This elegant collection of 14 of Yang Huilin's essays, reproduced or translated from a variety of English and Chinese-language sources, represents some of the most incisive thinking to come out of academic Christianity, or the Sino-Christian theology movement, over the last decade. Yang, a professor of comparative literature and religious studies and vice president of Renmin University, has been a major figure in promoting the academic study of Christianity in China and embedding it in the humanities, and this volume demonstrates why the “third force” (in Yang Fenggang's terms) of academic research has become a key player in religion in China.

Yang's work triangulates between philosophy, theology and literary/critical theory, traversing a great range of thinkers and eras while focusing on textual interpretation. Words and the Word, how meaning can be interpreted in words, how Biblical and literary texts might mean differently, are all sources of reflection and engagement. While China, Christianity and the Question of Culture is divided into three parts (Christianity and Chinese Culture; Theology and Humanities; Scriptural Reasoning) which represent a chronological development in Yang's work, an interlocking of themes and arguments across the essays directs us to see the volume more as an integrated whole. The first section mainly comprises essays drawn from an earlier English collection edited by Carine Defoort, spanning Buddhist–Christian dialogue, inculturation, and the questions raised by an “ethicized” Christianity taking hold in China. One essay in this section has drawn more comment, chapter five, on “The contemporary significant of theological ethics,” which discusses commonalities in the experiences of Auschwitz and the Cultural Revolution as “fantasies and fanaticism of collective unconsciousness” (p. 61), evincing the frailty of human values and standards. The Cultural Revolution remains underexplored in Chinese theological ethics, and Yang is one of few to tackle the topic head-on. The essay draws on Pollefeyt's study of banalization and diabolicization, and is notably unwilling to exculpate anyone in the Chinese context.

In a series of essays on Žižek, Heidegger, Derrida and the value of theology in the humanities in part two of the volume, Yang explores theological methodology as a way to approach and determine meaning, teasing out that hair's breadth of semantic space where theology and literature illuminate each other, and where a series of “inbetween-nesses” in event and language allow for an escape from the impasse of uncertainty. For Yang, the contemporary “crisis of faith” is in fact a crisis of meaning, a loss of certainty and objectivity. The move allows Yang to combine religious and philosophical questions, and suggest that the problems Christianity must now deal with are no longer just matters of faith, but primarily ones of meaning. A “non-religious religion” is both an interesting concept to Yang philosophically, as he weaves between Žižek and John Milbank, but also pragmatically, since Yang, like others in the Sino-Christian theology movement, takes much of the value of theology to be in the application of its frameworks and methodologies “to create the intellectual space for considering fundamental issues of cultural identity, values systems and meaning generation” (p. 123). Theologians might wish to take issue with this somewhat utilitarian and godless approach, but Yang argues, semi-seriously, that this academic theology has done more for China than seminaries.

For Yang, the question of language is the root to the quest for understanding, and this theme is central to part three, on Scriptural Reasoning. In an essay on the Chinese Union Bible translation of 1919 (chapter 14) Yang notes that the question of how the Divine Word can be lodged in human words constitutes pretty much the whole history of Christian thought. Exploration of language takes various forms across Yang's essays, and includes such questions as historic language use; how to theorize dialogue, the church as a community of discourse, and the important issue of “Chinese-language Christianity's cultural identity.” For over a decade, Yang Huilin has also been labouring to bring comparative literature and religious studies, along with Sinology, into closer dialogue and interaction, and this quest has brought Yang to Scriptural Reasoning, and to the development of a Chinese form of the practice, discussed in chapters 12 and 13 of the volume. If Abrahamic Scriptural Reasoning began with theists and theologians, Chinese Scriptural Reasoning has been developed by textual theorists and comparativists, and provides an intriguing counter-point to the more usual religious version of the practice.

The volume China, Christianity and the Question of Culture criss-crosses so many academic field boundaries that its audience is potentially extremely wide, although scholars in religion and literature might find it of most interest. Its arguments on a range of inter-cultural, theological and literary critical questions may intrigue and provoke specialists in equal measure, but the emergence of such a distinctly Chinese perspective that is both eclectic and coherent, demands, at the very least, serious engagement. One can't help thinking too that the present regime, bent on eradicating “Western values” from Chinese education, might not do well to read Yang's volume first. The text could have done with better editing and proofing at the Baylor end (and an index, for example), but the minor infelicities do not detract from the overall quality.