Needed: Integrative Theology

As I fly home, I want to write down a few reflections on my time while the memories are still fresh. It’s been a privilege to have had these two weeks. I have enjoyed my time in Indonesia very much. My hosts in both places were very kind and went out of their way time and again for me. Indonesia reminds me of South India and Sri Lanka with its tropical vegetation and hot and humid climate. The people are friendly, always ready to smile, and a smile goes a long way in Indonesia: they say you will be forgiven many a mistake with a smile and a simple ‘sorry’. A ‘nice’ person is a good person. I wonder how that affects notions of sin and guilt, justice, crime and punishment.

Bandung Theological Seminary was founded, with the help of missionaries, by leaders of churches with a Reformed emphasis. These churches are dominated by Chinese, who form a significant proportion of the evangelical movement in the archipelago. My impression was that the seminary and denomination are well-heeled, being sponsored by wealthy businessmen. The students are well educated, their facility in English giving them unparalleled access to theological resources in their 60,000-volume library. Some of the students in my class are in ministries in which they might find it hard to benefit from my teaching, struggling with nominalism and apathy in the Christian community, rather than the joys and complexities of interaction with those of other traditions. Other students, however, seemed to find the challenge to their theological paradigm of religious pluralism very stimulating, and are considering how it might impact their ministries, especially among the Majority community and modern, secularised city dwellers.

Many of the students at ETSI in Yogyakarta, by contrast, come from far-flung, technologically less developed islands, with, I was informed, a corresponding inferiority complex. Relationships between faculty members struck me as very warm and collegial. I had lunch with the principal and two other faculty members one day. All three had turned to Christ out of Islam in their youth, when to do so did not usually carry with it the same social stigma as it does today (not that it was easy for them). All had gone through the rigorous system of the seminary and had the stories to share. Many of them had done their PhDs in American seminaries, with Dallas having quite an influence.

My approach to the course in both institutions was to give a lesson in contextual theologizing – that is, reflecting critically on modern thinking as it is expressed in both the West, from where the tradition of academic theology has spread across the world, and in Indonesia, where the national ideology of Pancasila stands over its six official ‘religions’.

Many seemed to find my approach stimulating. I was told that the leadership of the seminary in Bandung had revised the curriculum in order to get the students to think theologically on current societal issues but have found it difficult to recruit teachers. The lecturers are happy to teach systematic theology (both Berkhof and Ryrie are in Indonesian) or books of the Bible but don’t want to take on the challenge of more integrative courses. This fits in with some previous encounters with theological education in Asia. Taking on a new module and preparing it from scratch demands a lot more thought than going through notes from one’s own training. But the more I learned about the religious context in Indonesia, the more concerned I became that even seminary lecturers seem not to want to do the creative work. The missiological dimension is crucial in this. If we are going to reach the large number of people who have little or no access to the gospel, including in the Indonesian archipelago, we must do the hard work. Neither Berkhoff nor Ryrie, I ventured to guess, had much to say about honouring ancestors, spirit possession, or idolatry.