International Conference on Religion and Globalization

International Conference on Religion and Globalization

[July 28-Aug. 2, 2003, Payap University, Chiang Mai, Thailand]
Paper: “The Encounter of Missionary Christianity with Resurgent Buddhism
in Post-colonial Myanmar”

Samuel Ngun Ling

The Problem: Myanmar as a Unique Context
Myanmar is a unique country in Southeast Asia – unique not in terms of modern
techno-economic development but in terms of what Kosuke Koyama once called, the
“Burmese way to loneliness.”1 Added to this uniqueness is the pluralistic structure of
the Burmese society which is uniquely known in history as a perfect ethnological
museum,2 or a melting pot.3 The present government has officially declared that there
are 135 ethnic groups living in the country, of which the eight major ethnic groups are
Burman, Kayin, Kachin, Chin, Kayah, Mon, Rakhine and Shan. The population of the
country at present is estimated to be about 50 million, though there was no general
census since 1983. Buddhism is believed to be practiced by 89.3 percent of the
population whereas Christianity is practiced by 5.6 percent, Islam by 3.8 percent,
Hinduism by 0.5 percent and primal religions (animism) by 0.2 percent respectively.4
The amalgamated existence of such multi-religio-cultural diversities demonstrates the
interwoven nature of a community life that is also common among people in other
Asian and African countries. The net result of such amalgamated cultural living is on
the one hand a blessing for the people of the country as it makes the country more
colorful and even unique but on the other hand it is a sort of problem as it makes
solidarity of the people more difficult, if not impossible. There are therefore more or
less both problems and challenges as these ways of multi-religio-cultural living are put
together into a practical reality.
To look at such a religiously pluralistic society as Myanmar with a Christian
theologian’s eyes, one can easily recognize it as a unique place where world’s major
religions come together for a union of different ethnic groups and cultures. For
Christians, it is a unique inter-religious locus where two great world faiths (Christianity
and Buddhism) and two great world cultures (East and West) meet and interact.
Historically speaking, Buddhism in Myanmar, especially after the post-colonial period,
can be called a resurgent Buddhism because of its closer and stronger connections with
the transitory socio-political powers. Why was and is this Buddhism resurgent? The
answer is because of its compartmentalized socio-political roles and power, since the
colonial period up to the present, in a chain of Burmese nationalist, socialist and
militarist (SLORC & SPRC) political movements. The present government repeatedly
makes the claim that there is freedom of worship and no discrimination on religious
grounds.5 But Buddhism, which before was a state favored religion, is now not only
reaffirmed by the present government, but enjoys a special distinctiveness or status6
1Douglas J. Elwood, ed., What Asian Christians are Thinking (Quezon city: New Day
Publishers, 1976), 29. Here Kosuke Koyama indirectly referred to the ‘Burmese way to Socialism’ which
was the country’s one party ideology.
2Taw Sein Ko, Burmese Sketches, vol. II, (Rangoon: British Burma Press, 1920), pp. 332-325
3 H.N.C.Stevenson, The Hill People of Burma, Pamphlet. No. 6, (New York: Longmans Green
and Co., 1944), 5.
4 Ministry of Information, Union of Myanmar, Myanmar: Facts and Figures 2002 (March,
2002), p. 4-5.
5The New Light of Myanmar (English), (January 5, 2003), 9.
6Mirror (Kye-mun) Burmese Newspaper (August 20, 21, 22, 2002).
