Reviews

Parichart Suwanbubbha. "Grace and Kamma: A Case Study of Religio-cultural Encounters in Protestant and Buddhist Communities in Bangkok and Its Relevant Environs, Thailand." Th.D. dissertation, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, 1994.

The number of theses and dissertations directed to the question of the relationship of Christianity to culture in Thailand has increased almost dramatically since Philip Hughes completed his groundbreaking study on "Christianity and Culture: A Case Study in Northern Thailand" twenty years' ago, in 1983. Ach. Parichart's work is unique among these studies because she writes from a Buddhist perspective, and, not surprisingly, her dissertation is strongest in its description of the Thai religious and cultural contexts within which Thai Christianity lives.

Dr. Parichart's thesis is that "Thai Christians under the CCT [Church of Christ in Thailand] have been influenced by culturally embedded Thai Buddhist notions of kamma" and, thus, have demonstrated "some of the same ways of thinking and behavior as Thai Buddhists who have been shaped by the notions of kamma." (p. 193) The dissertation describes important elements of the Thai worldview, elements centered on this concept of kamma (karma) and situates the reader in the midst of Thai lifeways and perspectives that have heavily influenced the Thai reception of the Christian message. Kamma refers to the moral consequences of all intentional human actions, which consequences have an immediate impact on our present lives as well as a more long-term influence on future lives. The author contends that the idea of kamma has a wide influence on Thai society, particularly in its commitment to merit-making activities and in its social structure, which is technically described as a hierarchical "patron-client society." So important is the concept that she describes popular Thai Buddhism as being "kammic Buddhism," the search for a happy, prosperous, and peaceful life in the present and in future lives.

One of the points at which the dissertation is most persuasive is in its analysis of certain events in Thai church history, particularly in the Phet Buri Church during the later nineteenth century. Dr. Parichart contributes to a better understanding of those events by showing how Thai converts would necessarily react to missionary

42

While the author has convincingly demonstrated the importance of using a Thai cultural perspective for understanding the behavior of Thai converts in the nineteenth century, she has failed to use the concept of grace as persuasively. First, it will be noted that in the statement of her thesis, quoted above, the author does not mention the Christian concept of "grace" at all even though it appears in her title and is treated in detail in the text. While the dissertation intends to use the doctrine of grace as a foil to show that Thai Christians think more like Thai Buddhists than like Western Christians, it is not clear throughout the dissertation that using such a foil is helpful or successful. Second, this problem is compounded by the author's decision to rely on Calvin's theology of grace based on the assumption of its relevance to the thought and work of the "Calvinist" Presbyterian missionaries in nineteenth and twentieth-century Siam. The author fails to test this assumption historically, with awkward consequences. While most of the Presbyterian missionaries would have called themselves "Calvinists," their work and thought were heavily influenced by other historical movements—notably the Enlightenment, American evangelicalism, and even Romanticism—to a degree that renders highly suspect any conclusions about their role in Siam based solely on Calvin's theology.

Third, the dissertation's emphasis on the Christian concept of grace is made even more problematic by a failure to deal with the role of grace in the thought of the missionaries themselves. Did they actually emphasize the concept in their evangelism and instruction of the Christian community? In her discussion of missionary thought in Chapter II, the author relies entirely on secondary sources, which sources emphasize missionary dualism and exclusivism. While the link between dualism and

43

A second problem in the dissertation is found in its use of data based on two questionnaires, one distributed to 176 Buddhists and another to 170 Christians. The copy of the dissertation used for this review, unfortunately, does not contain the Thai originals of these questionnaires, having only the English translation for the Buddhist questionnaire. The lack of the Thai versions makes it difficult to evaluate the answers given, since the sense and implications of wording can be quite different in English. The English translations betray some basic flaws in the questions themselves, such as one question that actually combines two distinct questions in one. Many questions also fail to provide equal numbers of positive and negative choices.

In spite of these problems, the author presents some potentially important results, which deserve further investigation. As one intriguing example, She reports that 76 (44.7%) of those responding to the Christian questionnaire disagreed with the statement that "human beings are not able to claim God's grace." Exactly the same number, 76, agreed with the statement. That is to say that Dr. Parichart's sample was equally divided on whether or not Christians can lay claim to God's grace by their own behavior. If these results are an accurate reflection of Thai Protestant thinking, one is still left with the difficult question of whether or not this answer proves or disproves the author's thesis that kammic Buddhism has heavily influenced Thai Christian thinking and behavior. It could be argued, in fact, that missionary theology itself betrayed elements of works righteousness, implicit in the very idea that one gains salvation by conversion to Christianity. However, it does seem that this data provides some tentative support of the author's thesis.

