This volume, based on a dissertation directed by Murray Rae at the University of Otago, New Zealand, presents an informative intellectual biography of the Korean American theologian Jung Young Lee together with a summary and critical assessment of Lee’s systematic theology with particular attention to the doctrine of the Trinity. As a Chinese Singaporean, Edmond Zi-Kang Chua is attentive to the decisive role of cultural and interreligious factors in shaping the way scholars approach Christian theology. Chua locates Lee as a theologian who knew violence first-hand, being born and raised in Japanese-occupied Korea, embracing the Christian faith at age twenty, living through the Korean War and moving from North Korea to South Korea before eventually migrating to the United States of America, where he taught for many years. Lee felt painfully marginalized because of his status of being in between his native Korea and the United States; when he returned to Korea after many years in the United States, he realized that he did not feel at home in either place.  Chua compares Lee’s contextual theology to the work of other Asian American theologians C.S. Song and Peter Phan.

Chua emphasizes the suffering of Lee as the context for his developing a theology of nonviolence based on his views of the Trinity and creation. Chua examines Lee’s application of the interpretive perspectives of yin and yang as a frame for revisiting the Christian Trinity. One of the names that Lee applied to God is Change, emphasizing the economic activity of the Trinity in creation and redemption. Lee affirmed the traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo, but he went beyond traditional Western theology by interpreting creation in light of yin and yang and stressing the reciprocal relations between God and creatures, including the vulnerability of God. Like other Asian theologians, Lee understands the suffering and death of Jesus Christ as affecting and afflicting the entire Trinity.  All three divine Persons suffer, and all share in the resurrection of Jesus, which makes possible a renewal of the entire cosmos.

While Lee affirms the transcendence and ultimate unknowability of God, Chua notes that Lee conceives Change as the ultimate reality: “God is conceived primarily as a vehicle of transformation in the universe, God changing Godself as the paradigm and driver of all other change, and God moving Godself as the paradigm and driver of all other movement, a ‘changing changer’ and ‘moving mover’ as opposed to an ‘unmoved mover’” (71). Lee sees God as transforming the world through the forces of yin and yang, claiming that, in Chua’s words, “yin-yang metaphysics proffers a biblical vision of triune life” (72). Chua calls this vision an ontological economic Trinity.

Chua notes various criticisms of Lee’s theology from various theological perspectives, including some from other theologians of Asian descent. He acknowledges the conflict between evangelical theology’s affirmation of the immanent Trinity and some of Lee’s formulations that seem to deny the immanent Trinity. Nonetheless, Chua stresses the biblical roots of Lee’s theology and argues for a fundamental complementarity of Lee’s theology and the Cappadocian Fathers.  He ends on a fundamentally positive note. This is a very helpful introduction and overview of the work of an important Asian American theologian.