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over other religions, and has the state’s backup in all its activities. What this special
status of Buddhism means is the continuity of the socio-political power of Buddhism,
pointedly sanctioned against the freedom and movements of other religions in the
country. This ‘favored religion’ concept claims to embrace all religions in the country
so that they flourish together peacefully and harmoniously, while minimizing the
freedom of other ‘un-favored religions.’ This means no real encounter between the
‘favored-religion’ (Buddhism) and ‘un-favored religions’ such as Christianity can
happen as long as the special attention on one major religion is continued. The net
result here is that the concept of ‘favored religion’ implicitly condones the idea of
‘favored adherents’ against other adherents of un-favored religions so that this concept
brings about discrimination between religious people, at least at the individual or ethnic
level. Here lies the basic ground where the minority ethnic Christians (un-favored
adherents) and the majority Burman Buddhists (favored adherents) confronted each
other in a conflict leading to a breach of communication between them. This conflict
resulted in turn in the identity problem of a Burman Buddhist becoming Christian. For
a Burman Christian, who was converted originally from the real Burman Buddhist
background, to become a Christian is to get rid of his or her socio-cultural identity. The
reason for this is the fact that a Myanmar identity as Christian is mistakenly conceived
by the nationalist-minded Burman Buddhists as disloyal to the Buddhist society and to
the nation as well. What has happened then to the tribal people who are Buddhists or
nat (spirit) worshipers? The answer to this question is that religious identity as a
Buddhist or animist has nothing to do with one’s social identity. In addition, the
Burman Buddhists embrace primal religions like nat (spirit) worship as part of popular
Buddhism and no offense is being made to its adherents at all. Maung Htin Aung
clearly painted this image when he said, “Nat worship is part of the Buddhist faith and
the Burmese (Burman) want to worship nats without ceasing to be good Buddhists.”7
In any case, the Myanmar Buddhists, being proud of themselves as professors
and possessors of one of the world’s great faiths and cultures, Buddhism, tend to look at
Christianity and its adherents, Christians, with nationalist eyes, as indicated above, and
as alien elements connected with western cultural imperialism. Myanmar was invaded
by the British in 1825, 1852, and 1885. And the whole country became the province of
India in 1885 until 1937. She regained independence on January 4, 1948, at 4:20am8
under the leadership of General Aung San and joined the United Nations the same year
and became a member of ASEAN in 1997. The nationalistic Buddhists in Myanmar
cannot overlook the imperialist image of missionary Christianity when they come to
think of Christianity as an imported western religion being associated with the colonial
schemes and movements in the past which took the whole nation about a century to gain
a full independence. In that context, colonization made Christianity in Myanmar an
element culturally alien and socio-politically undesirable to the Myanmar Buddhist
nationalists who consider “Buddhist faith the very raison d’etre of their state.”9 Hence
this alienation and undesirability of Christianity become intensified when the post-
7Maung Htin Aung, Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism (Rangoon: Buddha Sasana Council
Press, 1959), 73-75.
8U Tun Aung Chain, “The Christian-Buddhist Encounter in Myanmar,” an unpublished lecture
given at the opening ceremony and public lecture of the Judson Research Center of the Myanmar Institute
of Theology on July 13, 2003. The choice of date and time (January 4, 4:20am) was an astrological
calculation indicating a traditionalist orientation in the post-colonial order – the link between Buddhism
and political authority, which had been disrupted during the colonial period, was restored
9G.E, Harvey, British Rule in Burma, 1824-1942 (London, 1946), 25-26.
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independence custodians and protectors of Buddhism, the monks and the rulers,10
enviously saw the rapid growth of the Christian churches and the mushrooming of
Christian denominations, institutes and organizations both in the rural and urban areas
of Myanmar in the midst of various political restrictions and religious discriminations
against them in recent years. In such a restricted and a suspicion-filled situation,
Christian openness to their non-Christian neighbors and access to their own religious
freedom has often been limited or even ignored because of fears of ethnic Christian (unfavored
adherents) conflicts with the major Buddhist group (favored adherents) and
their possible political consequences. The inter-faith activities are therefore carried out
only in a very limited measure and sensitive way in the form of ‘person to person’ or
group to group relationships.
