily exploratory. And while Davis readily agrees that much of Western missionary Christianity is rooted in Western culture and therefore not binding on Thai Christianity, he repeatedly affirms that there is a core of beliefs that are transcultural and must be preserved intact. He never questions the possibility that even his insistence on an "essential gospel" is itself culturally bound or that, at least, his assumed list of essences of the faith (divinity of Christ, authority of Scripture, the existence of a set of eternal truths, and other similar beliefs) are so bound.

In a passing comment, Davis also makes it clear that he is not in sympathy with the kind of contextualization that Thai Christians do on their own. He quotes the ecumenical theologian Kosuke Koyama to the effect that Thai Christians have replaced the dynamic biblical understanding of God with a Buddhist-like timeless but impotent God. He states, "Koyama clearly feels, and correctly so, that Thai Christians tend to over-contextualize the God of the Bible, so that their image of God would fit with the Buddhist ideas." (page 47) The point being made about Thai Christian views of God is highly debatable, but the more important issue reflected in Davis' views is that he implies that Thai Christians themselves are not competent to carry out contextualization. They do not know how to preserve the proper boundaries between the essence of the Christian faith and the (unacceptable) religious views of their own culture. Too much can be made of what is a single paragraph in Poles Apart?, but it

is clear from the tenor of the whole book that Davis assumes that Thai Christians themselves have done little or nothing in terms of correct, creative contextualization of the type he is advocating. Early on, Davis also makes a passing critical reference to African contextualization, which he sees as being too syncretistic and proof of the need for "parameters" to preserve the distinctiveness of Christianity (pages 19-20). Western churches, apparently, do not share in the same untrustworthy, over-contextualizing tendencies. If I am reading Davis correctly, he stands firmly in the old-time missionary tradition that denigrates the theological integrity of the Thai church even as it assumes that Western missionaries are primarily responsible for the ways and forms by which Thai Christians are to express their faith..

Throughout the book, Davis' gaze is firmly fixed on the views of scholars and missiologists; his bibliography contains only a handful of Thai sources, few of which are Christian. He offers no cogent descriptions of how Thai Christians actually express their faiths and does not seem to have considered the possibility of actually studying how the process of contextualization has and has not proceeded in Thai churches. His sources are mostly Western, frequently theoretical works, and the bulk of them have nothing to do with Thailand at all. With all due respect, I would suggest that Davis' essentialist theology all but programmed him to look to Western theological and missiological sources for guidance in his very genuine struggle to incarnate the Gospel in Asia. There is, sad to say, nothing new here. Evangelical missionaries have long looked on themselves and their Western traditions as the hope of the church in Thailand—usually overtly, sometimes implicitly.

In spite of the ocassional ecumenical and broad-minded tone of Poles Apart?, what we are left with is a deadend approach to contextualization. Davis, on the one hand, wants to fit the Christian package into the Thai socio-religious context. He pares that package down to its barebones minimum in order to maximize the possibilities of contextualization, which is why his approach is unacceptable to some other evangelicals. The very nature of his evangelical faith, however, ultimately frustrates his program because he necessarily continues to believe that the Thai Buddhist religious consciousness is inferior to the Western Christian one and because he supposes that Western Christians have maintained the essentials of the one faith that leads to salvation. Davis' version of the Gospel is still an alien Gospel, and he

himself is still not willing to take the risks necessary to seriously relocate the Christian faith in Thai culture. The Gospel package according to Davis has to come from outside Thai society, and it has a definite shape, essentially un-Thai, that must be preserved at all costs. Anything taken from Thai society, rituals for example, must first be repackaged, reloaded, or reconceptualized according to the logic of the essential Christian package. Davis's essentialism and fundamental lack of sympathy with Thai religious consciousness, in sum, undermines his "evangelical minimalism," that is his attempt to keep the Christian essentials to a very minimum.

The central problem facing the evangelical approach to evangelism in Thailand, as reflected in Poles Apart? is that the Thai religious consciousness is syncretistic, pluralistic, and anti-essentialist. It is willing to borrow openly from many different sources to construct its faith. It acknowledges that there are numerous paths of religious truth and while, for it, Buddhism is the better path that does not mean that the Christian or Muslim or Hindu paths are invalid. Evangelical Christianity is the opposite; it is anti-syncretistic and essentialist. So long as it remains so, it remains unsympathetic to Thai religious consciousness and for just that long cannot tell the Good News of Jesus Christ to the people of Thailand. That is the evangelical trap.

