Asian American biblical hermeneutics or Asian American biblical interpretation is the study of the interpretation of the

Christian Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...

, informed by

Asian American Asian Americans are Americans of Asian ancestry (including naturalized Americans who are immigrants from specific regions in Asia and descendants of such immigrants). Although this term had historically been used for all the indigenous people ...

history and experiences.

History

Mary F. Foskett Mary F. Foskett (born 1961) is a Chinese-American New Testament scholar. Biography An ethnic Chinese born in Japan, Foskett was adopted into a white American family. Foskett received her BA from New York University, M.Div. from Union Theological ...

traces the roots of Asian American biblical hermeneutics to the rise of Asian biblical hermeneutics, as initially developed in the 1970s and 1980s by

Kosuke Koyama was a Japanese Protestant Christian theologian. Biography Koyama was born in Tokyo in 1929, of Christian parents. He later moved to New Jersey in the United States, where he completed his B.D. at Drew Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. at Pri ...

, C. S. Song, Archie C. C. Lee, and

R. S. Sugirtharajah Rasiah S. Sugirtharajah, known as R. S. Sugirtharajah, is a biblical hermeneutics, biblical hermeneuticist and an emeritus professor at the University of Birmingham. He is known for his work in developing the field of Postcolonial theology#Biblical ...

. This gave inspiration for Asian Americans to develop their own hermeneutical methods and, in 1995, the "Asian and Asian American Biblical Studies Consultation" was established in the

Society of Biblical Literature The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), founded in 1880 as the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, is an American-based learned society dedicated to the academic study of the Bible and related ancient literature. Its current stated mis ...

. Figures such as

Gale A. Yee Gale A. Yee (; born 1949) is an American scholar of the Hebrew Bible. Her primary emphases are Postcolonial biblical criticism, postcolonial criticism, ideological criticism, and cultural criticism. She applies Feminist theology, feminist framewor ...

Kwok Pui-lan Kwok Pui-lan (, born 1952) is a Hong Kong-born feminist theologian known for her work on Asian feminist theology and postcolonial theology. Academic life and career Kwok was born in Hong Kong to Chinese parents who practiced Chinese folk religi ...

, Tat-siong Benny Liew, and Sze-kar Wan challenged the dominant historical critical approach to studying the Bible as being insufficient for addressing the ethical concerns of the present, especially as experienced by Asian Americans. This has not led to a simple rejection of historical criticism. Instead, it has tended to "deploy historical inquiry with a decidedly ethical consciousness." Since the 2000s, in the midst of

third-wave feminism Third-wave feminism is an iteration of the feminist movement that began in the early 1990s, prominent in the decades prior to the fourth wave. Grounded in the civil-rights advances of the second wave, Gen X and early Gen Y generations third-wav ...

, there has also been the rise of Asian American feminist biblical hermeneutics. Some of the first works in the area include

's ''Poor Banished Children of Eve: Woman as Evil in the Hebrew Bible'' (2003) and

's ''Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology'' (2005). There has been some challenge against Asian American biblical hermeneutics as largely being developed by mainline scholars. In 2020, Asian American

Evangelicals Evangelicalism (), also called evangelical Christianity or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide Interdenominationalism, interdenominational movement within Protestantism, Protestant Christianity that affirms the centrality of being "bor ...

established within the

Institute for Biblical Research The Institute for Biblical Research established in 1973 is "an organization of evangelical Christian scholars with specialties in Old and New Testament and in ancillary disciplines". It describes its vision as "to foster excellence in the pursuit ...

an "Asian-American Biblical Interpretation: Evangelical Voices" research group, hoping to pave new ground for Evangelical voices within the scholarship of Asian American biblical hermeneutics.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Asian American biblical hermeneutics Asian-American culture Asian-American issues Biblical exegesis Hermeneutics Christian theology of the Bible

History

See also

References