Though the evangelical movement has become a diverse, worldwide movement, there has been consistency in attitudes toward culture. Throughout their history evangelicals have displayed ambivalence toward their cultural context. The world was either something to be won over in the name of Christ, or to be avoided as a source of temptation, but it could also represent a resource to be exploited in pursuit of their evangelical calling. As a result, their relationship with culture has been ambiguous, marked more often by vigorous campaigns against particular evils believed to threaten Christian living - whether liquor, polygamy or slavery, or, more recently, abortion and gay marriage - than by thoughtful engagement with the complexities of culture. In this respect views of culture reflect the unique historical and theological character of the movement, with its roots in the Reformation, and the revival and missionary movements emanating from Europe and North America. In this article we will use “culture” to refer to artifacts, practices, and institutions by which a people expresses its identity; in theological terms, what humans make of God's good creation.

It is a well-known historical fact that the modern Latin American nations came into existence under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church. Only a year after the “discovery of America” by Christopher Columbus on 12 October 1492, the cross and the sword were officially joined together to carry out the spiritual and military conquest of the New World for the Roman Pontiff and the Spanish king and queen. More than the Christian faith as such, what the Spanish and later the Portuguese conquistadores brought to these lands was the Roman Catholic Church - a hierarchical religious structure closely associated with the state. As John A. Crow has put it,

There is no exaggeration in saying that this “Church-State type of authoritarian absolutism” became the most decisive factor in the history of Latin America for almost five hundred years, not only politically and religiously, but also socially, culturally, and economically.

Discussion of E. M. Forster and modernism might well be brief. Forster was scarcely a modernist. His career followed a path distinct from those of the major modernist writers, coming close only in A Passage to India to the innovative forms distinguishing their writing. Forster can nevertheless be usefully considered - as a novelist and a critic - alongside modernists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. Gaps between his writing and theirs open worthwhile lines of enquiry about the nature of each - in particular, about the pace and enthusiasm with which different authors altered their strategies in response to the challenges of modernity experienced early in the twentieth century.

Forster summarised these challenges in a lecture delivered in 1944. Assessing 'English Prose between 1918 and 1939', he emphasised the influence of 'a huge economic movement which has been taking the whole world, Great Britain included, from agriculture towards industrialism' - a process, he explains, which 'began about a hundred and fifty years ago'. '[P]ersonally, I hate it', he adds. 'So I imagine do most writers' (TCD, p. 267). Other critics were offering similar historical perspectives around the same time. Forster's 'huge economic movement' corresponds closely with the 'project of modernity' - based on faiths in reason, technology, progress, and industry - which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer influentially defined in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), retracing its origins to Enlightenment thinking and the Industrial Revolution in the later eighteenth century.

INTRODUCTION

The approach adopted in this essay is largely descriptive, looking at some distinctive features of Asian evangelicalism. But in order to flesh out these features, some comparison and contrast will be made with its older, Western counterpart on the one hand and with non-evangelical expressions of Protestant Christianity in Asia on the other.

The terms “evangelical” and “theology” in the title as understood in the West cannot be transferred into Asia without further qualifications. This is because, as Paul Freston has pointed out, evangelicalism in the non-Western world cannot be defined in strictly institutional terms and in the way it is understood in the West. One could still use a “working definition” like David Bebbington's which highlights four features: conversionism (the belief that lives can be changed), activism (the expression of the gospel in some form of effort, especially in mission and evangelism), biblicism (a particular regard for the Bible as a source and norm for truth), and crucicentrism (a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross). But these beliefs are much more widespread in Asia. There is, of course, an Asian evangelicalism that corresponds closely to its Western forms, including various national “evangelical fellowships” which maintain links with similar fellowships elsewhere under the umbrella of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), and regional theological fraternities affiliated with the WEA Theological Commission. In Asia, the latter is represented by the Asia Theological Association (ATA).

When A Passage to India was published in 1924, Forster feared - rightly - that it would be his last novel. He was only forty-five, in good health, and, as it turned out, still had half his life ahead of him, during most of which he remained an active man of letters. The central question for his literary biography, then, is why he stopped writing novels so early in his career. He didn't stop writing. But his subsequent work takes other forms: stories, essays, reviews, broadcasts, lectures. The only works of length, apart from essay collections, that he published after the 1920s were his three biographical books, yet he thought all this writing less significant than his novels, and continually worried that his creativity had dried up. But while it is true that he was never to recapture the incandescence of his Edwardian novels, his biographical writing is extraordinarily good; and his shift towards life-writing has its own significances, not least for the understanding of his own biography.

