National Deliverance through Culture or of Culture? T. C. Chao on Christianity and Chinese Culture

Chao as humanist reformer, 1900s–1920s

Although Chao was later prominent among the leaders within what Daniel Bays calls the Sino-Foreign Protestant Establishment, his relationship with Western missions, starting from his early days at mission schools, was ambiguous. ⁶ He was admitted into the preparatory school for the Methodist Soochow University (Dongwu Daxue), but this position apparently did not deter Chao from speaking out as an anti-Christian vanguard. This negativity was prior to his baptism in 1907, and thus more than a decade before the major nationalistic tides brought by the May Fourth or the later anti-Christian movements. Yet Chao was already speaking in front of the whole school—its Western schoolmasters included—of not allowing “Western superstition [i.e. Christianity] to contaminate the pure land of Chinese civilization” and how he would “kill all the foreigners once we muster enough strength.” ⁷ For the young Chao, patriotism clearly translated into antiforeignism and, by implication, anti-Christian fervor—not unlike the anti-Christian students who might have read this religious recollection, which Chao published in 1923.

Yet, for a talented youth who was aspiring to serve his country, Christianity bore more than just imperialist connotations. In fact, it was at a neighboring Christian chapel near Chao’s home in Deqing, Zhejiang, that Chao for the first time heard about reform (bianfa) and Western literature (yangwen). This time also marked the beginning of Chao’s lifelong journey of Christian studies, for a Christian acquaintance there had recommended that Chao study at Presbyterian Vincent Miller Academy (Cuiying shuyuan) in Suzhou. ⁸ That was three years after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when the imperative of national reform and self-strengthening had reached an unprecedented consensus. He evidently carried his vision of national service with him to the mission schools in Suzhou.

In comparison, Chao’s Christian conversion occurred not so much because of exposure to Western education or culture but through personal friendship with missionaries—something that posed little threat to his Chinese cultural background. ⁹ John Mott led a memorable tent revival in Suzhou in 1907, but the more immediate reason for Chao’s conversion conforms to a long-treasured Chinese tradition of loyalty to friendship. Methodist missionary David L. Anderson, then head of Soochow University, was not put off by Chao’s antagonistic words. Instead, he commended Chao in a private conversation and invited him to be more reflective. Chao was greatly touched by the principal’s recognition and thought he would repay such grace by joining the church—for “it is fitting for a gentleman to die for those who understand him” (shi wei zhizhe si). ¹⁰

The Christian system of thought actually coincided with Chao’s own Chinese understanding of the world, as seen in the motivations of his conversion. Such a pattern was further reinforced in his theological studies at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN) from 1914 to 1917, followed by his first major public engagement in the May Fourth Movement. While in Nashville, Chao studied sociology, philosophy, and theology, and he drank deeply from the thought of the American prophets of the social gospel. Such a disposition was understandable, for Chao had been aspiring to contribute to national reconstruction ever since he came to Suzhou for Western-style study. Once back in Beijing, Chao, together with other Yenching faculty and Christian scholars such as Liu Tingfang, Wu Leichuan, and Wu Yaozong, joined the Peking Apologetic Group. ¹¹ The name reflects the urgency to participate in the ongoing “Chinese Renaissance” with new Christian initiatives, whereas the New Culture movement disregarded much of the traditional Chinese framework for the project of nation-building. ¹²

What essentially amounts to a humanist-reformist attitude was epitomized in Chen Duxiu’s championing of “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science.” It was also in Chen’s admiration of the teachings and personality of Jesus, as well as his total rejection of the supernatural beliefs of Christians as superstitious. ¹³ Correspondingly, Chao in this early stage of work mainly sought to articulate Christian teachings as compatible with, and accessible through, philosophical reasoning. When Chen’s attitude toward Christianity took a rapid turn toward the negative, merely a year after he spoke more positively of Christianity in 1920, Chao found himself under even greater pressure to make Christianity relevant to Chinese society. For Chao at the time, to fend off the charges of Christianity being a form of “imperialist cultural aggression” meant clothing Christianity with the fabric of Chinese culture.

