Seeking Christian Theology in Modern Chinese Fiction: An Exercise for Sino-Christian Theology

Jasper Jasper

doi:10.3390/rel10070422

Abstract

The development of Christian theology in contemporary China can learn much from Chinese fiction beginning with Lu Xun and his dedication to writing for the spirit of the Chinese people. Increasingly, Chinese novelists have reflected the growth of spiritual life in the Chinese People’s Republic in spite of the burden placed on the Christian church and religious believers.

Highlights

Chinese fiction beginning with Lu Xun and his dedication to writing for the spirit of the Chinese people
The cultural and intellectual difficulties of a truly Sino-Christian theology extend far beyond the political and social limitations placed upon Christian thought and practice in China, for the difficulty of re-envisioning Christian theology, rooted as it is in the Bible and the categories of Greek philosophy, in the Confucian traditions of Chinese culture may be well-nigh insurmountable
For example, a review of Christian attention to the issue of Christology by Chinese theologians over the last hundred years or so will reveal that, almost inevitably it seems, Christ emerges as a Sage, a social reformer, lacking the dimension of transcendence that Greek philosophy readily supplies (Jasper 2018, p. 134)

Summary

Introduction

Chinese fiction beginning with Lu Xun and his dedication to writing for the spirit of the Chinese people. His great novel Soul Mountain (Lingshan) (1990, first published in Taiwan; Gao 2000) searches, like Lu Xun before had done, the “soul” of the Chinese people in a nonconformity that reaches deep into the literature and spirituality of what Karl Jaspers has dubbed the Axial Age of ancient wisdom in the almost contemporary Chinese Classics and the Hebrew Bible

Results

Conclusion