Other responses to the questionnaires, however, appear to contradict that thesis. The author found, as one important example, that while 84.1% of the Buddhists agreed that human destiny depends on humans themselves, some 58.2% of Christians agreed with the statement that human destiny depends on God alone. It would appear that a majority of Thai Christians has accepted the concept of Providence with its implicit understanding that humanity is entirely dependent on God's grace. Whether or not this data disproves the author's thesis is, nevertheless, a very complex question. The theological relationship between Providence and human

44

In the end, this dissertation highlights the difficulties inherent in attempting to come to hard and fast conclusions concerning the origins of contemporary Thai Protestant thinking and behavior. A superficial knowledge of the Thai church apparently betrays elements of its life that are "obviously" Western and others that are "obviously" Thai. When one moves beyond the superficial to a detailed, in depth investigation of the sources of Thai Protestantism, however, it becomes more and more difficult to separate East from West, indigenous from missionary, Buddhist from Christian. In the case of this dissertation, these difficulties are compounded by the author's unavoidable dependence on Western scholars in pursuit of her thesis, which reliance tends to obscure her Thai perspective. The dissertation also points out the importance of resolving methodological questions and the need for scholars to base themselves, generally, in one discipline while drawing on approaches and data from others. It remains unclear down to the last page of this dissertation whether it is a theological, historiographical, or sociological work. This inter-disciplinary confusion is not helpful.

This dissertation, in sum, makes an important but limited contribution to our understanding of Thai Protestant church history by situating earlier generations of converts on their real-life sociocultural world. It provides fuel for thought on important issues related to the beliefs and lifeways of contemporary Protestants in Thailand. While the dissertation's thesis that kammic Buddhism has influenced Thai Protestantism goes almost without saying, the dissertation does not provide clear

45

Joachim C. Fest. Hitler. Translated by Richard and Clara Wilson. London: Penguin Books, 1974.

Some months ago, I went back to my slightly battered copy of Fest's Hitler, a book I'd started many years' ago and never finished. I intended to read it casually, but it soon dawned on me that Fest's interpretation of Hitler's life and accomplishments is an important twentieth-century theological treatise. It helps to define the theological context in which all of us still live today; it describes, that is, the "mother of all theological contexts," be they Karen, Thai, Australian, European, or whatever. However profoundly sad and regrettable the fact, Adolph Hitler was a dominant figure of the twentieth century, to the point that if we have to choose the one political figure from that century who most influenced the shape of the twenty-first century it would probably be him. While World War I was the formative event of the twentieth century, Fest makes it clear that Hitler embodied and carried forward the consequences of that war, thereby shaping the world that emerged after 1918 and after 1945.

Fest wrote this biography, which emphasizes Hitler's intellectual and ideological development, as a revision of and correction to previous studies, notably biographies written by British and American authors. Those studies largely perpetuate the Hitler "myth," which portrays him in demonic terms and obscures both his humanity and accomplishments. Those histories also interpret Hitler, conveniently, as a uniquely German phenomenon, the result of peculiarly German historical forces. Fest's biography is the first major, influential German historical interpretation of Hitler, and the differences in interpretation are important—evidently, controversial. Fest spends most of the book explaining Hitler's accomplishments rather than his failures. He points out that the actual events of Hitler's life prove that he was a gifted politician who knew how to play his opponents off against each other, how to take immense risks successfully, how to lie with deceptive candor, and how to grasp opportunities ruthlessly. After he became chancellor, he quickly gathered all of the reins of power into his own hands, in spite of widespread opposition. Eventually,

46

In the course of this revisionist study, Fest defends various decisions made by Hitler, which decisions have been widely seen as irrational and, again, demonic. He, for example, explains Hitler's rationale for the German invasion of Russia in 1941, one of those events generally interpreted as a case in point of Hitler's hubris and reckless disregard for common sense. The author shows that Hitler had his reasons for invading Russia, ones based on the logic of the situation that confronted him in 1941 and on his own experience as a politician and a "generalissimo." Fest has written thus an "apologetic," which seeks to correct the non-German tendency to shift all the blame for Hitler and, ultimately, the vast disaster of his rule, onto Germany alone. Fest points out the underlying ambivalence of the German populace towards Hitler's militarism as well as the real-life historical circumstances in Europe that permitted Hitler's rise to power. The author argues that Hitler was a manifestation of the post-World War I European situation and not, therefore, "merely" a German phenomenon. He makes a good case, at least so far as a non-specialist is concerned. It is weakened only by Fest's failure to give sufficient attention to Hitler's racist policies, which had massively tragic consequences for our world—consequences we are still suffering through today.

