第六章 在神圣隐藏中重返世界：王怡以殉道为导向的公共参与

Footnotes

1. See, for example, Alexender Chow, Chinese Public Theology: Generational Shifts and Confucian Imagination in Chinese Christianity (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 44-45; and Jarred 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), 150-151. ↩

2. See Chapter 4, sec. 4.2. ↩

3. Its word-for-word translation is “end-world.” ↩

4. Its word-for-word translation is “end-day.” ↩

5. See, for example, Wang Yi, “Mori de fuyin (Tai 25:31-46)” 末日的福音（太25:31-46） [The Apocalyptic Gospel (Matthew 25: 31-46)], Wang Yi wenku 王怡文库 [Wang Yi Resource Library], 8 August 2017. https://www.wangyilibrary.com/post/sermon-227600. ↩

6. Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007), 137-141. Wang Yi, “Zai fuyin zhong caolian siwang (Tai 14:1-12)” 在福音中操练死亡（太14:1-12） [Practicing Death in the Gospel], Wang Yi wenku, 12 March 2017. https://www.wangyilibrary.com/post/sermon-225723. ↩

7. Hauerwas, Matthew, 209-210. Wang Yi, “Xiayi zhan, tianguo (Tai 25:1-30)” 下一站，天国（太25:1-30） [Next Station, The Heavenly Kingdom], Wang Yi wenku, 1 October 2017. https://www.wangyilibrary.com 一站，天国. ↩

8. Hauerwas, Matthew, 24. Wang, “Mori de fuyin.” ↩

9. Hauerwas, Matthew, 24-25; 204. Wang, “Mori de fuyin.” See also Wang Yi, “The City of God on Earth,” in Wang Yi et al., Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement, eds. and trans. Hannah Nation and J.D. Tseng (Illinois: IVP Academic, 2022), 147-148 ↩

10. Hauerwas, Matthew, 25, 204-205. Wang Yi, “Moxiang fuyin” 默想福音 [Contemplating the Gospel], in Dasheng de moxiang 大声的默想 [Contemplation Loudly] (Hong Kong: Covenant Publishing Limited, 2017), 4. ↩

11. Hauerwas, Matthew, 127, 223-225. Wang Yi, “Zai fuyin zhong caolian siwang”; “Zheshi aizi de rongyao (Tai 17:1-13)” 这是爱子的荣耀 [This is the Honour of the Beloved Son], Wang Yi wenku, 30 April 2017. https://www.wangyilibrary.com/post/sermon-225730; and “Mori de fuyin.” See also Wang Yi, “The Way of the Cross, The Life of the Martyrs,” in Wang Yi et al., Faithful Disobedience, 153-167. 1.2. June Carries a Wound upon Her Ribs Since 2009, the ERCC has designated the period from 12 May (the date of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake) to 4 June as the “National Prayer Month”, a practice that continues to this day. June, moreover, frequently appears as a theme in Wang’s poetry, running through his early lamentation period right up to his arrest in 2018.14 His final poem, written in June before imprisonment, clearly displays apocalyptic eschatological characteristics, as it poses a conundrum. The first stanza reads: Some say Beijing hasn’t seen a single snowfall this year I know it’s all for June frost In an upside-down world Only upside-down things hold value Like the sun rising in the west Then I know the end time is near15 Wang endows June with an apocalyptic significance, presenting it as China’s collective pain. The Chinese idiom “June frost” itself signifies enduring injustice so profound that even the weather behaves abnormally. With this imagery, Wang skillfully merges an apocalyptic reality with the lived experience of suffering. The poem later continues: ↩

12. See, for example, Wang Yi, “6 yue 4 ri: Xisheng” 6月4日：牺牲 [4th June: Sacrifice], in Da jiaotang: Ershi nian shixuan 大教堂：二十年诗选 [Cathedral: A Poems Selections of Twenty Years] (2014), 378. https://www.wangyilibrary.com, originally written in 1995; “6 yue 4 ri: Xin zhangzheng de lushang” 6月4日：新长征的路上 [4th June: On the Road of New Long March], in Da jiaotang, 364; originally written in 1996; “6 yue 4 ri: Zhi shounan zhe” 6月4日：致受难者 [4th June: To the Victims], in Da jiaotang, 324; originally written in 1997; “6 yue 4 ri: Chu Aiji” 6月4日：出埃及 [4th June: Exodus], in Da jiaotang, 205; originally written in 2009; “Liuyue (zushi)” 六月（组诗） [June (Poem Cycle)], in Da jiaotang, 8-10, originally written in 2014; and “Liuyue jiuyao jieshu le” 六月就要结束了 [June Will Soon Be Over], Wang Yi wenku, 22 June 2016. https://www.wangyilibrary.com. ↩

13. Wang Yi, “Liuyue feishuang” 六 月 飞 霜 [June Frost], Wang Yi wenku, 6 March 2018. https://www.wangyilibrary.com. Some say Beijing hasn’t seen a single snowfall this year I maintain there’s a mysterious meaning to this Just as on the day my friend and father passed away Thunder and lightning seized the capital’s night In an upside-down world You must rely on imagination to survive To prevent a stray bullet from piercing your chest16 Here, the injustice of June Fourth is clearly intertwined with the apocalyptic imagery of June’s frost. The connection is so strong that Wang even invokes the crucifixion of Jesus to describe June in another poem, writing: “June bears a wound upon its ribs.”17 Such a link also appears to challenge our established ecclesiocentric framework for interpreting apocalyptic eschatology. Hauerwas’s terminology powerfully highlights the key point. If the church is destined to be an alternative polis, has Wang compromised the alienness of God’s kingdom in his commemoration of June Fourth? Has the church, as an apocalyptic community witnessing to God, been reduced to the “Republic on the Square” of 1989—freedom and democracy that seemed within reach yet ultimately slipped away? If April—the month of Good Friday—brings Hauerwas and Wang closest together, then June may be when they diverge most sharply. This tension becomes particularly acute within the context of Hong Kong’s Occupy Central civic movement in the 2010s. 1.3. Hong Kong Hauerwasians and Civil Movements During Hong Kong’s civic movement, a group of theologians known as Gangshi Houpai (Hong Kong Hauerwasians) emerged. It is worth noting that this term does not refer broadly to ↩

14. Ibid. ↩

15. Wang, “Liuyue jiuyao jieshu le.” theologians studying Hauerwas in Hong Kong, but rather denotes a particular political theological stance, one centred around Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary and represented by Andres Tang, Freeman Huen, and Vincent Lau. These scholars draw on Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder as theoretical sources, which they deploy to criticise the Hong Kong civic movement and to call the church to keep its distance from it. These Hauerwasian critiques of the Hong Kong civic movement operate at different levels, and each of these theologians focuses on different dimensions of their shared prospect. Sometimes, the critique is directed at the specific forms that the movement takes. Andres Tang, for example, claims that despite Occupy Central movement’s emphasis on love and peace, the form of “occupation” itself has already embodied “a certain form of violence/coercion” because the lethality of which was the gathering of 10,000 people or more on the main roads of Central,”18 and therefore it is inevitable that “the Christian faith’s ‘love’ and ‘peace’ are in conflict with the Occupy Central.”19 Some critics, however, take such criticisms a step further, directly criticising the struggle to defend the concept of civil society itself. Huen’s article “Public Theology: Whose ‘Public’? How Much ‘theological’?”20 is characteristic of this approach. In this article, Huen presents a genealogical study of the development of the concept of civil society, a narrative that culminates in Max Stackhouse’s attempt to position theology within the paradigm of a “public theology” whose aim is to participate in civil society as a mediator between the private and the political. Huen modifies this proposal of public theology by suggesting that the concept of civil society is itself an idealised concept.21 He points out that in reality, civil society has ↩

