Abstract
Chinese Public Theology is a welcome development from Chow’s first book Theosis (2013), and in its final chapter returns to the role of Eastern Orthodox theology in the developing forms of contemporary Chinese Christian theology. Western theologians, still deeply Eurocentric, have barely begun to recognize the vast importance of ‘Sino-Christian theology’ (or as Yang Huilin prefers, ‘Sino-Christian studies’) and the profound ecclesiological questions that underlie the emergence of a public theology in China today.
Chow provides us with a beautifully articulate description of the emergence of growth of public Christian voices in Mainland China and their relation to what he calls the ‘Confucian imagination’. This is taking place not only within a state-sanctioned Protestantism in the Three Self Movement, but amongst intellectuals in Chinese universities, many of them so-called ‘cultural Christians’, and now amongst new urban intellectuals of a later generation. It is almost impossible for Westerners to understand the vast disruption of the Cultural Revolution and its effective dismissal of public religion in the People’s Republic, as well as the ancient history of Confucianism in China and the debates about different understandings of transcendence. Chow’s knowledgeable and measured account of the development of a Chinese public theology provides a highly readable antidote to the Western tendency to jump in too roughly to a cultural and intellectual context in which public discourse and social vision take place in a way that is quite unfamiliar to most of us. And yet the development of a Chinese public theology and ecclesiology is perhaps the most important movement in contemporary Christianity. In many Chinese universities theology is very much alive but necessarily within interdisciplinary programmes, while the shifts in traditional family structures are opening doors to a new sense of the Christian family as a public body, an ecclesiology with a history that is quite different from anything in the West.
Underlying the growth of Christianity in China is the revival also of forms of traditional Confucianism. One of Chow’s more provocative insights is that Confucianism and particularly Calvinist forms of Christianity are, in many ways, complementary (p. 129). For Western theologians this is hard to understand, but it should alert us to the importance of such projects as the Institute for Sino-Christian Studies in Hong Kong. I would appreciate the opportunity to argue further with Chow theologically, especially on the question of Christology in Sino-Christian studies—but perhaps that can be matter for a future book. This is a very welcome volume.