Dr. Daniel J. Ebert IV
Southeast Asia is a region defined, in no small measure, by contested territory. The South China Sea — the West Philippine Sea in Filipino usage — is one of the most disputed bodies of water on earth. Multiple claimants assert overlapping sovereignty over the Spratlys, the Paracels, and Scarborough Shoal, with strategic interests, energy reserves, and national pride all converging over uninhabited reefs and contested waters. On land, the conflict in Myanmar has displaced hundreds of thousands of people across borders that have never been fully settled. In Mindanao, decades of struggle over ancestral domain continue among indigenous communities, Moro political movements, settler populations, and an often distant state. Territorial dispute is not a feature of Southeast Asian politics. It is close to the defining feature.
What drives these disputes is not only the fish or the oil or the shipping lanes, though all of those are real. What drives them is a deeper assumption: that territorial possession is a fundamental form of power, and that to lose territory is to lose something essential to national identity and security. That assumption is rarely examined. It is treated as self-evident — a permanent feature of political life that no serious actor can afford to question.
But it is not self-evident. And it is not unexamined in the Christian tradition.
From the standpoint of a Christian political theology, territorial claims are real. They are also not absolute. That is not a diplomatic hedge. It is a claim with deep roots in Scripture, and it cuts against the logic that drives most territorial conflict.
Psalm 24 opens with a declaration that resists every possessive instinct: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof” (Ps 24:1). Land does not belong to nations, dynasties, or ethnic groups in any ultimate sense. It belongs to God. Human communities hold it as stewards, under obligation, accountable for what they do with it and for whom.
That stewardship is not abstract. The law and the prophets are quite specific about what it requires: care for the sojourner, the widow, the poor, the person without political power. Amos and Isaiah do not merely warn about idolatry in the conventional sense; they warn about land used to consolidate power at the expense of those without it. Land becomes, in the prophetic tradition, a diagnostic of justice. The question is never only who holds it, but how.
The New Testament extends this logic in a different but complementary direction. Jesus repeatedly de-centers sacred geography. In John 4, he redirects the Samaritan woman away from the question of the proper worship site toward worship in Spirit and truth — a striking move in a world organized around holy mountains and holy cities. In Matthew 16, the community he forms is built on a person and a confession, not a place. The veil of the temple tears at the crucifixion (Matt 27:51), signaling that divine presence is no longer bound to restricted sacred space. The gospel then crosses every territorial boundary in Acts, moving outward from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth rather than inward to a fixed center. Paul’s letter to the Philippians speaks of citizenship in heaven (Phil 3:20) — not placelessness, but a belonging that no territorial claim can finally possess or foreclose.
Together these movements establish a Christological norm for evaluating territorial questions. Christ relativizes all territorial ultimacy. No land, no sea, no border becomes absolute under his lordship. The cross — which the New Testament names as God’s definitive act of power — accomplished nothing through territorial assertion. It accomplished everything through self-giving. That becomes the model by which political power, including territorial power, must be judged.
What does this mean in practice? The Philippines offers a particularly instructive testing ground. Filipino culture has a rich and textured sense of place — the barangay, the neighborhood, the relational webs that make belonging morally serious. Filipinos often know what much of Western political theory has forgotten: that place is not merely geography but shared memory, mutual obligation, and lived community. That is a gift. But the same relational density that sustains community can also be captured by political dynasties, patronage structures, and territorial claims that privilege some communities over others. In Mindanao, the overlapping claims of Lumad ancestral occupancy, Moro political aspiration, settler residence, and state authority based on a colonial doctrine of crown ownership expose just how complex territorial justice actually is. A Christian political theology shaped by the cross would affirm the significance of ancestral connection to land, demand protection for dispossessed communities, and refuse to grant any ethnic, religious, or state claim the status of the ultimate.
For the West Philippine Sea and the broader South China Sea disputes, a Christian perspective does not mean that nations should abandon their legitimate claims under international law. Sovereign rights and international legal frameworks have their proper place; order matters, and not every territorial assertion is equally valid. But it does mean resisting the sacralization of those claims — the moment when sovereignty becomes an absolute value that justifies any means of assertion or defense. It means asking: how do we pursue legitimate interests while treating our neighbors as neighbors? How do we assert our rights without making the sea into a god?
These are not only geopolitical questions. They are spiritual ones. A church absorbed into the territorial ambitions of its nation loses its capacity for distinctive witness. When Christians add their voice to territorial claims without qualification, they may be speaking as citizens or as nationalists. They are not, in that moment, speaking as the church. The church’s peculiar calling is to inhabit place without possessing it, to be rooted without being captured, to care about justice in territorial disputes precisely because the land is not ours.
Southeast Asia’s territorial conflicts will not be resolved by theology. But they are being shaped by assumptions about land, identity, and power that Christian thought is unusually well positioned to examine. The church’s first contribution to these discussions is not a policy proposal. It is a reminder.
The earth is the Lord’s. That is where any honest account of territorial questions in this region must begin.
Notes on Southeast Asia 
Leave a comment