16. Andres Tang, “Huiying ‘heping zhan Zhong’: yixie laizi jidu xinyang de tiwen (Shang)” 回应「和平占中」： 一些来自基督信仰的提问 [Response to “Occupy Central with Peace”: Some Questions from the Christian Faith], in Zhengzhi zhong de jiaohui 政治中的教会 [The Church in Politics] (Hong Kong: Logos, 2015), 72-73. ↩

17. Ibid., 71. ↩

18. Freeman Huen, “Gonggong shenxue: Shui de ‘gonggong’? You ji ‘shenxue’?” [Public Theology: Who’s ‘Public’? How Much ‘Theological’?], Shandao qikan [Hill Road] 31 (July 2013), 31–63. ↩

19. Ibid., 50-51. “degenerated into a playing field for private interests.”22 Furthermore, when the church attempts to maintain its political relevance by entering civil society, it inevitably falls into the predetermined public-private distinction of liberalism, thereby unconsciously creating its own public as one of “the many disparate and competing ‘publics’” within the liberal public.23 Public theologians seek to translate the faith into a moral language that can be adopted in the playing field for publics (civil society), which, in Huen’s view, represents a marginalisation of the gospel and Christian discipleship, resulting in a disembodied faith. As a last resort, he appeals to Hauerwas to call the church to live out its own “body politic” and to face the “inevitable conflict between discipleship and citizenship.”24 This critical approach appears to resonate significantly with the central concerns of postliberal theology explored in the preceding chapter. It follows Hauerwas in emphasising the church’s positioning as a cultural-linguistic community.25 Like many postliberal theologians, it describes discipleship training as a process of language acquisition, emphasizing the incommensurability and untranslatability of this language with other cultural languages.26 This insight is applied to examine the church’s participation in civic movements, questioning whether the church has compromised its mission as an alternative to liberalism and, consequently, become one of many secondary publics. On this point, the Hauerwasians offer a parallel message to Wang’s insistence on the irreplaceability of the church’s faithful disobedience. However, their sceptical attitude toward the Occupy Central Movement is at odds with the ERCC’s political concerns in many aspects. For instance, by the same standards, ↩

20. Ibid., 52. ↩

21. Ibid. ↩

22. Ibid., 62. Huen’s citation here contains a minor mistake. His footnote here indicates that the text that his paraphrase refers to is Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 26. But in the original context, Stanley Hauerwas uses the term “body polity” rather than “body politic”. ↩

23. Freeman Huen, Shehui· lunli: Du xie Houhuoshi [Title in English on colophon: Writing with Hauerwas: Essays on Social Ethic] (Hong Kong: Logos, 2017), 115-116. ↩

24. Ibid., 119-120. Wang’s signing of Charter 08,27 the ERCC’s commemoration of June Fourth, and its appeal for the Chinese government to honour the constitutionally guaranteed right to religious freedom all raise suspicions of blurring boundaries between the church’s distinctive witness and liberal political aspirations.28 Were this criticism be proved to be valid, the interpretative framework established so far in this thesis would also be called into question. If the ERCC’s political testimony ultimately cannot move beyond Wang’s earlier attempts to achieve an “overlapping consensus” between a Christian worldview and liberal politics,29 it seems reasonable to press hard questions as to why house churches insist on an anti-sinicisation stance instead of engaging constructively with Chinese culture and Confucianism. Were they to do so, it would be logical to incorporate aspects of the latter into the ERCC’s liturgical arrangements in order to express values shared in the church and culture. Why ought not elements from the latter two traditions be incorporated into the church’s liturgical arrangements to solidify the alliance of shared values with Christianity? Does Wang’s perspective on the relationship between politics and religion ↩

25. Charter 08 is a human rights manifesto drafted and revised by Zhang Zuhua, Liu Xiaobo, and others and signed by many human rights activists, including Wang. This declaration became the main reason why Liu was sentenced to “suspicion of inciting the subversion of state power” and detained for life. ↩

26. In sharp contrast, Huen invokes John Rawls’s discourse on civil disobedience, noting that it “restricts its (civil disobedience) feasibility and legitimacy to a relatively just democratic system.” He criticises the Occupy Central activists for failing to recognise that what they perceived as peaceful protest was, in the perspective of the Chinese Communist Party, already a form of “revolution.” Freeman Huen, “‘Zhanzhong’ yu gongmin kangming: Jidutu lunli bianshi de yici shifan” 「占中」与公民抗命：基督徒伦理辨识的一次示范 [“Occupy Central” and Civil Disobedience: A Demonstration of Christian Ethical Discernment], in Benny Tai et al., Gongmin kangming yu zhanling zhonghuan: Xianggang jidutu de xinyang shengsi 公民抗命与占领中环：香港基督徒的信仰省思 [Civil Disobedience and Occupy Central: Reflections on Faith by Hong Kong Christians] (New Taipei City: Song of Songs Publishing, 2013), 187. ↩

27. Regarding his endorsement of Charter 08, Wang once explained: “I believe such an appeal is in the freedom of expression for intellectuals and citizens. It also represents the signatories’ expression of love for this community. This love, of course, is not rooted in Christ. Yet they cherish their nation more than this government does. Why did I sign? Because although these demands cannot truly change China—that is, transform the soul of the Chinese people—the values upon which they are based align with my own convictions. Indeed, these fundamental human rights values have become a consensus within the flawed conscience of both believers and non-believers throughout human history, and are inherently closely connected to the Christian faith.” Wang Yi, “Jiating jiaohui de dengji wenti ji qita” 家庭教会的登记问题及其他 [The Registration of House Churches and Other Matters], in Linghun shenchu nao ziyou 灵魂深处闹自由 [Revolution in the Depth of Soul] (Taipei: Christian Arts Press, 2012), 333. Emphasis added. persistently retain a pronounced preference for Western liberal political ideas, and might it, as Bai Yucheng insists, merely be “one foot above liberalism”?30 In response to this challenge, this chapter counters by offering an opposing perspective, insisting that the ERCC’s political witness be examined and interpreted within the trajectory of Wang’s theological development. This will render our understanding of the ERCC’s faithful disobedience more dynamic, compelling us in turn to discern the differences between Wang’s Lutheran-Calvinist theology and Hauerwasian theology in terms of their postliberal cultural- linguistic insights and their deployments of apocalyptic eschatology. In this process, the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer will emerge as a focal point. 2. The Divine Hiddenness against Visibility 2.1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer as an Examplar of Non-Violence Hauerwas once mentioned that he frequently encountered after lectures the question “What about Dietrich Bonhoeffer?”31 Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler had become so widely known that he seemed to have become an antithesis of pacifism. In response, Hauerwas first denies the certainty of Bonhoeffer’s deep involvement in the assassination plot,32 and then endeavours to demonstrate that Bonhoeffer’s theological witness embodied pacifist concerns33 and restored the church’s visibility as “a community of peace.”34 He pointed out Bonhoeffer’s reflections on liberal politics and the church’s duty to ↩

28. 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), 267-287. ↩

29. Stanley Hauerwas, “Foreword,” in Mark Thiessen Nation et al., Bonhoeffer the Assassin?: Challenging The Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), xiii. ↩

30. Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (London: SPCK, 2004), 35-36. Within this perspective, I consider it reasonable to regard Nation et al., Bonhoeffer the Assassin?—a work co-authored by the three Mennonite theologians and pastors Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbel—as an extension of Hauerwas’s endeavours in this regard. ↩

31. Ibid., 40. ↩

32. Ibid., 43-48. step forward as the state’s “restrainer”35 and reminder of God’s “commandments and realities.”36 However, he also argues that Bonhoeffer was influenced by the Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms and the mandates,37 so that when he emphasised the visibility of the church to the state, he was finally unable to totally escape “the limits of the habits that have long shaped Lutheran thinking,” which “can invite the distinction between the private and public, which results in Christian obedience becoming invisible.”38 One American critic of Hauerwas’s interpretation, Jonathan Malesic, presents a compelling critique of Hauerwas’s argument from within Bonhoeffer’s theological framework. By highlighting the significance of Christian hiddenness in Bonhoeffer’s theology, he contends that Hauerwasian ecclesiology’s excessive focus on visibility misleads Christians into believing that “Bonhoeffer in his theology wants Christians to be unambiguously upfront about their Christian identity,” which overlooks the fact that “[s]ecrecy is a highly important theme in Bonhoeffer’s theology.”39 In what follows, we trace Malesic’s emphasis on hiddenness by examining the two central concepts he employs—Arkandisziplin and God’s endorsement of human self-concealment—and how these concepts shape his interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s notion of the “religionless Christianity.” 2.2. The Divine Concealment that Protects Religious Identity Malesic regards the conception of Arkandisziplin (discipline of the secret) that Bonhoeffer emphasised in The Cost of Discipleship as the latter’s answer to the tension Christians must navigate in the public sphere. He presents the tension in this way: “Moral life, preeminently ↩

33. Ibid., 53. ↩

34. Ibid., 52. ↩

35. Hauerwas mentions “four mandates” in his writings, but both labour and marriage can be subsumed under the mandate of oikonomia proposed by Luther. Ibid., 50. ↩

36. Hauerwas, 51. ↩

37. Ibid., 139. ↩

38. Ibid., 141-142. ↩

39. DBWE 4, 119. ↩

40. Malesic, Secret Faith in the Public Square, 144. unproblematic relationship with God. Malesic emphasises that the dramatic twist in the Genesis story of the theme of covering lies in God’s action of making garments for humans. He exposits its meaning as follows: “[E]ven as God punishes the humans for transgressing his law, he endorses their capacity for secret-keeping, gives them leather, giving them leather garments to conceal their nakedness.”44 God’s covering endorsed the importance of secret keeping in the postlapsarian world. This becomes the origin of “religion”, since what follows is the sacrifice of Abel and Cain in Genesis 4:3-4. This episode shows why concealment became “a necessary precondition of biblical religion.”45 2.3. Christian Concealment in a Religionless World Malesic adopts the “religious (hidden) church/non-religious (public) world” framework to explain Bonhoeffer’s late conception of a religionless world, also known as “a world come of age,” which implies a “modernity in which enterprises like art and science thrive without appeal to God.”46 Malesic is right to emphasise Bonhoeffer’s optimism about this development, and to argue that it frees the church from seeing itself as the regulator of every human social and intellectual endeavour. The Arkandisziplin becomes a temporary measure that the church adopts to face the religionless modern world, demonstrating the church’s patience and trust in God’s promise of the eschaton. As Bonhoeffer writes in a letter to Bethge, silent and hidden Christians wait in prayer to do the right things for “God’s own time.”47 Malesic finally positions the end describes Christians as a group much like museum curators, who guard the gate of truth as curators guard fragile and vulnerable art collections, deciding what should be presented to the world and what should not.48 In his view, both the ↩

41. Ibid., 169. ↩

42. Ibid. ↩

43. Ibid., 125. ↩

44. LPP, 162. Cited in Malesic, Secret Faith in the Public Square, 125. ↩

45. “Stewardship of the Christian tradition is a form of caring perhaps best thought of as curating…. Museum curators are gatekeepers. They do not grant access to the museum’s entire collection to any and all. While select American church, which seeks to dominate the political and moral issues of our time, and Hauerwasians, who emphasise the need for the church to be a visible alternative polis, have overlooked the longstanding Christian wisdom of hiddenness. He therefore proposes that the reclaiming of secrecy as a therapy aimed at correcting the dislocation of the church, especially in the United States, is needed at time Christians appear in public. He believes that this secrecy can prevent Christian teaching from being reduced to a form of public-interest language. He also thinks this secrecy will be beneficial to American public life, even if it was not the initial goal of Christian witness.49 So far, we can see that the positions taken in the debate between Malesic and Hauerwas put the political positions of Wang and the ERCC in a difficult position. On one side, from a Hauerwasian perspective, their civic engagement—especially their remembrance of June Fourth—is likely to raise concerns about the loss of the church’s distinctive voice. On the other side, Malesic’s espousal of Christian hiddenness, while somewhat balancing the Hauerwasians’ (over)emphasis on the church’s visibility and opening up more space for collaboration between the church and non-Christians in human rights and civic activities, nevertheless presents a significant challenge to the church’s faithful disobedience and the mission of publicisation. When the ERCC insists on appearing in the public square in the name of the church, it appears as an act of lost the patience and waiting characteristic of Arkandisziplin, an overstepping of the curator’s authority over God’s treasury that leads to throwing pearls before swine (Matthew 7:6).50 In the following sections, I ask if Bonhoeffer’s texts illumine this paradox, particularly his exposition of concealment in Creation and Fall. I find there that, while Malesic has made works will go up for public display, many, many more remain behind closed doors because they are fragile or because they are not crowd-pleasers.” Ibid. ↩

46. Ibid., 237. ↩

47. The parable of “throwing the pearls before swine” is used by Malesic in his book to remind Christians of the secrecy of the gospel. Ibid., 17, 60. an outstanding contribution in introducing Bonhoeffer’s theory of hiddenness into the field of political theology (particularly concerning the political engagement of the American church and Hauerwasianism), his interpretation occasionally confuses divine concealment with human self-concealment. This leads him to mistakenly link the church’s divine concealment to a concern for protecting self-identity. In contrast, Bonhoeffer’s account of divine hiddenness and unconsciousness targets precisely this self-protective human inclination for theological criticism. 3. Whose Garment? What Kind of Concealment? 3.1. Malesic’s Hiddenness and the Double Psyche Malesic correctly points out that the notion of Christian hiddenness echoes Bonhoeffer’s proposal of a “disciplined unconsciousness”. Christians can maintain the distinctiveness of their faith while going public, “if Christians conceal their Christian identity in public, cultivating a paradoxical ‘disciplined unconsciousness’ about that identity.”51 However, a conceptual gap emerges. In his use, concealment is about hiding one’s identity from the public. Bonhoeffer’s conception of unconsciousness, however, focuses on making oneself overlook the virtues one possesses.52 Malesic is aware of this conceptual and so proposes an inclusive relationship to bridge the two conceptions. He notes that “hiddenness from self is primary simply because it encompasses hiddenness from others.”53 In other words, Christians make themselves unaware of the Christian identity that enacts their practice of love, and this necessarily leads others to be unaware of it. Malesic with this reading rightly elaborates the late in Bonhoeffer’s articulation of the tension between human reflective activity and the ↩