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T. C. Chao

In an essay published in 1924 on the Chinese ethos (feng jie), Chao called on his readers to “practice the teachings of the Chinese sages and live out the spirit of Jesus Christ,” thus equating the two without much qualification. ¹⁴ The church, even in its reforms, needed to be concerned about how its current practice conflicted with “the ancient way of the Chinese” (Zhonghua gudao). ¹⁵ Three years later, Chao wrote more extensively on the essence of Chinese culture. ¹⁶ In this article Chao argues that the Chinese religious experience, which puts its sole focus on the natural world of this life, albeit dotted with worship of heaven and ancestors, actually exemplifies the virtue of the “golden mean” (zhong yong). ¹⁷ As such, Christian leaders, in their appeal to the Chinese people, sought to explain Christianity through the Chinese spiritual heritage. This means, Chao concludes in the end, that the “God-man” Christ (shenren de jidu) in the West has to become the “man-God” Jesus (renshen de yesu) and conform to the Chinese religion of sage-worship. ¹⁸

Chao finished this article on June 10, 1927. Three months previously, the Northern Expedition, under the politically charged united front of the Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), captured Nanjing. Such a perceived triumph over “imperialism and warlordism” did not leave Christianity intact. In fact, attacks became increasingly common since the explosion of the May Thirtieth (1925) Movement in every major Chinese city. ¹⁹ During the Northern Expedition such animosity culminated in the death of J. E. Williams, the vice president of Nanking University. ²⁰ With foreign consuls ordering evacuation and the Protestant establishment traumatized, as it was in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising three decades earlier, it was understandable that Chao then leaned heavily toward “knowing Christ through the truth already discovered by the Chinese ancestors.” ²¹

Also at this time, Chao composed his first substantial treatise on Christianity and Chinese culture (1927). ²² In its beginning Chao makes his thesis clear: The eternal religious essence in Christianity, though hardly discernable under layers of Western constructs, needs to put on the spiritual legacy of Chinese culture in order to be understood and accepted by the Chinese people. ²³ True indigenization, Chao argues, means Christianity having dialogue with the ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of the host culture. ²⁴

Chao listed these points of contact here in four major concerns: (1) Chinese naturalism and its corresponding moral implications, (2) ethics as the civil religion, (3) arts and aesthetics surpassing rational articulation, and (4) a certain cultural mysticism, notwithstanding the everyday pragmatism of the Chinese people. ²⁵ These are the significant cultural areas that Chao identifies to guide Christianity in its assimilation into Chinese culture. Meanwhile, Chao did mention certain distinctive Christian teachings. However, those teachings were largely submerged in Chao’s theory of indigenization and his detailed explication of the Chinese cultural essence. For a treatise that better reflects a study of Christianity as distinct from Chinese culture, we would have to wait another sixteen years.

Chao’s sense of mission to construct Chinese theology by synthesizing an idealized Confucianism with Christianity persisted until the early 1940s. Yet, already in the 1930s this liberal mandate encountered complications. While more details on this tension are in the following section, we can note here an important book review that Chao wrote in 1936. In a firm critique against Wu Leichuan’s Christianity and Chinese Culture, Chao displays unprecedented attention to the transcendence of Christianity, not as a reform program but as a religious faith. ²⁶ Chao dismisses Wu’s portrait of Jesus as a revolutionary reformer who eliminated domestic corruption and established just institutions for the happiness of the Jewish nation. ²⁷ To Chao, such a humanistic philosophy that treats Christianity simply as a motivating force for socioeconomic reform is no religion at all. Religious faith, especially within Christian teachings, has its own objective existence that should not be co-opted by a modernist framework. ²⁸ For Chao, reducing Jesus to the temporal and political realm at the cost of his universal and eternal message is no longer “adaptation and fulfillment” but “surrendering and compromising” to the cultural context. ²⁹ Christianity, Chao insists, would never be compatible with “collectivism and authoritarianism,” despite their increasing social popularity. ³⁰ Pushing back against his early devotion to the social gospel, Chao—consciously or not—was beginning to come to terms with the transcendence of Christianity.

Chao as theologian in formation: 1930s–1940s

The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, led not only to the Pacific War but also to the arrest of a dozen faculty members from Yenching—Chao included—by the Japanese forces. Interestingly, his imprisonment (and the following years) actually witnessed Chao’s most productive period as a Chinese theologian who often expressed his theological reorientation in terms of Christianity’s role in Chinese society and culture. ³¹ Generally speaking, from the 1930s to the 1940s we see a gradual shift of emphasis in Chao toward the transcendence of Christianity, God’s revelation as the source of true knowledge, and the idea that the differences between Christianity and the Chinese culture can be beneficial for the latter.

