Editor's Preface: Why Chinese Theology and Literary Theory?

To be able to judge of others by what is nigh in ourselves: this may be called the art of virtue. Analects Book VI, Ch. 28, trans. Legge

As China has embarked on a programmatic "opening up" to the world since 1978, both China and its global partners have been greatly changed by the encounter. New cultural hybrids have emerged, including academic theology in China, while the world has come to terms with new political patterns as China's rise reshapes the geopolitical order. Over the same period, sea changes in the teaching of theology in our universities and seminaries—with new posts in Asian American theologies, in Latinx theologies, in African theologies, and revamped curricula in systematics courses—have occurred in parallel with the recasting of literary studies and the enlargement of its canons and methodologies, its gendered subjects and linguistic reach. A certain time-lag between changing realities and our academic study of them is inevitable, especially in newly formed fields.

The "Sino-Christian theology" movement of the 1990s and beyond in China presents a new type of relationship between Christianity and literature, between theology and literary theory. In April 2016, a group of scholars from mainland China, the United States, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom met to study and discuss this phenomenon in a seminar on "Theory and Theology in Chinese Literary Studies." The core of this Special Issue presents papers from the seminar.

"Sino-Christian theology" as a discipline comprises exploration of the history of Christianity in China and its present-day thought and social impact, but it is also a methodology, or a "knowledge system," and this second sense—as a means of pursuing a range of questions in the humanities, including but not limited to Christianity and its place in Chinese life and thought—provoked much discussion among seminar participants. For many of its practitioners, and especially those of the first generation of academics, Sino-Christian theology is a neutral academic discipline, a means of approaching Christian culture and Christian faith independent of the church and its interpretive methods. The movement is rational, neutral, non-confessional—and also aspires to be educative and nation-building. Its guiding aim to serve society rather than the church presents a challenge to church theologians from within and beyond China, while its methodologies and the questions it asks about reading practices, hermeneutics, and cross-cultural dialogue invite engagement from literary scholars and critics.

Literature has offered scholars like Yang Huilin a prism through which to understand Christianity, and comparative literature a place to conjoin ethics and biblical studies with literary criticism, critical theory, and translation theories. The study of Christianity and literary theory has enabled many in the Sino-Christian theology movement to critique the rigidities of Marxist models in play in the humanities in China, and to forge a new type of intellectual enquiry. As Hong Kong scholar P. C. Lo has noted, the study of Christianity in China is a turn away from the "religious" orthodoxy of Maoist Marxism. And as David Jasper and other participants in our seminar theorized, given the approaches of Sino-Christian theology, its range of topics, and institutional location in humanities departments, literary studies may prove a better dialogue partner for understanding and exploring the movement than theology, given that literary intertextuality resembles the type of inter-cultural theology that many of its proponents employ.

The essays below offer an introduction to the themes and methods of this "Chinese-language theology" movement. Sharon Kim's introduction presents an overview of Sino-Christian theology as she addresses Chinese scholars' "ambidextrous approach" to theology and theory. Relating Chinese work to current American discourse on globalization and secularism, she also considers why this particular Chinese operation of theology within the literary landscape has yet to register in US scholarship.

The second paper is by one of the leading scholars in the Sino-Christian theology movement, Yang Huilin. The affinities between theological studies and Chinese studies of the classics, which are enjoying a revival in the new China of Xi Jinping, have proved fertile...