48. Ibid., 140. ↩

49. “The righteousness of the disciples is hidden from themselves. Of course, they, too, can see the extraordinariness, but not themselves in it; they remain hidden from themselves.” DBWE 4, 119. ↩

50. Malesic, Secret Faith in the Public Square, 145. disciple’s pure obedience to Christ. Christians are so concertedly looking to Jesus alone that they are oblivious to the extraordinariness of their actions.54 Yet Malesic’s invocation of Bonhoeffer’s unconsciousness has notable limitations. Such an unconsciousness and hiddenness to the self, in reality, do not play prominent role in Bonhoeffer’s account of Christian concealment. If we consider, for example, Malesic’s museum curators, it is difficult to where the disciplined unconsciousness might fit. Is Malesic suggesting that the curators’ protective action is first and foremost rooted in their unconsciousness of the value of the collections they have been entrusted with? Furthermore, his interpretation of Genesis 3 traces the origin of concealment to Adam and Eve’s self- covering; however, it is difficult to see how the hiddenness of the self to one’s own has any significant place in this passage nor in God’s subsequent covering action. Thus, an in-depth exploration of Bonhoeffer’s teaching on disciplined unconsciousness reveals a marked conflict with Malesic’s construal of Christian self-concealment, particularly his account of Christian identity. This becomes especially clear when exploring the concept of self-concealment in light of the exposition on simplicity in Ethics. Bonhoeffer describes it this way: A person is simple who in the confusion, the distortion, and the inversion of all concepts keeps in sight only the single truth of God. This person has an undivided heart, and is not a double-psyche, a person of two souls (James 1:8). Because of knowing and having God, this person clings to the commandments, the judgment, and the mercy of God that proceed anew each day from the mouth of God.55 Read against this criterion, Malesic’s account of unconsciousness presupposes a sharply divided moral subject. Building upon the liberal distinction between the religious church and ↩

51. Ibid. ↩

52. DBWE 6, 81. the non-religious public sphere, his proposal effectively divides the social world into two ethically differentiated domains, governed by distinct norms of speech and self-presentation. Such a division, however, does not merely concern external contexts; it requires a corresponding division within the moral agency of the Christian subject. Within the church, Christians are encouraged to receive explicit theological teaching and to consolidate a distinctly Christian identity, one that is self-consciously formed and normatively articulated. By contrast, in the public sphere this same identity is to be withheld, as Christian moral action is expected to proceed without explicit reference to its confessional source. The public self is thus required to act ethically—particularly through practices such as the love of the neighbour—while bracketing the theological commitments that ground and orient such practices. From a Bonhoefferian perspective, this arrangement constitutes not a pragmatic differentiation of communicative contexts but the institutionalisation of a double psyche. The Christian is rendered a fragmented moral agent, whose responsibility is divided along the public/private axis of modern liberalism. Such a division obscures the possibility of Christian simplicity. By requiring the subject to navigate action according to different normative registers across social spheres, the single truth of God is no longer kept in view as the decisive orientation of moral responsibility. Action in the public sphere is thus severed from the undivided heart that clings to God’s commandments, judgment, and mercy as they proceed anew from the mouth of God. One might object that this account leaves insufficient room for contextual differentiation, collapsing ethical discernment into a form of confessional absolutism. Such an objection, however, misidentifies the target of Bonhoeffer’s concern. Christian simplicity does not entail uniformity of action across contexts, nor does it exclude discretion, silence, or strategic judgment. Rather, it resists the elevation of contextual distinctions into independent sources of moral normativity. Bonhoeffer affirms that responsible action is concrete and situationally discerned, yet he rejects the fragmentation of moral responsibility along differentiated social spheres—a point that will become clearer in the following chapter through an examination of the Lutheran doctrine of the three estates. The problem, therefore, is not that Christians behave differently across contexts, but that their actions are governed by more than one ultimate authority. Bonhoeffer’s concept of simplicity insists that the hiddenness from oneself does not entail defending Christian identity. How can a person hide from himself what he is and has? A divided perception of the self might be a possible outcome, but the dominical command of simplicity precludes it. Simplicity involves hiddenness, which is not an action consciously performed but rather an unintended outcome of another more fundamental action—namely, fixing one’s gaze on complete submission to God. Hiding one’s righteousness in Bonhoeffer’s terms is equivalent to single-minded concentration on Jesus. This explains why, in Discipleship, Bonhoeffer sometimes speaks of the church community’s invisible “identity,” which he associates with Christian righteousness;56 however, in other sections of the same book, Bonhoeffer also portrays Christian identity as opposed to Christ.57 3.2. The Commentaries on Genesis and the Eschatological Problems In Creation and Fall as well as other writings, Bonhoeffer never directly describes God’s act of making garments as an endorsement of any human capacity, potential, or tendency. ↩

53. “Here on earth, they (Christians) only see the opposite of what they are to become. What is visible here is nothing but their dying. … As a visible church-community, their own identity remains completely invisible to them. They look only to their Lord. He is in heaven, and their life for which they are waiting is in him. But when Christ, their life, reveals himself, then they will also be revealed with him in glory.” DBWE 4, 233. ↩

54. For example, “[f]or every unmediated natural relationship, knowingly or unknowingly, is an expression of hatred toward Christ, the mediator, especially if this relationship wants to assume a Christian identity.” DBWE 4, 95; and “[i]t is never a question of our having or taking on the same identity as the disciples or other people in the New Testament. The only issue of importance is that Jesus Christ and his call are the same, then and now. … The question whether I ought to compare myself with the disciple or with the paralytic poses a dangerous and false alternative. I need not compare myself with either of them. Instead, all I have to do is to listen and do Christ’s word and will as I receive them in both of these biblical accounts.” Ibid., 203-204. Rather, it is only described as God’s work of preservation: “God accepts human beings for what they are, as fallen creatures.”58 Therefore, in the context of our present discussion, the crucial question is whether God’s preservation can be interpreted as an endorsement of human self-concealment. Bonhoeffer’s exegesis, I will propose, does not allow this interpretation. Firstly, according to Bonhoeffer, what is preserved by God is “a world between curse and promise, and the last promise allows him to return to the earth from which he was taken, allows him to die.”59 God preserved human life after the fall to enable Adam to “live on his way to death.”60 This preservation can only be understood by Adam as “to mean sinking back into the nothingness out of which God created the world.”61 To the fallen Adam, the final promise is nothingness, nothingness as the “death of death.”62 Based on these claims by Bonhoeffer, it is easy to see that if God’s making of garments is merely an endorsement of man’s capacity for self-concealment, what is promised in such a preserved life can only be the death that returns us to dust rather than the kingdom of God for which Christians hope. Then, Bonhoeffer’s chapters on Adam, the one expelled from Paradise, and Cain, the murderer, expose a fundamental problem with Malesic’s conception of hiddenness, more specifically, with his eschatology.63 When speaking of “God’s own time,” Malesic defines it as the ultimate moment in linear history, rendering the Christian’s self-concealment and self- preservation as the church’s temporary measures for getting through the time that remains. Such a reading of salvation history has overlooks what Hans G. Ulrich calls the “Messianic- apocalyptic” character of Bonhoeffer’s eschatology, which he draws out of his exegesis on Genesis.64 Adam’s preserved but cursed life is described by Bonhoeffer as a struggle of living ↩

