If the aim of Chinese Christianity is to be theologically true and exegetically faithful to Scripture, it cannot be accomplished without recourse to and integration of the foundational roots of the ancient church, also known as the Patristic Age.1 This is the realization of the Chinese proverb, “Looking back to go forward.” It is not enough to resort to the faiths that stemmed from the Protestant reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These have had an enormous impact on the shaping of Chinese churches with much benefit. And of course, they too have had a legacy. Yet, it is little known that most of the principles derived from the early Reformation period were themselves heavily indebted to early Christianity and understood how that ancient faith provided a legacy and foundational period of the Church’s self-understanding through its faith, sufferings, and achievement of theological clarity. Seeing that Protestant Christianity is an indelible part of China’s religious landscape, we want to propose that any claim for orthodoxy or unity among the diversity of churches means that Chinese Christians must go beyond their Protestant past to the formative eras of their faith—apostolic and patristic—which are themselves the joint anchors of responsible biblical interpretation, Christian teaching, theological imagination, and spiritual growth.
In a new course of twelve lecture style presentations, offered through Regent College in partnership with the China Academic Consortium, we will be concerned with how Chinese Protestants can embrace the wealth of guidance and faith which the resources of ancient Christianity provide. The primary argument engrained in these themes is that post-apostolic Christianity was an age that came to be reckoned as a particularly unique and foundational age within the broader narrative of church history. We will also show how the rapid growth of ancient Christianity took place amid the backdrop of a sometimes hostile and power-oriented society (the Roman and Persian Empires), giving birth to its own social order, even though it remained a minority for centuries scattered across the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern contexts.
If we were to ask why any believing Chinese scholar or churchman should hearken to ancient Christian wisdom, a number of reasons come to the fore. First, the study of patristics, like any in-depth historical study, liberates us from the present. Every age, including our own, has a certain outlook. An examination of another and influential era of thought forces us to confront our innate prejudices and our own worldview which would otherwise go unnoticed. By delving into the writings of ancient Christians, one is confronted with different times, places, and perspectives that can change the way we think about our life in God, reading Scripture, and instruction for those who depend on us.
A second reason to study patristics is to learn how the early Christian texts can provide us with a “map” for thinking about or living the Christian life. Simply having the personal working of the Spirit and one’s experience of God is not sufficient for grasping essential Christian truths. Such a map is composed of the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of Christian pastors and scholars who have come long before. In fact, it is the patristic travelers from the second to the fifth centuries who “drew” the map during a crucial formative era. These travelers consist of (but not limited to) Tertullian (early third century, Africa) who wrote on prayer, on baptism, and on identifying falsehoods in Christian thinking; or we could turn to Athanasius of Alexandria (fourth century) who articulated the significance of the Incarnation of the Word (Christ), or Ambrose of Milan (fourth century) who explains why the Holy Spirit is necessary in our conception of the Almighty, or Gregory of Nyssa who spelled out how we should conceive of the Trinity, or Augustine (fifth century, Africa) who gave us tools for catechesis (Christian instruction), or Ephrem of Syria who penned inspired Christian poetry.
A further reason for studying the early Christian age is that the reader will be equipped with an enduring language for expressing truths about the acts and presence of God and many other matters of significance to Christian belief and life. One discovers a world where specific words had a designated meaning that was not shared with other meanings. In our age of the slipperiness of language and our lack of attention to words because of their sheer abundance (mobile phones and media in all forms), we may not see the way words are redefined and can be made into something else that has different meanings—choice, identity, marriage, tolerance—you make them into whatever you will. It seems to be a problem in all countries, especially in Western nations.
Aristotle claimed that our souls are like a wax tablet; what we see and hear become engraved on our being, which is a problem in our age of information overload. We are barraged by words in the form of constant communication from innumerable sources. As we let more and more words into our consciences, it threatens the value of those words that hold a special significance. Such a situation makes it harder to claim that there is a singular road to God and the kind of God that is revealed to us are non-negotiable matters. Christianity itself was built upon the Logos—the eternal Word, which “spoke” all things into being. That Word impinges upon our souls for the sake of truth and righteousness. It follows that specific speech and reason are necessary in imbibing and maintaining Christian belief.
A final thing to mention about reading the ancient Christian texts, you will find matters that are peculiar to the patristic church and may not always reflect the realities of churches in China. Certainly not everything one discovers in early Christianity is applicable to our times and cultures. Just because the ancient writers spoke and wrote plainly in their own day does not necessarily mean we, in our day, can understand it without difficulty. There will be the use of imagery and allegory, as well as a vocabulary, that will require extra patience. But it is no less true that viable parallels exist between ancient Christian learning and life within Chinese Christianity, and part of the purpose of our writing this series of presentations is to identify what those are in the best way we know how. In all your encounters with the great legacy of ancient Christianity, seek the truth prayerfully, knowing that the Holy Spirit worked in this age as a close continuation of the original Apostles. Carefully reading the early Christians is described by Ignatius of Antioch as similar to constructing a building:
[You are] like stones of the Father’s temple, having been made ready for the building of God the Father and carried up the heights by the engine of Jesus Christ, which is the cross, using the Holy Spirit as a rope. And faith is your windlass, and love is the road leading up to God.2
A very important implication from the above is that we must resist the temptation of simply “using” or borrowing from patristic literature and theology in a way that pays no heed to the original context. Understanding not merely how the mind of the ancient Christians worked, but why ancient Christians spoke and wrote the way they did, is a matter of learning about their world. It is too easy to find parallels between early Christianity and Chinese Christianity if their culture is bypassed in haste. While these parallels do exist and should be sought, we must be circumspect in identifying them through the lens of a deeper and thoughtful reading of their times. It is hoped that the recipient of these presentations will, rather than co-opting the ancient Christians into our own era, be willing to spend some time in theirs. That is the ultimate goal of the course, “The Legacy of Ancient Christianity for China.”
Click below to read a PDF description of the course in Chinese and English.
Click here to register at Regent College.
Endnotes
Image credit: Aleksandra Sapozhnikova via UnSplash.
Daniel Williams
Daniel H. Williams (PhD, MA University of Toronto, 1991; ThM Princeton Seminary) has recently retired from Professor of Patristics and Historical Theology in the Departments of Religion and Classics of Baylor University. He is now Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute for Studies in Religion (Waco, TX). His publications are …View Full Bio
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