After he had finished his last book, in 1955, Forster asked Leonard Woolf what he might write next. Woolf, whose thoughts were perhaps already turning toward the five-volume autobiography that would prove his magnum opus, advised Forster to write his autobiography. But, as P. N. Furbank explains, it was advice Forster felt he couldn't take: 'He thought he might be able to handle isolated incidents but he did not understand his own life sufficiently to describe it as a whole.' This striking - and entirely characteristic - self-deprecation was perhaps a smokescreen, obscuring what Forster understood perfectly: that a homosexual life could not be described fully in print in the 1950s; perhaps even that the criminalisation of homosexuality had necessitated his living his life in a fragmentary way.

When Maurice, the latecomer among Forster's completed novels, was published posthumously in 1971, many reviewers saw the book as a failure. Time and again the text was seen as 'simple' and dated in its treatment of homosexuality. Often behind the negative assessment of the novel was the view that a text addressing male-male desire could not be good art. Philip Toynbee, writing in the Observer, found Maurice 'novelettish, ill-written, humourless and deeply embarrassing'. He argued that among the 'special restraints' that made Forster's other novels a success was that 'he should not express his homosexual feelings directly'. Forster's talents were best confined by a 'millrace', and it was the very channelling of his energies through the exclusion of homosexuality that gave his other work its force. For Toynbee, homosexual experience was best left on the bank, outside representation and the creative process. Subsequent critics reacted strongly to the initial reception to the novel, exploring it in the context of 1913-14, when it was first drafted. However, the view of the text as straightforward and unsophisticated has remained in place. It is that position that I want to challenge here, and to make the case for Maurice as a thoughtful adaptation of the novel form to the subject matter and a strong intervention in debates of the time.

Maurice can be seen as highly conventional, combining two of the main masterplots of the novel as a genre, the Bildungsroman and the 'marriage plot'. It is, though, also a new departure for the novel, as Forster had to meet the technical challenge of writing a Bildungsroman where the result of the protagonist's engagement with society is the decision to live outside it, and a 'marriage plot' where the lovers are two men.

This chapter examines the conscious and academic theologizing done by evangelicals on the African continent. The purpose thus stated seeks to specify the nature of the present study on one hand and, on the other hand, it acknowledges the fact that conscious academic theology is not necessarily the same as the theology lived and practiced by Christians on a daily basis, whether in Africa or elsewhere in the world. As we will see in the following pages, one needs to keep in mind the distinction between academic and lived theology as one explores evangelical theology in an African context. In light of the foregoing, then, I will first make some brief remarks on the words evangelicalism, theology, and African. Secondly, I will describe the background of contemporary Christian conscious theologizing in Africa. Thirdly, I will review the role of Byang Kato in determining the specificity of evangelical theology in Africa. This will bring us to the concluding section where the status of current concerns in evangelical theologizing in the continent will be examined.

Introduction

A Passage to India is the most controversial of Forster's novels. The majority of critics regard it as his finest work yet no consensus has emerged about its meanings, partly because the book has proven highly responsive to so many approaches. Despite literary criticism's changing focal points over the decades, from politics and spirituality through to ethnicity and sexuality, it has always kept A Passage to India firmly in its sights because Forster's novel offers fertile ground for the broadest range of analytical and theoretical perspectives. This, in turn, is precisely because of the narrative's simultaneous breadth of reference and radical indeterminacy.

After Howards End, and after producing four novels in six years, Forster appeared to the general reading public to lie largely dormant for fourteen years, until A Passage to India appeared in 1924. Yet, in that time, despite the intervention of the war years, he had published three books: The Celestial Omnibus (1911), Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922), and Pharos and Pharillon (1923), a book of literary and historical sketches. He had also finished a play, 'The Heart of Bosnia', written Maurice, and begun another novel ('Arctic Summer') which he was never to finish, exploring friendship and the Renaissance ideal of the 'complete' individual. Most importantly for A Passage to India, during these years Forster travelled twice to India. He visited the subcontinent for the first time in October 1912 with R. C. Trevelyan and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. On setting out, Forster conjectured whether his trip might kill off his projected novel and indeed it did contribute to that book's termination. But it led to two other novels, both of which, like the aborted 'Arctic Summer', centred on the subject of friendship.

