第四章 给我一个原则，我就能撬动世界：王怡之凯波尔式诠释及其局限

Footnotes

1. “It cannot be denied that common grace has been active throughout the ages among a number of more developed peoples …. When Holy Scripture reveals to us the mystery of creation, God’s providence in the covenant with Noah, and the movement of the world toward a final catastrophe, all this most definitely concerns not only the elect but all people, everything that lives.” Abraham Kuyper, “Common Grace in Science,” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 459. ↩

2. See Ibid.; and Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, 481-482. encompass all spheres of society governed by God’s providential activity. This distinction, in turn, undergirded his division of Christian mandates into evangelistic and cultural dimensions.3 Such a conceptual framework provided urban house church dissidents with a universalisable idiom through which their Christian faith could be integrated with their political pursuit of liberal democracy. Moreover, through the trajectory of his career “from pulpit to parliament,”4 Kuyper developed a theological framework that fundamentally construed the crises of his own social context as conflicts between a “Christian worldview” and a “modernist worldview,” or between the sovereignty of Christ and that of the nation. For urban house church intellectuals situated within the post–June Fourth vacuum of values, this framework exerted a powerful attraction, offering a readily available grand intellectual system and overarching narrative through which they could return from aesthetic and religious quests to sustained engagement in social and political reform.5 1.2. Chen Mingzhi: Organic Church Agasinst Sinicisation As mentioned in Chapter 2, after his conversion, Wang was committed to repositioning conservative constitutionalism within a neo-Calvinist Christian worldview. In this light, it seems highly reasonable to adopt a Kuyperian understanding of Wang’s ecclesiology and public theology. Chen employs the Kuyperian distinction between church as institution and church as organism to explain the public meaning of ERCC’s disobedient practice. His research interest is to utilise ERCC as a contextualised paradigm of Kuyperianism to refute criticisms from the Sino-theological circle regarding the reception of neo-Calvinism by house churches. ↩

3. Abraham Kuyper, “Common Grace,” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, 194-195. ↩

4. Frank Vanden Berg, Abraham Kuyper (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1950), 69. ↩

5. See, for example, Yu Jie, Daguang: Zongjiao gaige, guannian duijue yu guozu xingshuai diyi juan – Qingjiao zhixu wubainian 大光：宗教改革、观念对决与国族兴衰－清教秩序五百年 [A Great Light: The Reformation, Clash of Ideologies, and National Revival, vol. 1: Five Hundred Years of Puritan Order] (Gūsa Publishing, 2021), 15; and Wang Zhiyong, Dangdai jidujiao shengyue shijieguan 当代基督教圣约世界观 [Contemporary Christian Covenantal Worldview] (Taipei: Christian Arts Press, 2013). He argues that the heuristic value of Kuyperian ecclesiology for contextualising Christianity in contemporary China has been largely disregarded because Sino-theology critics have failed to study the discourse of house-church neo-Calvinists in depth. They have used it as a springboard for developing their own theory. Therefore, he believes his careful study of Wang’s ecclesiology can help to recover the ignored heuristic power.6 Taking Wang’s “Cong gaigezong shenxue kan zhengjiao guanxi yu zaihou chongjian”7 published about two months after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake as the major reference, he notes that: The functional organism-institution distinction operative in Wang’s ecclesiology, his emphasis on forming Christian organizations to fulfil the cultural mandate, and the institutional church’s more or less indirect, formative, and supportive role to the organism- in-society, all conform in no small ways to Kuyper’s public ecclesiology.8 In the article Chen cites, following the encouragement for house churches to enter the public sphere and participate in social ministries, Wang attempts to address the “pastoral crisis” that emerged in disaster relief, namely, the reduction of the church to a charitable institution. As a solution, he suggests that the church’s social participation needs “a professional, social and non-profit bridge, and this bridge is the institution.”9 In distinction from the bridging social institution, the institutional church’s role in social mission is to support “the (social) institution with dedication and feeds and encourages ↩

6. Chen Mingzhi, “The Church as Organism and Institution: Abraham Kuyper’s Public Ecclesiology for Christian Public-Social Engagement in Contemporary China,” PhD diss. (University of Aberdeen, 2024), 157. ↩

7. Wang Yi, “Cong gaigezong shenxue kan zhengjiao guanxi yu zaihou chongjian” 从改革宗神学看政教关系与 灾后重建 [The Relationship between Politics and Religion and Post-Disaster Reconstruction from the Perspective of Reformed Theology], in Jidu shi zhu: Lun zhengjiao guanxi 基督是主：论政教关系 [Christ is Lord: On the Relationship between Church and State] (2019), 196-209. https://www.wangyilibrary.com 怡牧师文集：论政教关系》. ↩

8. Chen Mingzhi, “The Church as Organism and Institution,” 249-250. ↩

9. Wang, “Cong gaigezong shenxue kan zhengjiao guanxi yu zaihou chongjian,” 204. believers’ participation with the word of God.”10 To highlight the peculiar role of the church in such a division of labour, Wang reminds his church members that the church itself, what I mean is the co-workers in the church who are deacons of the word of God, should not exceed the role of the trustee of the word. Because at all times, the only mission of the church is to bring the word of God to the world and to bring the world to the word of God. In fact, such a relationship between the gospel and culture is implicit in the relationship between politics and religion.11 Kuyper’s institution/organism distinction and its correspondence to the distinction between evangelical and cultural mandates can be identified here. The institutional church is still considered relevant to the public, insofar as it is one of the spheres within the Christian worldview. It is positioned as one of the many social spheres within a much broader blueprint of the “public,” even if it is the most salient one, “illumining all the sectors and associations that appear across the wide range of human life and activity.”12 By God’s Word and sacraments, it influences the public in a “limited, indirect, and formative” way.13 There needs to be intermediaries, such as charitable institutions, between the institutional church and the public, the spontaneous order conservative constitutionalists long for. Despite the substantial similarities, Chen correctly observes that Wang gives the institutional church a more crucial role than Kuyper. For example, Wang insists that the public ministry of the organic church must be directly supported financially by the institutional church, and that the ERCC, although tactfully maintaining a certain distance, is still actively involved in public affairs such as rights protection and disaster relief. As Chen claims, “Kuyper would ↩

10. Ibid. Parenthesis added. ↩

11. Ibid. ↩

12. Kuyper, “Common Grace,” 194. ↩

13. Chen, “The Church as Organism and Institution,” 263. have frowned upon such direct and significant interference and entanglement.”14 However, for Chen, such differences do not affect the Kuyperian essence of Wang’s ecclesiology; rather, they demonstrate the contextualising potential of Kuyperianism across cultures. In “Common Grace,” Kuyper employs the “four terrains” typology to distinguish the degrees and modes by which common grace and special grace affect people across different contexts.15 Chen invokes this typology to demonstrate Kuyperianism’s contextualising ability. The circumstances Zhao Tianen encountered when he promoted neo-Calvinism in Chinese house churches correspond to the definition of the second type of terrain in typology. At that time, institutional churches had taken root but adopted a separatist attitude and “avoided all usurpation and limited themselves to fulfilling their own task” of the gospel mandate.16 In Kuyper’s time, the Netherlands was the third terrain in which the special revelation of Christianity indirectly influenced the “customs, usages, mores, and laws,” and this is what a Christian country is generally understood to be.17 Wang’s situation was somewhere in between. Institutional churches were beginning to have a limited public influence in other areas. Chen, therefore, suggests that in distinction from Zhao Tianen’s and Kuyper’s “organism-centric” approaches, Wang’s highlight of the role of institutional churches in public missions is “unsurprising.”18 This proves Kuyperianism’s “acute sensitivity to contextual factors.”19 On this basis, Chen takes Alexander Chow as his main interlocutor and challenges the widely held view in Sino-theological circles that the contextualisation of Christianity requires a return to Confucianism as China’s cultural root and a constructive dialogue with it. His criticism focuses on the equation between contextualisation and Confucianisation these sinicisation proposals generally presuppose. He first points out that the cases of Zhao Tianen, ↩

14. Ibid., 263-264. ↩

15. Abraham Kuyper, “Common Grace,” 199-201. ↩

16. Ibid., 199. ↩

17. Ibid. ↩

18. Chen, “The Church as Organism and Institution,” 262. ↩

19. Ibid., 259. Wang, and the house church have already demonstrated their sensitivity and adaptability to their situations. Therefore, Kuyperianism in China is by no means “quickly translated ... with little contextual reflection and evaluation,” as Chow criticises.20 He then points out that Confucianism has lost its overt status as the “ruling orthodoxy” and has only had an “implicit” influence on Chinese culture in the pursuit of modernisation of China.21 A significant reason why Christian intellectuals like Wang and Zhao Tianen adopt Kuyperianism is precisely because they consciously intended to exclude the implicit influence of Confucianism on Chinese society. Therefore, the suggestion of retrieving Confucian resources to contextualise Christianity to a large extent confuses the ends with the means.22 Lastly, he questions that based on the same requirement, compared to Confucianism that has only implicitly influenced contemporary Chinese people, would it not be more appropriate for the Marxist and communist political ideologies that have sustained the rule of the CCP and comprehensively shaped “contemporary Chinese people’s worldview and way of life” to demand the favour and appreciation of the house church intellectuals?23 In short, Chen sees the contextual adaptability of Kuyperianism in the theological genealogy from Kuyper to Zhao Tianen and Wang. With its concrete life experiences, the house church becomes a living “model as applied” for the contextualisation of Kuyperian ecclesiology. On the contrary, the Confucianised Christianity proposed by Chow focuses on abstract theories and religious-philosophical aspects, which makes this model merely “imagined.”24 It can be said that Chen cleverly used the contextualisation appeal of Sino- theology scholars to question their Confucianisation proposal. Does the so-called “context” in which the sinicisation project operates refer to the theoretical definition of culture, or the ↩

20. Alexander Chow, Chinese Public Theology: Generational Shifts and Confucian Imagination in Chinese Christianity, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 131. Cited in Chen, 292. ↩

21. Chen, “The Church as Organism and Institution,” 293. ↩

22. Ibid. ↩

23. Ibid., 293-294. ↩

24. Ibid., 290. communal life experience actually experienced by a group of people? Is the equation between China and Confucianism commonly assumed in Western academia a kind of respect for a foreign culture or an oversimplified categorisation that obliterates diversity and ignores alternatives? Chen’s response implicitly captures a less noticed but crucial theological focus of Wang’s. The latter’s emphasis on the life tradition of the house church sharply opposes the approach of liberal theologians (especially the Chinese cultural and academic Christians) who regard Christianity as a system of doctrines and principles that can be separated from the community of disciples’ worship life. This criticism echoes the contemporary postliberal theological critique of the “religion” motif in liberal theology. However, due to the ambiguities in Kuyper’s system and his use of the “principle” language to describe Christianity, Chen’s adoption of the Kuyperian interpretative framework may be a disadvantage in highlighting this critical power. This will become particularly clear in my later discussion of Xu’s alternative Kuyperian approach, which differs from the Westminsterian version well known to house churches and, in direct contrast to Chen’s, endorses the need for sinicisation and Confucianisation. 1.3. Xu Ximian: A Contextualised Neo-Reformed Theology Xu’s Sino-theological approach does not directly take Wang and ERCC as its object of criticism but rather target the house church tradition’s widespread separatist tendency towards Chinese culture, society, and politics. It primarily takes the Wenzhou house church as an example, while urban intellectual house churches that actively participate in social and cultural ministries are presented as a minority.25 However, Xu’s criticism of the influence of ↩

25. Xu Ximian, “Give Us Dutch Neo-Calvinism: Retrieving and Reconsidering Dutch Neo-Calvinism in the Chinese Context”, in Modern Chinese Theologies Volume 2: Independent and Indigenous, ed. Chloë Starr (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 82. Westminsterian neo-Calvinism in Chinese house churches might also be applied to Wang and ERCC’s “Ninety-Five Theses” against the sinicisation of Christianity.26 Xu begins by highlighting the internal divisions within neo-Calvinism. He notes that the reception of neo-Calvinism in Chinese house churches—mediated through figures such as Zhao Tianen and Tang Chongrong—has been dominated by a Westminsterian variant associated with Cornelius Van Til.27 According to Xu, this “secondhand”28 Westminsterian version of Kuyperianism departs significantly from the original Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition, particularly in its understanding of common grace. Van Til sharply criticises Kuyper’s and Herman Bavinck’s accounts of common grace, regarding them as an endorsement of human progress that “overestimates the knowledge of God in history and creation and, that being so, plays down God’s incomprehensibility.”29 While recognising the negative role of common grace in limiting sin, Van Til believes that it will continue to be weakened throughout history until its mission has been completely replaced by special grace. This eschatological vision has, Xu argues, fostered a separatist tendency and a corresponding indifference toward cultural labour within traditional Chinese house churches.30 On the contrary, Kuyper and Bavinck “expect an eschatological ingathering of the fruits of humankind’s cultural labors.”31 They believe common grace will ultimately be united with special grace to achieve consummation rather than decline. This means that in the grace of Christ, nature will not only be renewed, as Van Til’s eschatology believes, but also restored.32 ↩

26. Wang Yi and Early Rain Covenant Church, “Ninety-Five Theses: The Reaffirmation of Our Stance on the House Church,” in Wang Yi et al., Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement, ed. and trans. Hannah Nation and J.D. Tseng (Illinois: IVP Academic, 2022), 104-124. ↩

27. Xu, “Give Us Dutch Neo-Calvinism,” 72-73. ↩

28. Ibid., 70. ↩

29. Ibid., 75. ↩

30. Ibid., 74-76. ↩

31. Richard J. Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 50. Cited in Xu, “Give Us Dutch Neo-Calvinism,” 77. ↩

