PANA Institute for Leadership Development

Concurrent Session C1 / Saturday.2008.Aug.9 / 11:00 AM / Mudd 103

Barbara Schwartz Brus, Phillips Theological Seminary, Tulsa, OK:  basbrus@gmail.com

This paper examines Shusaku Endo's Silence through the lens of Jung Young Lee's Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology. Although more than 25 years separate the writings of Japanese novelist Endo's Silence and Christian theologian Lee's Marginality, and both are written from different physical and social locations, at the heart of each text lies the common experience of marginalization. The characters in the narrative written by Endo, a Catholic in the Buddhist-Shinto milieu of Japan, reflect and act out the stages of divine marginalization presented by Lee, a Korean-American immigrant theologian. These characters discover, along with their readers, how the “tree” of Chris-tianity can take root in all soils and grows most authentically and powerfully when it is planted not at a society's center of power but in its margins.

Lee's autobiographical theology and Endo's autobiographical fiction (con)textually present a vision of Christianity that speaks to those who suffer, who are weak, who live in the margins and out of the centers of power, in an effort to draw them into the com-munity built under Jesus-Christ's love, one that is truly inclusive and one that is meant to speak to a culture outside the Western European milieu. Endo's novel also shows the aim of Lee's theology, how one trapped at the center can undergo the process of divine marginalization by imitating Jesus-Christ's love for those at the margins, a love that caused him to suffer alongside them in order to be genuinely with them.