“Who” and “what” is a human person? Depending on which pronoun takes priority, one can answer the “human question” scientifically, philosophically, theologically, morally, socially, or with a combination thereof. These modes of inquiry shape the way a given society negotiates what constitutes human being and personhood. In the process, society arbitrarily engages in “cultural shadow work.” It renegotiates the social order through continually redefining the “human being” and ends up shaping a new culture based on a particular set of values.

Although we have forever been asking and defining what it means to be human, the modern-postmodern shift to the human subject as the source and norm for “truth” has ultimately placed humanity (anthropology) at the center of every inquiry. While great strides have been made in understanding human being and personhood, new definitions arise out of new contexts. Present inconsistencies and ambiguities mean that there exist side by side rampant individualism and “communal identity,” abortion and assisted reproductive technologies, genetic engineering and euthanasia, without any sense of underlying discontinuity. This generally works to the advantage of those with the greatest amount of influence or the most to gain, often at the expense rather than on behalf of, “the other.”

Certain streams of contemporary thought emphasize a theological anthropology “from below,” using human experience as the source and criterion to determine divine reality, and encouraging the “construction” of one's own reality as “personal narrative.” Christian anthropology, however, does not start with “the phenomenon of human being” as a societal, individual, or even a theological construct. It starts with God.

When Christmas Day fell on a Sunday in 2005, a minor religious and cultural furor erupted, as reported by American news organizations, when several leading evangelical churches decided to cancel their Sunday morning worship services. This was because Christmas was a “family day,” said church spokespersons. One leader observed that it would not be “convenient” for parents to have to deal with excitable children, have Christmas breakfast, and then change clothes and come to church. After all, people could go to one of the scheduled Christmas Eve services - there was nothing special about Sunday.

What aroused the most comment on this story was the fact that these were evangelical churches-accustomed to bearing the torch of conserving cultural and religious traditions, not discarding them. So, this event was a particular shock to cultural observers. But what was also interesting, yet unacknowledged by editorialists on the front pages of newspapers, was the ecclesiology that such an action revealed, at least among American evangelicals.

This chapter will explore this broad question via historical, descriptive, and constructive approaches. I will propose a version of a renewed evangelical ecclesiology that has continuity with evangelical history and articulates both a broad theological vision and practical fruitfulness.

It is possible to tell the story of the British evangelical movement as beginning with a theological discovery. The tale of John Wesley's quest for assurance, and his discovery of the Reformation doctrine of salvation sola fide, remains iconic and, with the heart “strangely warmed” from trusting Christ alone for forgiveness, these experiences remain central to evangelical theology and culture alike. Evangelicalism, at least in its British formulations, however, has never particularly been a movement that is driven by, or even possessed of, a distinctive theology, a point made particularly clear by considering the wider European context. Wesley's evangelical conversion took place at a Moravian meeting, after all, listening to a reading from Luther. Yet Moravians, even Böhler's societies, and Lutherans, even Pietistic ones, are not generally included under the heading “evangelical.” Further, if the doctrine of salvation by faith alone is to be the distinctive mark, then there were many teaching that doctrine in England in Wesley's day, often with far more theological sophistication than any evangelical in eighteenth-century Britain, and these were sharply opposed to the new movement.

The two most significant recent historians of evangelicalism, David Bebbington and Mark Noll, have defined the movement in non-theological ways. Noll focuses on social context and contacts: evangelicalism is primarily a network, or a series of networks, with individuals identified as belonging to the movement if they are a part of the network. Bebbington’s famous fourfold definition, that evangelicals are cross-centred, conversionist, biblicist, and activist, implies some theological beliefs, but there is no sense in which there is a distinctive theology that is evangelical, and only evangelical. In its early expressions in Britain at least, evangelicalism was a movement defined by relationships and activities at least as much as by theology.