32. Xu, “Give Us Dutch Neo-Calvinism,” 77-78. On the basis of this distinction, Xu argues that the Westminsterian approach taken by house churches has hindered the contextualisation of Dutch neo-Calvinism in China. Influenced by Van Til, they placed too much emphasis on the distinction between Christians and non- Christians, discouraging constructive dialogue between them. In contrast, a more authentic Dutch neo-Calvinism encourages Christians to engage with elements of Chinese culture, such as “Confucian philosophy, Sinicised Marxism, Chinese nationalism, and scientism,” on the basis of common grace.33 Although Xu considers Bavinck to be a representative of the more authentic version of neo-Calvinism, since this chapter deals with Wang’s Kuyperian interpretations, it will focus on Xu’s representation of Kuyper’s theory. Xu identifies two significant elements of Kuyper’s system that can particularly support the contextualisation project in China. The first is his account of six periods of Christian theology. In his Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology,34 Kuyper divided the history of Christian theology’s development into six periods: “naivety, the internal conflict, prematurely claimed triumph, development of multiformity, the apparent defeat, resurrection.”35 More crucial to Xu than the details of Kuyper’s explanation of the individual contexts of these six periods is that this historical narrative approach reflects Kuyper’s “close heed to the shifts of contexts while sketching the history of theology.”36 He emphasises the “ideological-genetic feature” of Kuyper’s historical account: History “is concerned with idea” (ideological) and consists of “genetically connected moments” (genetic), which renders its process purposeful and thus “is united as one.”37 The linking sequence of these moments implies “the shifts of contexts.”38 Kuyper’s six-period theory, therefore, is ↩

33. Ibid., 86. ↩

34. Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology: Its Principles, trans. J. Hendrik de Vries (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898). ↩

35. Xu Ximian, “How to Make Sino-Reformed Theology Possible?: Retrieving Abraham Kuyper’s Proto- Reformed Contextual Theology,” Journal of Chinese Theology 8 (2022), 166. ↩

36. Ibid., 169. ↩

37. Ibid., 170. ↩

38. Ibid. taken as a demonstration of his strong concern for context. Xu believes this offers significant inspiration for Chinese neo-Calvinists “in the seventh period,” encouraging them to retrieve traditional Chinese cultural resources to achieve contextualisation.39 The “tempo-spatiality and organicity” of the Christian principle is the other Kuyperian element that supports the contextualisation of Christianity.40 Xu invokes Kuyper’s metaphor in the Stone lectures, which describes Reformed principles as the root of a plant that “in a particular context develops its own trunk and branches and eventually grows into a splendid living system, producing a worldview and view of life for people in this context.”41 A Sino- Reformed theology can therefore be interconnected with “Reformed theologies” in other contexts and be regarded together as the flowering result of the fundamental “Reformed theology.”42 This demonstrates the organic character of Calvinism. Based on the two elements of Kuyperian theory outlined above, Xu calls on the Chinese Reformed church to recognise the common grace that operates in traditional Chinese culture. Common grace “has given birth to diverse cultures, civilisations, legal systems, philosophies of human virtues, and so forth, around the world,” and has become the soil in which special grace must take root and bear contextualised fruit.43 He particularly takes Mou Zongsan, a representative of New Confucianism, as an example, arguing that his Mind Confucianism can offer a useful “conceptual tool” for contextualising Reformed theology.44 Chen defends the house church’s rejection of the sinicisation agenda, of which Confucianisation is a crucial part, by demonstrating the contextual adaptability of Kuyperianism. Xu, however, takes the Sino-theological scholars’ criticism of the house church’s anti-sinicisation tendency one step further, pointing out that Kuyperianism internally ↩

39. Ibid. ↩

40. Ibid., 173; ↩

41. Ibid. ↩

42. Ibid., 174. ↩

43. Ibid., 177. A more detailed discussion on this, see Chapter 5, sec. 3.2. contains an affirmation of adopting local cultural resources and engaging in dialogue with them. Chen’s defence does not therefore completely fail. His doubts about Confucianism being taken for granted as equivalent to the “Chinese context” can still serve as a response to Xu’s proposal and trigger further discussion. However, for our present purpose, it is enough to show that the Kuyperian framework does not unquestionably endorse the anti-sinicisation practice of the house churches, and may even pose a threat to it. Next, we will explore Jung’s defence for Wang and the ERCC. Although adopting a Kuyperian interpretive framework and thus largely overlapping with Chen, he expresses a more welcoming attitude towards the sinicisation agenda and explicitly embraces Xu’s proposal. 1.4. Jarred Jung: Costly Kuyperianism as Limited Contextualisation Jarred Jung’s doctoral thesis defines Wang’s theology as a “costly Kuyperianism.”45 He adopts the Kuyperian conception of sphere sovereignty, which involves the distinction between the institutional church and the organic church, and its correspondence with the special/common grace distinction, to outline Wang’s ecclesiology.46 In the face of the differences between Wang’s and Kuyper’s systems, he also adopts a contextual solution to maintain Wang’s Kuyperian basic tone. Two important differences are pointed out. The first is that Wang “holds a more pessimistic view of culture,”47 which “leads to a development of sphere sovereignty into a concept overall more antithetical to the state and more eschatological in nature than Kuyper’s.”48 Secondly, Wang grants the institutional church a more prominent role in social reform than Kuyper does. Jung insightfully compares the career trajectory of Kuyper from the church to the politics with Wang’s, which went in the opposite direction.49 ↩

44. Jarred T. Jung, “Costly Kuyperianism: Neo-Calvinist Public Theology in a Context of Persecution with a Focus on Pastor Wang Yi,” PhD diss. (Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2023). ↩

45. Ibid., 215-223. ↩

46. Ibid., 214. ↩

47. Ibid., 227. ↩

48. Ibid., 217-218. He believes that this has resulted in Wang not placing “heavy weight on the organic church’s impact on society”50 as Kuyper did, instead emphasising the “prophetic demonstration” of the institutional church towards culture and its social impact.51 These two points may be best understood as two sides of the same coin. Wang’s pessimistic sensibility and eschatological hope for social reform prevent him from expecting autonomous reform in other social spheres and draw he to emphasise the influence of the institutional church on them. In discussing the prophetic role of the church, Jung particularly highlights Wang’s attachment to Presbyterian ecclesiastical polity. He refers to a later article52 by Wang and correctly points out that Wang believed that the organisational structure and governance logic of the Presbyterian church reflected the rule of law under Christ’s monarchy to the greatest extent in accordance with the Reformation principles of Sola Scriptura and Sola Christus.53 Then, he cited two other articles to claim that Wang “views the Presbyterian polity itself as a form of the church’s ‘prophetic mission’ to ‘denounce sin and proclaim promises’”54 and as “a blessing for the revival of the house church and for the future of public governance in Chinese society.”55 Despite recognising these differences, Jung still defines Wang’s ecclesiology as primarily Kuyperian and attempts to demonstrate the continuity with Kuyperianism that runs through his earlier and later views. To defend this, he disagrees with Chloë Starr’s study on the theological meaning of the ERCC’s “Ninety-Five Theses” as proposing a two-kingdom antagonism ↩

49. Ibid., 218. ↩

50. Ibid., 220. ↩

51. Wang Yi, “Zhanglaohui de mimi” 长老会的秘密 [The Presbyterian Secret], Wang Yi wenku 王怡文库 [Wang Yi Resource Library], 01 November 2017. https://www.wangyilibrary.com. ↩

52. Jung, “Costly Kuyperianism,” 219. ↩

53. Ibid., 220. Citing here, Wang Yi, “Zhongyao de shaoshu: Zhanglaohui zai zhongguo de juese,” 重要的少数： 长老会在中国的角色 [The Important Minority: The Role of the Presbyterian Church in China], in Jidu shi zhu, 293. ↩

54. Wang Yi, “Jidutu shequ shi zhege shijie de xiwang—Yu Jie Wang Yi fangtan lu” 基督徒社区是这个世界的 希望－余杰王怡访谈录 [Christian Community Is the Hope of This World—An Interview between Yu Jie and Wang Yi], Wang Yi wenku 王 怡 文 库 [Wang Yi Resource Library], 01 July 2011. https://www.wangyilibrary.com. between the church and state and claims that it still firmly adheres to Kuyperian theology.56 He suggests that the “Theses” was published when the Chinese government’s repression and control of religion were heating up, and the sinicisation of Christianity was re-emphasised as the CCP’s important guidance for religious regulation. This situation “pushed Wang Yi and ERCC to draw a stronger separation between church and state than he previously held, leading to a two-kingdom theology.”57 Nevertheless, Jung insists that despite “the use of ‘two kingdom’ semantics,” if “the ‘Theses’ is considered as a whole, it becomes apparent that Wang is not separating himself from his earlier stance that echoes Kuyperian sphere sovereignity.”58 He explains that the “Theses” have never affirmed that the civil kingdom can be a realm ruled by natural law independent of the spiritual kingdom ruled by divine revelation. It, on the contrary, claims “God’s sovereignty over everything,” and thus demands that the state “operates according to God’s ways.”59 This is regarded as consistent with Wang’s early constitutionalist writings after the conversion.60 Furthermore, the Lutheran separatist two-kingdom theology is also incompatible with the cultural mandate that Wang has always emphasised.61 In addition to the two-kingdom theology, Jung also puts effort to draw a line between Wang and Anabaptist theology. He finds that the prophetic role Wang gives the institutional church “sounds in many ways similar to the neo-Anabaptist call to ‘let the church be the church’.”62 Furthermore, Kuyper entrusted the cultural mandate more to the organic church ↩

55. Chloë Starr, “Wang Yi and the 95 Theses of the Chinese Reformed Church,” Religions 7/12: 142 (2016), n11. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7120142. For our previous discussion about this article, see Chapter 3, sec. 3.2. ↩

56. Jung, “Costly Kuyperianism,” 230. ↩

57. Ibid., 231. ↩

58. Ibid., 232. ↩

59. See Chapter 2, sec. 3.2. ↩

60. Jung, “Costly Kuyperianism,” 233-234. ↩

61. Ibid., 252. Citing here, John Howard Yoder, “Let the Church Be the Church,” in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, ed. Michael G. Cartwright (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1998), 168-180. In fact, there is considerable debate over whether Yoder and Hauerwas should be classified as “neo-Anabaptists.” While James Davison Hunter categorises both within this framework, arguing that they adopt a more radical stance of resistance toward secular mainstream power than the traditional, quietist Anabaptist tradition, see James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 150–66. In contrast, Yoder criticised the neo-Anabaptist “ideological framework” in order to anchor his theology in the thick denominational life of sixteenth-century Anabaptism; see and limited the role of the institutional church, but “Wang Yi’s context reveals that just by its very presence in society, the institutional church can be as directly responsible for mission as the organic church.”63 However, Jung insists that the prophetic witness of Wang’s church consciously takes transforming other social spheres as its purpose, and it marks its essential difference from the ecclesiology of Anabaptists such as Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder, which “are primarily concerned with what is internal to the church.”64 Instead of turning into an Anabaptist model, Wang’s ecclesiology is more appropriate to be construed as a new “paradigm” that “casts the debate over the validity of Kuyper’s institute/organism distinction in a new light, sustaining the distinction while demonstrating that both the institute and the organism can be direct arbiters of God’s mission.”65 In response to Zhao Wenjuan’s criticism of Wang from the separatist perspective of traditional house churches, Jung believes that it does not appropriately consider the essential Kuyperian elements of Wang’s theology and focuses too much on his early liberal concerns. Wang’s purpose is not “the democratizing of China” but “the transformation of Chinese society in a Kuyperian fashion.”66 When the state transgresses the boundaries of sphere sovereignty and “seeks the position of God,” the church’s “very existence outside of government regulation is a political statement.”67 In this case, the separatists’ quest for an apolitical church ultimately proved unrealistic. John Howard Yoder, “Reflections on the Irrelevance of certain Slogans to the historical Movements they represent, Or, the Cooking of the Anabaptist Goose, Or, Ye garnish the sepulchers of the righteous,” April 25, 1952, folder 6, box 47, Harold S. Bender Papers, Archives of the Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana. Resonating with the discussion regarding the shared “inner life essence” of urban house churches and traditional house churches, this thesis, in contrast to Jung, aligns with Yoder’s position on this issue, referring to him and Hauerwas, who was influenced by him, as Anabaptists rather than neo-Anabaptists. ↩

62. Jung, “Costly Kuyperianism,” 253. ↩

63. Ibid., 252. ↩

64. Ibid., 254. ↩

65. Ibid., 258. ↩

66. Ibid., 259. His attitude towards the criticism that the Chinese Reformed house churches are not contextualised enough is where he differs most from Chen. He to some extent agrees that Wang’s ecclesiology may be “under-contextualized to Chinese thought and too Western.”68 In particular, he raises concerns about the relevance of the Presbyterian republican organizational structure and the Westminster Confession of Faith, which were formulated in seventeenth-century England, to the contemporary Chinese context. Jung believes the Sino- theological cautions in this respect are “worth considering.”69 Certainly, like Chen, he is aware of the automatic adjusting ability in Wang’s adoption of Reformed theological resources. But he suggests that intentional contextualisation will be more contributive to the localisation and globalisation of Christianity. 70 Further considering Chow’s and Xu’s Confucianisation proposals, he argues that the latter is more likely to be accepted by Wang. It takes the Kuyperian doctrines of common grace and the organicity of the Reformed principle as the normative framework and seeks its metamorphosis in China, and thus is more conducive to helping “the church to explore and develop Chinese understandings of Western theologies.”71 2. Root Problems: The Internal Ambiguity of Kuyper’s Theory At the end of the previous chapter, we mentioned that Wang’s conservative-traditional house church critics and Sino-theological critics presented opposing views on the distance between the church and society in his system. We have now also identified tensions within scholarly Kuyperian defences of Wang’s work, which turn on interpretations of Kuyper’s discourse regarding the organicity of the Christian principle and its relationship to contextualisation. In this section, I will demonstrate that the origin of this interpretive dispute lies in ambiguities inherent in Kuyper’s theory itself. These ambiguities raise in turn questions ↩