Davis' approach to contextualization is made doubly doubtful by the fact that he almost entirely ignores the real Buddhism that is actually practiced by the people of Thailand. He aims his descriptions and criticisms of Buddhism at classical Theravada Buddhism. When he typifies Thai Buddhist thinking he does so on the basis of classical texts, and most of his authorities on Buddhism, though not all to be sure, write about Buddhism generally rather than real-life Thai village Buddhism. Thus, for example, Davis repeats, as we saw above, that age-old missionary description of dreary, formless Buddhism, which does not offer its adherents any hope for the future. Village Buddhism, in contrast, is frequently lively and local people constantly go to it for solutions to life's problems. Indeed, if one looks by way of comparison at the average Protestant worship service and the strictures placed on Protestant congregational life, the gay temple colors and lively festivals of rural Buddhism offer far more in the way of joy and celebration. It is churches rather than temples that appear cheerless and dreary. Davis' failure to direct his contextualization

study to local Thai village and urban life is a major methodological flaw, and it may be that it also reflects a deeper reluctance to acknowledge the value of Thai culture as a full, valued partner in contextualization.

Davis, has also failed, methodologically, to study how local Thai churches have actually gone about contextualizing their faith. He has failed to see, for example, that a central element in the Thai understanding of God as the All-Powerful Patron is drawn more from "secular" socio-political models of patron-client relations rather than on classical Theravada Buddhism. He has failed to see that King Bhumibol offers to Thai Christians an important model for the person of Christ. (There is, for example, the powerful photograph taken some years ago and widely shown in Thailand down to the present of an elderly, wrinkled village woman bowed low on the ground, her glowing face gazing in reverent awe on the King, who is on bended knee above her. Democratic Westerners may not feel comfortable with the image, but for Thai Christians it unconsciously models the love the royal Saviour has for his people.) Again, Davis' classical Theravada Buddhism is irrelevant.

Poles Apart? does not, thus, reflect the actual situation on the ground either in terms of Thai Buddhism as it is practiced at the local level or of the ways in which local Christians have already gone about making cultural sense of their religious faith. It is a theoretical theological treatise—removed from local life—that propses a form of contextualization driven by the Western missionary agenda and aimed at classical Theravada Buddhism, an artificial construct that does not even exist as such in Thailand. To a large degree, Poles Apart? is representative of numerous other evangelical missionary studies of contextualization and the relationship of the church to Thai culture, most of which are actually more about the attempts of missionaries to make sense of the Thai religious scene than anything else. They are autobiographical records of the Western evangelical struggle to come to terms with Thailand, an ongoing struggle that reflects the "evangelical trap." Taken together, they seem to be striving for some strategy, some means to sneak the evangelical package past the Buddhist guardianship of the Thai religious consciousness.

Having said all of this, I would still strongly recommend Davis' Poles Apart? to those who are interested in the relationship of the Protestant churches to contemporary culture in Thailand. The author raises key issues that allow no easy

solutions in a readable, direct manner that eschews self-important rhetoric. He presents a clear evangelical perspective that encourages readers to think through their own positions. Beyond superficialities, there is hardly anything in this book that I would agree with, but I still feel that it is an important work that deserves to be widely read and deeply studied. My only caveat would be that readers not take it at face value but use it as a stimulus for their own critical reflections.

Marcell Le Blanc, S.J., History of Siam in 1688. Translated and edited by Michael Smithies. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2003.

This is not a book that I would normally choose to review for HeRB, but I was requested to do a review of it by a local Chiang Mai representative of the journal Quest and have decided to do a second, somewhat different review of the book here. It turns out that it is a book well worth reviewing. It raises issues and provides insights that are useful to the larger study of church history in Thailand.