55. DBWE 3, 139. ↩

56. Ibid., 131. ↩

57. Ibid., 135. ↩

58. Ibid., 136. ↩

59. Ibid. ↩

60. Ibid., 141-146. ↩

61. Hans G. Ulrich, Transfigured not Conformed: Christian Ethics in a Hermeneutic Key (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2022), 27-50. with “a desperate, an unquenchable, an eternal thirst” for life.65 The fallen Adam goes on his way to death with “an obsessive nostalgia for the original unity.”66 Because paradise is guarded by sentinels, “Adam’s life outside the gate is a constant attack on the kingdom from which he is shut out. It is a flight, a search to find upon the ground that is cursed what he has lost.”67 Such an attack against God’s kingdom finds its fullest expression in Cain’s murder. This is the so-called history of human existence (preserved by self-concealment), a history of desperate assaults on the gate of paradise, which culminated in the murder of Jesus, the Son of God. Bonhoeffer sees in this narrative development an apocalyptic picture of the war between two kingdoms, two realities, and two histories. Beyond the reality of the fallen world, which was constituted only by the promise of death, God’s preserving action of making garments intervenes as an indicator of God’s will to of reconcile fallen humanity to Godself. “All orders of our fallen world are God’s orders of preservation that uphold and preserve us for Christ.”68 The covering of Christ’s redemption represents the radical opposition between God’s concealment and human self-concealment. This divine act is foreign to us in every way, for it is marked by a kind of self-sacrifice, a martyrdom, that people no longer understand.69 All human works are a continuation of Adam and Cain’s desperate attack on this strange paradise; at the same time, in the death and resurrection of Christ, God’s counter attack on humankind was also completed. Therefore, the reality of God, or God’s own time, is not properly understood as merely a “future event” or a “deferral” as postmodern philosophy likes to call it. The “Messianic” character of redemption emphasises the reality of God’s intrusion into and sustaining presence ↩

62. DBWE 3, 143. ↩

63. Ibid., 134. ↩

64. Ibid., 144. ↩

65. Ibid., 140. ↩

66. “What a strange paradise is this hill of Golgotha, this cross, this blood, this broken body. What a strange tree of life, this trunk on which the very God had to suffer and die.” Ibid., 146. in this world-age. As Bonhoeffer writes in Ethics, “[i]n Jesus Christ the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world.”70 This is a reality that we directly encounter, coexist with, and must actively respond to.71 Christ and the cross have become the centre of the world again. The kingdom of God has arrived, and the paradise to which people’s nostalgia points has in fact broken in. When Christian ethics is concerned with this intervening reality, Bonhoeffer observes that a range of philosophical binaries are dissolved: “[t]he place that in all other ethics is marked by the antithesis between ought and is, idea and realization, motive and work, is occupied in Christian ethics by the relation between reality and becoming real, between past and present, between history and event (faith) or, to replace the many concepts with the simple name of the thing itself, the relation between Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.”72 Simplicity is impossible for the world but realised in Christ. For our purposes here, the critical binary that is dissolved is the political philosophical antithesis Malesics situates between the public and private. In summary, although Malesic perceptively highlights the often-overlooked element of hiddenness in Bonhoeffer’s theology—an element that can offer significant momentum for reflection on contemporary American churches’ political engagement, regardless of their stance on liberal politics—his interpretation is problematic in the following respects. First, his misunderstanding of disciplined unconsciousness leads him to see Bonhoeffer’s Arkandisziplin as a self-protective measure of Christian religious identity, without noting that this unconsciousness is also critical of the Christian’s self-absorbed preoccupation with his or her own “Christian identity”. Second, he traces the theological legitimacy of such self-protective self-absorption back to God’s act of making garments for Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, taking ↩

67. DBWE 6, 54. Italics omitted. ↩

68. Bonhoeffer’s “emphasis on the realisation of God’s new reality corresponds to an equally intense emphasis on God’s story in its unmediated and determined totality as invading this world-age”. Ulrich, Transfigured not Conformed, 38. ↩

69. DBWE 6, 49-50. Cited in Ulrich, Transfigured not Conformed, 38. it to be an endorsement of human self-concealment. However, a close reading of Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of Genesis has shown that he draws a sharp and very different contrast between God’s covering and humankind’s self-covering. The final and most fundamental problem with Malesic’s interpretation lies in his failure to accord sufficient attention to the messianic- apocalyptic tenor of Bonhoeffer’s eschatology, which assumes the reality of God’s having already decisively intervened in the world. Malesic’s vision of the world appears to be one condemned to putting things in opposition to each other after the Fall. Such thinking, according to Bonhoeffer, however, “fails to recognize the original unity of these opposites in the Christ- reality and, as an after-thought, replaces this with a forced unity provided by a sacred or profane system that overarches them.”73 3.3. Religionless Christianity: A More Mature Form of Faith? The set of problems also permeates Malesic’s interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s account of “religionless Christianity,” leading him to establish an erroneous binary between the “religious (hidden) church/non-religious (public) world”. Of course, Malesic’s version of Christian hiddenness does not entirely leave no place for the public witness of the church. Malesic also points out “the limit of Arkandisziplin” in the Nazi period, during which Bonhoeffer called on the church to “publicly protest the state’s interference by ... publicly leaving the state-supported church.”74 Malesic finds that speaking of the secular vocation of Christians, Bonhoeffer asserts that when “there is a clash between the space the body of Christ claims ... and the world’s own claim for space,” Christians will face the limits of their secular vocation.75 In some cases, it will become necessary for Christians to retreat from their secular vocation, confess their faith, and be prepared to suffer publicly. Malesic does not ignore these claims. But he does maintain ↩

70. DBWE 6, 59. ↩

71. Malesic, Secret Faith in the Public Square, 154. ↩

72. DBWE 4, 245-246. the priority of hiddenness over publicity by arguing that Bonhoeffer’s discussion of such special cases implies that the norm for Christians in most situations is to hide their confession.76 To protect Christian identity from destructive damage under an evil Nazi regime, Christians were required to suspend their habitual invisibility. However, once “Christian identity” is no longer threatened under such an extreme situation, Christians must again return to their default stance, which is to cloak their confession in secrecy. In this way, Malesic positions Bonhoeffer’s notion of “the world come of age” as an elaboration of a more mature form of Christianity hiding itself once again after episodes of political catastrophe. Simply characterising the publicisation of house churches as an “extreme case” may appear to some to be the easiest way to resolve the tension between house churches’ public disobedience and Bonhoeffer’s account of hiddenness. This strategy shifts the focus of the discussion to debates about the criteria obtaining in the “state of exception.”77 Political dissidents are thus tempted to reduce their question about how to understand the evil confronting them to the question of whether their situation is an exception. However, the following example of a Chinese dissident not only illustrates how this discourse surrounding the “exceptional state” evacuates the dialogue of its most promising insights, but also reveals how Malesic’s interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s account of “religionless Christianity” may entail cultural chauvinist implications. ↩