67. Ibid., 263. ↩

68. Ibid., 263-264. ↩

69. Ibid., 265. ↩

70. Ibid., 266. about the appropriateness of Kuyperianism as the dominant interpretive framework for Wang’s theology. As we will see, over-reliance on this framework not only leads to interpretive confusion but also obscures some of the fundamental concerns of Wang’s ecclesiology, weakening its profound critical force, most notably his resistance to the sinicisation agenda. 2.1. What Is “Christian”? And What Kind of “Principle”? As Xu claims, if one considers Kuyper’s belief in the superiority of European Christian civilisation, “it seems preposterous to argue that Kuyper was well conscious of theology’s contextuality.”72 Yet, if in his discussion of the “tempo-spatial character” and “metamorphosis” of Christian principles is taken seriously enough, he can be seen as proposing a set of “proto- Reformed contextual theologies.”73 My diagnosis is that this paradoxical proposal grows from the long-standing internal tension in the development of Reformed doctrines of natural law and two kingdoms. As David VanDrunen points out, although contemporary Reformed adherents widely question the doctrines of natural law and two kingdoms, regarding the former as a distinctive idea of Catholicism and Enlightenment, and the latter as a Lutheran concept, both have long been important elements of Reformed theology.74 John Calvin proposed a theology of two kingdoms ruled by God in different ways. The civil kingdom is ruled by the Son’s “non- redemptive work of creation and providence,” and the kingdom of Christ “his redemptive work through the incarnate Lord Jesus Christ.”75 The church is identified only “with the redemptive kingdom of Christ”76 and maintains a “fundamental antithesis” with the eventually passing civil kingdom regarding “their morality, identity, and destiny.”77 ↩

71. Xu, “How to Make Sino-Reformed Theology Possible?,” 165. ↩

72. Ibid., 171, 174. ↩

73. David VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 2. ↩

74. Ibid., 4. ↩

75. Ibid., 303. This early Reformed ecclesiology differs greatly from the neo-Reformed idea of the church as organism, which includes the different spheres in the civil kingdom. VanDrunen believes that the decline of Christendom drives such development. When “the Western world has almost universally embraced freedom of religion, … most Reformed people … have given their assent to a tolerant, politically liberal, religiously pluralistic society” but simultaneously “sought to construct specifically Christian world views, bring Christ’s kingdom to expression in every area of life, and level radical critiques of non-Christian thought.”78 This allowed them to distinguish between two kinds of Christian citizenship. In participating in the affairs of the civil kingdom, Christians need not resort to the Bible or to special revelations from God. They instead appeal to universal natural law to advance the cultural and political agenda together with non-Christians.79 However, this division also forces the Reformists to further clarify the relationship between church as institution and that as organism, especially the importance of the former to the latter; otherwise, at least in the cultural sphere, Christianity will become an insignificant one among many providers of moral principles, easily replaced by other religions or ideologies. As a representative of Dutch neo-Calvinism, Kuyper was confronted with this question. He positions the cultural mandate within the scope of common grace, which, in a certain sense, is independent of biblical or special revelation. In his account of “divine ordinances,” Kuyper clearly equates this concept with natural laws.80 The divine ordinances were given to nature by God at the creation, and if people were not guilty of sin, they would be able to perceive them unhindered and adequately and “establish an unsurpassable constitutional law” according ↩

76. Ibid., 5. ↩

77. Ibid., 13-14. ↩

78. Ibid., 281. However, VanDrunen also points out that Kuyper “clearly preferred the language of ‘divine ordinances’ to that of ‘natural law’” in order to distinguish his idea from the understanding of nature in the worldview of the French Revolution. Ibid., 287. to them.81 He emphasises the integrity of natural revelation and its independence from special revelation to such an extent that he believes that “God communicated only through general revelation in the pre-lapsarian state.”82 It is only “[i]n response to the ravages of sin, God introduced special revelation,” which is “the ‘abnormal’ means of God’s communication.”83 However, in the fallen reality, he suggests that common grace needs to be illuminated by special revelation. He expounds on this by focusing on the epistemological priority of the special revelation and its function of regeneration. As VanDrunen notes, For Kuyper, regeneration, a sovereign divine action of renewing the human heart, is necessary because all knowledge flows out of a basic starting-point. For true knowledge, this basic starting-point must be that God in Christ is sovereign over all. Kuyper did not believe that formal thought processes have been attacked by sin, … [b]ut as knowledge develops into science, he asserts that all thought that does not begin from the conviction that God is sovereign must consistently diverge from the truth. Only through regeneration, then, can one affirm God’s sovereignty and hence pursue true knowledge.84 From this perspective, Kuyper’s position may be understood as a classical foundational epistemology, which presupposes the legitimacy of human formal thought processes and positions all epistemological issues in the setting of basic propositions as the starting point. This logic can be heuristically illustrated as follows. Sin is like a virus that corrupts the foundational data of the program, but the latter’s computing power remains intact. And the regeneration brought about by special revelation replants the most basic proposition, “God is ↩

79. Abraham Kuyper, “The Ordinances of God,” in Political Order and the Plural Structure of Society, eds. James W. Skillen and Rockne M. McCarthy (Atlanta: Scholars, 1991), 245. Cited in VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, 282. ↩

80. VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, 279. ↩

81. Ibid., 280. For Kuyper’s description of soteriological element of religion as abnormal, see Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1931), 54. ↩

82. VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, 291. Emphasis added. sovereign,” into the program and enables it to generate correct knowledge. In line with this logic, “the activity of the church as institution” is limited to “its ecclesiastical offices,” epistemologically inspiring the mission of social transformation of the church as organism through its “ministry of the Word.”85 In Kuyper’s blueprint of sphere sovereignty, institutional churches, the Bible, and special revelations are defined as sources of general principles derived from the recognition of God’s absolute sovereignty, including, for example, “knowing what man is, knowing what a nation is and the purpose of the nations, knowing the source of justice and authority, knowing too where the claim to freedom and progress derives its impulse.”86 VanDrunen carefully sorts out the relationship between natural laws, general principles, and the social application of principles in Kuyper’s system. For Kuyper, natural laws include the general rules and “the most particular detail” of them.87 This resonates with his account of divine ordinances, which were “imposed upon nature by God” in creation and able to be adequately perceived by human “observation of and reflection upon the experience of life.”88 Since the fall, one’s life experience has lost the ability to discover divine ordinances. Special revelation is “like a pair of glasses that enables him to read once again with his weakened eyes the partially obscured revelation of nature.”89 Therefore, by providing general principles, the church as institution restores human perception. This is also its limit. The application of natural laws is entrusted to the church as organism, which guides public policy according to the particular principles of each sphere’s sovereignty that nature reveals again. Considering the theoretical framework above, VanDrunen describes Kuyper as standing “ambiguously in the Reformed two kingdoms tradition.”90 His view of the cultural mandate ↩

83. Peter S. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 134. ↩

84. Kuyper, “The Ordinances of God,” 256. Cited in VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, 284. ↩

85. VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, 286. ↩

86. Ibid., 282. ↩

87. Kuyper, “The Ordinances of God,” 250. ↩

88. VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, 302. follows this tradition in many ways. Firstly, the rule of the civil kingdom refers to the common grace based on the order of creation and distinguished from the rule of special grace in the spiritual kingdom (institutional church). And there exists “a fundamental antithesis” between Christians and non-Christians.91 Secondly, like many early Reformed two-kingdom theorists, he distinguishes between “God’s twofold role as creator and redeemer.”92 The Son as the creator gives the common grace, and the special grace comes from the incarnate Christ as the redeemer. Lastly, they all believed that common grace had its own independent purpose from the growth of the spiritual kingdom.93 However, as mentioned in the previous review of Xu’s theory, Kuyper differs from the Reformed predecessors in believing the “eschatological ingathering” of Christian and non- Christians’ cultural works rather than a Christian pilgrim in the necessarily passing civil kingdom. Furthermore, in planning a “mutual social life of believers and unbelievers,” he also goes much further than his predecessors, for example, by proposing the concept of different sovereignties in various social spheres.94 But there is also ambiguity. VanDrunen, for example, points out the ambiguity of his use of the term “Christian.” It sometimes refers to the special grace of salvation and the institutional church, but sometimes to “a non-redemptive ‘Christian’ influence, a ‘Christianization’ that does not save or pertain to re-creation.”95 Moreover, analytically speaking, Kuyper’s uses of the term “principle” have at least four different levels of meaning. First and foremost is the “confession of the absolute sovereignty of God,” which is regarded as the fundamental doctrine of Calvinism.96 This ground principle constitutes the necessary and sufficient condition for God’s ordinances to be perceived. Then, ↩

89. Ibid., 303-304. ↩

90. Ibid., 305. ↩

91. Ibid., 305-306. ↩

92. Ibid., 307-308. ↩

93. Ibid., 313. ↩

94. Abraham Kuyper, “Calvinism: Source and Stronghold of Our Constitutional Liberties,” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, 307. from this confessional principle, the general principles provided by the institutional church and special revelation mentioned earlier are derived. The third use refers to the other part of natural law, that is, the application of general principles in different contexts and spheres. At this level, special revelation cannot provide further explicit guidance, and one must rely on the capacity for rational observation and application that was given to humans at creation and has not been formally corrupted by sin.97 The last meaning is found in the plant metaphor he uses to explain the organicity of the Reformed principle. As he describes, the interconnected “principles” that “hide under every manifestation of life … have their common root in a fundamental principle.”98 This image of the principle as organism encompasses all three meanings above, integrates them into a unified whole, and constitutes the most holistic meaning of the principle. Between the second and third layers, there is a grey area that leaves room to question the necessity of special revelation for cultural labor in the realm of common grace. It is reasonable to ask “if a non-Christian adopts the same principles as Christians at the third level of practice, can they also be considered part of the principle as organism at the fourth level?” Addressing this issue, Kuyper further distinguished between the “thought-principle” and the “life- principle.”99 Although describing non-believers’ recognition of thought-principle as “a foundation with at most a partial wall but without a roof or windows” and “a tower that lacks the spire,”100 it can certainly, in a qualified sense, help non-Christians “return to what was originally rejected,”101 that is, the “God” revealed in natural law. For example, he claims that “among non-Christian authorities there exists a fear of God and his justice, a fear that Calvin honoured even among pagan tyrants.”102 Therefore, in the sense of thought-principle, Kuyper ↩

95. Kuyper, “The Ordinances of God,” 250. ↩

96. Abraham Kuyper, Calvinism: Six Lectures Delivered in the Theological Seminary at Princeton (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1899), 260. Cited in Xu, “How to Make Sino-Reformed Theology Possible?,” 172. ↩

97. Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” 481-482. ↩

98. Ibid. ↩

99. Ibid., 482. ↩

100. Ibid., 481. seems to have made a subtle but crucial blurring of his initial claim that God’s ordinances in nature must be illuminated by special grace to be revealed. Here is where the advocates of the sinicisation of Christianity find support. Although Kuyper later used the metaphor of plant growth to talk about the growth of the Christian body of knowledge into “a distinct entity” that differs from other entities due to its fundamental principles, they have found a way to cross this “so wide, so deep, so impassable”103 chasm in Kuyper’s emphasis on the tempo-spatiality of the Reformed organic principle, and further suggest that Christians should affirm God’s manifestation in Chinese classical culture, transcending the Western perspective.104 Confucian moral philosophy can be interpreted passively as part of a different life system (in terms of life-principle) that is completely separate from the Christian organism, or postively as a metamorphosis of the Christian principle (in terms of thought-principle). Both can find support in Kuyper’s ambiguous account of natural revelation. 2.2. The Kuyperian Debate on Contextualisation in China Returning to the question of the application of Kuyperianism in China, Chen and Xu may be said to have focused on two competing yet coexisting expressions of Kuyper’s discourse on how Christian principles develop into a life system. Can a natural revelation not premised on the Christian ground principle be called revelation? Chen tends to suggest that a “partial wall” separated from the entire building should not be considered part of the building. Xu, however, holds the opposite view, since there is no completed and unchanging building body, but a living body in a state of metamorphosis. As long as the parts are compatible with the Reformed principles as the roots, they can be affirmed as their branches. ↩

101. Ibid., 483. ↩

102. See, for example, Starr, “Wang Yi and the 95 Theses of the Chinese Reformed Church.”; Xu, “How to Make Sino-Reformed Theology Possible?,” 177. This further reflects the difference in emphasis between them on Kuyper’s account of organicity. Chen focuses on the Reformed principle itself as organic (living principle), while Xu points out that this organicity depends on human perception granted at the time of creation. Considering the relationship between the second-level and third-level meanings of Kuyper’s account of the principle, it can be found that, in the strict sense, what can be called living, or the true source of this organicity, is not the ground principle (God’s absolute sovereignty), but the ability to observe and perceive that was given at the beginning but has fallen. Using the computer metaphor proposed earlier, the biblical principles are more like patch files used to repair a program with normal computing power but damaged foundational data. It enables the computer to function again by restoring or renewing (depending on the different versions of neo-Calvinism) its original file. The term “principle” sometimes refers to the ground principle of God’s sovereignty and the general principles that are provided to society by the church with special revelation (patch file), but at other times refers to the entire integrated unity in which all principles are interconnected above the ground principle (the functions and operations of the computer as a whole). It may be inferred that Kuyper may aim to express that the ground principle already inherently contains the content that will organically unfold in the concrete contexts. However, the radical distinction Kuyper draws between the special grace and common grace makes it difficult to understand how the ground and general principles can organically incorporate other derived principles corresponding to common grace and their interconnection to form a whole. This question proves particularly relevant when considering that the former is attributed to the work of the incarnate Christ as redeemer, while the latter is rooted in the non-redemptive work of Christ as creator. As mentioned above, Kuyper has made a clear distinction between these two roles of Christ.105 If this distinction is taken seriously, the true organic plant can only be the unity of divine ordinances that has been endowed with creation from the beginning, while the ground principle are more like a rich soil that can provide good nutrients for growth by transplanting some tissue (fragmented divine ordinances) onto it from other plants that are destined to develop poorly due to the influence of sin (non-Christian worldviews). No matter how necessary and contributive this soil is for the growth of the plant, it cannot be considered a living organism in the strict sense.106 To sum up, a more careful and extensive reading of Kuyperianism by Xu can certainly undermine the effectiveness of Chen’s Kuyperian defence of the anti-sinicisation practices of the house church. Of course, this does not mean that Chen’s proposal has been completely defeated, as Kuyper himself had ambiguities on this issue; thus, the validity of Chen’s interpretation can also find justification in Kuyper’s texts. However, my question is a different one: Why is it necessary to insist on Kuyperianism as a normative interpretative framework for reading Wang at all? What will be the consequences if other theological traditions are affirmed as load bearing or even more prominent than Wang’s early Kuyperian theology? Wang’s critics and defenders all seem to broadly assume that if the Kuyperian framework is abandoned, for ↩

