Secular and Post-secular in China and the West

Ping-cheung Lo’s careful and informative survey of Professor Yang Huilin’s oeuvre performs a valuable service to readers of Christianity and Literature in that it both rehearses the main lineaments of Yang’s early thought and places it within the Chinese cultural context. Central to Lo’s reading of Yang’s scholarship is his own claim that while there exist “profound similarities and interesting differences between the American secular approach and the Chinese theological approach in literary studies,” the differences are not merely interesting but also crucial. In particular, Lo parses the difference between the postsecular in the West and the post-Communist in China. While a “surge of scholarly interest in Christianity” is the outcome of each, Lo is cautious about aligning the movements too quickly or too closely. He posits this caution to counterbalance Sharon Kim’s statement that, in contrast to the Chinese integration of theology and theory, American criticism “tends to partition theology as a separate and alien field from literary theory” and to her suggestion that western postsecularity may not only be congruent with, but may also find new resources in, the theologically inflected theories of Chinese scholars.

Although Lo does not dispute the promise of a fruitful interchange between American and Chinese literary theorists, he argues that historically there is more congruence between western secular, rather than postsecular, theory and Chinese theological approaches. Both secular literary theory in the West and theological approaches in China have functioned as revolutionary tonics to perceived limited and intransigent modes of cultural life. In the West, secular literary theory, divorced (at least overtly) from theology, offered relief from a European culture embroiled in religious controversies and wars. Chinese-language theological approaches to literature, pioneered in the 1990s as part of the Cultural Christian movement and continued at least in research circles ever since, offered relief from a formulaic Marxism. In both cases, Lo claims, the functional goal was to “free literary studies from the long shadow of the past” and to assert the autonomy of literary or more broadly humanistic studies: in the West, autonomy from theology, the queen of the sciences; in China, autonomy from Marxist clichés. If, indeed, securing the autonomy of literary studies lies at the heart of its integration of theology and literary theory, there may be more partitioning in Chinese literary studies than is at first apparent to western scholars.

The desire to be free of critical pieties prompts what Lo takes to be the disparate movements toward or away from religious language in the West and in China. Kim suggests a similarity between the use of theology in the post-Mao era in China and the use of theology in the postsecular era in the West. But here Lo demurs and tellingly notes, “Embracing Christianity in China is actually a force of ushering secularism in[to] China rather than reversing the course of secularism.” For both Lo and Yang, “secularism” appears to be equivalent to western modernity, understood as an ideology consistent with rationality, democracy, and freedom from totalitarian authority, rather than standing as an oppositional term to “the sacred.” Insofar as Christian theology can be deployed in the service of rationality and freedom, it becomes a conduit for the secular in Chinese society. Given the insistent cultural locatedness of these academic moves—postsecularity in the West and theological approaches to literature in China—the question becomes what is translatable from one cultural context to another. What of Chinese theological-literary approaches can be inculturated into western academic criticism? To what extent can Chinese theological-literary approaches model new ways of relating Christian theology, literary theory, cultural studies, and the vexed terms “secular” and “sacred” to one another? Kim suggests that western literary criticism has much to learn from the theologically inflected criticism of Chinese scholars. Of this I have no doubt. But what can be learned and what can be imported or utilized are not so clear.

Lo suggests that the “development of a literary-theological mind” in China, particularly as pioneered by Yang, can be understood as a “microcosm for understanding the macrocosm of society at that time”—a society that wished to rejuvenate itself in a post-Mao era by looking to the resources of western civilization and its Christian worldview. However, it was not the strictly theological that Yang found useful in Christian thought—that is, it was not the doctrine of God and certainly not the doctrine of the Incarnation, Christianity’s unique contribution to language about God, that shaped his literary method. (Hence Lo’s footnote on Yang’s exclusion of Christo-centric language from his utilization of Northrop Frye, whom Yang much admired.) It was rather the critical, ethical engagement with the world, worked out in western writers and particularly in Shakespeare, that Yang found and finds so compelling. The divorce between Christian theology and Christian ethics is not unique to China, as theologians have often noted. The sixteenth-century reformer William Tyndale, for instance, himself an outspoken critic of social ills, nevertheless acerbically observed that there would be little resistance to his teaching if he limited it to speaking against “pride, covetousness, lechery, extortion,” land grabs by the rich, and the exploitation of the poor. Theology proper, however—that is, claims about the nature of God—did help to foment resistance and reformation in England (Tyndale 107).

For Yang, in a very different context, putting theological content to the side is crucial to engaging Christianity’s ethical and prophetic voice within the Chinese academy. Indeed, bracketing theology proper enables Christianity to surgically penetrate Chinese society, stripped of its evangelistic and dogmatic edges. As Lo notes, Yang’s primary concern “is the reform of Chinese culture and society, and the means is the promotion of Christian Studies.” Yang himself, however, has recognized that appropriating Christian ethics alone may be both “too easy” (Yang, “Inculturation” 155) and potentially dangerous. Drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr’s analysis of the self-righteousness that can stem from converting transcendent ideals into historic certainties, Yang suggests that the inculturation of Christianity in China should not confine itself to ethical concerns only, but should also move from a “functional plane” to a “significance plane,” using theological hermeneutics to redefine “zhi (knowability),” “yi (will),” and “qing (sentiments)” (Yang, “Inculturation” 166–167).

Yang’s careful attention to the possibilities of theological discourse directs our own attention to three words that are central to this discussion but that do not admit of easy definition: theology, religion, and Christianity.

