306 Book Reviews / Mission Studies 25 (2008) 273–314

God’s Mission in Asia: A Comparative and Contextual Study of This-Worldly Holiness and the
Theology of Missio Dei in M. M. Thomas and C. S. Song. By Ken Christoph Miyamoto.
American Society of Missiology Monograph Series, Pickwick Publications, Eugene, Ore-
gon, USA 2007. Pp. ix + 233. $27.00.

This erudite but readable book gives a detailed account of the post-1948 developments
stemming from the 1910 Edinburgh meeting through the Life and Work movement, and
especially of its links with the International Missionary Council and successor bodies
within the World Council of Churches (WCC). The author focuses on the language of
missio Dei and the Asian context of the notion of “this-worldly holiness,” especially in the
work of two distinguished Asian theologians, M. M. Thomas of India and C. S. Song of
Taiwan, and through them on what is now the Christian Conference of Asia (CCA).
Miyamoto received his doctorate in Mission and Ecumenics from Princeton Theological
Seminary, and is currently Associate Professor of Christian Studies at Kobe Shoin Women’s
University, Kobe, Japan. He is a skilled interpreter of the history and theology of the ecu-
menical movement, particularly in its relationship to mission. He guides the reader, for
example, through the story of the Uppsala Assembly of 1968, with its insistence that the
world should set the agenda for the Church, and it is in this context that the emergence of
the missio Dei concept is explored, with its concentration on a world-centric rather than a
Church-centric view of mission.
The first three chapters set the historical scene for the detailed study of Thomas and
Song, both closely associated with the WCC and the CCA. We see how Thomas moved
from strong evangelical beginnings in the Mar Thoma Church through Barthian neo-
orthodoxy and active commitment to the anti-colonial struggle, to commitment to “nation-
building” in independent India, and then to the battle for justice for the oppressed, centered
today on the dalit movement.
Miyamoto’s genealogical account of the lineage of indigenization in missiology, from
contextualization to “solidarity with disfavored strata and groups,” is helpful. Western read-
ers may feel that his very proper concentration on Asia leads him to downplay the signifi-
cance of twentieth-century liberation theology, let alone earlier enterprises like those of the
Wesleys or William Booth, who took the Gospel to working class Britain. But he is surely
right, in his concluding paragraph (201), to note the significance of the Student Christian
Movement as a vital tradition that held together East with West, diakonia with kerygma,
and in which both Thomas and Song were much involved.
Miyamoto’s study, limited in scope as it necessarily is, suffers from the absence of discus-
sion of issues arising from the Faith and Order movement. There are, for example, several
tantalizing uses of the term “discernment” (50, 66, 201), in the discerning which of God’s
interventions in “the world” are soteriologically significant. (I wondered if this was compa-
rable to the Indian term viveka.) How does the assertion that God is present in the suffer-
ings of the oppressed (dalit) actually become “good news to the poor”? The answer probably
lies in Thomas’ conviction that “redemption” (his term), like “new humanity,” must some-
how be “in Christ.” So too Song, while interpreting creation itself as redemption, discerns
God’s redeeming nature in the incarnation.
This is a book that should prove helpful in the process leading up to “Edinburgh II” in
2010. Yet its very excellence in exploring the Life and Work, missio Dei, this-worldly holi-

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/157338308X365585

 Book Reviews / Mission Studies 25 (2008) 273–314 307

ness tradition of ecumenism points to the necessity at Edinburgh II of reuniting this strand
with that of Faith and Order – including ecclesiology and worship.

Robin Boyd
Edinburgh, Scotland