Review of: Joh, W Anne. Heart of the cross by GERARD HALL, S.M.

HEART OF THE CROSS: A POSTCOLONIAL CHRISTOLOGY. By W. Anne Joh. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2006. Pp. 192. $24.95.
Theological Studies 68 no 3 S 2007, p 704-705. ISSN: 0040-5639. Related Record Number: ATLA0001599828
Review of: Joh, W Anne. Heart of the cross. 192 p. Louisville, Ky : Westminster John Knox, 2006.


While this study, through the use of postcolonial theory, poststructuralist psychoanalysis, and political-liberationist-feminist hermeneutics, provides insight into the theology of the cross, it achieves its distinctiveness as a narrative theology by its appeal to Asian/Korean American experience. Using Korean notions of jeong (agape, eros, filial love, compassion, empathy,
solidarity, relationality) and han (ruptured heart, original wound, world sorrow, personal and collective experience of alienation), Joh establishes
categories (and stories) with which she engages in a debate with traditional and contemporary theologies of the cross. Following Moltmann, J. wants to reclaim the cross as a "signifier of redemptive agency" (118), a claim she finds wanting in the writings of feminist scholars (100). At the same time, she stands with the feminist critique of "traditional interpretations of the cross" (118), a critique from
BOOK REVIEWS 705 which Moltmann's "hierarchical" trinitarian Christology is not immune (81). A new theology of the cross beckons. J. interprets the cross as performing a double-gesture: it pays homage to patriarchal concepts of power and obedience while it simultaneously subverts
these very same powers (76). Postcolonial theories—focusing on the politics of identity and difference, along with notions of "hybridity," "mimicry,"
and "interstitial third space,"—provide contours for presenting this double-gesture of the cross, an action that is profoundly subversive. Especially
productive in this discussion is Julia Kristeva's notion of the "abject" (Powers of Horror [1982]) for analyzing the dynamics of oppression. J. argues that "abjection on the cross has been haunting the edges of doctrinal theology" (92). For Kristeva, abjection and love belong together just as, for J., han and jeong are "two different sides of the same heart" (111). The subversive power of the cross is then found not in the obliteration of the abject (as in traditional theology), but in its return, mimicking and symbolizing
"the confrontation between the logic of love and the logic of violence" (114). If readers are left wondering where the redemptive power of the cross resides, J.'s final chapter seeks to answer this in terms of a Christology of jeong that is both personal and political. Jesus' own praxis of jeong is outlined with reference to the Buddhist concept of the no-self; indeed, "Jesus is awakened to no-self through jeong" (123). There is here, no doubt, a basis for developing a genuinely Asian Christology that juxtaposes rather than opposes han and love, or the cross and resurrection. This creative scholarship provides a Christology especially relevant to a world in which oppressed and oppressor, love and hate, self and other, are interpreted in oppositional categories that privilege patriarchal dominance in its various forms. As J. informs us, "jeong never collapses the space between the I and the other" (127). It retrieves the cross as a subversive power through which our modes of solidarity and relationality can be critiqued and even transformed. Although privileging the subversive power of the cross, J. also wishes to establish its postcolonial redemptive potential. To this end, conversation with contemporary theologians writing on the cross and redemption—such as René Girard, James Alison, Stephen Fin-Ian, and S. Mark Heim—would provide deeper grounding for her tantalizing,
if somewhat technical, thesis. Australian Catholic University, Brisbane GERARD HALL, S.M.