73. Malesic, Secret Faith in the Public Square, 155. ↩

74. For instance, in “Bonhoeffer, Schmitt, and the State of Exception,” Petra Brown interprets Bonhoeffer’s account of the “extraordinary situation” in light of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the “state of exception,” criticising it for potentially leading to a “‘pure violence’ without reference.” Petra Brown, “Bonhoeffer, Schmitt, and the State of Exception,” Pacifica 26/3 (2013), 246-264. In distinction from Brown’s interpretation, Kevin O’Farrell proposes a Bonhoefferian theology of exception “as a moment when persons encounter the inadequacies of their ethical and political concepts to address its challenges, inadequacies that contribute to the dissolution of concrete political life.” In this situation where human ethics and political agency are dissolved, the possibility of action is directed toward God’s command and action, which come to “persons as a gift that liberates persons for creative human action,” and establish “the ethical limits of fruitful political life in their place.” Kevin O’Farrel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a Theology of the Exception (London: T&T Clark, 2024), 156. O’Farrell’s interpretation of “the exception,” particularly its anti-moral self-justification implications and its embrace of fragmented self-identity, exhibits significant conceptual overlaps with the “hiddenness from idea of authenticity” proposed later in this chapter. Yu Jie once recounted a discomforting experience in Western academia. In a speech at Harvard University, he used the term “holocaust” to describe the great famine caused by Mao’s government during the Cultural Revolution. He immediately faced strong resistance from many professors and students, as if they had been seriously offended. Such experiences made Yu realise that he needed more specific accounts of the extremity of the Nazi event.78 He recalls how in 2004 Sandra Kalniete, then Latvia’s foreign minister and a member of the European Parliament, infuriated the vice-president of a German Jewish centre when she argued at the Leipzig Book Fair that the state socialism of Nazism was morally comparable to Soviet communism. Moreover, Yu Jie observed that the demand to regard Nazi crimes as the most extreme evil in human history emanates not only from the victims’ side, but that a similar tendency is equally present in Germans’ own reflections upon their historical culpability. For example, he points out that German historian Heinrich August Winkler’s claims that although mass murders in other places should still be condemned, none of them are comparable to the Nazi Holocaust.79 The reason is that “Germany is a country of the West. It participated in the European Enlightenment and in a long tradition of the rule of law.”80 It is not my purpose in this section to enter the “state of exception threshold” debate with the aim of establishing a more inclusive criterion for what will be counted as a holocaust. Rather, I aim only to show how the threshold question—“which mass murders meet the criteria for ‘holocaust’?”—destroys the capability of communication between different politically traumatised groups. Even if a more inclusive standard is adopted to put more events in this ↩

75. Yu Jie, “Xinban xu yan: Deguo, xifang de ‘dongfang’” 新版序：德国，西方的「东方」 [New Preface: Germany, the ‘East’ of the West], Deyizhi de mei yu zui 德意志的美与罪 [The Beauty and Sin of Germany] (Taipei: Lordway Publishing, 2022). ↩

76. Ibid. ↩

77. Heinrich August Winkler, “Eternally in the Shadow of Hitler?,” in Forever In The Shadow of Hitler?, ed. Ernst Piper (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 174. category of “exception,” victims around the world are still required to extremise the evil they face to justify their “holocaust” victimhood. Many elements of Bonhoeffer’s theology strongly oppose this way of talking about suffering. Following Barth, for Bonhoeffer evil is a nothingness. The essential problem of the Nazis is not the forms of extraordinary evil that some Jews or Germans have endeavored to demonstrate, but the banality, nothingness, or what Bonhoeffer calls “foolishness”81 that characterises the willingness of human beings to be reduced to certain slogans and ideologies to the point of losing the possibility of discernment in the present situation, thereby losing their human nature as a neighbor. Bonhoeffer’s account of nothingness thus preserves contextual particularity and the universal significance of sin. For in a fallen world, people everywhere are in fact confronted with it, but at the same time, precisely because it is nothing, there is no way to establish a hierarchical order among its different expressions. This prevents any Sündenstolz (pride in having sinned) that might be hiding behind confessions of wrongdoing.82 Without such a vision, Bonhoeffer’s articulation of a world “come of age” looks a lot like an assertion of the historical superiority of the Western experience. To put it into perspective, the Western church has gone through the religious Christian era, just as Western society has gone through the Enlightenment and the Nazis, and has reflected on these historical passages firsthand. The Western church has gone even further, for the church in the non-religious era had seen beyond the crisis of the Nazis, which demanded confessions in public. It has focused on the threat to the purity of Christ’s teachings posed by the visibility of Christianity in the public square, which Christians have to counter by their hiddenness. The result is a more mature life-stage of the church. As for those Christians who have not yet been fortunate enough to experience the “religious world,” who face daily persecution but have not had the opportunity ↩

78. LPP, 7-9. ↩

79. Yu does explicitly use “Sündenstolz” to describe the Winklerian reflection. See Yu, ““Xinban xu yan.” to see that God is widely acknowledged as the first proposition or common answer to human questions, such Christians are undoubtedly in an even more naïve state. They will have to learn to run the same path the Western church has already run. In other words, we can ask if the “publicisation” of the house church is merely an acceptable case of exception. Does Bonhoeffer’s description of religionless Christianity encourage us to see the “publicisation” as a symbol of infancy, which should be discarded once the Chinese society becomes more modern, more independent, and less anti-Christian? But what exactly is religionless Christianity? As will be shown, this is a crux question of this chapter. Is there any possible point of convergence between the ERCC’s political mission and its emphasis on publicisation and faithful disobedience, and Christian hiddenness—two seemingly antithetical concepts? If we exclude the option of treating ERCC’s political mission merely as an exceptional state to be tolerated, might there exist any possible points of convergence between it and the seemingly contradictory concept of the hiddenness of Christianity? The following section will argue that they can be compatible, drawing on resources from contemporary Lutheran political theology to propose a third way, an account of “publicisation as hiddenness.” The aim in this section is to demonstrate how Wang’s understanding of the church’s political mission manifests a form of political action driven by simplicity in the face of the gospel. 4. Reconciling Publicisation and Hiddenness 4.1. Religion as Cry, Try, and Sigh In his analysis of Bonhoeffer’s poem “Christians and Pagans,” Bernd Wannenwetsch adopts a dramatic perspective on Bonhoeffer’s religious theory, dividing it into three distinct phases: religion as “cry,” “try,” and “sigh.”83 He takes religion as “cry” to reflect humanity’s survival needs, wherein“[t]he need, desire, and liberty to cry to God for help are simply characteristics of being a creature.”84 However, this original simplicity of trust (naïveté) in the Garden of Eden was utterly lost following the fall of humankind. Thus began the second dramatic phase of religion—religion as “try.” Humanity shifted from simple trust in God towards a quest to secure divine protection, which has accompanied by a tendency to functionalise and domesticate God. This tendency manifests most clearly in projecting God as a “deus ex machine” for the existential problems—whether in terms of survival, morality, or politics. This dynamic continues to influence the operational logic of the contemporary church, within which the church “sell themselves as ‘experts in religion’, quality providers of ‘spirituality’, and to organize and present themselves like service-agencies whose efficiency and quality depend on the prior analysis of the wants and needs of their clientele.”85 However, this state of affairs is disrupted when people encounter the suffering God. This God appears not as the “mighty provider of bread, shelter, meaning, and redemption” but as a suffering God calling us to stand by him and participate in his suffering.86 For those who respond to this call, God ceases to be merely the solution to life’s problems and instead becomes the sole problem of their existence.87 This constitutes the crucial distinction between Christianity and other religions.88 ↩

80. Bernd Wannenwetsch, “Christian and Pagans: Towards a Trans-Religious Second Naïveté or How to Be a Christological Creature,” in Who Am I?: Bonhoeffer’s Theology through His Poetry, ed. Bernd Wannenwetsch (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 190. ↩

