Christ Our Ritual Sage? A Chinese Articulation of Christ's Priesthood

Abstract

Christ Our Ritual Sage?A Chinese Articulation of Christ's Priesthood Joshua Brown This article concerns developing an account of Christ's priesthood utilizing concepts and terms from Chinese philosophy. The primary problem I address is methodological: how can an intercultural reading of Christological doctrine be simultaneously culturally relevant and orthodox? In answer to this question, I seek to negotiate intellectual complications that arise in attempting to articulate a doctrine concerning Christ's historical and cultural embodied person while drawing on a cultural and ritual milieu vastly different from those of the Christian Scriptures or doctrinal tradition. Focusing on the question of Christ's priesthood, I demonstrate here that a reading that is at once both culturally relevant and orthodox is possible through cultivating a reading of two concrete programs and then using these perspectives to analyze and resolve issues in articulating Christ's priesthood in a Chinese key. Thus, I base this work here on an analysis of ritual and ritual agency in the philosophical writings of the early Confucian Xúnzǐ (310–210 BC) and St. Thomas Aquinas's account of Christ's priesthood in question 22 of Summa theologiae [ST] III.1 The framework in which I pose this reading of Christ's priesthood is, [End Page 15] then, the relationship between human culture and Christian doctrine. In the modern West, the difficulties of articulating Christian teaching in a Western idiom have been by and large negotiated for a long time, and thus many Western Christians do not have any trouble understanding Christian doctrine in their native intellectual categories. However, especially in the wake of postmodernism and postcolonialism, this is not true in many parts of the world. In recent decades, a number of Asian and Asian American theologians have articulated some variety of the claim that traditional Christian doctrinal categories, especially Christological doctrines, are products of and are only relevant to the dominant intellectual culture of the West and that, hence, a culturally relevant and responsive theology for Asian peoples must find a different foundation to be really "Asian."2 Modern theology therefore faces a considerable dilemma. On the one hand, many Asian theologians are suspicious of the possibility of a truly Asian theology being founded on traditional Christian categories and discourse. On the other hand, sociologically speaking, it seems that Christianity itself is fading in the West and that the dominant Christian culture will be Chinese within a matter of decades.3 We face, then, a very imaginable situation in which the majority of Christians might be led to believe that the doctrinal content of traditional Christology is not culturally relevant to them, and thus can be replaced. What is to become of these categories, then, and the doctrines they communicate? What is to become of the theological sciences that today seek to better understand and articulate these doctrines and their categories? Will they fall away and, indeed, [End Page 16] become irrelevant, or will they find ways to speak to a changing context? In this article, I seek to show that being responsive to the changing global context enables Christianity to accommodate the concerns for both cultural relevance and traditional Christian doctrinal categories. Yet doing so requires a difficult process of understanding how traditional Christian proclamation can inform and be relevant to the intellectual devices of historically non-Christian cultures, such as that of China. And so, instead of making an argument for method, I demonstrate what this work could look like. In this demonstration, I focus on the challenge of articulating Christ's priesthood in a Chinese idiom, mediated by Xúnzǐ. Ultimately, the prospects for this articulation will rest heavily on the ability to consider Christ's priesthood within the category of the ritual sage, the shèngrén , as it functions in Xúnzǐ's philosophy. But, in order to appreciate why this move is necessary, we first require a presentation of Xúnzǐ's broader understanding of rituals and their role in moral cultivation. Then, we must understand Christ's priesthood in traditional doctrinal categories so that we may explore the relationship between this doctrine and Xúnzǐ's thought. Hence, in the second section of the present article, I...