Wrestling with the “Body of Christ” in an Age of Tribalism Towards an Asian American Hermeneutics of Dissent – Sze-kar Wan
Abstract
By examining both the deleterious effects and the strategic values of tribalism, this article compares White Evangelicals to Asian Americans, by evaluating Paul’s two conflicting images of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12. White Evangelicals impose rigid, closed identity boundaries that make it impossible for outsiders to interrogate internally produced knowledge. In contrast, Asian Americans, who are conditioned by multiethnicity, intragroup tension, and even contradiction, must enact open, malleable, and porous identity boundaries that make it necessary to dialogue with values and knowledge developed outside the strategic alliance. These two contrasting approaches to knowledge production and group identity are documented and corroborated in Paul’s two readings of the body of Christ. A hermeneutics of dissent takes due account of the intratribal tension of Asian Americans and embraces the two conflicting readings, thereby offering an alternative vision to self-enclosed, insulated tribalism
Keywords
1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12, White Evangelicals, Trump, identity, knowledge production.
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