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In an interview he gave in Paris in 1994, Edward W. Said, was asked about his often expressed sense of not being at home in any culture and his feeling of being two people in one. Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University, is a Palestinian who was born with American citizenship. His response is worth a thought for all of us who live in a "foreign context." He answered,

"Well, I do not think I am two separate people; I am maybe four of five. The answer has been the multiplication of interests, without regard to trying to reconcile them to each other. I have stopped doing that, and now I just assume that I am, and everyone else is as well, a contradictory and heterogeneous identity. I do not really think much about myself as a fixed quantity, partly because of my illness. Without regard to who I am, I feel I still have a lot of things to do, and a lot of things I do not want to do. So I have made choices. Those things that I can do, I pursue with the realization that I am more than one person, or at least I am not a single, stable, coherent identity. For me, the condition of exile means the freedom to pursue these choices with no regard to a fixed place." He went on to say that his past, history, and heritage are now for him, "…part of the large picture which I call 'exile,' which for me has become a relatively generous field of opportunity."

In his fascinating and detailed study of American theology from the post-Revolutionary era to the Civil War, Mark Noll describes that era as the most productive period for American Calvinist theology in American theological history—and the most contentious as well. American Calvinist theologians, from roughly 1790 through to 1860, wrestled creatively with a variety of key issues having to do with the nature of God, humanity, salvation, and atonement. Their primary method for reflection, however, was by attacking the thinking of other Calvinist theologians in what Noll calls "zero-sum reasoning," by which he means that "the defense of one theory usually entailed arguments against all others." (page 267). Noll cites Presbyterian theologians, such as Charles Hodge, as being major players in the game of Zero Sum Theology theological one-upmanship.

Presbyterian missionaries first arrived in Siam in 1840, established a permanent station in Bangkok in 1847, and founded the work in Chiang Mai in 1867. The leading clergy members of the two Presbyterian Missions, the Siam and Laos Missions, were men trained in the Era of Zero Sum Theology, and they brought the instincts for theological battle with them to the field. Their records indicate a sure tendency over the whole course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth to apply those instincts to theological reflection in Siam. Among their targets were Animists, Buddhists, Baptists, Catholics, and errant members of their own churches; their way of "doing theology" is one important source of contemporary Thai Protestant theology in Thailand. With that in mind, it is important to ponder Nolls' assessment that the antebellum era was the "greatest, but also the most self-destructive, era of productive Christian theology in the nation's history."

The following paragraph from Nicholas Tarling puts 19th century Thai church history into its largest global and Southeast Asian regional setting. It reminds us that everything was fluid, changing, and multi-polar in the years after 1800. Tarling writes,

"From the late eighteenth century, the involvement with Europeans, with things and ideas European, deepened and affected the whole of Southeast Asia; but it varied in intensity from people to people and from place to place; it increased through time but at no constant pace; and it took differing forms. Furthermore, it was always a matter, to a greater or lesser degree of interaction, rather than simply of Western initiative or challenge and indigenous response. Nor were Western initiatives and challenges the only ones. Others came to Southeast Asia, too, though in some sense they themselves had already been stimulated by the Western ones. Islam, for example, had increased its hold on archipelagic Southeast Asia in the preceding period of European enterprise: linked more closely with its homeland by better communications in the nineteenth century, it was deeply involved in many of the social and political changes which that region now underwent."

Source: Tarling, Nicholas. "The Establishment of Colonial Regimes." In The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. Vol. 3, From c. 1800 to the 1930s, edited by Nicholas Tarling, 1-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, page 1.

The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) translation of Zechariah 8:2 raises a number of fascinating theological issues. That translation reads, "Yahweh Sabaoth says this: I have been burning with jealousy for Zion, with furious jealousy for her sake." Whether in a contemporary Thai or Western religious context, the assertion that God experiences burning emotions of anger and jealousy is hard to accept. The Thai religious agenda generally seeks to douse the fires of burning emotions through the denial of the reality of a "self" while the Western religious project proposes that the way of salvation is one of self-denying service for a Greater Cause. Both contexts generally view jealousy and anger as dangerous emotions that ensnare people in self-centeredness and blind them to the Way.

The biblical premise that God feels intense emotions of jealousy and anger presents us with an opportunity to rethink the relationship of negative emotions, so called, to our humanity. It suggests that there is a form of jealousy and a kind of anger that is consistent with a life of religious faith. From a Christian perspective, God created us with these emotions, which we are constrained by the authority of the Genesis creation myths to accept as good. In this framework, the Christian faith does not call upon the faithful to give up themselves but rather to reorient self to God; and it is possible for such a reoriented self to feel jealousy that is free of self-aggrandizement and anger that is free of fearful self-importance.

The problem, of course, is that we consistently debase our God-given emotions by reorienting them to our self. We do this with emotions such as love and compassion just as much as we do with anger and jealousy. That tendency towards corrupt emotions does not mean we should not feel anger or jealousy any more than