103. “Another difficulty in Kuyper’s thought … is the distinction ‘between Christ as Mediator of creation as the second Person of the Trinity, and Christ as Mediator of our salvation as Son of God and man.’” VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, 308. Citing here, Jeremy Begbie, “Creation, Christ, and Culture in Dutch Neo-Calvinism,” in Christ in Our Place: The Humanity of God in Christ for the Reconciliation of the World, eds. Trevor Hart and Daniel Thimell (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1989), 127. ↩

104. This can be compared to Jesus’ parable of sowing seeds (Matthew 13:1-9; Mark 4:1-9; Luke 8:4-8). In this metaphor, Jesus’ teaching itself is the seed that can grow. The vitality to grow is in the gospel itself, not in any human ability, such as that to perceive the contextual divine ordinances that incompletely remain after the fall. Wang’s sermon on this parable is also in line with my view here. He points out that this sowing of seeds means the arrival of Jesus’ words in the hearts of a group of people he himself has chosen, that is, the church. And “the produce of the land depends on the farmer.” Therefore, he called on the congregation of ERCC not to spend their energy speculating about “who is which kind of land” or aspiring to become good land. The real point is that “the kingdom of heaven has come only through Christ” and “it is going to bears fruit in their lives.” Wang Yi, “Nimen de erduo shi youfu de (Tai 13:1-23)” 你们的耳朵是有福的（太13:1-23）[Blessed are your ears (Matthew 13:1- 23)], Wang Yi wenku, 12 February 2017. https://www.wangyilibrary.com/post/sermon-225720. Like Wang’s sermon, my comparison here does not need to be stretched too far, for example by trying to match the conceptual counterparts in the Kuyperian system to different locations in the analogy. The point is to highlight the important but unnoticed difference between the two in terms of the source of the organicity. example, by replacing it with Lutheran two-kingdom theology or Anabaptism, the public character of Wang’s ecclesiology will be left without a theological foundation and inevitably revert to the separatist model of the traditional house church, thereby losing the most groundbreaking aspects of his work. I hold an opposing view, which I believe better exposes the creative, illuminating, and critical power of Wang’s ecclesiology. Take Chen’s defence as an example. His questioning of the Sino-theological equation between Contextualisation and Confucianism is indeed likely to be one of the questions Wang would raise to the proponents of sinicaisation. In fact, Wang’s critique of Confucianisation is not only sociological (such as Chen’s question of whether Confucianism can or should still represent today’s “Chinese context”), but also theological, involving the linguistic characteristics of the Christian faith that Wang has recognised. However, Kuyperianism, with its strong epistemological overtones, may have obscured the critical power of this aspect. This is precisely the step I intend to take now—to explore elements from other theological traditions within Wang’s theology and avoid rushing to re-integrate them under a Kuyperian framework. These elements have long been employed, sometimes consciously, by Wang to critique and revise his own Calvinist convictions. This will allow us to perceive his Yoderian-Hauerwasian influences, which are broadly classified as Anabaptist. 3. Martyrdom, Publicisation, and the Gospel-Centered Shift 3.1. Pro-American Neo-Reformism Versus Anti-American Anabaptist? We have been talking about the public. Two days ago, a pastor said, “Don’t you understand that the church is the public and the church is the real public in this world?” If you don’t enter the church, in this world, in God’s eyes, this world is marginal and non-public. Therefore, everyone, you have come to the Lord’s church today, and you have finally entered the public. Hasn’t there always been a sense of anxiety in our hearts, saying that the church has never entered the public? The Church is the public society in this universe, the centre of God’s will, and the centre of all history.107 The above statement is cited from Wang’s sermon on Ephesians. If I say an Anabaptist theologian makes it, it can hardly surprise any readers with a basic knowledge of Yoderian- Hauerwasian ecclesiology due to its striking resemblance with the latter’s account of “church as polis.”108 Similar expressions go far beyond this. For example, Wang’s ideas of the church as a “counter-cultural culture”109 and the gospel of the cross as “the only real revolution of mankind”110 that has subverted the ruling order since the fall can be found in similar, if not identical, formulations in the writings of Yoder and Hauerwas.111 Furthermore, his insistence on martyrdom and non-violence as the church’s life essence also makes it difficult not to associate him with the position of the Anabaptists. However, due to Wang’s (overly) prominent neo-Reformed constitutionalist identity, researchers have generally endeavoured to reframe similar statements within the presumed antithesis framework, which understood neo-Calvinism and Anabaptism as taking opposing positions on whether the church should go public. For example, Jung and Zhao, despite their contrasting evaluations of Wang, share this preconceived impression of the two theological traditions. Not only is the public dimension of Wang’s church witness understood as aiming to bring about a transformation of American-style liberal democratic society that is almost ↩

105. Wang Yi, “Yitong mingbai Jidu de ai (Fu 3:14-19)” 一同明白基督的爱（弗3:14-19）[Apprehending Christ’s Love Together (Ephesians 3:14-19)], Wang Yi wenku, 24 June 2018. https://www.wangyilibrary.com 白基督的爱. ↩

106. John Howard Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State (Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press, 1964), 18. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014), 32. ↩

107. Wang Yi, “Moshi lun yu wenhua shiming (Qi 21: 38)” 末世论与文化使命（启21:38）[Eschatology and Cultural Mandate], Wang Yi wenku, 9 December 2017. https://www.wangyilibrary.com/post/sermon-227568. ↩

108. Wang Yi, “Guowang de shizi jia zhisan (Ke 14:43-52)” 国王的十字架之三（可14:43-52）[The King’s Cross Part Three (Mark 14:43-52)], Wang Yi wenku, 15 November 2018. https://www.wangyilibrary.com/post/sermon-228070 字架之三. ↩

109. For example, Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, 46; and John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 1, 162-192. completely in line with its early conservative constitutionalism. Hauerwas’s ecclesiology is also depicted as a form of political separatism and quietism that focuses solely on the internal affairs of the church. Both are problematic. Let us examine Wang’s part first. As mentioned earlier, Jung notes that Wang’s later pastoral works show more eschatological and ecclesial-centric characteristics, which are lacking in the ecclesiology of Kuyper and Bavick. The differences are mainly explained as Wang’s “tone change” in response to the particular situation in China rather than a mark of his actual movement to Anabaptism.112 These rhetorical and expressive adjustments do not diminish the fact that “Wang Yi’s ecclesiology bears the same principles as Kuyper’s and Bavinck’s.”113 This echoes Jung’s belief in that Wang’s “strong antithetical position against the government is not to be taken universally against any government.”114 In other words, if Wang were facing a state like Kuyper’s Netherlands —a democratic and free constitutional Christian country —he would not insist on this antagonistic attitude between politics and religion. He further claims that “this is evident when one considers his tone towards more Western-minded liberal governments early in his works,” which “reflect a strong preference for an American-style constitutional democracy.”115 Considering that Hauerwas attacks American liberalism so fiercely that one critic even worried that Hauerwas “is overdetermined by a reaction against ‘Americanism,’”116 if Jung’s view that Wang’s embrace of American liberalism remained intact is correct, this can be seen as conclusive evidence of their opposition. However, the precondition cannot be satisfied, and the problem lies in Jung’s interpretation of Wang’s account of the separation of ↩

110. Jung, “Costly Kuyperianism”, 222. ↩

111. Ibid., 226. ↩

112. Ibid., 240. ↩

113. Ibid. ↩

114. This criticism was made by Rusty Reno in his unpublished letter to Doug Harink. Hauerwas acquired his permission to put it in his book. Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (London: SPCK, 2004), 236. church and state, which fails to capture the meaning of a crucial turning point in Wang’s trajectory of thought. 3.2. Farewell to John Locke: From Zhengjiao Fēnlí to Zhengjiao Fēnlì A decisive moment in which Wang’s political theology broke out of the conservative constitutionalist framework occurred between 2010 and 2011. Among the many contract theorists, John Locke had long been the only one whom Wang most admired. Until 2010, this stance could still be found in Wang’s writing. In a movie review of Avatar written in that year, Wang used the language of Lockean property rights to explain the religious freedom embodied by the house church.117 He describes Avatar’s main conflict as a “cosmic forced demolition event” which “embodies a Lockean conception of property rights. That is, property rights are never only about financial gain, but also about human dignity, memory, faith, relationships, and the carrying of an entire way of life”.118 And he further notes that “the worship of the house church” is “a story similar to this.”119 However, in 2011 he revised an article he had written on the separation of church and state, in which his attitude toward Locke’s political thought changed drastically. The article “Luomashu 13 zhang yu zhengjiao fēnlì” [Romans 13 and the Separation of Church and State]120 is a revision of his 2006 article “Zhengjiao fēnlí yu Luomashu 13 zhang—jidujiao zhengzhi zhexue zhaji zhier” [The Separation of Church and State and Romans 13—Notes on Christian Political Philosophy Part Two],121 but the extent of ↩

115. Wang Yi, “Linghun de dingzi hu: Afanda” 灵魂的钉子户：阿凡达 [The Spiritual Nail House: Avatar], in Linghun shenchu nao ziyou 灵魂深处闹自由 [Revolution in the Depth of Soul] (Taipei: Christian Arts Press, 2012), 200-203. ↩

116. Ibid., 202-203. ↩

117. Ibid., 203. ↩

118. Wang Yi, “Luomashu 13 zhang yu zhengjiao fēnlì” 《罗马书》13 章与政教分立 [Romans 13 and the Separation of Church and State], in Linghun shenchu nao ziyou, 249-267. Emphasis added. ↩

119. Wang Yi, “Zhengjiao fēnlí yu Luomashu 13 zhang: jidujiao zhengzhi zhexue zhaji zhier” 政教分离与《罗马 书》13章：基督教政治哲学札记之二 [The Separation of Church and State and Romans 13: Notes on Christian Political Philosophy Part Two]. Duli zhongwen bihui 独立中文笔会 [Independent Chinese PEN Center], 10 February, 2017. https://www.chinesepen.org/blog/archives/61551. The article was originally posted on the Guancha 观察 website in 2006, but the website is no longer accessible, so the article cited here is the re-uploaded version by Duli zhongwen bihui. Emphasis added. the change in thought between the two versions is as great as that in his view of Locke, which can be described as almost subversive. The most obvious change is from “zhengjiao fēnlí” (政教分离) to “zhengjiao fēnlì” (政 教分立).122 The former has actually been the most widely used Chinese translation of the separation of church and state. The word “lí” (离) presents the image of walking away from a place, or the distance that separates the two, and thus "fēnlí" puts its accent on the separation or dissociation of the two. On the other hand, the word "lì" (立) means “standing” or “establishment”. And the most common use of the term “fēnlì” is to express the complex relationship between political powers, each with its own area of exercise, but each influencing or checking the other. For example, the Montesquieuian idea of the separation of the three powers is usually translated as “sanquan fēnlì” (三权分立). What are the substantive changes embodied in Wang’s change in terminology? To his conservative constitutionalist patners, the article’s concluding section may be the harshest part. Continuing his earlier view that “opposition to idolatry” is the fundamental concern in the separation of church and state, Wang radically changed his attitude toward the Lockean theory of rights. He criticises Locke’s political theory as reducing “God’s transcendental justice into man’s voluntaristic ‘natural right’,” and the state becomes “more secularised in its origin by ↩ ↩²

120. Wang, “Luomashu 13 zhang yu zhengjiao fēnlì,” 265. ↩

121. Ibid., 264. ↩

122. Ibid. ↩

123. Ibid., 267. In this article, Wang also indirectly criticised his own early position. In a note, he writes that “some evangelical scholars have overemphasised the connection between Locke’s social contract theory and Reformed covenant theology, but have failed to appreciate the vast and essential differences” between them. He takes Douglas F. Kelly’s The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World: The Influence of Calvin on Five Governments from the 16th through 18th Centuries, which he translated in the past, as one example of this misunderstanding. Ibid., 266. In the translator’s preface to that translation, Wang almost unreservedly endorses Kelly’s view. See, Wang Yi, “Preface of Translator,” in Douglas F. Kelly, Ziyou de jueqi: 16-18 shiji, Jiaerwen zhuyi he wuge zhengfu de xingcheng 自由的崛起：16-18 世纪，加尔文主义和五个政府的形成 [The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World: The Influence of Calvin on Five Governments from the 16th through 18th Centuries], trans. Wang Yi and Li Yuzhen (Nanchang: Jiangxi People’s Publishing, 2008), 1-9. Heslam argues, Kuyper’s criticism conflated Locke’s theory with Rousseau’s atheistic popular sovereignty, criticising them both on the same grounds. The fact is that when he attempted to locate the political philosophy of the Whigs in British Puritanism, he implicitly hinted at a connection between his Calvinism and Lockean liberalism.127 As previously noted, Wang’s Christian constitutionalism during the period of zhengjiao fēnlí could be construed as an attempt to correct Kuyper’s misreading. He pointed out the Christian transcendental constraints underlying Lockean contract theory, clearly distinguishing it from continental liberalism, which is founded on the concept of popular sovereignty. Furthermore, he reintegrated Lockean conservative constitutionalism into the neo-Reformed Christian worldview, viewing it as an essential part of the latter.128 From this perspective, Wang’s later divergence from Locke inevitably affected his acceptance of Kuyperianism. Specifically, the shift to zhengjiao fēnlì has posed a critical challenge to his earlier Kuyperian imagination of the public. Alongside his increasing respect for the martyrdom tradition of Chinese house churches, his understanding of freedom, rights, and civil society— especially his conceptions of “the public” and the self—underwent a groundbreaking renewal. Adopting Hayek’s terminology, Wang’s early constitutionalism defines civil society as a “spontaneous order,”129 whose formation relies on two necessary elements. The first is the spontaneity of civic activity, which is evident in Wang’s persistent insistence on the freedom of assembly and association. The second element is a demand for heterogeneity, meaning that the order or field formed by this spontaneous civic activity must possess a mentality that in some sense stands in opposition to the political state, thereby becoming its constraint.130 ↩

124. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview, 151. ↩

125. See Chapter 2, sec. 3.2. ↩

126. Wang Yi, “Women de wuzhi ruci zhongyao: Zaidu Hayek wenji” 我们的无知如此重要：再读《海耶克文 集》[Our Ignorance is So Important: Rereading Hayek’s Works Collection], in Linghun shenchu nao ziyou, 31. ↩

127. For example, Wang criticizes that “[i]n the political situation of mainland China, ninety percent of the intellectuals have the following mentality in varying degrees. Instead of commenting on and building a civil society in contrast to the political state, they stand extremely strongly in the shoes of the political state and the emperor to think for them or to determine the mode of response of the people. They even asked others to stand in According to these two criteria, Wang found that such a public sphere for citizens is absent in China. The Chinese scholar-official tradition, as noted previously, has homogenised power relations across different social spheres and incorporated them into a grand narrative of the “celestial empire” through the Hua-Yi distinction and the moral ideal of inner sagehood and outer kingliness. Therefore, when Wang points out that China has always lacked a “republic body” of citizens, he is not denying the existence of local or smaller associations in China; rather, he means that “there is no free men’s free community of life that breaks through the bloodline, not under the rule of the imperial power.”131 Under the influence of individualist convictions, he once defined spontaneity in terms of the Lockean concept of negative liberty, which focuses on ensuring that the government does not exceed its minimum function scope, i.e., protecting personal property.132 Civil society had become almost synonymous with commercial society, and it is believed that if the freedom of contract and the right of property were ensured, the spontaneous order would naturally follow.133 This determined his early imagination of the proper relationship between church and state, the Lockean “zhengjiao fēnlí.” As noted earlier, fēnlí emphasises the difference and non- interference between the two. Thus, while asserting that the state should not interfere with human freedom in the religious sphere, it likewise excludes the possibility of the church as a collective interfering directly with an individual’s activities in political and other public spheres. this position and think for the emperor. ‘Just think how difficult it is for him!’ ‘Think about it, what can Xi Jinping do?’ And so on.” Wang Yi, “Dangqian zhongguo jiating jiaohui de zhengzhi tiaozhan”, 当前中国家庭教会的政 治挑战 [The Political Challenge of Chinese House Churches today], Wang Yi wenku, 08 March 2014. https://www.wangyilibrary.com. Emphasis added. ↩

128. Wang Yi, “Zongjiao gaige dui zhongguo wenhua de tiaozhan” 宗教改革对中国文化的挑战 [The Challenge of the Reformation to Chinese Culture], Wang Yi wenku, 12 September 2017. https://www.wangyilibrary.com 宗教改革和中国文化的挑战. ↩

129. “Thirdly, The Supreme Power cannot take from any man any part of his Property without his own consent. For the preservation of property being the end of government…” John Locke, The Second Treaties of Government, §138, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). ↩

130. “A commercial and civil society, a self-governing space of folk, and the creation and accumulation of wealth occur under the freedom of contract. It is the property right and the freedom of contract that constitute the main means by which what Hayek called the ‘spontaneous order’ of human society can grow in an orderly fashion.” Wang, Xianzheng zhuyi, 95. This highlights the indirect nature of the public influence of the institutional church, as captured by Chen in Wang’s disaster relief article. It shows how Kuyperian sphere sovereignty had a profound influence on him, to the extent that he called the transcendental context he was trying to restore a Reformed “Christian worldview,” of which conservative constitutionalism, with its insistence on zhengjiao fēnlí, was a crucial part.134 Therefore, before the inalienable public quality of the house church was revealed, Wang had regarded the conservative-liberal intellectual circles that developed around internet forums as the epitome of the ideal republic order, believing it was the most possible place to break down the barrier between language and reality set by the totalitarian regime.135 Although he later saw the transcendent light in the suffering members of house churches, how such a hope could go beyond the boundaries of the individual and be realised as a public order on a collective level still needed to be explained. This is particularly challenging for right-wing liberals who exalt individualism and distrust all collective values. A collection of individual free men is not enough to make a true republic.136 What guarantees that the collection of self- interested individuals’ activities could realise human dignity and nurture a real public order? How could the uncertainties and inequalities of the market create an optimal space for the ↩

131. See Chapter 2, sec. 3.2. ↩

132. One of Wang’s important insights is that the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party did not only have a narrowly political impact on language, but also intrinsically molded the Chinese people’s linguistic habits and aesthetic tastes, which is particularly reflected in the Chinese literature’s preference for obscure expression. See Wang Yi, “Yuyan, zhengzhi he xinyang—‘Rugu shalong’ de zaixian yanjiang” 语言、政治和信仰—“如故沙龙” 的在线演讲 [Language, Politics and Faith—An Online Lecture on “RGForum”], in Linghun shenchu nao ziyou, 225. This concern is similar to that of the vernacular language movement advocated by intellectuals during the May Fourth Movement. For Wang, however, the abandonment of the form of Chinese classical writing is not enough; the point is to create a space that could accommodate and promote the direct expression of language. This is why, for him, academicisation in China is equal to a kind of political taming of language. “Academicisation ... creates a disconnect between us, our language, and the real world, and ultimately a loss of language.” Ibid., 231- 232. See also Chapter 2, sec. 2.1. ↩

133. As Michael Sandel points out, “‘a community’ cannot always be translated without loss to an ‘association’, nor an ‘attachment’ to a ‘relationship’, nor ‘sharing’ to ‘reciprocating’, nor ‘participation’ to ‘co-operation’, nor what is ‘common’ to what is ‘collective’.” Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 151. Although this paragraph was written in response to Rawlsian liberalism, its application to Chinese neoliberal case is still appropriate given the individualistic conception of the self that is presupposed in both. exchange of opinions rather than another hegemony of market elites? Before he fully committed himself to the publicisation of the house church, Wang had no clear answers to these crucial questions. Echoing this ambiguity is the lack of confidence in the civic bonds that such a conservative order can form, which was exposed in his aesthetic experience.137 The defiant writing of Chinese neoliberals still paradoxically bears the deep imprint of totalitarianism. The fear and rejection of the totalitarian regime made it impossible to create a genuine civic bond that could transcend the limitations of contractarian theory and build a republican life that penetrated the atomistic boundaries of individuals.138 But when his commitment to the vision of publicisation and his acquaintance with the house church tradition grew, it became increasingly clear that house churches had lived out just the “spontaneous order” that he had been so desperately seeking.139 They had become “a prototype of civil society” by adhering to the gospel and the Bible, even in their most private and sectarian moments.140 The communal witnesses of the house church reveal a common essence of life originating from the gospel. Seeing this Wang abandoned his individualist account of the political agency and adopted a communitarian conception of self. Drawing on Michael Sandel’s communitarian thought, this shift is best understood in terms of a “constitutive view of community,” 141 which affirms the essential role of communal attachments in the formation of self-identity, to the extent that one cannot fully know who one ↩

134. See Chapter 2, sec. 2. ↩

135. Wang acknowledges that the individualistic instance he insisted on in the past was actually out of a fear of the collective ideology of the communist China. Wang, “Jidutu shequ shi zhege shijie de xiwang.” ↩

136. “Described in terms of Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order, the significance of the house church is that, in an old society, it spontaneously evolved into a new society.” Liu Tongsu and Wang Yi, Guankan Zhongguo chengshi jiating jiaohui 观看中国城市家庭教会 [Observations on the Urban House Churches in China] (Taipei: Christian Arts Press, 2012), 25. “In a dishonest Chinese society, there exists only one true civil society, and that is the Church of Jesus Christ. As a republic of tens of millions of real citizens in free association, the Church is the only real republic that exists in Chinese society.” Wang, “Dangqian zhongguo jiating jiaohui de zhengzhi tiaozhan.” ↩

137. Liu and Wang, Guankan Zhongguo chengshi jiating jiaohui, 168. ↩

138. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 150. is apart from the community to which one belongs.142 A reversal of the causal relation between the spontaneous order and the free individual follows. The spontaneous order is no longer the product of the activities of (negatively) free individuals ensured by zhengjiao fēnlí; on the contrary, the necessary condition for freedom is to be embedded in a given “spontaneous order,” and this order, according to the witness of the house church, is the martyrdom form of life established by the Word of God.143 Therefore, Liu Tongsu and Wang explain how the public significance of the publicisation maintains the form of life of the house church: In Isaiah 2, God commanded Israel to invite the nations to come together to tell of His glory. Psalm 102:21 and 22 says, “so the name of the Lord will be declared in Zion and his praise in Jerusalem when the peoples and the kingdoms assemble to worship the Lord.” Psalm 105 further calls the holy people to sing praises and “make known among the nations what he has done.” These verses show that Sunday worship in the church is cosmic, evangelical, and communal. If we, as a “church,” can only hide together to worship God, if brothers and sisters go out as “believers” to preach the gospel only after the congregation is ended, in other words, when the “church” disappears and “believers” come out, and if this is forced upon us, we should pray for an early end to this situation. For every huitang should be a permanent, public centre of worship for the kingdom of Christ in a city.144 It is an evangelical critical force that blossoms at the centre of the church’s worship life. The mere presence of the gospel constitutes the fiercest critique of the existing political situation. ↩

139. “Only house churches are communities that possess both internal faith and value identity as well as external life form, order, and motivation. In fact, house churches have become the prototype of contemporary Chinese civil society.” Liu and Wang, Guankan Zhongguo chengshi jiating jiaohui, 26. ↩

140. Ibid., 156. Through worship, the evangelical church proclaims to the nation the presence of God’s kingdom as the true centre of the universe, thereby posing a real threat to any attempt at the totalisation of states or societies. It was precisely the public witness that the house church made during the era of intense persecution. This demonstrates how the trajectory of Wang’s poetry writing seamlessly connected with the mission of publicisation of the house church. The postscript to Wang’s collection of poems published after his turning to praising hymns, Qiutian de wutuobang, ends with Psalm 84:6,145 and the house church is named “Early Rain.”146 It reveals that the early rain that nourish the church is the very answer to the wutuobang (utopia) of autumn. To move from lamentation to praising hymns is to move from a life of solitary aesthetics to a life of communal worship. Words fractured from meaning are reconnected to other words in the grammar that is given by God’s gospel, just as broken individuals are reconnected to live out a sacred body with other praising ones in the worshipping community called and instituted by God. That the church appears as a genuine public challenges not only totalitarian regimes, but also the modern liberal imagination of the public and the Kuyperian account of sphere sovereignty, for it transgresses the distinction between the public (national or social) and private (religion) spheres, refusing to limit the gospel to the question of personal salvation or private lives. Instead, it defines the issue of the public as one of the presence of the gospel. To put it into perspective, we now return to the scene of Jesus’ trial mentioned at the end of Chapter 2. It was after turning to the zhengjiao fēnlì model that Wang began to face the great discrepancy between the scene of world of Jesus and that of Locke. Facing a trial unjust in both procedure and substance, Jesus never resorted to natural law or natural justice to claim his God-given ↩

141. Wang Yi, “Zuowei jiushu de shige shi (fu er)” 作为救赎的诗歌史（附二） [Appendix Two: Poetry History as Redemption], in Qiutian de wutuobang, 334. ↩

142. Psalm 84:6: “As they go through the valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools.” I cite RSV here to show its connection with the name of ERCC more clearly. rights. He, rather, just as in his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, willingly surrendered his life to the unjust verdict to fulfil the will of the Father, and took the path of the cross to complete the work of redemption.147 Jesus’ response profoundly challenged Wang’s early constitutionalism. From a Lockean perspective of natural law, the actions of the judges, who unjustly sought to take Jesus’ life, placed them in a state of war against the people. Under this situation, the people had been “left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against Force and Violence” and regained their “original liberty.”148 Furthermore, Wang’s defence of natural law through covenant theology posits that the sanctity of God guarantees the natural justice recognised by the contract theory.149 Rather than correcting the earthly authorities to align with their heavenly mandate, Jesus submitted to a judgment that violated the constraints of divine natural law. This implies the self-contradiction between the incarnate Christ and the Son of creation, two roles between which Kuyper has made a significant distinction. Lastly, and most essential to the theme of this chapter, Jesus’ submission broke down the imagined boundary of sphere sovereignty. He fulfilled the work of salvation through his willing journey to the cross. But this is a way that sacrifices God’s sovereignty (natural justice) over the state and the judiciary. By taking a public forum, a sphere outside the church, as the place to carry out the mission of the gospel and salvation, Jesus, as well as the house churches that follow this example, clearly ↩

143. “Any complaint about reality in the face of a world in which the Son of God died on the cross and rose again is arrogant and hubristic. … ‘I’ve had enough of this.’ ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ … In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus, who should have uttered these lines, prayed to the Father in tears, ‘Do your will, not mine.’ On the cross, Jesus, who should have spoken these lines, cried out to the Father, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’” Wang Yi, “Moguan: Zhuangyan de xianshi” 默观：庄严的现实 [Contemplation: The Solemn Reality], in in Dasheng de moxiang 大声的默想 [Contemplation Loudly] (Hong Kong: Covenant Publishing Limited, 2017), 235-236. ↩