The Challenges: The Church Situation
The church life in Myanmar is predominantly western-oriented, especially in its
ways of God-talk (theology), its form of worship, its structure of church organization
(ecclesiology) and in its strategy of mission outreach (missiology). This western
orientation of church life came to Myanmar Christians not only through their
missionaries’ teachings but also through their colonial rulers, administrators, and civil
educators. The problem is that the church took shape in the image of those who
established it and administered its people. Professor Erick Sharpe, former missionary to
India, was right when he described the Burma situation several years ago as
“Christianity in Burma is tarred with a colonialist brush.”11 This ‘colonialist tar,’ which
may represent the influence of western ideals and ways of life upon the churches,
remains suspicious to the present government, and is what needs to be first of all
removed from the life of the church in Myanmar. A reason for the need to do this is
because the church in Myanmar has been and still is undergoing various political
pressures and suspicion, causing the unnecessary delays and disruptions of many church
activities. As the net result, the church growth in Myanmar continues to be looked at
enviously with suspicion and sensitivity as part of western cultural interference in the
country’s internal affairs and as being associated with the foreign missionary agencies
or churches serving as sponsoring bodies. In response to the challenges of those
political suspicions and fears and to the negative impact of both the British colonial rule
and later Burmese socialism, the Baptist churches in Myanmar have adopted the three
self-dependent principles: self-support, self-propagation and self-governance.
To do away with western ideals and accessories, the churches in Myanmar may
need to deconstruct all its western-modeled thought-forms, western-styled forms of
worship, and western-patterned structures of Christian life and then reconstruct them in
the Myanmar way with Myanmar resources. This process, already initiated under the
leadership of the so-called Myanmar Theologians Fellowship, can be called the
Myanmar-ization of Christianity because of its deconstruction and reconstruction works
that have to do with the imported missionary Christianity in a way relevant to the
religio-cultural pluralistic Myanmar context. Hence, this deconstruction and
reconstruction of missionary Christianity is a challenging theological task which the
Myanmar churches need to undertake promptly.
10John Cady, “Religion an Politics in Burma,” in The Far Eastern Quarterly, vol. xii (February,
1953, No.2), 150. During the colonial period, John Cady, one of the civil administrators, pointed out,
“The wearers of the yellow robe were proverbially the conscience of the people, the custodians of
literature and learning, the educators of youth, the champions of the moral order.”
11 Erick J. Sharpe, Faith Meets Faiths (London: SCM Press, 1977), 104.
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The most undesirable among many missionaries’ indoctrinated traditions is the
divided and discriminative trends of ‘mission fields and mission administration’ which
is part and parcel of the ‘divide and rule’ colonial policy of the British Indian Empire at
that time. These include different mission fields and missionaries of the same sending
body as well as all other mission fields and missionaries of the different denominational
mission societies and agencies in the periods between the seventeenth century and the
middle of the twentieth century. This tradition of ‘divided mission fields’ and
‘discriminative mission administration’ resulted in ‘undesirable schism’12 and
‘unjustifiable favorism.13 For instance, the missionaries concentrated only on
developing the local dialects of their missionary centers or fields into written forms and
lacked visions for the future of their evangelized people as people with identity and
unity, and have contributed to shameful and divisive competition and schism among the
regional Christian churches of different mission fields. Also fearing that they would
have no influence in society, if Christianity were represented overwhelmingly by the
poorest and the most ignorant elements (though this really happened today), the
missionaries and mission administrators were not very enthusiastic about the growth of
Christianity among the hill-tribe people in Myanmar.14 In his recent lecture at the
Myanmar Institute of Theology, Simon Pau Khan En, a professor of Ecumenics at the
said Institute, explained how those diverse mission traditions of the western churches
have divided their adherents and churches in Myanmar when he said, “Diverse church
traditions thus become divisive factors for the churches in Myanmar.”15 The situation
shown to us by Simon Pau Khan En here is a ‘divided trend’ that originated in the west
and that flows down from the west to us through different channels of mission agencies.
