Editor’s Note: Following Easten Law’s two introductory essays on Sinophone Theologies, Menghun Goh turns the series toward biblical reflection. Beginning with the experience of keeping multiple New Years across Kuala Lumpur, the United States, and Taiwan, he considers untranslatability not as confusion to be resolved but as a theological condition. Through Paul’s letters, “similarity-in-difference,” and the image of the body of Christ, Goh explores how Christian identity is formed in hyphenated relation rather than in isolation.
Introduction: Context as Inter-contextual
I grew up keeping more New Years than I could count. In Kuala Lumpur, the Gregorian year turned in January and the Lunar Year some weeks later, while Hari Raya arrived some eleven days earlier each year, working backward through the whole calendar in the course of a lifetime. Deepavali and Wesak kept their own reckonings. At each of these turnings, money changed hands in a small envelope: red at the Lunar New Year, green at Hari Raya, purple at Deepavali. The green envelope is an adaptation of the red, and the purple of both. Yet the red carries an old story about money that suppresses a demon, while the green refers to the Eid gift and to almsgiving; and the rule about who has outgrown receiving differs from house to house. One form received and then altered—recognizably a single practice, and not a single practice at all.
Twenty years of study and ministry in the United States added Thanksgiving and, in church, Advent. Eleven years of teaching in Taiwan added another aspect to the Lunar New Year, during which adult children give red envelopes to their parents. None of these years, and none of these envelopes, translates into the others without remainder. I have come to read that untranslatability not as confusion to be resolved but as a theological condition—one I find in Paul, and one that bears on the Sinophone theologies Easten Law, Matthew Lai, and others explored in the previous two postings.
Theological Conditions and Sources: Bible and Culture
Biblical scholars have long noted that Paul drew on the Jewish and Greco-Roman “lists of vices” for “the works of the flesh” (Galatians 5:19–21), and on the matching “lists of virtues” for “the fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22–23). He was neither adulterating the gospel (cf. Galatians 1:8) nor co-opting his neighbors’ moral vocabulary. He was working with what David Tracy calls “similarity-in-difference.” It is when we “attend to the other as other, the different as different” that the other may appear to bear “some similarity to what we have already experienced or understood” (Plurality and Ambiguity, 20)—and that singularity can then transform our sense of what is public. Stripped of particularity and opacity, the other becomes either a copy of us or a matter of indifference. Instead of being treated as an obstacle to be removed, difference becomes a prompt for inquiry and conversation, and, one hopes, for unexpected revelation.
This is why Paul’s supplements matter. To the vices he adds idolatry (Galatians 5:20), lest the believers objectify the Spirit and absolutize any value or practice. To the virtues he adds love (Galatians 5:22), lest freedom be severed from responsibility: “For you were called to freedom…only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another” (Galatians 5:13, NRSV). Neither supplement dissolves the list it joins; the tension is left standing in juxtaposition. Here, the empowerment leading to freedom that Paul describes comes not from imitating anyone but from receiving the Spirit (Galatians 3:2)—which is how a former persecutor could begin again without pretending his past away (Galatians 1:13–15).
Theological Discernments and Commitments: A Hyphenated Relationality and Heteronomy
The same priority of the Spirit shapes Paul’s account of imitation. The Thessalonians “became imitators of us and of the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 1:6), but how did the believers imitate the Lord they had never met? And how did Paul know? He discerned them receiving “the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit” in spite of persecution (1 Thessalonians 1:4–6). To imitate, and to recognize imitation, both require the Spirit’s disclosure. And because imitation is undergone rather than achieved, it does not run one way only: the Thessalonians soon “became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia” (1 Thessalonians 1:7), and Paul was among the beneficiaries. Imitation is Spirit-led, multidirectional, and in need of ongoing discernment.
This brings me to the body of Christ. “The body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12). The foot is a foot because it stands in relation to the hand, ear, eye, and nose. I would write that relation with hyphens—foot-hand-ear-eye-nose-etc.—to name its relationality and its heteronomy. The foot is recognizable as itself, yet held in a chain, so that what happens to the nose reaches the foot though the two never touch. The “etc.” is not a shrug. It marks the members yet to be named, whose arrival will alter how we understand the foot; what we had counted as similarity may then read as difference, and the reverse.
So, the hyphen in “similarity-in-difference” is indispensable. Like the “etc.,” the “-in-difference” holds a place for what we do not yet know, lest similarity be sterilized into sameness and idolized. The hyphen is an experimental space of connection and disconnection, distance and intimacy. If the body of Christ is a crucified and risen body, broken and shared at the table, then every ground we share awaits the event of “etc.”—ready to be divided, distributed, and consumed, so that the covenant Christ made, makes, and will make may be re-membered.
Conclusion
In reflecting upon the lived experience of celebrating New Year—the receiving and giving of blessings and envelopes (red-green-purple-etc.; Gregorian-lunar-Hijri-liturgical-etc.)—I find that neither chain in the hyphenated relation has a member that is the real one of which the others are variants. Each is kept by someone, and to keep one well is to be reminded that it is being kept otherwise elsewhere. So, I do not hold four identities in a stack, one authentic and three acquired. I live at the hyphens: Malaysian-Chinese-American-Taiwanese, with the “etc.” left open—not least because one year in that chain begins in Advent and is not mine to foreclose.
A context, then, is inter-contextual: cross-pollinated by other contexts and constituted by heterogeneous sub-contexts. We are constitutively in need of others. Without difference, there is no “I”/“we” since the “I”/“we” always implicates the other; and without similarity-in-difference, the “I”/“we” falls apart—for a foot that stands alone is not a foot.
