138 International Bulletin of Missionary Research, V ol. 33, No. 3 Rejoicing in Hope A Tribute to Kosuke Koyama Straight lines seemed to be an image of imperialism. I became aware that the love of God—hesed, agape—is more of a zigzag than a straight line. For the sake of others, love makes self-denying zigzags, displaying its power as it overcomes profound frustration. —Kosuke Koyama T he earth-bound portion of Kosuke Koyama’s “zig- zagging” life came to an end on March 25, 2009. “Ko,” as many knew him, died in Springfeld, Massachusetts, at the age of seventy-nine. He had been battling esophageal cancer for several years, but the immediate cause of his death was pneumonia, according to his son, Mark, with whom Ko and his wife of ffty years, Lois, had recently been living. Koyama was born in 1929 in Tokyo into a Christian fam- ily. His paternal grandfather had become a Christian around the turn of the century, and his father had followed him in Christian faith. Ko himself was baptized at age ffteen, in the midst of World War II. He often refected through the years on the signifcance of this experience of being baptized into “the religion of the enemy.” The pastor who baptized him, Ko recalled, told him that God loved the Americans as well as the Japanese. That became the heart of his ecumenical theology. Ko lived through the frebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, in which 88,000 inhabitants were killed by those same Americans. The experience was to signifcantly shape his understanding of history, the idolatry of power, and the suf- fering of God. Following the war, he enrolled in Tokyo Union Theological Seminary, graduating in 1952. He then moved to New Jersey, in the United States, to complete his B.D. at Drew Theological School in 1954 and his Ph.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1959. After graduating from Princeton with a dissertation on Luther’s interpretation of the Psalms, Koyama was sent by his home church, the United Church of Christ in Japan (Kyodan), as a missionary to the Church of Christ in Thailand. Serving as a pastor in northern Thailand, he found himself in theological conversation not only with Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Karl Barth, who had been his interlocutors at Princeton, but also with the farmers who now made up his congregation. The re- sult was “water buffalo theology,” a term that would permanently enter the name of Koyama in the register of twentieth-century contextual theologies. Ko wrote several works in Thai during this period, but it was the English publication of Water Buffalo Theology—a collection of meditations and academic pre- sentations from 1960 to 1968 that was frst circulated in 1970 by SPCK and later published by Orbis Books (1974 and 1999)—that gained him widespread recognition. Other books in English followed: Fifty Meditations and Theology in Contact (1975), No Handle on the Cross (1977), Three-Mile-an-Hour God (1978), and Mount Fuji and Mount Sinai (1984). Koyama’s bibliography included numerous articles and reviews as well, in English, Thai, and Japanese. Through arresting images and a profound sense of irony, he sought to move beyond rabid triumphalism and crusading ideology to realize in a fresh way what it means to “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5), which for Ko could only mean the crucifed mind. His refections were laced with