Starr - Chinese Theology

CHINESE THEOLOGY

CHINESE THEOLOGY

Text and Context

Chlo Starr

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of James Wesley Cooper of the Class of 1865, Yale College.

Copyright 2016 by Yale University.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936590

ISBN 978-0-300-20421-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of

Zhang Boda

(Bda Chang, 19051951)

Zhao Zichen

(T. C. Chao, 18881979)

the martyred and the bereft

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a pleasure to thank the many friends and colleagues who have helped me in numerous ways over the years, from offering advice, to procuring materials or texts, to providing enlightening comments and conversation. Among these I am especially thankful for Glen Dudbridge, Ryan Dunch, He Guanghu, Jason Lam, Leo Leeb, Don Starr, Philip Wickeri, Gerda Wielander, Jean-Paul Wiest, Zhang Jing, and colleagues at Yale Divinity School, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale. For helpful comments on chapters, I am most grateful to Peter Ditmanson, Sharon Kim, Rana Mitter, Linn Tonstad, John Yueh-Han Yieh, the two anonymous readers at Yale University Press, and the six inadvertently onymous readers whose critiques of draft chapters for promotion review helped me hone the volume. I would like to thank the Visiting Fellows and students who patiently read early chapters in class, particularly Liu Jiafeng and Anna Wu Qing; Chen Lang, Xu Xiaohong, and Liu Boyun for translation work, especially help with Buddhist terminology; Christian Meyer and the Globalization team; Henrietta Harrison for hospitality during Harvard-Yenching visits; and colleagues and friends at Yale Divinity School who have read portions, made life more pleasant, or improved my grasp of theology, including mentors Denys Turner and Harry Attridge.

I am very glad of the opportunity publicly to thank Yang Huilin for supporting my initial research at Renmin University in 20082009 via a Hanban fellowship, and to Liu Xiuyan and Geng Youzhuang at Renmin; to Daniel Yeung for a visiting fellowship at the Institute of Sino-Christian Studies in Hong Kong in 2009; to the Henry Luce Foundation for a Theology Fellowship in 20112012, with particular thanks to Michael Gilligan at the Luce Foundation and to Stephen Graham at the Association for Theological Schools. St. Annes College, Oxford, proved a congenial place to write up the final sections of the volume with its Plumer Fellowship in 20142015, for which especial thanks to Tim Gardam and Robert Chard. Thanks also to Rana Mitter (and Dirk Meyer) for a home in the China Centre during my Oxford sabbatical, and to Greg Sterling and the Yale Divinity School, and the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale (and the indomitable Helen Siu), for their generous financial support and sabbatical leave.

The book would have been much depleted without tremendous help from librarians at Yale, Harvard, Beijing, and Oxford. Particular thanks to librarians Michael Meng, Tang Li, Martha Smalley, and Cindy Lu for their help over the years in the East Asian and Divinity School libraries at Yale, and to David Helliwell and Joshua Seufert at the Bodleian.

Sincere thanks and gratitude to Jennifer Banks, Heather Gold, and Mary Pasti at Yale University Press, whose cheerful professionalism and rapid responses to emails have made the stressful process of reviews and revisions so much more pleasant, and to Jessie Dolch for her meticulous and thoughtful copy-editing (and painstaking excision of British English).

And finally, thanks to Peter Ditmanson, Joshua Seufert, beer, Margaret Hillenbrand, and Henrietta Harrison for the title, and to my mother for pretty much everything else in life.

...

A shorter version of in part on an earlier essay, Sino-Christian Theology: Treading a Fine Line between Globalisation and Self-Determination, in Thomas Jansen, Thoralf Klein, and Christian Meyer, eds., Chinese Religions and Globalization (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014). Permission to reproduce copyright materials is gratefully acknowledged.

ABBREVIATIONS

CHINESE THEOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

A mirror called theology has been given to us to reflect the image of God implanted in those of us Christians who are also heirs to Chinese civilization.

C. S. Song

In an ideal world, this volume might have two separate introductions, like those childrens books with multiple narrative threads where you can choose your own beginning and ending: one for theologians, and one for readers interested in Chinese literature. Word counts and press deadlines join with the argument of the book to insist on the less amusing but perhaps more radical task of integrating the two. If this causes any dissonance, the tension only reflects something of that which Chinese theologians have faced as they tried to write of and conceive of a Christian God in a language in which the concepts did not readily exist and in literary forms that bore little relation to those in which they themselves had inherited the gospel.

This volume aims to do two things: first, to present a general history or overview of Chinese theology through background chapters and studies of individual texts, and second, to offer the argument that Chinese theology cannot truly be understood without a sense of Chinese literary form and of the social meaning of the text. Dynastic politics, anti-imperialism, social reform movements, and Communism have left deep striations in Chinese theology, but Chinese theological texts and thinking have also been molded and influenced by Chinese literary traditions. The argument in this volume is that this common experience of the Word and the crafting of a community and theology have, for a great number of Chinese Christians, been based in a shared reading of texts.

Chinese Theology traces currents of thought and major figures of Chinese theology from the writings of literati Christians in imperial China to the sermons and micro-blogs of theological educators and pastors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chinese theology has been written in a great array of forms and styles, from the diary to the imaginary, via the essay, the hymn, and the sermon, and the volume attempts to do some justice to its richness. The volume traverses a range of eras and beliefs, incorporating Roman Catholic and Protestant voices and a variety of church affiliations. While there are evident losses to such a breadthany number of scholars could have written stronger individual chaptersa single volume allows a keener sense of overall development and new comparisons and insights. The setting up of the state patriotic movements (official churches) in the 1940s and 1950s, for example, looks very different when viewed in the light of Republican Christian aspirations rather than from a contemporary perspective. A longer trajectory allows the anti-Christian literature of the 1930s to be set alongside the anti-Christian treaties of the 1630s, or parallels to be made between the ways Christianity was regarded as a corrective to corrupt Neo-Confucian metaphysics in the Ming and as a corrective to Marxist methodologies in contemporary academia.