144. John Locke, The Second Treaties of Government, §221-222, in Two Treatises of Government. ↩

145. For example, in his “The Possibility of Political Theology,” Wang divides the development from God’s holy covenant to human contract into four phases: God’s swear to himself, God’s covenant with human, the promise between human beings in God’s name, and the human contract without reference to God. Even in the last case, Wang insists that it still presupposes a “transcendental background” and is bound by it, because “the pursuit of a constitutional polity and the acceptance of and submission to transcendental values is a simultaneous process.” Wang Yi, “The Possibility of Political Theology: Christianity and Liberalism,” Chinese Law & Religion Monitor 8/1 (January-June 2012): 107-112, 114-115. cross the line Kuyper draws for them in his attempt to prevent the direct influences of the national church on the state. In summary, Wang’s transition from zhengjiao fēnlí to zhengjiao fēnlì was a crucial factor influencing the development of his thought. This implies a potential tension between his later ecclesiology and his early alignment with conservative liberalism, as well as with Kuyperian sphere sovereignty. However, to date, this transition remains a blind spot in the study of Wang’s thought, at least in the English-speaking world. A brief review of the genealogy of English scholarship on Wang helps to illustrate this point. 4. Reconstructing an Emerging Interpretive Framework: Freeing the Full Range of Wang Yi’s Later Texts 4.1. The Genealogy of a Defective Interpretive Framework As one of the earliest representative studies that involve Wang’s constitutionalism, Gerda Wielander’s book published in 2013, Christian Values in Communist China,150 relies heavily on Wang’s article “The Possibility of Political Theology,”151 which was published in the journal Chinese Law & Religion Monitor in 2012.152 However, it is in fact only an English translation of an earlier article “Zhengzhi shenxue de kenengxing: Jidujiao yu ziyou zhuyi,”153 which Wang had published on an internet forum in 2005. Therefore, her study reflects Wang’s thought during the early stages of his conversion, rather than that at the book’s publish time, which had already undergone a transition towards zhengjiao fēnlì. This study has strongly influenced subsequent researchers’ understanding of Wang’s political and legal views. It ↩

146. Gerda Wielander, Christian Values in Communist China (New York: Routledge, 2013). ↩

147. Wang, “The Possibility of Political Theology.” ↩

148. See ibid., 135-136, 139. ↩

149. Wang Yi, “Zhengzhi shenxue de kenengxing: Jidujiao yu ziyou zhuyi” 政治神学的可能性：基督教与自由 主义 [The Possibility of Political Theology: Christianity and Liberalism]. Duli zhongwen bihui 独立中文笔会 [Independent Chinese PEN Center], 07 September, 2016. https://www.chinesepen.org/blog/archives/61209. The article was originally posted on the Guancha 观察 website in 2005, but the website is no longer accessible, so the article cited here is the re-uploaded version by Duli zhongwen bihui. influenced Chow to classify Wang as belonging to the “right defence” model of Chinese neo- Calvinists.154 Starr’s understanding of Wang’s constitutional writing, which is regarded as a distinct genre to a certain degree in conflict with his two-kingdom ecclesiology, also took it as the main reference.155 Although Wielander’s book is not directly quoted, Lian Xi’s,156 Bai Yucheng’s, 157 and Zhao Wenjuan’s158 studies on Wang are clearly influenced by the interpretative paradigm established by these earlier studies.159 Based on this interpretive paradigm, Bai argues that Wang oscillates between the dissident traditions of the house church and American rightist liberalism.160 And Zhao’s critique of this early liberal framework even places Wang’s later ecclesiological discourses exclusively within it.161 The neglect of the chronological progression in Wang’s works is also evident among his Kuyperian proponents. Chen’s Kuyperian understanding of Wang’s account of missionary and cultural mandates is mostly based on an article on post-disaster reconstruction in 2008.162 And when he attempts to read this back into the ecclesiology in the “Ninety-five Theses,” the subtle but important differences between Kuyperianism and Wang’s mature view on the relationship between the church and the public disappear.163 Jung’s case is somewhat special. He indeed ↩

150. Alexander Chow, “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today,” International Journal of Public Theology 8/2 (2014), 166n22; and Chinese Public Theology, 101-105. ↩

151. Starr, “Wang Yi and the 95 Theses of the Chinese Reformed Church,” n11. ↩

152. Lian Xi, “‘Cultural Christians’ and the Search for Civil Society in Contemporary China,” The Chinese Historical Review 20/1 (May 2013), 70–87. ↩

153. Bai Yucheng, “One Foot above Liberalism: Wang Yi’s Search for Civil Society,” in Christian Social Activism and Rule of Law in Chinese Societies, eds. Yang Fenggang and Chris White (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2021), 267-288. ↩

154. Zhao Wenjuan, “Being a Protestant Church in Contemporary Mainland China: An Examination of Protestant Church-State Relations,” Asia Journal of Theology 33/2 (October 2019), 1-31. ↩

155. It is noteworthy that these three scholars share a background at Duke Divinity School. It is reasonable to infer that this has influenced them to some extent in adopting a Hauerwasian or Hauerwasian-like approach, criticising Wang’s conservative-liberal political theology from a perspective that emphasises the rural and martyrdom traditions of the traditional house church. This critical perspective underscores the significance of this thesis’s engagement with Hauerwasian theology in Chapters 5 and 6. ↩

156. Bai, “One Foot above Liberalism: Wang Yi’s Search for Civil Society,” in Christian Social Activism and Rule of Law in Chinese Societies, eds. Yang Fenggang and Chris White (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2021), 276. ↩

157. Zhao, “Being a Protestant Church in Contemporary Mainland China,” 13n35. ↩

158. See Chen, “The Church as Organism”, 240-257. ↩

159. “Wang often invokes the language of two kingdoms to describe the relationship between church and state and their respective authorities, in a way that is equivalent to Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty.” Chen, “The Church as notices Wang’s distinction between zhengjiao fēnlí and zhengjiao fēnlì, and, as far as I know, he is currently the only researcher to have pointed it out. However, due possibly to unfamiliarity with Wang’s early Lockean inheritance, he mistakenly assumes that zhengjiao fēnlì has been Wang’s consistent position from the beginning to the end. Consequently, he fails to notice that Wang has undergone a transition from fēnlí to fēnlì and tries forcibly to place the later model into the framework of Kuyperian sphere sovereignty, despite the conflict between the two.164 For instance, when explaining the content of zhengjiao fēnlì, he cites an 2007 article of Wang, which claims that “both the state and the church should be subject to the law of God” because “all authority on earth is from God.”165 This is presented as an evidence of the “similarity” between Wang’s zhengjiao fēnlì and Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty.166 However, the substantive differences between them, especially Wang’s gospel-centered account of the public in conflict with the Kuyperian natural law approach, is excluded in such readings. The misguided connection made by Wang’s Kuyperian defenders, as well as some of his critics, between Wang’s early constitutional writing and his later ecclesiology reveals that the zhengjiao fēnlí characteristic of Wang’s early writing and the self-criticism implied in his later shift have been widely overlooked. This blind spot contributes to underestimating the critical force against American liberalism that he has in common with the Anabaptists like Hauerwas. 4.2. The Gospel Revolt: Martin Luther and John Calvin Kiss Each Other After reviewing the inheritance of an inadequate interpretive framework, this section interacts with the concrete content of these interpretations. It will expose why the criticisms of Organism”, 242n932. In this note, Chen refers to the 2008 article, but at the end of the footnote he suggests that readers should also refer to Wang’s “Ninety-Five Theses” and Starr’s “Wang Yi and the 95 Theses.” ↩

160. Jung, “Costly Kuyperianism,” 227. ↩

161. Ibid., 228. Citing here, Wang Yi, “Fandui tongxinglian hunyin weibei ‘zhengjiao fēnlí’ ma?” 反对同性恋婚 姻违背“政教分离”吗？ [Does Opposition to Gay Marriage Violate “The Separation Between Church and State”], Wang Yi Wenku, 5 September 2007. https://www.wangyilibrary.com 吗. ↩

162. Jung, “Costly Kuyperianism,” 228. the American liberal characteristics of Wang’s ecclesiology are untenable. To clarify, my intention is not to argue that Kuyperianism or the broader neo-Calvinism was rejected or abandoned as a whole by Wang in his later years. His Reformed denominational identity remained steadfast. In 2018, he continued to use the term “worldview” to describe Christianity.167 However, his understanding, inheritance, and development of neo-Calvinism were not uncritical. Wang has referred to other denominational traditions to show the potential shortcomings of Reformed theology and provide resources for revision. The revision is gradual despite some observable essential turning points, such as the shift to the zhengjiao fēnlí model. Sometimes, it may even generate suspicion of self-contradiction. However, this inconsistency is not merely a change of tone or a rhetorical strategy that oscillates between different audiences, as Jung, Starr, and Bai have argued.168 Martyrdom ecclesiology provides the reflective resources on neo-Calvinism. Its development reached maturity especially in the final three years before Wang’s arrest, from 2016 to 2018. During this period, alongside the martyrdom- themed series of sermons on the Gospel of Matthew and the Epistle to the Ephesians, this transformation was most evident in the 2018 publication Fuyin de zhengbian (福音的政变 The Gospel Revolt), which presented his most up-to-date thoughts on the Reformation.169 Fuyin de zhengbian signifies Wang’s attempt to re-root Reformed theology in the larger context of the Protestant Reformation, reflecting his later critical reflections on neo-Calvinism and American conservative liberalism. The reflection on the former mainly focuses on two interrelated aspects. The first is its theoretical and philosophical character. Wang defines the essence of the Reformation as “the rediscovery of the gospel.”170 Luther’s rediscovery is ↩

163. See, for example, Wang Yi, “Jiaohuilun yu fuyin yundong (San)” 教会论与福音运动（三） [Ecclesiology and the Evangelical Movement (Part Three)], Wang Yi wenku, 29 November 2018. https://www.wangyilibrary.com. ↩

164. Jung, “Costly Kuyperianism”, 222; Starr, “Wang Yi and the 95 Theses of the Chinese Reformed Church”; and Bai, “One Foot above Liberalism,” 268, 276. ↩

165. Wang Yi, Fuyin de zhengbian: Zongjiao gaige chensi lu 福音的政变：宗教改革沉思录 [The Gospel Revolt: Meditation of Protestant Reformation] (Hong Kong: Covenant Publishing Limited, 2017). ↩

166. Ibid., 59. described as “half seawater, half flame.”171 The seawater refers to his theological breakthrough inspired by the development of nominalism, and the fire to a pietistic tradition influenced by the mystics.172 As for Calvin, an important contribution of his rediscovery was to achieve a “rationalistic interpretation of the mystery.”173 Wang suggests that while more philosophical than Luther, Calvin had still absorbed the pietistic tradition under the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux.174 His theoretical approach, nevertheless, led to a tendency to objectify the faithful knowledge. Among many Calvinist successors, the “tension derived from humility and awe toward God’s transcendent existence” present in Calvin’s epistemology was weakened.175 As Wang describes, “when they spoke of the mysteries of God’s creation and election, it was as if they were discussing the lives of their neighbours observed in the garden next door.”176 This became the place where Wang, after his “obsession with Calvinism, began to reflect between ecstasy and tranquillity.”177 Wang’s reflection here is based on a gospel-centred “reversal of self-understanding,”178 which involves the transformation of the whole person, including but not limited to the renewal of emotions, thoughts, and actions. He points out that the crisis of Calvinists lies in the overemphasis on the priority of correct conceptions. This prevents Christians from the biblical power to confront their will and emotions, “too quickly transforming the spiritual impact of the sadness, sorrow, or deep despair of the poems into a series of propositions.”179 Taking the doctrine of “total depravity” as an example, he writes that “total depravity is just a doctrine to ↩

167. Ibid., 133. ↩

168. Ibid. ↩

169. Ibid., 134. ↩

170. Ibid. ↩

171. Ibid., 38. ↩

172. Ibid., 39. ↩

173. Ibid., 135. ↩

174. Ibid., 111. ↩

175. Ibid., 61. them, not a heartfelt lament. Unless they lament, they cannot hear ... the terrifying yet sweet gospel.”180 This demonstrates the importance of the post-June Fourth background explored at the beginning of this thesis in interpreting Wang’s theology. In his reflection on the highly propositional Reformed theology, the traces of the tension between Wang’s legal and political theories and his poetic writing before his conversion reemerge. His profound questioning of the essence of the Gospel reflects the spiritual self-interrogation inherited from Liu Xiaobo and carried on by post-June Fourth intellectuals, as well as their consciousness of the darkness of humanity. This sensibility has led him to realise that the critical force of Reformed doctrines must first be aimed at the self. Otherwise, Reformed Christians “will be plunged into the deepest cognitive dissonance of the self in human history.”181 He cites a traditional Chinese folk tale, “She Gong hao long” (叶公好龙 She Gong loved Dragon). The story describes an ancient man called She Gong who loved dragons so much that his home was all decorated with images of dragons. One day, when the real dragon came to visit him, he was frightened out of his mind.182 For Wang, it is also the problem of the objectively propositional faith, toward which Reformed theology has a strong tendency. As a response, he quotes a well-known saying in Chinese house churches, “life is more important than opinions,” to re-establish a foundation for Reformed theology on Luther’s theologia crucis.183 In fact, even prior to the time when Wang composed Fuyin de zhengbian, Luther had already exerted a discernible influence on him. As Starr observes, although the ERCC’s 2015 Ninety-Five Theses does not aim at a “detailed comparison with Luther’s theology,” both its ↩

176. Ibid., 14. ↩

177. Ibid., 114. ↩

178. Ibid., Chapter 6. form and content clearly attempt to re-root the church’s “analysis of church–state relations, its rejection of the “sinicization” of Christianity, and the excoriation of the state-registered church” within a tradition marked by “Luther’s life and action at a time of great turbulence in church life.”184 Luther was esteemed as a paradigm of religious freedom of conscience. Furthermore, in developing their own independent educational system, Wang and the ERCC critically inherited Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms and his educational theories.185 However, it was not until the publication of Fuyin de zhengbian in 2017 that Wang’s more comprehensive, mature, and detailed reflection on and absorption of Lutheran theology came to the fore. In Fuyin de Zhengbian, Wang upholds a Lutheran, forensic understanding of justification by faith.186 However, this understanding does not remain at the level of being merely satisfied with exemption from the punishment of God’s wrath. Rather, centred on the cross, it is reformulated as existing in a paradoxical, simultaneous relationship with the life of sanctification. He claims that the gospel of justification by faith necessarily brings about a “revolution of faith in the depths of the soul.” This sense of revolution is linked to the characteristic “spiritual anxiety” found in Luther’s faith, which at the same time resonates with the profound self-suspicion and grief consciousness of the post-June Fourth generation. As Wang describes: Martin Luther possessed a typical and intense late medieval anxiety of the soul. At times, I resent myself for not having a comparable degree of anxiety… For my suffering lacks depth; my tears are few and intermittent, insufficient to make the bed float. My despair, ↩