The divided churches irrespective of denominations, including para-churches, have
therefore proved the fact that unity or solidarity means little or nothing to these
churches because they are already divided among themselves, following the divided
streams of western mission traditions. The ecumenical call for unity is hence a
demanding challenge for all the churches and denominations of Myanmar today.
Without solidarity among the churches and denominations themselves, the witness of
the church to the Buddhist neighbors will not be effective and successful. Hence, to
strive for solidarity between churches and denominations of different mission traditions
has become one of the great ecumenical challenges for doing theology in Myanmar.
Theological Challenges
There is no doubt that the life and works of missionaries, particularly of
Adoniram Judson, the first American Baptist missionary to Myanmar, dominated
whatever theological thinking there was among the ethnic Christians and early Burman
converts of the nineteenth century. For instance, the works of Adoniram Judson such as
12 David Lai Sum, “Naming God in Burma Today,” (D.Min. Thesis: Divinity School of the
University of Chicago, 1994), 31. Here Sum indicates that missionaries to the Chin Hills rejected use of
a Chin dialect (Falam) as a medium of instruction in all primary schools in the Chin Hills, though the
British administrators decided to do it.
13 Cung Lian Hup, “Innocent Pioneers and Their Triumphs in A Foregin Land: A Critical Look
at the American Baptist Mission in the Chin Hills (1899-1966) in Burma from a Missiological
Perspective,” (Th.D. dissertation, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, 1993). Hup shows how the
Chin Christians were neglected and ignored by the missionaries in comparison to the Burmese and the
Karens.
14Cf. Charles W. Normn, ed. Christianity in the Non-Western World (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
Prentice Hall, Inc, 1967), 52-53.
15 Simon Paul Khan En, “Solidarity Amidst Diversity,” an unpublished lecture given on MIT
Prayer Day (July 4, 2003).
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‘A Burman Liturgy’ (1829) which contains formulas of worship, a creed in twelve
articles and formulas for practical ministry and other writings16 such as ‘Golden
Balance,’ and ‘The Threefold Cord’ remain the basic theological position of both early
and present Myanmar Christians of the older school of thought, particularly of the
Baptists in Myanmar. According Kyaw Than,17 these missionary works (particularly
the 1929 liturgy and 1819 confession of the first convert, U Naw) have constituted the
very basis of Protestant theological development in Myanmar.
Theologically speaking, many Myanmar Christians are not yet mature in
theological thinking so that they follow centuries-old missionary teachings verbatim
without critical questioning and re-evaluating their contents. Being spoon-fed as such
by missionary teachings, many Christians still hold a view or thought-form that is quite
exclusive in their faith-claim especially in relation to people of other faiths.18 The
problem here is that spoon-fed spirituality produces ‘missionary compound’ mentality
and an exclusive Christian attitude - a mentality that looks only to the west for a model
of life and an attitude that makes Christians feel better than others, a holier-than-thou
attitude.19 This holier-than-thou attitude led Christians then to look at the non-
Christians and their religions with complete disdain as a bunch of hell bound people and
no worthy friends of Christians. The narrow-minded group of this type of missionary
trained Christians always point to what their missionaries told them in the past to follow
as Christians and use proof texts in the Bible which justify their exclusive theological
stand, such as a text of the Bible about not befriending unbelievers. I believe that this is
the problem not only in Myanmar but also in many parts of the world. Hence, in that
aforementioned context, the Christians are against whatever is Buddhist and do not take
sufficient notice of Buddhists as persons. Buddhists are normally viewed as objects of
the Christian mission as Pe Maung Tin, a much respected Christian former professor of
Pali in Yangon University, once pointed out, “They (missionaries) evidently came to
teach, not to learn, not to make Buddhists the object of their missionary love and
concern. Rather, the Buddhists are seen only as the object of their missionary
preaching.”20
Further, another theological challenge has to do with the Christian witness. Many
Christians in Myanmar today are not well convinced that Christian witness is not simply a
matter of imparting knowledge about the Christian faith and tradition but that it is above all a
matter of developing one’s ability to reflect theologically and critically about what is relevant to
the challenges of the context. Hence, very little attention is paid to the questions and challenges
posed by the Christian encounter with the Buddhists and Buddhist traditions they adhere to.
