Suffering, change, and marginality: Postmodern implications of Jung Young Lee's theology

The goal of this project is to systematically approach Jung Young Lee's theological imagination through exploring the themes of suffering, change and marginality in their relationship to postmodernity. Jung Young Lee's theology is the result of his spiritual journey, which is described as a contextualization and an autobiographical approach, through Japanese colonial occupation in Korea, the Korean War, and the immigration experience of marginalization in the U.S.; Lee's theology embraces both deconstruction and construction for the sake of constructing a Korean-American theology. His theological development is classified as the theology of suffering, of change, and of marginality, which are developed by the hermeneutics of reversal to reverse from impassibility to passibility, immutability to change, center ideology to marginality. Then, these kinds of reversals are oriented toward otherness and deconstruction, which is the fundamental criticism on the foundation of Western theologies. The both/and way of thinking as a concrete manifestation of the hermeneutics of reversal is yin-yang symbolism in the East Asian worldview that is the textuality of the I Ching, which is regarded as the cosmological (non-metaphysical) foundation for an Asian theology in Lee's theological imagination. The theology of change contributes to the understanding of God not from the ontotheological foundation but from the cosmological foundation for an ecumenical and ecological theology.; Lee's theological uniqueness comes out of the diversity of his theological resources of East Asian religious traditions that makes Lee's ecumenicity possible, which is described as “construction in the deconstructive age.” Consequently, Lee's theological imagination is represented by diversity, ecumenicity, openness, otherness, and inclusiveness. These characteristics of his theology are closely related to not only deconstruction and otherness of radicals of postmodernity but also circularity and construction of nostalgics. Lee's marginality requests the radical transformation to overcome center ideology, which is possible through the revolutionary change in church structure, theological education, and theological interpretation of the Bible and the history of Christianity. The radical transformation for marginality is realized through embracing the spirituality of self-emptying and servanthood in the process of marginalization.