Musing With Confucius And Paul

A scholarly analysis of Chinese Christianity explaining how it is possible to embrace the Christian faith while maintaining the Chinese identity and culture. Being a Chinese Christian means to adopt a very distinctive and unique identity that feeds both traditions. In this book, Khiok-khng Yeo explores the Analects of Confucius and Paul's Letter to the Galatians, and shows how together they provide the resources for the construction of a Chinese Christian theology. The author explains the common elementsbetween St Paul and Confucius, and how both ideologies complement each other or extend the areas where the other is not so thorough. The Christ of God as found in Paul's letter to the Galatians brings Confucian ethics to its fulfilment, while Confucius' philosophy amplifies many aspects of Christianity that are underplayed in the western churches. Bringing the best of the Confucian tradition into the Christian story, Professor Yeo offers an approach to help revivify global Christianity.

The book is a manifesto or apologia for Chinese Christians. It seeks to articulate how it is possible to maintain a Chinese identity and a Christian identity at the same time without capitulating to some western or other cultural model of Christian identity. To be a Chinese Christian is to adopt a distinctive, unique identity that owes much to both traditions but is sui generis. Providing great resources for the construction of a Chinese Christian theology, Confucius and Paul converge across a surprisingly broad front. Yet, the Christ of the Cross completes or extends what is merely implicit or absent in Confucius; and Confucius amplifies various elements of Christian faith (e.g., community, virtues) that are underplayed in western Christianity. The Christ of God as found in Paul's letter to the Galatians brings Confucian ethics in the Analects to its fulfillment while protecting the church from the aberrations of Chinese history and while protecting China against the aberrations of Christian history in the west. Chinese Christianity has something to give the church that needs to be heard. China can develop its distinctive vision of Christianity for the sake of the church universal. Chinese Christianity will have its global mission if it can find its own authentic Chinese-Christian identity. Insofar as that identity brings the best of the Confucian tradition into the Christian story, it will help revivify global Christianity.

The refugee that has come to your church, the pastor of the immigrant church in your town, and you yourself all come before the same Bible, even the same verse, and walk away with completely different understandings and applications. In an increasingly globalized and multicultural world, how can we learn to see beyond our own cultural influences, understand those of others, and learn from each other in order to better understand and apply the word of God? How do we stay faithful to the text when our contemporary cultural perspective is so different from the original author's? This book will enable you to understand the common pitfalls and dangers related to cross-cultural hermeneutics while also equipping you with principles and real-life examples for how to interpret Scripture in such situations. Additionally, given the fact that our world is increasingly digitized and people are less and less likely to read, we will consider the issue of oral hermeneutics and how those who can't read or choose not to read can interpret Scripture faithfully.

The aim of this thesis is to unfold the multilayered intersubjective experience of the author himself, a Chinese pastor. The author postulates himself as the subject in whom the said experience was evident, so that it can be analyzed and interpreted. Theauthor argues for a cultural-linguistic experience of shi as the locus at which the intersubjective experience takes place. He then shows that such experience embodies a Chinese Christian's 'two texts' inheritance, and argues that it is through unfoldingor revealing of such experience that the nature of his relationship with them can be demonstrated.

In Confucian Questions to Augustine, Park compares the works of Confucius and Mencius with those of Saint Augustine. His purpose in so doing is to show Confucian Augustinianism as a new theological perspective on Confucian-Christian ethics and Augustinianism by discovering analogies and differences in their respective understandings of the formation of moral self, particularly the acquisition of virtue, and how they believe this leads to happiness. Using the method of inter-textual reasoning, and assuming continuity between Augustine’s early and later works, he compares Confucius and Mencius’s xue, si, li, and yue with Augustine’s moral learning, contemplation, sacrament, and music, respectively. Confucian Augustinianism shows how to enjoy God, follow Jesus, and live in the Holy Spirit.

"The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in China deftly examines the Bible's translation, expression, interpretation, and reception in China. Forty-eight essays address the translation of the Bible into China's languages and dialects; expression of the Bible in Chinese literary and religious contexts; Chinese biblical interpretations and methods of reading; and the reception of the Bible in the institutions and arts of China. This comprehensive and unique volume presents insightful, succinct, and provocative evidence about and interpretations of encounters between the Bible and China for centuries past, continuing into the present, and likely prospects for the future"--

The rise of China as a superpower and of Chinese Christians as vital members of the global church mean that world Christianity would be a dynamic transformation and bountiful blessing to the world by engaging with Chinese biblical interpretations among global theologies. This book, a twentieth-anniversary revised and expanded edition, includes studies that range from exploration of the philosophical structure of Eastern culture to present-day sociopolitical realities in Malaysia and China—all in support of cross-cultural methods of reading the Bible culturally and reading the cultures biblically.

Various cross-textual readings have been attempted between the Christian Bible and Chinese literature. Using cross-textual hermeneutics, this study centers on the political wisdom of Ecclesiastes and the Analects, and its goal is to demonstrate that both texts offer wisdom pointers for human survival amid uncertain sociopolitical realities. Chapter 1 introduces the vibrant interaction of biblical wisdom literature within the ancient Near East and highlights some of its political connections. The openness of wisdom literature is then proposed to support this present effort of cross-textual research. Chapter 2 offers readings of eight passages that communicate Qoheleth's political wisdom in Ecclesiastes. Chapter 3 centers on the Analects and on some notable passages that relate to Confucius' political ideas. Chapter 4 seeks to demonstrate the dialogical dynamics between the two works by exploring specific hermeneutical connections. In conclusion, readers will come to understand the distinctive and collective political insights of both wisdom texts. That is, this study suggests contextualized ideas for living wisely from within both a faith tradition and a native tradition.