Beyond Identity: Sang Hyun Lee’s Call to a Liminal Faith

Remarks given at the Korean Biblical Colloquium panel, AAR-SBL, 11/24/24, San Diego

Feb 12, 2025

brown wooden door beside brown wooden door — Photo by Sangga Rima Roman Selia on Unsplash

By Dr. KC Choi, Kyung-Chik Han Professor of Asian American Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary.

A Chance Encounter with Dr. Sang Hyun Lee

I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Sang Hyun Lee over twenty-five years ago when I attended a Jonathan Edwards conference in Philadelphia as an M.Div. student at Yale. Even though I was a complete stranger to him, Dr. Lee didn’t hesitate to have an extended conversation with me about my studies. My conversation with Dr. Lee is one of the few lasting memories I have of that conference.

I think it was appropriate that I met Dr. Lee at an Edwards conference. The Philadelphia conference was one of two international conferences on Edwards that Dr. Lee organized (the second one was held at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2002). Within the wider theological academy, as well as within the field of American religious history, Dr. Lee is regarded as one of the foremost authorities on Edwards’s theology and philosophy. In 2015, on the occasion of the unveiling of Dr. Lee’s portrait at Wright Library at Princeton Theological Seminary, Harry Stout, Ken Minkema, and Adrian Neele of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale wrote,

Today, Edwards enjoys unprecedented interest on a global scale, and Prof. Lee, through his dynamic portrayal and recommendation of Edwards’s thought, has played a vital role in cultivating and encouraging that level of readership and dialogue. We all owe him a great debt for the time, thought and effort he devoted to the study of Edwards….

Bridging Edwardsian Theology and Asian American Theology

Dr. Lee is well known for editing volume 21 of the Works of Jonathan Edwards, titled On Trinity, Grace, and Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), as well as editing Edwards in Our Time: Jonathan Edwards and the Shaping of American Religion, with Allen C. Guelzo (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999) and The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). His best-known work is the monograph The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), which mapped out Edwards’s dispositional ontology. As the directors of the Yale Edwards Center affirm, this book “established a paradigm for interpretation that continues to set the parameters for Edwards scholarship to this day.” My book Art and Moral Change: A Reexamination (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2024) relies on an interpretation of Edwards’s theological aesthetics that is made possible by Dr. Lee’s groundbreaking interpretation of Edwards’s dispositional ontology. The more I think about my meeting with Dr. Lee at that Edwards conference in Philadelphia, the more I realize how that one chance encounter with him was so formative of my own intellectual trajectory and lifelong fascination with Edwards’s theology.

Within the Asian American Christian community, however, Dr. Lee’s groundbreaking work on Edwards is relatively unknown. Of course, many Asian American theologians are familiar with his last major work, From a Liminal Space: An Asian American Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), and we do not typically think of this book as one about Edwards’s theology. But I want to propose that Dr. Lee’s From a Liminal Space is indeed a book about Edwards’s theology, and specifically a book about Edwards’s dispositional understanding of God in his trinitarian life. Moreover, I want to propose that because Edwards’s dispositional understanding of God is the theological frame of From a Liminal Space (and the theological occasion for his appropriation of Victor Turner’s anthropology that we find in this book), Dr. Lee’s account of Asian American theology ends up being a radically prophetic theology.

The Concept of Liminality in Dr. Lee’s Work

While I have written about my differences with Dr. Lee’s notion of cultural hybridity elsewhere (see my Disciplined by Race: Theological Ethics and the Problem of Asian American Identity [Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019], chap. 3), I have become more appreciative of Dr. Lee’s account of liminality. (So, note that I am making a conceptual distinction between hybridity and liminality, though they can be interrelated; more specifically, I am operating on the premise that cultural hybridity is one consequence of liminality but not the only one.)