179. Starr, “Wang Yi and the 95 Theses.” ↩

180. See Chapter 7, sec. 1.1. ↩

181. “Righteousness is ‘imputed’ to us through Christ’s substitution, rather than ‘infused’ into us. This means (in accordance with the legalistic mindset characteristic of the Western Church) that ‘justification’ is a judicial pronouncement concerning a person’s legal standing before the eternal and supreme God.” Wang, Fuyin de zhengbian, 126. even when amplified by exaggerated rhetoric, cannot match the echo between abyss and abyss.187 Corresponding to this Lutheran depth of anxiety and grief, the grace of the cross is understood as an all-encompassing impact upon the whole person.188 The comprehensiveness of the gospel’s impact implies that this spiritual revolution necessarily gives rise to a new, communal form of life. At this point, Wang explicitly appeals to Luther, anchoring the origin of the church in the proclamation of the Word of God and the administration of the sacraments.189 This form of life, so marked, signifies “placing the crucified Christ, as Martin Luther did, at the centre of the entire night sky of faith.”190 From this, we can see that during this period Wang interprets Luther’s sola gratia, sola fide, and sola scriptura within a normative framework shaped by a theology of the cross—one that emphasises how the gospel of Christ radically overturns and reconstitutes the whole person. Two members of the ERCC have confided to me that, beginning in 2017, to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the church began encouraging members to read the Chinese translation of Gerhard O. Forde’s On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518, published that year.191 Given the temporal overlap, it ↩

182. Ibid., 67. ↩

183. “Jesus’s teaching method could also be described as a form of shocking education... dedicated to stirring and challenging his listeners’ emotions, and striking at their will. ... This is also one of the reasons why he often used parables rather than stating propositions directly. Indeed, this is why he became incarnate—to inscribe the Word upon human hearts, rather than merely writing it with his own hand upon stone tablets. ... If the Word cannot strike at people’s emotions and shake their wills through its manner of delivery, it will not truly penetrate their minds. ... Martin Luther’s critique of medieval scholasticism was precisely a rejection of the tendency to place ‘correct thought’ above emotion and the will.” Ibid., 60-61. On how Luther’s justification entails “the creation of a new heart,” and how his use of the term “heart” signifies “the orientation of all human affects,” which “govern the will and action,” see Bernd Wannenwetsch, “A Love Formed by Faith: Relating Theological Virtues in Augustine and Luther,” in The Authority of the Gospel: Explorations in Moral and Political Theology in Honor of Oliver O'Donovan, eds. Robert Song and Brent Waters (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2015), 22-25. ↩

184. “‘Where was the church before Martin Luther?’ Luther’s answer was: ‘In the Gospel.’ Thus, in the German regions, when those who rediscovered the Gospel of ‘justification by faith’ gathered together to preach the Gospel, worship God, and administer baptism and the Lord’s Supper, they came to be known as ‘evangelical’ churches.” Ibid., 148. ↩

185. Ibid., 47-48. ↩

186. Gerhard O. Forde, Lun zuo shijia shenxue jia 论做十架神学家 [On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518], trans. Ren Chuanlong (Shanghai: Shanghai Sanlian is almost certain that Forde’s work exerted influences on Wang’s martyrdom- and gospel- centred discourse during his final two years prior to imprisonment. Of particular significance for this thesis is Forde’s connecting of Luther’s theologia crucis to a martyrdom-oriented way of life, which readily explains why Wang—who sought to integrate the house church tradition with Reformation heritage—would be drawn to this Lutheran theological approach.192 Moreover, Forde’s positioning of theologia crucis and theologia gloriae at a level of the life of action more fundamental than theological theory clearly influenced Wang’s elevation of the statement that “life is more important than opinions.”193 As Wang writes: It doesn’t matter what you think; it’s how you think and express that counts. For example, that you are thinking on your knees is more important than that you are thinking standing up. That you cry when you think is more important than the degree of logical thoroughness with which you think. That your opinion leads to your loss is more important than that your opinion leads to your gain. It even means that sometimes your brokenness may be more important than your wholeness; your silence may be more important than your words; your weeping may be more important than your eloquence.194 Bookstore, 2017). For the original version, see Gerhard O. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1997). ↩

187. “In the face of all this, the claim here is that it is only through suffering and the cross that sinners can see and come to know God. So theologians of the cross must be able to speak honestly and forthrightly, to ‘say what a thing is.’ This suffering is from God and it is good. That is the deepest reason why we call the Friday of the crucifixion good.” Ibid., 86. ↩

188. “Our temptation is always to change the subject. In this case the blame is switched from us to theology. The assumption is that we can more or less easily escape the error described by just disavowing the theology. ‘Call evil good and good evil? Who? Me? No way! I don’t hold with the theology of glory!’ So the matter is settled - supposedly. Yet we have seen all along in the preceding theses and their proofs how we actually do get drawn into calling evil good and good evil. The theologian is the culprit here, not the theology as such. The theologian is always the acting subject, indeed, the ultimate reason why the theology comes out as it does. The point here is that the theologian of glory is impelled to act in a certain way. We can even say that over against the cross all theologize as they must. This is the outcome of the great divide. Faulty seeing leads inexorably to false speaking. The cross, as Luther could put it, finds us out (Crux probat omnia).” Ibid., 81. Emphasis added. Here we can even observe how Forde’s exposition of the relationship between theologia gloriae and false speaking may resonate with Wang’s perspective in poetics, which regards faith as the bestowal of a pure language. See Chapter 2, sec. 3.1. The theological weight Wang places on the pursuit of a “pure language” becomes all the more intelligible and compelling when read against Wang’s biographical formation within a culture shaped by lies. See Chapter 1, sec.1.2. ↩

189. Wang, Fuyin de zhengbian, 47. This quotation illuminates the present dialogue with Hauerwasianism. It echoes Hauerwas’s emphasis on “how we speak” over “what we speak.”195 Furthermore, this concern for the holistic life of the believer reinforces the emphasis on the martyrdom form of Christian life, as was previously underlined in the discussion of the mission of publicisation and the life essence of the house church.196 As Hauerwas argues, martyrdom as a response of imitating Christ expands the moral imagination of Christians, freeing them from the misleading dilemma of either watching evil succeed or using violence against evil.197 His exposition of martyrdom is crucial to our current dialogue in two aspects. Firstly, he emphasises the key role of narrative in this empowerment of ethical choice,198 and for him, narrative is a concept that is essentially linked to community. 199 Influenced by communitarianism, Hauerwas adopts a spatial metaphor to explain the formation of human agency. The communitarian Charles Taylor famously proposes that the self in the moral space depends on two things to establish its sense of direction: the “framework”200 and the location of the self. The framework is provided by our “strong evaluation” of things, which recognises the “incomparable qualitative distinction” that exists between different goods.201 A framework is like a map of moral space, but to establish a sense of direction, one still needs to know one’s ↩

190. See, Stanley Hauerwas, “Foreword,” in Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why It Matters What Christians Believe, eds. Ben Quash and Michael Ward (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), ix-xi. In this brief foreword, Hauerwas begins by emphasising the importance of how we speak to Christian witness and links it to the liturgical practices of prayer and the church. Then, he mentions how orthodox doctrine itself can be used for self-protection and self-justification, and thus depart from the gospel. Finally, he points out that real orthodoxy requires believers to learn not to talk too much, to learn to be silent on things they should not explain, and commit them to deliver prayers. This is consistent not only with Wang’s view of the gospel as essentially connected to the worship of the church as a practice of martyrdom, but also with his teaching on silence. “What we need to learn is not to talk where we should shut up. Similarly, we need to learn not to talk too much, and how not to be too precise where we need to be vague. ... Stay mysterious where there is mystery.” Wang, Fuyin de zhengbian, 137. ↩

191. Chapter 3, sec.2. ↩

192. Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 124-128. ↩

193. Ibid., 125. ↩

194. See Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 9-35. ↩

195. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 16-23. ↩

196. Ibid., 20-21. position on the map, that is, the spatial relationship between oneself and the landmarks. This means that the self must consider “where we stand in relation to them (the recognised values)” to be of crucial importance.202 Both of them necessarily depend on narratives. As he argues: “[S]tories give us an understanding of life, people, and what happens to them which is peculiar (i.e., distinct from what other forms, like works of science and philosophy, can give us), and also unsubstitutable.”203 In line with this, Hauerwas, in emphasising the formative role of narrative in the community of disciples, points out that it “provides a way to locate ourselves in relation to others, our society, and the universe.”204 Hauerwas also praises Taylor’s defence of the ad hominem model of moral reasoning, which views moral judgments and arguments as inseparable from the strong evaluation of the self, and argues that this entails the centrality of narrative in moral reasoning.205 Wang, while not elevating narrative and virtue to the same extent as Hauerwas, as mentioned before, embraces a communitarian understanding of the embedded self. In doing so, he aligns with Hauerwas in providing a critical challenge to the contemporary liberal conception of the self, which Sandel characterises as “unencumbered.”206 Secondly, the narrative character of the church also means that its non-violent form of life is externally given. Martyrdom is not “an ethical stance about which they want to be consistent, a set of rules they want to be sure not to break; but a gracious privilege which they want to share.”207 Wang has the same awareness of the externally given nature of martyrdom. As he writes: ↩

197. Ibid., 42. Parenthesis added. ↩

198. Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 291. ↩

199. Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 148. ↩

200. Stanley Hauerwas, The Work of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2015), 14-15, 21. ↩

201. Michael Sandel, “The Procedural Republic and The Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory 12/1 (1984), 81- 96. ↩

202. John Howard Yoder, “‘What Would You Do If?’: An Exercise in Situation Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 2/1 (Fall 1974), 100-101. Cited in Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, 127. So, do I long to die for the Lord? Do I long to die for the gospel? I know that I have an intense longing within me, as Paul said, “I desire to be poured out.” But I also know that I am not willing within myself. An unwilling force always exists within the willingness that the Lord has given me. This makes me realise that my willingness does not come from myself.208 Such self-awareness resonates with Wang’s discussion of “humble.” As noted in Chapter 2, Liu argues that the fundamental problem with the Chinese spirit lies in intellectual and moral arrogance, most fully articulated in Confucianism. The radical awareness of “not belonging to myself,” as revealed in the quotation marks, is the most critical divergence between him and Liu in their spiritual self-interrogations. The latter ultimately sought refuge in liberal theology, placing hope in the noblest elements of the inner self —a religious consciousness that the reality of sin had not completely corrupted. However, Wang found that humility must come from “a completely inverted self-understanding in the gospel.”209 He notes that “a humble person is one who hates his own unhumbleness.”210 This tension is also present in Hauerwas and Yoder’s description of martyrdom as a “gracious privilege.” On this basis, Wang’s embrace of the Reformation doctrine of total depravity has been elevated to a level higher than human religiosity. “The Gospel shattered people’s religious consciousness. It shattered the usury of morality and the even greater greed within our hearts.”211 This means that the peaceable new life of the church is absolutely a gift. As Hauerwas suggests, “Christian community is formed by a story that enables its members to trust the otherness of the other as the very sign of the forgiving character of God’s Kingdom.”212 Even in the practice of forgiveness and reconciliation, Christians still see themselves solely as those ↩

203. Wang, Fuyin de zhengbian, 124. ↩

204. Ibid., 111. ↩

205. Ibid., 112. ↩

206. Ibid., 88. ↩

207. Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 50. who have been forgiven. From this arose the faithful disobedience of the church and its irreducible difference from other forms of political or civil disobedience. Therefore, Wang declares: Outside of Christ’s cross, humanity cannot learn what it means to be a humble dissident anywhere else. This includes “non-violent resistance.” Non-violence means that the dissident is prepared to bear the consequences of his resistance. In most cases, however, dissent means that the dissident is prepared to let the person being opposed bear the consequences. Therefore, “non-violent resistance” is already a very high moral standard, but it is insufficient to reflect the inversion found in the Gospel. Because non-violence does not mean humility. A non-violent dissident does not truly respect the person they oppose. Non-violent dissidents have indeed prepared themselves to bear the consequences. But the difference between non-violence and the cross lies in the fact that non-violent resistance is prepared to bear the consequences “for the sake of the dissent itself” not “for the sake of loving the person they resist.”213 Wang believes that Paul’s statement, “value others above yourselves” (Philippians 2:3), provides the most simple but practical definition of humility.214 Christians in faithful disobedience are aware that the evil of those they oppose is no greater than their own darkness. But this does not deprive them of the disobedient agency. For the source of empowerment does not lie within themselves, as Liu believes, but is an incomprehensible yet real gift that has come upon them. This rather strengthens the perseverance of the dissidents, because the day Peter completely failed and denied his Lord was precisely the day the Gospel triumphed over the world through an unjust trial.215 All human limitations and failures cannot diminish the ↩