Although Chao had encountered neo-orthodox theology in 1932 England, and despite his critical review mentioned above of Wu’s book, the traces of liberal theology were still evident in Chao’s work. ³² In fact, the tension persisted throughout Chao’s works in the 1930s, with the theme of transcendence largely in the background. In 1935 Chao published Yesu zhuan (Life of Jesus), in which he rejected miracles (following nineteenth-century higher criticism) and prominently included Chinese cultural elements. ³³ He composed this theological treatise in the style of a Chinese traditional chapter-novel, with the chapter titles coming from a range of classical Chinese sources from Tang poetry to Buddhist sutra. For example, the chapter on Jesus’s teachings is entitled “Xun xun ran shan you ren,” which is a line from the Analects praising the sage-teacher’s orderly and skillful guidance of his disciples. ³⁴

In the next year Chao published Xue ren, a work of Christian devotion that directly connects Confucian moral ethics with Christian social ethics. ³⁵ The pursuit of ren (benevolence) in traditional China, Chao thought, is practically equivalent to Jesus’s moral emphasis. Putting Chinese classics and the Bible side by side, Chao identified prominent Chinese traditions with biblical examples, such as the concept of ge wu (“studying the essence of things”) in the Daxue (Great Learning), with Jesus’s teaching that the pure in heart will see God; the sacrificial example of Mongol resister Wen Tianxiang with the Christian calling to “offer up your bodies as a living sacrifice”; and the idyllic aesthetics in a poem of Tao Yuanming with the otherworldly beauty of the kingdom of heaven. ³⁶ While Chao was not completely one-sided in emphasizing only the common ground in his comparison, his message is clear. He even cites the biblical example of Nehemiah’s rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem to exhort resistance against the ongoing Japanese invasion at the time. ³⁷

During the 1930s a question remained for Chao: How to reconcile the emerging theme of the Christian transcendence with Chinese culture? Just as he embraced a confessional stance to anchor himself in a faith tradition, the moment of change came in a Japanese prison. ³⁸ It was precisely behind bars that Chao experienced a substantial rise in religious awareness. ³⁹ In short, his suffering in the Japanese prison proved to be decisive. Chao had a dream in which the sovereign God found him in his anguish during solitary confinement, and he was “caught by truth.” ⁴⁰

After Chao was released by the Japanese on June 1, 1942, new works and ideas came gushing out, forming a much more consistent theological position. The first substantial work after his imprisonment, Jidujiao jinjie (An interpretation of Christianity), took Chao only nineteen days to write, a speed unrivaled except by his earlier Yesu zhuan. In this 100,000-word treatise on his renewed interpretation of Christianity, Chao asserts that Christianity “through cultural communications is capable of rejuvenating the Chinese culture with new blood and fresh ideas.” ⁴¹

Here Chao reinterprets “the Chinese worldview” as a human-centered philosophy dictating proper relationships, which in turn is modeled after the assumed cosmological order. ⁴² When times are peaceful, this restrained system of morality and responsibility, seasoned by Chinese art, could express inner aesthetics and emotions in a mystical harmony with nature. ⁴³ During chaos and war, however, elements in the indigenous culture, whether art or Taoism, often proved insufficient for consoling people. ⁴⁴ It is precisely the Christian God—personal and sovereign, in contrast to the Chinese cosmology—who is able to establish a transcendent authority and reliable ideal. ⁴⁵ Nevertheless, in this first treatise, Chao still conceived Christianity as complementary to the already complex and clearly articulated Chinese scheme of horizontal, human-to-human relationships. ⁴⁶

Meanwhile, Chao seems to have lost interest in debating whether Christianity and the Chinese culture are compatible. If Buddhism, with its ascetic and otherworldly doctrines markedly foreign to existing Chinese culture, could win Chinese acceptance, Chao asks, why couldn’t Christianity? ⁴⁷ Instead of some inherent incompatibility between the two systems (as Chao and others tended to worry about in the 1920s), Chao pointed a finger at people’s unwillingness to recognize the true Christian message. ⁴⁸ In a treatise on a similar topic published three years later, this somewhat timid suggestion became a full-blown recognition of sin. ⁴⁹ What hinders the acceptance of Christianity, Chao says in this second treatise, is not cultural incompatibility but “the arrogant self-sufficiency of the cultural elites, the selfish ignorance of the commoners . . . and a church that hesitates to press forward because of all the [secularizing] ‘sciences and philosophies.’” ⁵⁰