Along with the Scripture principle, the axiom of solus Christus has been a hallmark of theologies in the Reformation tradition. The first indicates the priority of divine revelation over tradition, speculation, or immediate experience; the second acknowledges the sovereignty of divine grace in incarnation and redemption over against apparently synergistic conceptions of its mediation through church, sacrament, or the moral acts of Christian existence. The perfection of Christ - the integrity and completeness of his person as the God-man, and the non-transferability of his offices - is Christologically and soteriologically fundamental. For much of Protestant theological history, the incarnational and Trinitarian metaphysics underpinning these commitments were taken for granted as non-controversial. In the post-Reformation confessional period, disagreements emerged between Lutheran and Reformed over the relation of the divine and human natures of the incarnate one, partly in relation to eucharistic controversies over the ubiquity of Christ's humanity. Lutherans emphasized that the humanity of the ascended Christ shares the divine property of omnipresence, and so is present in the eucharistic elements, whereas the Reformed stressed that his humanity is localized in heaven, not in the sacrament, and that his finite human nature is incapable of containing the infinite divine Word. But both confessions remained firmly attached to the Christological orthodoxy articulated at the Council of Chalcedon: in the one person Jesus Christ fullness of deity and fullness of humanity are united, the union of the natures being such that they can neither be divided nor confused.

Following his third and final visit to India during the last three months of 1945, Forster reflected on the increasing politicisation he had found among the educated class of a country which was on the brink of winning independence from Britain. This change appears to be behind an undercurrent of regret that runs through his essay, 'India Again', subsequently incorporated into Two Cheers for Democracy. Yet although the Indians he met on this trip were more interested in discussing politics than art for its own sake as Forster would have preferred, nevertheless he comments that beneath this educated crust:

In this statement Forster acknowledges that notions of what makes for the 'authentic' India (and authentic Indians) are sites of political controversy. He also demonstrates his own acute consciousness of the pitfalls of the tradition of writing and thinking about India of which his most famous novel, A Passage to India, is a part. If Passage is the great anti-colonial statement in English fiction of the first half of the twentieth century, and Forster the great debunker of imperial pomposity, then we can gain a stronger sense of his unfolding relationship with India, of which the novel records only a fragment, by paying attention to some of his other utterances on India.

Ask the man on the street what comes to mind when you mention 'Shakespeare', and the chances are that he will reply, 'to be, or not to be'. We have come to associate Shakespeare with tragedy, especially with Hamlet, and in fact the first century of Shakespeare on film began with Hamlet, in the form of a five-minute film directed by Maurice Clément and shown at the Paris Exhibition in 1900. It starred Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet and Pierre Magnier as Laertes. The predominance of the tragedies on screen until 1990 is confirmed by Kenneth Rothwell’s and Annabelle Melzer’s definitive filmography and videography that lists 184 entries for Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, i.e. 27 per cent of the total entries, even though they comprise only 8 per cent of Shakespeare’s work. Not surprisingly the film adaptations of the tragedies have received the most attention from (predominantly male) film critics as well. How and why Shakespearean tragedy on film has been able to transcend the temporal, national, ideological and cultural boundaries of Elizabethan England, even without Shakespeare’s language, will be the question I am going to pursue.

'Who’s there?': the question of Fortinbras Hamlet opens with a question, 'Who’s there?' and by the the time the play has ended, more questions have been raised than answered. The opening question also points to the end of the play when Fortinbras enters to clear the stage of carnage and assume the throne as Hamlet’s successor. It suggests that there is a circularity in the play and that Fortinbras may have been more important to Shakespeare than he has been to some directors.

Cinema is a 'looking' medium that writes its texts in visual language, and cinema has always been interested in looking at women. My account of Shakespeare’s women on film wants to signal this interest from the beginning by remembering Bogart’s 'Here’s lookin' at you kid' in Casablanca, not just because that line, which cues the film’s repeated instances of lingering focus on Bergman’s face, defines a whole genre of cinematic looking, but also because it has achieved epigrammatic status independent of the film. It’s become a slogan for much wider cultural habits that may have originated in films like Casablanca but now circulate in culture at large, reproducing cinema’s looking practices in real life. The movies, in short, have taught us how to look at each other. To see how cinema has looked at Shakespeare’s women, I want to begin with an instance of subversive looking: a wink, the one Mary Pickford’s Kate aims sideways out of the frame at the end of The Taming of the Shrew, caught, in the next shot, by her sullen sister Bianca, whom it instantly transforms into a smiling conspirator. That wink rewrites Shakespeare’s ending. But more importantly, it inserts into this Shrew a way of looking that is going to signify for the future of Shakespeare’s women on film. Pickford’s 1929 Shrew, directed by Sam Taylor, was the first 'talkie' Shakespeare, a production gamble she financed with both her money and celebrity as 'America’s Sweetheart': she was the most famous and highly paid face in the world and half of an internationally recognised 'star couple'.