As Chloë Starr argues in Chinese theology: text and context (New Haven 2016), Chinese theology must be understood through the lens of Chinese literary expression. When Chinese Christians appropriate their indigenous literary and philosophical frameworks to theorise a Christian God, they do not always adhere to the rigid structure of Western logical analysis. Their theology is often relational, engaging ordinary readers as spiritual peers to explore the commonalities between Christianity and Chinese culture. This is particularly true for T. C. Chao, also known as Zhao Zichen (1888–1979), one of the most prolific systematic theologians of twentieth-century China.
A product of foreign mission education and a new generation of Chinese cultural mediators, T. C. Chao set out to absorb Christianity into the Chinese mode of thinking. His famous publication, Yesu zhuan (The life of Jesus), issued in 1935, presented a semi-fictional account of Jesus’ life. He consulted archaeological, biblical and theological research to explain the Jesus story to his fellow countrymen. By referring to Jesus as fuzi, a Confucian master or philosopher-mentor, Chao used the Chinese ethical mindset to portray Christ as a moral exemplar for humankind. He de-mythicised Jesus, re-sacralised him as the Christ of Chinese modernity and nationalism, and praised Jesus’ devotion to his ultimate mission of saving the world.
Yongtao Chen offers the first comprehensive analysis of T. C. Chao's theological contribution. This book originates from his dissertation submitted to the University of Helsinki in 2014. Composed of seven chapters, it characterises Chao as a cosmopolitan thinker who synthesised Chinese and Western thought, and highlights his theology as a gradual shift from humanistic liberalism to neo-orthodoxy. Chapter i reviews the scholarly literature on the development of Chinese Protestant theology. Surveying the life of Chao, chapter ii contextualises his efforts to articulate a unique Chinese Christology in times of wars and revolutions.
Chapters iii–iv focus on Chao's interpretation of the personhood, suffering and resurrection of Jesus Christ through the lens of Confucianism from 1917 to 1936. In chapters v and vi, Chen assesses Chao's soteriology from the Second World War to the Communist revolution of 1949, and asserts that Chao's Methodist upbringing and Confucian heritage gave him a clear knowledge of the doctrine of grace, and prepared him to dialogue with mainline Protestant traditions. Chapter vii evaluates the intellectual contributions of Chao. What distinguished Chao from other Chinese Protestant thinkers was his ability to reconcile Confucian ethics with Christology and to articulate ‘an ethically oriented Christology’. The concluding chapter pulls all the themes together and indicates that Chao's theology exhibited an intellectual and a spiritual quest for understanding the role of morality in human sanctification. The bibliography presents a full list of Chao's scholarly and spiritual publications in Chinese and English, and serves as a useful guide for future researchers.
A major strength of Chen's careful investigation is the text-in-context approach that he employs to historicise the evolution of Chao's theological orientations and his impact on the Chinese Churches before and after the Communist revolution. Chao produced a variety of materials ranging from evangelistic tracts and liturgical materials, to hymnals, devotional literature and doctrinal treatises. He actively engaged with missionaries and Chinese writers. He borrowed many Confucian terms to indigenise Christian doctrines such as chengyi for the idea of justification by faith, and chengsheng for the concept of sanctification. Like other revivalist preachers such as Watchman Nee and Wang Mingdao, Chao urged his readers to draw on the concepts of chengsheng and chengyi to consolidate their faith. Although Chao's theological writings did not always appeal to ordinary believers, his conceptual insights revealed a unique vision of using the Confucian paradigm to integrate Christian doctrines into the Chinese literary mode of expression. His systematic analysis of the Sino-Christian core values and norms provided a theological template to theorise the religiosity of Chinese Protestantism.
Two major lessons can be drawn from this study. First, the making of T. C. Chao's theology displays a symbiotic relationship between localising Western Christianity and maintaining fellowship with the global Church. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese Christians lived in a challenging environment as they attempted to nurture their faith, and faced opposition from relatives, neighbours and government officials. Chao's story typifies Chinese believers’ determination to adjust the force of global modernity to the age-old traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, and growing Chinese nationalism. His theology was meant to give the Chinese Churches a spiritual resource with which to cultivate their vision of an ideal society, and a theological framework to make sense of a fast-changing world. Evidently, both local and global doctrinal understanding often coexisted and enriched each other from the beginning.
The second lesson is a methodological one in which theology and culture should be treated as complimentary categories in the study of Chinese Christianity. By analysing Chao's theology (i.e. orthodoxy) in relation to the faith practices of local Christians (i.e. orthopraxy), Chen highlights the multiple linkages between Christianity and Chinese culture. He balances the global and regional forces of Christianisation from a cross-cultural perspective, and shows convincingly that the indigenisation of Protestantism in China was a conscientious process of adaptation, accommodation and negotiation among Chinese thinkers, foreign missionaries and ordinary converts.
In short, this monograph reflects a heightened sense of awareness among contemporary Chinese scholars of the need to historicise their indigenous theological tradition for the flourishing Churches today. The book should appeal to Chinese intellectual historians, theologians and missiologists.