Again, many Christians are not well aware of the need to relate the Christian faith and practice
to the present issues of socio-politico-economic realities, though these realities are closely
linked with the Myanmar religious community life as a whole. Other theological issues that
have to be addressed doctrinally include the Christian understanding of God in personified
form, the idea of Christ’s atonement, the doctrine of salvation by faith through grace, and the
works of the Holy Spirit. These issues need to be, of course, reconceived and reinterpreted in
terms, ideas and expression understandable to the Burmese Buddhist thought-forms. In addition,
feminist and gender issues are also entering the context for further discussion.
16Francis Wayland, A Memoir of the Life and Labors of the Rev. Adoniram Judson, vol. II
(Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1853), 448-466
17Kyaw Than, “Theologizing for Selfhood and Service,” in Asian Voices in Christian Theology,
ed. G. H. Anderson, p. 56.
18Samuel Ngun Ling, “In the Midst of Golden Stupas: Revitalizing the Christian Presence in
Myanmar,” in RAYS, MIT Journal of Theology, vol.3 (February, 2002), 110-111.
19 U Kyaw Than, “Christianity, Burmese People and Burmese Culture,” (in Burmese) a paper
presented to the Third Inter-Seminary Assembly held from October 14-17, 1999 at Pyin-Oo-Lwin, p. 8
20Southeast Asia Journal of Theology, vol.3, No.2 (October, 1961), 28.
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Missiological Imperative
Turning to the issue of mission, one has to reconsider seriously what has
preconditioned the Christian mission in the past and what possible problems can
continue to persist in the future so that he or she may develop a new mission paradigm
shift that best fits today’s situation. With the aforementioned historical, socio-political
and religious conditions in mind, this new shift of mission focus demands a rethinking
of the whole mission concept – its content, its strategy and its approach. An important
question here is whether it is appropriate for the Church in Myanmar to employ the
dogmatic and missionary forms of Christian witness and mission to the Buddhists. The
answers to this question are twofold: one is because the approach used by the past
missionaries was along the narrow and exclusive line so that when the Christian mission
is carried out in that way, a direct encounter with the Buddhist mission known as the
Buddha Taungtan Tatana (Buddhist Mission to the Hill Tribes) often happens both at
local and national levels.
The second is because the works of missionaries clearly show the nature of
conquest of the people. This kind of conquest-mission, a sort of proselytized mission, is
mainly concerned about conversion, statistics and the quantitative result of mission
rather than the quality of Christian life. But the primary aim of the Christian mission is
not conquest of others but service to others. It is not to gain statistics but to serve. "For
the Son of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for
many" (Mark 10:45, RSV). Such a ‘but to serve’ type of mission cares for people
regardless of race, religion and culture. This type of mission respects all faiths whether
they are favored or un-favored by the government. We need today a mission that does
not look down on our non-Christian neighbors and that is not bent on condemning good
non-Christians to hell. The church in Myanmar does not need such a proselytized
mission that calls for the arrogant statistical conversions but it needs service mission
that is carried out with genuine Christian love and humility.
