CREEDS AS LOCI OF INTERCULTURAL ENCOUNTER, PART THREE

Editor’s note: this is the third entry in a four-part series on cultural adaptions of creeds. Check in next week for the conclusion of the series!

Post-war conflict and intellectual turmoil in Republican China compared with mid-twentieth-century Germany

Continuing our journey of Asian credal experiments, having seen that cultural transformation has always involved friction, and invoking the principal of charity or at least awareness of the plurivocality of complex religious language in intercultural encounter, we move on to consider a more mature phase of credal translation. After functioning as an initiation into a believing community, likely incompletely understood, the creed can instead be a working locus for deepening theological analysis.

Zhao Zichen (Tzu-ch'en, or TC Chao) was a past president of the World Council of Churches, Dean of Yenching (Yanjing) University (of Harvard-Yenching Institute fame) the premier Christian university in Beijing in the mid-century, converted in his university days at Soochow (Suzhou) University (also known as Dongwu University), and was later educated at Vanderbilt. At the point of writing his “Provisional Draft Creed” in 1920, he was a professor at Soochow University, prior to moving to Yenching in 1926, influenced by and influential in the contemporary university-based Chinese responses to Western values, variously thematized as the May Fourth, Chinese Enlightenment, or New Thought movements. May 4 1919 was the date of a major student protest in Beijing that brought to a head political unrest against the Republican government’s capitulation to Japanese territorial demands in the context of recent Western imperialism. Important ideological threads that continued to shape Chinese society for the next century included pro-science and pro-democracy views, anti-Confucianism and anti-Western attitudes, and the vehicle of a youth-led and populist rather than elitist movements intent on the renewal of Chinese society by discarding historical accretions such as classical literary scholarship that determined civil service postings in favor of new colloquial language in vernacular literature.

Zhao’s assimilation of and reaction against these trends are evident in his opinion of the deficiencies of the Apostle’s Creed: the presence of extraneous historical facts not critical for faith (e.g. suffering under Pontius Pilate), the presence of nonessential unscientific elements that may obstruct the journey to faith (e.g. the virgin birth), the absence of social norms or examples (as in the Beatitudes), the lack of moral and ethical teachings in favor of metaphysical definitions, and the missing discussion of character formation in the life of Jesus as the basis for lived faith and communal salvation. To remedy these faults, he proposed the following:

            Provisional Draft Creed (1920)

I believe in the ruler who created, manages and sustains all things, the holy, loving heavenly father of humanity, who is also the standard for human morality.

I believe that through Jesus’ sanctified birth and sacrificial love, that is, his self-established character, he became God’s only perfect son, of one body with God, one glory, one age; sufficient to commend the moral character of God and the possibility of humanity; he is teacher, friend, elder brother, and savior.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, that is, the spirit of God’s Christ, who seeks us out, who wants us, through his love, to escape sin and evil, to live in harmony with him, to communicate with him, to work together with him so that we may enlarge our spirits and develop our moral life to the point where we are capable of giving glory to God and serving others.

I believe that all who share a heart and will with Christ, share in his life and death, his glory and humiliation, share in his labor are all Christians, and that as Christ lives eternally, Christians will also have eternal life.

I believe that through their spiritual friendship, Christians become a united church; if they form a visible organization, such as a church body, this is a tool to realize the spiritual life of Christians.

I believe that the Kingdom of Heaven is gradually realized in line with God’s will, that is, the realization of the good society of new humanity; that days of truth will be ever more evident; that the church will become ever more flourishing, that humanity will become ever more peaceful and united; that the world will become ever more cultured.[1]

The sociological function as a means of theo-political clarification and intra-faith differentiation are evident here. Zhao makes pains to distinguish his creed from “physical or metaphysical, not ethical” creeds, in this quoting John Watson,[2] a Free Church of Scotland minister writing in The Mind of the Master (1896) where he proposes an ethical creed: “I believe in the Fatherhood of God ; I believe in the words of Jesus ; I believe in the clean heart ; I believe in the service of love ; I believe in the unworldly life ; I believe in the Beatitudes; I promise to trust God and follow Christ, to forgive my enemies and to seek after the righteousness of God.”[3] The revolutionary atmosphere of the time is echoed in his focus on Jesus’ “achieved character,” not merely essential nature, but as something we can emulate through sanctification. This notion clearly has Confucian parallels, but perhaps echoes his Methodist heritage as well. It also risks  criticisms of adoptionism. This sanctification is not achieved  merely individually but with his ultimate progressive goal of national, cultural, and universal salvation in view. As a member of the Peking Apologetic Group, Zhao translated the group’s aim around the same time as writing this creed:

“Not only do we fully understand that Christianity is the greatest need in connection with the regeneration of Chinese society and that the spreading of Christianity is our greatest obligation; but we also clearly see that in the spreading of Christianity at the present time, we must make use of modern conceptions of science and philosophy in order to clear up the religion’s  misunderstanding and doubts of the present generation, with a view to proving the truth of the claims of Christ.”[4]

Notably, this Peking Apologetic Group described itself as a response to the New Culture movement, but where the mainstream of the movement was anti-religious (dominantly anti-Confucian, but also anti-Christian as a facet of anti-Westernism), the Apologetic Group positioned indigenised Christianity as a new cultural response, maintaining the anti-superstition and pro-science aspects of the enlightenment/renaissance approach. His almost bureaucratic pragmatism exemplifies the middle stage of credal function, neither initiatory nor creatively theopoetic, but institutionally developmental, as we see in conciliar fine-tuning. The concerns, both doctrinal and ecclesiological, are different from those at Nicaea or other councils. We can see the influence of a distinct Sinological historiographic tradition, a Confucian characterological emphasis and a Daoist focus on ecological interconnection, absent the threat of rival bishops usurping imperial favor. Ironically, Zhao’s use of Confucian thought in his indigenization presents a complex response to other strands of the New Culture movement that could less charitably be seen as pragmatically using political buzzwords to “sell their Christian agenda.”[5]

What he was trying to do parallels Jürgen Moltmann’s attempt to include ethico-eschatological elements into the creed, albeit with a different emphasis on historicity:

“Traditional Christology stressed only the theological person of the God-man Jesus Christ. Modern eschatological theology stressed the eschatological person of Jesus Christ. The most recent contextual Christologies have disclosed the social person of Jesus Christ. These last two developments have again begun to take seriously the messianic and social mission of Christ, over against the Christology of the Nicene and Apostles’ creeds; for in these creeds there is either nothing at all, or really no more than a comma, between “and was made man, he suffered” or “born” and “suffered . . .”[6]

Moltmann himself has often cited his World War II experiences of desolation as formative in his identification with the suffering, crucified Jesus that paradoxically points towards a theology of hope. The intellectual context of Moltmann’s Christological volume of his systematics in 1989 The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions was, by his own description, suffused with contextual theologies: liberation, ecological, feminist, and Jewish-Christian dialogue. In it, he famously proposed an addition to cover the earthly existence of Jesus he felt glossed over in the Nicene and Apostles Creeds’:

Baptized by John the Baptist,

 filled with the Holy Spirit:

 to preach the kingdom of God to the poor,

 to heal the sick,

 to receive those who have been cast out,

 to revive Israel for the salvation of the nations, and

 to have mercy upon all people.[7]

Both could be seen to be influenced by their respective theological and political contexts: 1920s modernist critique of over-historicism, revolutionary ferment and creative nationalistic fervour; and 1980s contextual theologies, particularly liberation theology, in the German aftermath of World War II. Both seem to draw on the Sermon on the Mount as a corrective to the overly metaphysical emphasis of the creeds, using a combination of propositional norms, emotional calls to action, and civilizational and cosmological imperatives to reshape an approach to what Christianity is about. Yet the differences are telling: whether one attributes them to the distinct historical, cultural, or theological contexts, or even the different genres of writing that the creeds are embedded in — one a journal article that reflects on the personal meaning of the creed by a young activist theologian to a largely student audience intent on nationalistic advance, the other a volume of systematic theology by a mature theologian.
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[1] Original in Zichen Zhao, “對於《信經》的我見 [My View of the Apostolic Creed],” in 趙紫宸文集 [Works of Zhao Zichen] (1920; 商務印書館 [Shangwu Press], 2007), 3:38; Translation modified by omission of copious scriptural references from Chloë Starr, “From Missionary Doctrine to Chinese Theology: Developing Xin 信 in the Protestant Church and the Creeds of Zhao Zichen,” in From Trustworthiness to Secular Beliefs: Changing Concepts of Xin 信 from Traditional to Modern Chinese, ed. Christian Meyer and Philip Clart (Brill, 2023), 357.

[2] Zhao, “對於《信經》的我見 [My View of the Apostolic Creed],” 34–35.

[3] John Watson, The Mind of the Master (Hodder & Stoughton, 1896), 21.

[4] Zichen Zhao, trans., “Christian Renaissance in China: Statement of Aims of the Peking Apologetic Group,” The Chinese Recorder 51, no. 9 (1920): 636.

[5] Elisabeth Forster, “The Buzzword ‘New Culture Movement’: Intellectual Marketing Strategies in China in the 1910s and 1920s,” Modern Asian Studies 51, no. 5 (2017): 1273. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26599538.  

[6] Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions (SCM Press, 1990), 149–50.

[7] Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 150.