Dr. Lee argued that Asian Americans ought to occupy a liminal position. This notion of liminality emerges from and is buttressed by his Edwardsean account of God as a being in infinite relational repetition ad intra and ad extra (From a Liminal Space, 52-53). What this means is that God is disposed to being in relationship within himself (i.e., Jesus and the Holy Spirit) and God is disposed to increasing his own self by being in relationship with that which is “outside” himself (i.e., creation). What this dispositional account of God means for human persons is that we are all called to participate in this divine infinite movement of relationship building or expansion.

A Call to Radical Service and Just Relationality

For Dr. Lee, Edwards’s dispositional understanding of God affirms the vocation of Christians as one of radical service to others, especially to those who are not like us. Dr. Lee’s call for Asian Americans to live in communitas underscores this vocational telos powerfully: “Asian American theology can appropriate Edwards’s notion that one’s primary task in following Christ is to help establish loving communion with others and that striving for such a goal is nothing less than a participation in God’s own work in history” (From a Liminal Space, 53). But to be disposed to the other, we need to make ourselves liminal, which means that we need to be the kind of persons who are ready and willing to relativize all those things that might make us reluctant to be in relationship with others. As Dr. Lee wrote:

One enters liminality by leaving behind for a moment his or her structure and status. Liminality is the room into which one is ready to let the other come as the other. Liminality is receptivity and thus also vulnerability. Liminality as a means of God’s expression of God’s love for the other, therefore, is also God’s “capacity” to take marginalization and even death upon Godself, as God did in Jesus the incarnate Son. (From a Liminal Space, 53)

Dr. Lee’s concept of liminality as the prerequisite for just relationality is how, I think, his Edwardseanism launches his book down a radically prophetic path. For Dr. Lee reminds us repeatedly that if Asian Americans are to be genuinely disposed to service or just relationality, then we may very well need to loosely hold onto our identities as Koreans or Asians, and even as Americans. For as important as our identities may be for our sense of self, our identities can also be one of the more significant stumbling blocks to stepping outside ourselves and being in relationship with those who are different from us. Accordingly, he implores Asian Americans to “resist an overattachment to [our ancestral] roots” (From a Liminal Space, 155), and calls for Asian American churches to be spaces where “new identities” emerge, where we reimagine ourselves as more than Asian, and more than American (From a Liminal Space, 168). For Dr. Lee, the prophetically creative potential of liminality is exemplified by the Galilean ministry of Jesus. His was a ministry marked by “leaving” his “home and close family,” thereby “cut[ting himself] off from the place that had given him his identity” (From a Liminal Space, 64). Only when we are liminal in this way can we be ready for the kind of work to which God calls us:

Jesus…expected his followers to experience this stage of liminality before an alternative place of belonging presented to them. Jesus made this demand rather sharply: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37). (From a Liminal Space, 65)

Beyond Identity: The Prophetic Challenge for Asian American Christianity

I want to make clear that Dr. Lee did not reject identities; he was not a post-racial theologian. But what Dr. Lee did reject was an Asian American Christianity that simply doubled down on its Asian Americanness without critically interrogating what it means to be Asian American.

In our desire to affirm ourselves (and to be recognized) as Asian American, we can too easily slide into affirming our cultural beliefs, practices, and experiences in ways that create moral blind spots, inhibiting our chief and only vocation “to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8, NRSV).

It is because of his Edwardsean account of a God who is disposed to ever increasing circles of communion that Dr. Lee pressed us to resist the idolatrous temptations of uncritical identities, and to constantly strive to move beyond our own parochial circles of relations, always seeking the other, the outcast, the forgotten, the least of society (Matt. 25:31-48). It is because of Dr. Lee’s Edwardseanism that he saw the potential for Asian American Christians to serve as agents for radical justice. We can be such a catalyst so long as we put ourselves in a liminal space, always at the ready to move beyond ourselves and toward the other.

Since the day I met Dr. Lee decades ago, his scholarship on Edwards has been a deep well of edification. But I still have much to learn from Dr. Lee’s pioneering interpretation of Edwards. I am especially grateful for how his Edwardseanism paves a way for us to reimagine what it means to be Asian American and Christian. And I can only hope that we all have the courage to live up to the kind of prophetic calling that Dr. Lee envisioned for Asian American Christianity.