A Counselor’s Cultural Identity: Implications from A Multicultural Counseling Perspective in Malaysia

Malaysia is a country with a diversified cultural background, ethnicities, and religions. Islam is the most widely practiced religion, followed by Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, other traditional Chinese religions, as well as other indigenous religions. Despite the richness of the cultural landscape, the counseling services in Malaysia seem to be very limited in terms of diversification of multiculturalism. Cultural relevance of counselling theories, adaptation of Western-trained counseling services to suit a Malaysian culture, and multicultural counseling competencies, are among the concerns in the profession. This paper focuses on factors that shape a counselor’s identity based on their cultural background, and its implications on multicultural counseling in Malaysia. Among the important factors highlighted in this paper are religious beliefs and values, locus of control, gender, and personality. This paper encapsulates the importance of understanding a counselor’s cultural identity for the effectiveness of multicultural counseling in Malaysia.

Yin-Yang (Yijing) and the Bible

Chinese religions, philosophy, and especially Confucianism constituted a great challenge for the Catholic mission since its beginnings in China in early modern times. This essay looks at the way the missionaries, especially the Jesuits, made several attempts to solve the problem. Niccolò Longobardo s.j., for example, refused to use Chinese terms for the Christian God, dismissing them as insufficient or atheistic. Most Jesuits, however, advocated for terms such as Tian, Shangdi, Tianzhu, and Taiji for God in China. The Mandate of the Vicar Apostolic Charles Maigrot m.e.p., prohibiting the use of the Yijing and Taiji as the Chinese name for God, became a great challenge for Joachim Bouvet s.j. in developing his Figurism. With this system, he found complements for Christianity in China and created a new theology combining Eastern and Western ideas. These efforts were stopped by the prohibition of the Chinese rites and by the historical-critical method for reading the old Chinese books.

The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ has been the subject of manifold and intensive reflection in the Chinese context and has shown various faces. The essay surveys the innumerable works of biblical, apologetical, catechetical, liturgical, general theological, literary, and art-historical nature on Jesus Christ covering the periods from Tang and Yuan dynasties (seventh–ninth centuries and twelfth–fourteenth centuries) to the “Cultural Revolution” (1966–1976). The essay observes how various Chinese portraits of Jesus Christ engage with Chinese religions, and how the Chinese context limited the possibilities for the unfolding of a specific face and image of Jesus much more than other Asian and Western contexts. It raises the question of the future: Which faces and images of Jesus Christ will the Chinese context still generate? In this vast part of Asia, will he remain a vox clamantis in deserto?

Scriptural Reasoning in China

Interreligious learning through cross reading the Scriptures, including the Christian Bible, has been a long-standing cultural phenomenon in China. The essay looks at the recent reception and experimental practice of Scriptural Reasoning (SR) in China in the last twenty years, and the extensions of SR made by Chinese scholars, for instance, the transformation of SR to a discipline of Comparative Scripture, the integration of SR with ancient Chinese values of deep learning in border crossing, and an inclusion of Chinese religious Scriptures in SR, etc. A report and evaluation of a ten-month experimental practice of SR at Minzu University of China follows. And finally, the essay identifies some prospects for SR in China, including promoting the practice of SR among religious communities, developing a systematic interpretation of sacred texts with the inspiration from SR, and a deep combining of SR, methodologically and theoretically, with the study of history of Chinese religions.