The 2015 Yearbook of Chinese Theology notes that in China “theology” is to be “understood in the broadest sense to refer to the study of Christianity” (viii). In Lo’s essay, various synonyms are used for this form of theology: Christian studies, for instance, or Christian worldview, both of which lie adjacent to Žižek’s notion of a cultural “Christian legacy.” More narrowly construed, however, theology both in traditional ecclesiastical contexts and in contemporary theory, makes claims, normative and speculative, about the nature of God, meaning, language, and reality. At least in the western context, it is difficult to strip theology of its philosophic freight of absence and presence and its long cultural and ecclesiastical shadow. To the extent that Chinese theology is rigorously non-ecclesiastical, that is, it is theology that is “rational, neutral, and nonconfessional” to use Starr’s triadic formulation, the word “theology” appears to bear a somewhat different valence in China than it does in America. Assessing the affective and cultural weight of the word “theology” in different contexts merits our attention. For instance, what of Lo’s final claim that Chinese theology’s rational, neutral, and nonconfessional character are not attributes of an internal logic, but rather the fruit of a “merciless censorship system?” Given the various uses of the term “theology” in both China and the West, we are wise to be cautious about making too positive a claim about what in Chinese theological approaches can be assimilated into western literary discourse. For instance, what Yang, as a “first reader” of Shakespeare, finds startling and refreshing in the bard’s Christian language and thought, some western readers, despite the “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies, find entangled in and even compromised by Elizabethan religious politics. Put succinctly, it is not readily apparent how Yang’s work, as summarized by Lo, namely that “Shakespeare is the crowning achievement of English literature and Shakespeare studies is Christian studies,” can find traction in the postsecular Western academy.

Furthermore, even to speak of “theology” as a singular, abstract noun obscures its collective nature. It is difficult to know in advance precisely what we might mean when we announce that the topic of discussion is “theology,” even if we limit the term to Christian theology. Christianity is rife with theologies; to borrow Kevin Hart’s terminology, theologies are the competing grand narratives that arise from the fertile soil of a multiform scripture, multiform belief, and multiform practices (Hart 91–92). However, to clarify (or perhaps expand) what theology might signify, or at least what it might signal within the arena of literary studies, may itself be a useful enterprise, and talking about the uses of the term in various cultural contexts is one way both to sharpen and to enlarge its scope. Both western postsecularity and Chinese theological approaches do appear to share a resolute commitment to disassociating theological discourse from Christian practice and piety, which I take to be Yang’s goal in setting aside the “functional plane” of Christianity in order to attend to its “significance plane.”

While the definitional problems of “theology” are located within the vocabulary of Christian thought, religion, understood as a collective noun, compounds the problem by suggesting affinities across cultures, literatures, and ways of life, as when Lo notes that Yang “made the existential choice of western literature and religion over the Chinese counterparts” (emphasis mine). Insofar as “religion” denotes a universal essence, or at least commonly held conceptions among various faith traditions, it is mired in modernist claims to abstraction and universality that overlook the term’s western and Christian genealogy, as Talal Asad has astutely argued (Asad, 27–54). However problematic the definition of religion is, it remains a tantalizing prospect to consider how Chinese academic theology may reopen the possibility of shared if not universal identity, values, and meaning in a postmodern context. Yang, for instance, argues that a theological approach creates an intellectual space that is formed by its necessary tension between “truth” and “method.” This charged space, in turn, offers the possibility of both open-endedness and an “anchorage” for the development of rigorous, ethical, formative literary studies (Yang, China 97–98), including the redefinition and clarification of knowability, will, and sentiments.

The deployment of such theological hermeneutics, however, also raises the question of what Yang understands by “Christianity.” Yang’s English-language essays, to which Lo points us, engage Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity,” or nonreligious interpretation of Christianity. In mid-twentieth-century Germany, Bonhoeffer needed language that would distance his own position from the compromised confessionalism of the State Church. Religionless Christianity met this need, but the concept was itself deeply embedded in and grew out of the traditional confessional language of Lutheranism with its emphasis on the Deus Absconditus, the suffering Christ, and the doctrine of the two kingdoms. While Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity pointed unerringly away from institutionalized ecclesiology and religiosity, it also pointed in equal measure to the person of Christ. For Bonhoeffer, Christ as human/divine, the nexus of transcendence and immanence, Immanuel—God with us in a world that is emptied of religion, is not merely an exemplary figure but the progenitor for a vocation of suffering, critique, and social action.

In the Chinese context, as Lo has pointed out, the long shadow of the past is not a compromised and decrepit church but a rigid Marxism. It seems appropriate, then, that despite the gestures toward Bonhoeffer, Yang would seem to draw more directly on Žižek’s reconstructed endorsement of the “direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism” (Yang, China 130) to craft a “non-religious religion” for a modern atheistic China, one in which “theology is unrestricted by religious belief” (Yang, China 123). The paradigm of theology, not a particular theology’s normative claims, is what makes Christianity an attractive resource for contemporary Chinese academics. As Lo notes, Yang and others are especially drawn to Christianity’s prophetic and ethical voice—its serious acknowledgment of “the pervasiveness and inevitability of evil” coupled with “a strong sense of critical engagement with this world.” Herein, Lo says, lies “the constructive role of Christianity … [for] the future development of Chinese civilization” as a counterweight to a spiritual self-transcendence that “dissolves” rather than resolves the human predicament. But by raising the specter of self-transcendence, Lo reengages the ethical question of whether Christianity can maintain its pointed social critique if a transcendent God is bracketed (to borrow a Radical Orthodox critique) and theology becomes only a structural paradigm for “theoretical deduction” (Yang, China 135). To put it another way, what relations, complementary or contradictory, does the nonreligious religion of Sino-Christian theology bear to Bonhoeffer and to Žižek? And what might American academics learn from this particular triangulation? Here as elsewhere, no easy comparison or assimilation can be made, but the challenge to work out a series of responses is one to which we should respond.