Le Blanc (1653-1693) was a Jesuit mathematician sent out by the French government as a missionary to the court of King Narai of Siam (r. 1656-1688) in 1687. While he was in Siam, Le Blanc witnessed a virtual coup d'état by which Narai's successor, Phra Phetracha (r. 1688-1703), seized the person of the King, executed some of his key supporters, and similarly disposed of two other claimants to the throne. In the process of these events, Phetracha also ousted and executed Narai's chief minister, a Greek adventurer by the name of Constantine Phaulkon (1647-1688) and forced the French troops that were Phaulkon's chief source of support to leave Siam. Not coincidently, Phetracha also severely limited the growing influence of European Catholic missionaries and the Christian community, which was composed almost exclusively of foreign Catholics including Japanese Christian refugees. Le Blanc provides one of a number of European descriptions of these events, one that is based on his own close proximity to them. History of Siam in 1688 is thus an important primary source document for the study of a key event in seventeenth-century Thai history at a time when Siam successfully resisted French attempts to colonize and Christianize it. The value of this book for most readers, then, is what we might style a "secular" one because of its importance to general Thai history. The

book's editor presents it in this light, and we can presume that Silkworm Book's chief interest in publishing this book is for its straight historical value.

Le Blanc's book, however, may also be looked upon as a theological treatise and an ideological "snapshot" of Catholic missionary religious attitudes and prejudices that helps us to understand how Christianity has come to be seen by Thai Buddhists as the adversary of Thai religious consciousness. As a historian of Protestantism in Thailand, I find original sources for Catholic missionary thinking such as this one to be useful for throwing more light on the whole history of Christian missions in Siam since the sixteenth century. Institutionally, one can make a good case, I think, for arguing that Catholic and Protestant church history are two separate fields of study. Aside from some few half-hearted stabs at establishing a closer ecumenical promiximity in more recent decades, the only substantial relationship between the two historically has been adversarial.

One could also make a case, however, that ideologically the two Christian movements have shared a great deal in common and actually encompass one continuous history rather than two. The first two Catholic missionaries arrived in Siam, so far as we know now, in 1567 (see Catholic Church History in Thailand) less than 50 years after the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. When Christian missions began in Siam, that is, Catholicism and Protestantism were still ideologically much closer to each other than either would have admitted then. Le Blanc's aplogetic for French and Catholic behavior in Siam in 1687-1688 makes those similarities abundantly clear, and much of his attitude concerning and behavior towards Thai culture and religion is the same as those of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. Both the Catholic and Protestant missionaries severely criticized the Siamese for being immoral, unrefined, superstitious, ignorant, sly and deceitful, cowardly, and so on through a long list of failings. Le Blanc, as a minor example, cites a proverb "current in Siam," presumably among the foreigners, that, "…one should leave commerce to the Dutch, fine arts to the Chinese, war to the French, and deviousness to the Siamese." (page 56)

Unlike the Protestant missionaries, however, Le Blanc also condemned the Siamese for being savages and barbarians. He believed that they were lacking in any civilized refinements, and he has few good words for any Siamese other than King

Narai and one or two faithful Siamese servants of French masters. The later Protestant missionaries usually acknowledged that the Siamese were civilized, believing only that their's was an inferior civilization. Le Blanc's History of Siam in 1688 represents thus another example of what Edward Said and others term "orientalism," the preudicial presentation of Asian peoples by self-styled European experts on the Orient.

This book is a theological treatise that parallells later Protestant missionary writings in a number of other ways as well. Most notably, it attributes the events it records to providence, seeing in God's hand the force that moves human behavior along divinely directed paths. It also gives considerable attention to the persecution Christians underwent during and after the events of 1688 and emphasizes the value of and heroism displayed by the suffering of the Christians. Le Blanc foreshadows future Protestant missionary thinking even in his ocassional swipes at heretical Protestantism itself. Protestant missionary writers in the nineteenth century were equally happy to lambast the Antichrist of Rome and his minions in Siam.

The translation and publication of History of Siam in 1688 is an important contribution, then, to the study of Thai church history. One does wish that the editor had provided a somewhat more comprehensive description of the background and historical context of the book, altho the "Chronology of Events" at the end of the book is helpful. The bibliography is also quite inadequate. What the editor has done is to point interested readers in the direction of Van der Cruysse's Siam and the West 1500-1700, which he also translated. I reviewed that book in HeRB 4 and feel for a number of reasons that it does not adequately take the place of a fuller scholarly treatment of the background and significance of History of Siam in 1688. If nothing else, the reader may not even have access to Van der Cruysse. Be that as it may, this is still an important book and yet another welcome addition to the published primary sources available for the study of Thai church history.