The Christians should always search for points of contact where dialogue
between religions can take place peacefully and interactively. Together with Hans
Kung who claimed, “No world peace without peace among religions, no peace among
religions without dialogue between religions, and no dialogue between the religions
without accurate knowledge of one another.”21 In Myanmar history, neither severe
confrontation nor close relationship has ever existed between the Buddhist and
Christian churches since the time of the Burmese monarchs up to this present day. The
two churches therefore coexist so distantly without interfering or cooperating in each
other’s affairs. “Worship your own god, go your own religious way” is a philosophy of
the country’s leaders. Religious interaction or dialogue is often seen as a suspicious
tool of the Christian religious conquest. Hence, the Myanmar Buddhists never felt that
they needed dialogue with Christians or mutual learning in order to enrich their
Buddhist faith. In such a context, the hope of Christian mission in Myanmar must not
be what others can do for the church but what the church can do for them. Such a new
shift of mission paradigm may require both listening and acting more than telling and
teaching. Mission must be a matter of being there and caring, instead of going there
and unloading. In fact, if the church in Myanmar really wants to be understood, it must
seek first to understand others. Only such a type of mission would be able to make the
gospel comprehensive and intelligible to people of other faiths, especially to the
Buddhists in Myanmar, and better bring them to the knowledge of Christ.
21Hans Kung, “Christianity and World Religions: Dialogue with Islam,” in Toward a Universal
Theology of Religion, ed. Leonard Swidler (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 1988), p.194.
7
Conclusion
Myanmar, known as a hermit nation, is a country where the two wheels of
Dhamma and Logos (Christ) have rolled together but peacefully at a certain distance.
Due to this reality of peaceful coexistence and lack of real encounter, the churches,
organizations and theological institutions in Myanmar have been silent theologically for
almost two centuries from early 19th century to this present day. A reason for this
theological silence, as already pointed out in the aforementioned sections, is
significantly and primarily concerned with the preconditioned spiritual inputs of the
exclusive Christian missionary teachings in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The other
reason may have to do with the local Christian communities who continued to struggle
for their own survival after 1966 when the surprised expulsion of all foreign Christian
missionaries was made without any prior reason. It was only after 1966 that the
Christian thinkers in Myanmar began to liberate their theological thinking, though slow
in pace, from the captivity of their missionary teachings to pursue the advance of a new
theological journey on their own soil and context.
In fact, any assessment of the patterns and paradigm shifts of the Christian
mission, church life and Christian theology in Myanmar will have to begin with the
analysis of those inherited missionaries’ exclusive theologies, thought-forms and
lifestyles, which still dominate and determine the manners of the church life in present
Myanmar. A question which all Myanmar Christians need to ask themselves here is: (i)
Are Myanmar Christian churches still captive to their inherited past? To say yes to this
question will mean to prove that the long theological silence of the church in Myanmar
is due to their inherited past - an ideological captivity. Nevertheless, whatever it was in
the past, any Christian theology doing in Myanmar ought to be a theology that
theologizes, interprets, reflects and understands critically ( on the basis of Critical Asian
Principle) and concretely in the situation of the present. It implies that any doing
theology in Myanmar ought to be a dialogical theology, a theology that is informed and
shaped by inter-religious experiences or a theology which is self-consciously dialogical
in content and orientation. It is imperative therefore that Myanmar Christians develop a
theology in dialogue with other faiths in order to help articulate a genuine contextual
theology out of the interfaith encounter.
Finally, the followings need to be considered seriously for doing theology in
Myanmar: (i) doing theology in Myanmar must be a theology that is critically
reconstructed in form and terms comprehensive to the Myanmar people. (ii) the
imported western ways of theological articulations that have been detached from the
real life situation of the Myanmar people need to be modified or reshaped in form and
thought applicable to the Myanmar situation. (iii) A theology developed in Myanmar
must take seriously into consideration Myanmar religio-cultural and socio-political
resources to make it sense to Myanmar people. (iv) doing theology in Myanmar cannot
be authentic unless it takes seriously into account the importance of interfaith dialogue
with peoples of different faiths especially with the adherents of Buddhist faith in
Myanmar. (v) Any doing theology in Myanmar must be redemptive or liberating than
oppressive of the people involved. The central focus should be to set at liberty the poor,
the oppressed and the marginalized to heal the broken society and to be in solidarity
with the powerless in their struggle for justice, peace and freedom. (vi) Any doing
theology in Myanmar must enable Myanmar people to rediscover their lost identity,
human right and dignity.