208. Ibid., 117-118. ↩

209. Wang, Fuyin de zhengbian, 111. ↩

210. See Wang Yi, “Shenpan (Tai 26:57-75)” 审判（太26:57-75）[Trial (Matthew 26:57-75)], Wang Yi wenku, 5 November 2017. https://www.wangyilibrary.com. urgency of the command that “[d]o not conform to the pattern of this world” (Romans 12:2), nor can they cause disciples to lose hope. “Value others above yourselves” requires that the faithful disobedience of house churches come from a sincere respect and love for the Chinese Communist regime. After thoroughly rejecting and despairing of Chinese culture, philosophy, politics, and ethnicity, the “patriotic” (爱国 aiguo) was surprisingly revived as a significant theme of Wang’s faithful contemplation.216 We will conduct an in-depth exploration of Wang’s account of the patriotic, which will further help us recognise the concern for locality that he shares with Hauerwas. In sum, Fuyin de zhengbian can be regarded as the culmination of Wang’s efforts to reestablish his Calvinist doctrines and the public meaning of the martyrdom practices of ERCC on the common ground of Luther’s theologia crucis. His embrace of the Calvinist doctrines of grace, selection, and God’s sovereignty critically distances itself from the dubious triumphalism of the Western liberal-democratic political order and re-anchored it in the Lutheran simple focus on the way of the cross. Only with this perspective can we seriously consider Wang’s statement in custody in 2018 that his intention is not to change laws or institutions in China but only “to testify about another world.”217 This is a voice that has been suppressed under the dominant interpretive framework that I deconstruct in this chapter. 4.3. The Misunderstood Zhengbian, the Distorted Gospel Fuyin de zhengbian has garnered attention from some researchers affiliated with Wang.218 Nevertheless, its application has predominantly served to bolster arguments that oppose a ↩

211. Wang Yi, “Moxiang aiguo” 默想爱国 [Contemplating the Patriotic], in Dasheng de moxiang, 78-85. I translate aiguo as “the patriotic” here to reflect the distinction between aiguo and aiguo zhuyi (爱国主义 patriotism) that Wang makes in the book. ↩

212. Wang Yi, “My Declaration of Faithful Disobedience,” in Wang Yi et al., Faithful Disobedience, 223. ↩

213. See Bai “One Foot above Liberalism,” 274, 278-279; Zhao Wenjuan, “Shaping the Role of the Church as Transformer of Society: Exploring Chinese Theology and Transformative Theological Education in the Chinese Context,” International Journal of Asian Christianity 6 (2023), 6n3. Although Jung does not directly refer to the book, he cites from a chapter of it online. Jung, “Costly Kuyperianism,” 185n14. fundamental theme of the book: the critical reflection on neo-Calvinism and American liberalism. Zhao presents this book as a crystallisation of Wang’s attempt to transplant the model that Reformed theology shaped Western society onto China’s social transformation.219 Her understanding of Wang’s ecclesiology, however, still remains confined to the old framework of Wang’s early constitutionalist discourse. She criticises Wang’s ecclesiology for proposing a “sociological” approach that runs counter to traditional house church’s quietism, “thereby stripping away the theology of the church as a mission shaped by the gospel to the world.”220 The gospel-centered transformation of thought reflected in Fuyin de zhengbian and its criticism of liberalism have not received adequate attention. It is worth noting that Wang has explicitly described the church as “sociological.” For example, with Liu Tongsu, he suggests that “from the beginning, ‘Christian’ was a sociological term, not a theological concept.”221 However, Wang’s use of the term “sociological” does not follow the modern sociological approach that Ernst Troeltsch’s church-sect typology has taken, as criticised by Zhao, but rather the opposite.222 As Zhao points out, the latter approach takes a universalistic definition of the church. It assumes that only faith communities oriented toward the “social end” can properly be called a church.223 Liu and Wang, on the contrary, use the term to highlight the locality of the church in accordance to their mission of church building.224 Their belief that “‘Christian’ is a concept related to the local church, a term used by Gentiles to refer to members of an unprecedented new community known as ‘the church’”225 in many ↩

214. Zhao, “Shaping the Role of the Church as Transformer of Society,” 6. ↩

215. Zhao Wenjuan, “The Church as an Alternative Polis: Revisiting the Ecclesiology of Wang Mingdao,” Asia Journal of Theology 37/1 (April 2023), 59. ↩

216. Liu and Wang, Guankan Zhongguo chengshi jiating jiaohui, 145. ↩

217. For Troeltsch’s typology, see Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (New York: Macmillan, 1931). ↩

218. Zhao, “The Church as an Alternative Polis,” 58. ↩

219. See Chapter 3, sec. 2.2. ↩

220. Liu and Wang, Guankan Zhongguo chengshi jiating jiaohui, 146. ways resembles Hauerwas’s emphasis on the church as a visible institution with “budgets, buildings, parking lots, potluck dinners, heated debates about who should be the next pastor.”226 In response to James Gustafson’s criticism, Hauerwas refused to place his ecclesiology under Troeltsch’s typology and be defined as “sectarian.”227 He clarifies that, for him, “[i]nsofar as the church can reclaim its integrity as a community of virtue, it can be of great service in liberal societies.”228 He then lists a series of social and political concerns that he has written about, which extend far beyond the church’s own institutional affairs.229 His response shows that whether the church lives as an alternative polis cannot be defined by superficial “sociological” scales, i.e., whether the church attempts to participate in a liberal society and support its functioning or withdraw from it. Rather, this is primarily a linguistic issue concerning whether the church understands the non-enclosed language that makes this community a community. And in Hauerwas’s ecclesiology, learning this language is inextricably linked to the particular narrative, “the story of Jesus as a social ethic,” that the church has received from God.230 These remind us of Wang’s linguistic understanding of the gospel,231 and how, under this understanding, the public nature of the gospel itself reconciles the inwardness of traditional house churches with the social participation advocated by the mission of publicisation. This offers us an appropriate perspective for approaching the theme of the next chapter: the postliberal cultural-linguistic theological approach adopted by both Wang and Hauerwas. In his 2021 article “One Foot above Liberalism,” Bai’s citation of Fuyin de zhengbian in aims to demonstrate that Wang’s theology contains a “clear bias” for the “American Christian ↩

221. Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, 107. ↩

222. Ibid. ↩

223. Ibid. ↩

224. Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 40-44. ↩

225. See my analysis of Wang’s poetry in Chapter 2, sec. 3.1. right.”232 He particularly quotes Wang’s statement that if he has to choose between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, he “would have voted for him (Trump) without question.”233 Bai explains that Trump represents, for Wang, “a much better guardian of the tradition of American civil religion than Democrats.” 234 Therefore, despite Wang’s criticism of the Trump phenomenon, Bai believes this criticism is directed only at the lack of “spiritual richness” in Trump’s political agenda. This is insufficient to constitute a profound reflection on the American Christian right and has made Wang “silent on common Christian criticisms against the American right, such as its uncritical association with American nationalism and its subjugation of Christian ideals under political agenda.”235 However, the above interpretation almost completely reverses the meaning of Wang’s text. Returning to the original text, before Wang states his intention to vote for Trump, he notes that Trump represents “American ‘civil religion’ and national religion,” which is not “ancient evangelical faith.”236 And after expressing his voting intention, he immediately writes again: My criticism is not directed at him (Trump) personally, but at the Christian right ... who are unaware of the huge difference between the ancient gospel and American “civil religion.” They are also unaware that, 500 years after the Reformation, God is doing something big to separate the “Gospel of Jesus Christ” from the “Gospel of America,” just as water in the air is separated from water below the air.237 From the perspective of martyrdom as the church’s life essence, Wang launched a fierce critique of contemporary conservative evangelical church culture in the United States. He points out that American evangelical churches are not fulfilling their spiritual responsibilities, ↩

226. Bai, “One Foot above Liberalism,” 274, 278. ↩

227. Wang, Fuyin de zhengbian, 100. Cited in Bai, “One Foot above Liberalism,” 278. Parenthesis added. ↩

228. Ibid., 278. ↩

229. Ibid., 278-279. ↩

230. Wang, Fuyin de zhengbian, 100. ↩

231. Ibid. but instead pinning their hopes on an unqualified “Martin Luther” entering the White House,238 which he described as an “overrealised eschatology.”239 Trump’s rise to power was a disastrous shift for the church, as Trump irritated the entire society in a manner that was “completely opposite to the way Jesus offended everyone in society.”240 By contrasting Luther’s theologia crucis with Trump, Wang unreservedly points out that “the ‘reformation’ initiated by Trump from the White House is a theology without the cross, a Christianity that has betrayed the Reformation, and the inevitable result of its continuous failure in the United States.”241 The church has become a politician, pinning its hopes on a “Martin Luther with a sword.”242 Wang asserts that such struggles will ultimately be futile, merely reflecting that Christians “remain attached to the irretrievable ‘Christendom’ and live in an anti-cross illusion.”243 For Wang, the Trump phenomenon is actually the eruption of a long-standing problem within American Christianity: The church expects to “live a life better than that of God’s son,” and thus has lost “the gospel of the cross.”244 This is a consequence of the church's assimilation into modern consumerism. He mentions that once when he unintentionally touched the wrist of a person on a plane, although he immediately apologised, that person reacted “as if it was a serious offence, second only to a massacre.”245 He believes that this incident does not actually reflect a cultural clash between the East and the West, but rather “a clash between classical Christian culture and modern consumer culture.”246 Influenced by this culture of “not being able to tolerate any inconvenience,” the church eventually launched a “pseudo-Reformation” ↩

232. Ibid. ↩

233. Ibid., 94-95. ↩

234. Ibid., 95. ↩

235. Ibid., 95-96. ↩

236. Ibid., 99. ↩

237. Ibid., 98. ↩

238. Ibid., 92. ↩

239. Ibid. that completely excluded the cross.247 Taking this as a lesson, he calls on the church to return to the way of the cross, to endure the inconveniences that mainstream modern culture and politics bring to Christians, and to become “a non-mainstream mainstream and a non-political politics.”248 And this can only be achieved through insistence on the “presence of the Gospel,” not for ruling or changing society, but for the sake of witness.249 The contemporary church needs a real “Martin Luther on the road to exile.”250 Therefore, Trump’s representation of the religion of American citizens is undoubtedly not the reason determining Wang’s voting intention. As for the real reason, he does not explain. Considering the context, it is more reasonable to infer that Wang voted for Trump because he believed it was the lesser of two evils. Readers may challenge the accuracy of his realistic judgment. But it is clear that Wang is by no means, as Bai claims, an advocate of Christianity as American civil religion. On the contrary, it is where he strongly criticises the American evangelical church. Trump’s rise to power shows that the churches have betrayed the gospel, losing the courage and perseverance to suffer for it. They have picked up swords to protect themselves rather than relying on the word of God. From this perspective, Wang’s criticism implicitly suggests that American evangelical churches are engaging in practices analogous to those of the TSPM in China, which are precisely what the “Ninety-Five Theses” of the ERCC vehemently opposes. Again, one can see how Wang’s criticism of American Christianity and the Trump phenomenon aligns with many of Hauerwas’s beliefs, including the notion that the church must become a countercultural community of witness and an alternative polis.251 Furthermore, this reveals that Wang, who strongly identifies with Puritanism, may paradoxically agree with ↩

240. Ibid., 93. ↩

241. Ibid. 99. ↩

242. Ibid. ↩

243. Ibid., 101. ↩

244. For Hauerwas’s theology of witness, see Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 37-63. Hauerwas’s critique of the relationship between modern American Christianity and Puritanism.252 Hauerwas’s critique of Puritanism lies precisely in their abandonment of the life of truth and the way of the cross in confessional struggles, as Bonhoeffer criticised it as an endeavour “to forgo the final suffering to be able to serve God in quietness and peace.”253 Wang’s Puritan identity is also based on the early Puritans’ nonconformist tradition, which persisted in speaking the truth despite persecution.254 In his 2025 doctoral thesis, Bai revised his earlier assessment of Wang.255 He recognised Wang’s “harsher criticism”256 of Trump and further contended that “Wang Yi went against not only his earlier view, wherein he considered Reformed Christianity a necessary component to modern constitutionalism.”257 Bai’s critical focus consequently shifted from the conservative- liberal characteristics of Wang’s theology towards the latter’s absorption of “Van Til’s narrow view of truth,” which “left little room to interpret his position as anything other than rejecting all ethical and intellectual common ground between his branch of Christianity and other schools of thought.”258 Bai’s later critique clearly reflects a widespread concern among Chinese theologians regarding the “presuppositionism” of Westminsterian neo-Calvinism. which, according to Bai’s definition, “tends to downplay the value of natural law or any such universal morality, and instead prefers to predicate all moral standards upon Biblical theology in line with rigorous Calvinism.”259 This denomination-centric presuppositionism is widely regarded ↩

245. For Hauerwas’s tracing of the Puritan root of the problematic “Christian” America, see Stanley Hauerwas, “A Christian Critique of Christian America,” Nomos 30 (1988), 110-133. ↩

246. Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, 58. Citing here, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Sword, trans. Edwin Robertson and John Bowden (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 102. ↩

247. See Wang Yi, “Tradition of the House Church in China: Nonconformist,” in Wang Yi et al., Faithful Disobedience, 39-44; and Wang Yi, Beifu shijia: Zhongguo jiating jiaohui shi 背负十架：中国家庭教会史 [Bearing the Cross: A History of the House Church in China] (2020), 177-178. In addition, for Yoder’s nonconformist theology, see, Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 39, 96, 196-197. ↩

248. Bai Yucheng, “American City on a Chinese Hill: American Fundamentalism in Contemporary Chinese Christianity,” PhD diss. (Duke University, 2025), 242. ↩

249. Ibid., 243. ↩

250. Ibid. ↩

251. Ibid., 244. ↩

252. Ibid., 49. as a threat to the catholicity of Christianity and to the pursuit of universal values, such as freedom and justice, alongside other schools of thought. Partly in response to the concerns regarding catholicity and universalism addressed above, the following chapter will further explore the postliberal theological characteristic inherent in Wang’s thought; this characteristic is particularly pronounced in Wang’s critical reflections on propositional, “philosophical” Calvinists, in which Van Til is regarded as the culmination of this approach.260 This characteristic, yet to be fully grasped by its Sino-theological critics, harbours profound socio-political critical potential. This critical force not only empowers the house church’s radical but peaceful resistance to China’s totalitarian politics but also deepens the theological significance of the mission of publicisation in criticising the Confucian tradition, thereby addressing the concerns raised by Sino-theological scholars. The dialogue with Hauerwas, a prominent representative of postliberal theology who is sometimes invoked to question Wang’s American conservative-liberal tendency, undoubtedly paves the way for this exploration. ↩

253. Wang, Fuyin de zhengbian, 45-64. ↩