One of the central themes of the book, however, deserves serious theological reflection and response. Fest makes it clear that Hitler personally and his followers generally relied heavily on inherited Christian categories, beliefs, and archetypes. The Nazi use of religious thought was partly pure propaganda, but on a deeper level many Nazis also accepted Christian categories as their own. As described by Fest, Hitler and his followers made use of those categories in the following ways:

First, Hitler was born a Catholic and saw in the Catholic Church important lessons on how to organize and control "the masses." He, at times, claimed political infallibility, which he compared to the Pope's ecclesiastical infallibility. He also occasionally referred to the Nazi Party or to the SS as being secular monastic orders. Hitler devised a whole annual cycle of psuedo-religious ceremonies, which consciously mimicked the Christian liturgical year. Second, Hitler saw himself as

47

Fest demonstrates that Hitler and his followers thus used essentially Christian theological categories to organize their thinking. Yet, it is clear that those categories are Christian only in form, not in content. Hitler's version of messiah-ship, for example, was based on the model of the white knight rather than the crucified Christ. His view of salvation was a world dominated by Europe, a Europe dominated by Germany, and a Germany dominated by a pure Aryan race—a world in which inferior races existed only to serve the "true" race. His salvation was the end of Communism and the acquisition of sufficient "living space" for Aryan Germany. Hitler himself eschewed Christian values of humility and transformed the Christian life of suffering and service into a quest for power, the quest that ultimately destroyed him. Where Christians struggle to serve, Hitler struggled to dominate.

Hitler, as portrayed in this biography, presents those of us who care about the Christian faith and seek to live faithful Christian lives with a frightening reality check on the power of religion to go wrong and do wrong. Based on Fest's interpretation, it is arguable that Hitler was as much a religious figure as anything else. People had

48

Stated differently, Fest's biography of Hitler reminds us of the intimate relationship between ideology and religion. Ideology is the set of ideas (beliefs) humans use to construct a social-political-economic reality they take to be desirable and often includes unacknowledged, self-serving assumptions about the world. Religious faith is the set of beliefs (ideas) humans use to construct ultimate meaning. The distinction between faith and ideology is not, however, as clear-cut as these definitions imply. Fest makes it clear that faith is frequently (generally?) a form of ideology and ideology is also a form of religious faith. Hitler's power-hungry, white knight version of Christianity serves as an important reminder that none of our wide variety of Christianities is Christ. They are, rather, human responses to the Incarnation, which at their very best are occasionally vaguely Christ-like.

Finally, this biography of Hitler serves as a clear warning that contextualized Christian theologies are not necessarily Christ-like theologies. Hitler, we can argue, reshaped the European Christian tradition into a profoundly relevant theology, which proved meaningful to tens of millions of Depression Era Europeans (not just Germans, as Fest points out) in the context of post-World War I Europe. National Socialist revivalism transformed their shabby and crisis-ridden lives into ones filled with new hope and purpose, and Fest makes it abundantly clear that Adolph Hitler was a masterful politician who knew how to respond to the wants and needs of the people. The Nazi "miracle" can be partly explained by his ability to create a contextual politics that had a strong religious-like component in it. The drive to construct contextual theologies in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the West is a worthy one only to the extent that the results tend to be Christ-like, self-critical, and self-consciously tentative.

49

Fest's Hitler should be required reading at every Christian theological seminary in the world. It is not merely a history of key events in the twentieth century. It is also a description of our present theological context and, potentially, a warning against what seems to be the fundamentalist religious direction of the twenty-first century.

Maurizio Peleggi. Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy's Modern Image. Honolulu: University of Hawi'i Press, 2002.

This is one of those books that break new ground, which on hindsight shouldn't have been new ground at all. The author's thesis is striking only until he begins to document it, at which point it seems obvious. The thesis is that the Siamese royal family, beginning with King Mongkut, consciously set out to refashion itself as a modern, "civilized" dynasty in the Victorian mode. The monarchy learned to dress itself in Western dress, to have itself photographed by Western photographers, to build palaces in a Victorian style, and to even allow images of the king to be displayed in public (on coins, as statues), something unthinkable in traditional Siam. The book is generally readable, if at points inclined to academic jargon. All of the requisite adornments of a credible, even lucid scholarly presentation are in place. For those interested in the details of how the Thai monarchy redesigned its own image, the book will probably be interesting to the end. In truth, however, it would have just as much impact on our knowledge of modernization in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Siam as an article in a scholarly journal as it does as a book. There is, on the other hand, no reason to be sorry that it is a book.

That being said, I find the author unaccountably negligent regarding his failure to use Protestant missionary sources. While he is aware that the missionaries existed, he has clearly failed to investigate the possible contribution the extensive primary and secondary literature of missionary writings could make to his thesis. For some decades, newly arrived missionaries were expected to pay a courtesy call on the king. Some of them were fairly frequent visitors in the palace. They wrote about their impressions in their letters to their overseas sending agencies, and they published accounts of these visits in the American religious press. Their books contain long chapters on Thai royalty. None of this appears anywhere in Lords of Things. It is

50