If Chao in these two works still approaches the issue from the perspective of complementarity—albeit in much sterner terms—his third and most definitive treatise on Christianity and Chinese culture, published in Tianfeng (a journal that later became an official publication of the Three-Self Church), reveals a decided emphasis on the autonomy of a transcendent Christianity and its necessary social implications. ⁵¹ In contrast to his earlier works, Chao begins not with Chinese culture but with an exposition of the essence of Christianity. Chao insists that Christianity is a way of salvation (jiufa) that enables the transcendent world of eternity (chao shijie) to enter into the present world of transience (xian shijie). Since the present world cannot rid itself of conflicts arising from power and desires, only Christ, Chao says, can restore “meaning to lives, destination to history, and values to culture”—for he is the bridge between these two worlds. ⁵²

Here Chao no longer insists that the Chinese already have their own religion in filial piety, nor does he commend Chinese art and ethics as great achievements, as in his first treatise. ⁵³ He now adopts a much more consistent critique against the lack of a transcendent perspective in Chinese culture. ⁵⁴ The Chinese, Chao argues, know only about the phenomenal world, and in their need for a social philosophy they have turned to nature for a moral norm. Yet, this philosophy does not explain well the alienation of human beings from their supposed cosmological norm or from society. Nor did the introduction of Buddhism historically help provide any alternative to the transient world. ⁵⁵

Furthermore, Chao argues that the constant changes and reforms since the late nineteenth century, from copying tangible forms of Western civilization to adopting outright some elements of Western culture and values, have made the present world even more transient for the Chinese. The fact that everything now could be disregarded, including the cosmological beliefs that used to assume a quasi-religious role, has further exacerbated the problem of having only the transient world. ⁵⁶ “China nowadays,” mourns Chao, “has only practical applications without essential inner principles [zhiyou wuti zhiyong].” ⁵⁷

Against this backdrop, Chao calls on Christianity to help produce a new culture, one that has “God’s holy commandments as its moral foundation, the fulfillment of the commandments as the meaning of human lives, the love of God and people . . . as the faith of society . . . the heavenly Jerusalem descending from the transcendent world into the present world as the philosophy of history.” ⁵⁸ Comparable claims in his two previous treatises are even more ambitious, ranging from “enfolding the entire society into the church,” “saving the national soul,” constructing a new ethos through all levels of education, to renewing politics in both the domestic and the international realms. ⁵⁹ Chao was eager, as World War II finally subsided with much in ruins, to send Christians with “passionate faith and superb personality into Chinese society” to be salt and light in each and every social field. ⁶⁰

Concluding thought

Since the beginning of Chao’s theological quest, he never wavered in seeing Christianity as necessary for national deliverance. Yet, his early search for the immanence of Christianity in the Chinese context suggests that, for its legitimacy and efficacy, Christian faith depends on a successful sinicization. Chao, representative of many Chinese intellectuals at the time, needed to be assured that the essence of Christianity is already found in the best of Chinese traditions. Without such direct relevance, it seems, it would be impossible for him to aspire for personal or national deliverance in Christianity. Yet, as he was baptized again with physical and spiritual suffering, it dawned on him that to be delivered may mean going beyond the existing cultural or philosophical framework. Consequently, for Chao the transcendence of God and of Christianity stopped being the problem and instead became the cure in providing an eternal foundation for dealing with human and social issues. At the time, Chao invested his greatest hope in rebuilding the church, which he saw as the base for further social impact. With all his enthusiasm, he was unaware that for him and his theological vision, time was nearly up.

In 1947 Karl Barth, a theological contemporary of Chao, whose works Chao studied and discussed, delivered a series of lectures in war-shattered Germany that became Dogmatics in Outline. A year later, Chao presented his initial effort in systematic theology. ⁶¹ Its four sections deal with creation, Christology, soteriology, and ethics, in which he attempts to reconcile Christianity’s dual emphases on eternal transcendence and immanence with their various applications. In its preface Chao expressed his hope that “if God could grant me time and peace, I should be able to complete a more comprehensive systematic theology in the future.” ⁶² Yet, time and peace he would not have. This work turned out to be his last major theological treatise before the new Communist regime engulfed everything in its ideological fanaticism. ⁶³ When Chao passed away in 1979, he left only some sporadic works of poetry and a bewildering drama Xuanji tu that appeared posthumously in 1980 (which was more than ten years after Barth died, with his own magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, uncompleted). ⁶⁴