81. Ibid., 181. ↩

82. Ibid., 182. See also Bernd Wannanwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens, trans. Margaret Kohl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 21-30. ↩

83. Ibid., 184. ↩

84. “Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions: Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.” LPP, 188. Cited in Wannenwetsch, “‘Christians and Pagans’,” 185. Following his analysis of these three notions of religion, Wannenwetsch insightfully demonstrates how Bonhoeffer, through the stage of Christianity as the religion of the “sigh”, produces a transformed reaffirmation of the first stage of religion as “cry”. The structure of the poem “Christians and Pagans” demonstrates Bonhoeffer’s conscious effort to counter a triumphalist account of Christianity. This triumphalist account not only has “exalted Christians over non-Christians,” but attempts to “leave behind religion as a premature form of dealing with the divine.”89 Here, Wannenwetsch recognises that, for Bonhoeffer, Christ’s call to participate in his suffering is in fact “neither religious nor anti-religious” but a “trans- religious standing.” 90 Such a standing reflects the Lord’s Prayer’s affirmation and commitment to the daily necessities of human beings as creatures, 91 constituting a reaffirmation of bodily experience.92 It simultaneously presupposes an encounter with the suffering God, demanding in turn a transformation that forms a “Christologically mediated this-worldliness.”93 Consequently, Wannenwetsch asserts that Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity” is primarily a critique of religion as “try”, whilst religion as “cry” is “transformed into a restored creatureliness or a converted religion.”94 To borrow and adapt Milan Kundera’s famous dictum, we might say: Only Jesus can shed that authentic first tear, bestowed in the garden upon all who will stand by him and share his suffering; beyond this, all tears remain merely self-indulgent second tears, and religion as “try” epitomises precisely this kitschy exemplarity. Wannenwetsch’s dramatic analysis of Bonhoeffer’s religious theory reflects his sensitivity to the theme of hiddenness in Lutheran theology. As he argues: ↩

85. Ibid., 188. ↩

86. Ibid., 189. ↩

87. “Give us today our daily bread.” Matthew 6:11. ↩

88. Ibid., 188-189. ↩

89. Ibid., 190. ↩

90. Ibid., 192. In his letter to Bethge, Bonhoeffer captures this ambiguity in the image of “religion as a garment of Christianity.” A garment is a useful and healthy thing, as it warms and protects the skin of those who wear it. Yet, as the very image of “covering” conveys, it contains a potentially dark side: a garment also covers up, conceals, and potentially deceives.95 The distinction between religion as “try” and religion as “sigh” as a reaffirmation of the cry for the needs of human natural life, reflects a radical opposition between human self- concealment—the dark side of concealment—and God’s covering for humankind. God’s covering for humans and nature is not an endorsement of humankind’s self-concealment, but rather its antithesis. The latter gave rise to Cain’s religious endeavours, which led to his murder, while the former revealed its purpose in the work of Jesus upon the cross: “The natural is that form of life preserved by God for the fallen world which is directed towards justification, salvation and renewal through Christ.”96 4.2. Hidden from the Idea of Authenticity In Wannenwetsch’s view, Bonhoeffer’s theory of religion primarily aims to illustrate how genuine Christian faith restores people to the naïveté of creaturehood, thereby returning us to the theme of simplicity. What proves particularly illuminating in the dialogue being held among Chinese Christians with Hauerwas is his reflections on the theme as related to the pursuit of a communitarian notion of “authenticity”. In A Community of Character, Hauerwas clearly explores the theme of “authenticity” under the guidance of Alasdair MacIntyre.97 He points out how modern society, having lost its focus on collective identity and narrative, inevitably succumbs to a form of cynicism, driven by a self-protective impulse to reject “any overriding ↩

91. Ibid., 181-182. Citing here, LPP, 140. ↩

92. DBWE 6, 173-174. Cited in Wannenwetsch, “‘Christians and Pagans’,” 181. ↩

93. Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 125-128. loyalty to any cause or community.”98 But to him, this is a self-destructive endeavour, as human beings are inevitably narrative creatures. He argues: “Our only escape from destructive histories consists in having the virtues trained by a truthful story, and that can come solely through participation in a society that claims our lives in a more fundamental fashion than any profession or state has the right to do.”99 Here we observe how the concept of authenticity— that is, the pursuit of an integral self-identity—leads to a concern for virtue-cultivation and the art of narrative. However, the naïveté Bonhoeffer sought to restore invites Christians to pursue a self- identity distinct from the communitarian concern for authenticity. As Wannenwetsch observes, in the poem “Who Am I?”—written during the same period as “Christians and Pagans”— Bonhoeffer ultimately concludes with the line “Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine.” This demonstrates that Bonhoeffer ultimately resolved the question of self-identity by means of a simple act of trust. “To know that God knows is enough. God-knowledge need not become self-knowledge.”100 God’s remembering is so reliable that “humans can live in the midst of their unrest, nagging questions, and unresolved tensions.”101 We come here to a crucial difference between the Lutheran account of the freedom of a Christian and the Communitarian concern for authenticity, carried over from the tradition of Romanticism and Hegelianism to contemporary eudaemonist ethics. According to the latter, we first acquire (rather than choose) the self-identity in the community, and true freedom means being true to it. I take Charles Taylor’s conception of the self as representative.102 For him, ↩

94. Ibid., 127. ↩

95. Ibid. ↩

96. Wannenwetsch, “‘Christians and Pagans’,” 190. ↩

97. Ibid. ↩

98. See Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Although MacIntyre may have exerted a greater and more direct influence on Hauerwas, his usage of the term is occasionally ambiguous. For example, as Pedro Monteiro Franco argues, he sometimes “talked disparagingly about authenticity,” regarding it “the symptom of a diseased modernity in which there are no fixed moral references, no sense of truth, and no positive self-and-other relations.” But in fact, he also “wants to construe a more substantive account of authenticity which is based on a teleological account of the human life.” Pedro Monteiro Franco, human action is a process of self-interpretation, in which those elements that define who I am, the Heideggerian pre-understanding, are made apparent to us in our inquiry into the good, though never entirely explicit.103 However, the way of discipleship Bonhoeffer offers, while not denying that the righteousness defining Christian agency can be manifest in action, is constituted by trust and obedience to Christ, rather than Taylor’s self-understanding. This is why the life of a disciple is more appropriately described as being on the way of Christ rather than operating primarily within a moral space made up of Christian goodness and values. Taylor assumes that, to establish moral orientation, the agent must first make “strong evaluations” of things, that is, to recognise qualitative distinctions between the goods of different things so that a map-like moral horizon can be formed.104 Futhermore, Taylor claims that [t]he fact that we have to place ourselves in a space which is defined by these qualitative distinctions cannot but mean that where we stand in relation to them must matter to us. Not being able to function without orientation in the space of the ultimately important means not being able to stop caring where we sit in it.105 It is not enough to have a good map, orientation also requires the agent to identify her position on the map and understand how she is connected to the goods. When Hauerwas asserts that besides virtue-cultivation, “it is equally important to be introduced to stories that provide a way “Bernard Williams and Alasdair MacIntyre on Authenticity,” Topoi 43 (2024), 388, 391. Therefore, compared with him, I consider Taylor to have provided a clearer definition of this conception in The Ethics of Authenticity, which clearly distinguishes it from the modern conception of freedom as self-determination. This distinction helps us to avoid potential confusion arising from the semantic ambiguity. ↩

99. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 34. On the influence of Heidegger’s account of pre-understanding on Taylor, see Stephen Mulhall, “Articulating the Horizons of Liberalism: Taylor’s Political Philosophy,” in Charles Taylor, ed. Ruth Abbey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 122. ↩

100. Ibid., 20. ↩

101. Ibid., 42. to locate ourselves in relation to others, our society, and the universe,”106 anyone familiar with communitarianism cannot help but recall Taylor’s spatial metaphor. However, Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on simplicity implicitly challenges the necessity of the two elements required by Taylor. The submission of the self to and the pure concern for Christ imply that the disciple’s orientation does not necessarily involve constantly turning the attention to oneself, grasping one’s identity. The way of discipleship does not focus on the wholeness, self-harmony, or self-coherence of a “longing self” from a map-like overview perspective.107 Rather, it is adventurous.108 It is like the Exodus of Israel, which set out towards a definite promised land but fully relied on God’s leading at all particular times and places. On the way, the Israelites relied on the pillars of cloud and fire rather than a map, God’s manna rather than a plan to hoard grain.109 What caused the Israelites to lose their orientation and stray from the way to Canaan was not a lack of geographic sense of direction or unfamiliarity with the environment, but rather an unwillingness to follow God’s clear signs and a lack of contentment with God’s daily and immediate provision.110 ↩

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

103. See Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 125-143. Although in that chapter the author mainly contrasts Augustine’s conception of the self with Taylor’s, the difference applies equally to Bonhoeffer’s case. ↩

104. Hauerwas also uses “adventure” to describe the process of self-inquiry. However, he ultimately links this adventure to the pursuit of character integrity. See Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 148. And I suggest that one most effective way to show the differences between the Lutheran and Hauerwasian imaginations of the way of discipleship is to ask whether such an adventure can immerse Christians so deeply that they even forget their concern for self-identity, to the point where they enjoy playing fragmented roles in this story. ↩

105. “In salvation, man cannot eat the fruit of his own labour, just as in the wilderness, you cannot feed yourself; only God can satisfy you. So, in matters of morality and righteousness, the gospel declares to us that “righteousness” is external to us; it never emanates from within your heart; righteousness is not something you painstakingly cultivate yourself. Righteousness lies outside of you, planted by the Heavenly Father and watered by the Holy Spirit. The salvation accomplished by Jesus Christ on the cross is imparted to you from outside, laid upon you, and then guides you.” Wang Yi, “Shuineng chuqu xinzhong de wuhui? (Tai 15:1-20)” 谁能除去心中 的污秽？（太15：1-20） [Who Can Purge the Filth from the Heart? (Matthew 15:1-20)], Wang Yi wenku, 2 April 2017. https://www.wangyilibrary.com/post/sermon-225726. ↩

106. For a more detailed comparison between the “map-making” model and the “way-finding” model, see Brian Brock, Joining Creation’s Praise: A Theological Ethic of Creatureliness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2025), 82-94. 4.3. Publicisation as a Form of Hiddenness Let us return to the tension between the ERCC’s publicisation and the hiddenness of Christianity. The crucial question now lies not in the superficial debate about whether to “go public or not.” It has been repositioned as a question about how the pursuit of visibility through publicisation is generated and what drives it. Wang’s later reflections on the connection between the gospel and the church’s public mission increasingly revealed a self-forgetful devotion that looks much like Bonhoeffer’s account of simplicity. When Wang contemplates the anti-moralistic nature of the Gospel, the fragmented nature of his self-identity before God becomes particularly evident. He notes that “the Gospel tears away man’s moral mask” and “dispels the illusion of social progress, which holds that humanity’s sole hope lies in the moral achievements of a select few among us.”111 Immediately after this, he mentions that after Abraham had bargained with God concerning Sodom (Genesis 18: 23-33), “he no longer pleaded with God, but returned home in silence. For God’s grace had shown him that even he himself, as intercessor for Sodom, was not that righteous man.”112 Considering that Wang construes the church’s public mission as being to “pray for the peace of the city”113 (Jeremiah 29:7), we can see how this anti-moralistic understanding of the gospel resonates with Bonhoeffer’s notion of the hiddenness of the Christian in The Cost of Discipleship—that the righteousness of Christ’s disciples must be “hidden from themselves.”114 What is revealed here is a fragmented self-identity that disciples can willingly embrace only because of their trust in God. As he stated in a sermon on the Gospel of Matthew: ↩

107. Wang, “Moxiang fuyin,” 6. ↩

108. Ibid. ↩

109. See Chapter 3, sec. 1.1, 2.2. See also, Daniel A. Bell, “Communitarianism,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, 1997), published 4 October, 2001; last modified 24 June, 2024, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/communitarianism/. Beyond his use of communitarian language to defend China’s patriarchal politics within the text, the very fact that Bell, who has been widely regarded by Chinese dissidents as a “yang wumao” (洋五毛 western advocates of China’s global propaganda), serves as the author of the communitarianism entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is suggestive enough. ↩

110. DBWE 4, 119. Sometimes you treat the grace of Jesus within you as if it were part of your very body— like an organ that has grown onto you and will never disappear. When you fall into this illusion, you are in grave danger of stumbling. You must understand: It is God who placed it within you—not something that grew on you. He can remove it at any moment. If you stray from the Lord’s protection, if you depart from the Holy Spirit’s governance within you, you will weep bitterly every moment. You will become a betrayer, you will become an unbeliever.115 While Wang does not deny that becoming a Christian can, or even should, bring about life- changing transformation, renewal, and growth, this remains an act of God that must be concealed from oneself. It should not enter into one’s reflective self-awareness. G.K. Chesterton, when discussing the virtue of “humility,” once likened it to “health,” for both signify that once we become conscious of them, we have to some extent already lost them.116 Once a humble person becomes conscious of their own humility, it signifies that they are no longer truly humble. In Wang’s view, the growth of a Christian’s life must constantly bear the mark of genuine humility, meaning they must inevitably experience “constant breakdowns” and “constant stumbles” in their existence.117 Here we observe again the tendency towards self-doubt and self-interrogation frequently prevalent among post-June Fourth intellectuals. Considering how contemporary virtue ethics resources are now being utilised to legitimise Communist China’s meritocratic politics, one can discern the origins of Wang’s wariness towards the communitarian core concepts—such as “narrative”, “character”, and “virtue- cultivation”—that permeate Hauerwas’s writings. Unlike Hauerwas, who primarily engaged ↩

111. Wang Yi, “Shenpan (Tai 26:57-75)” 审判 （太26:57-75） [Judgement (Matthew 26:57-75)], Wang Yi wenku 王怡文库 [Wang Yi Resource Library], 5 November 2017. https://www.pastorwangyi.org/post/审判. ↩

112. G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (n.p.: Christian Classic Ethereal Library, 2002), 25-28. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/heretics.html ↩

113. Wang, “Shenpan.” with liberal societies that marginalise these concepts,118 in China, a meritocratic political imagination centred upon the moral sage has consistently dominated cultural and political practice.119 Just as Liu Xiaobo reflected on his own character and even his motives for confessions, this doubt ran so deep that Wang, in his profound contemplation of humanity’s utter depravity, ultimately sighed: “In truth, what I lack most is the ability to underestimate myself. For no matter how I speak, I still overestimate my own goodness. Alas, even this final sentence has fallen into the devil’s snare.”120 According to Wannenwetsch, in his poem “Who Am I?,” Bonhoeffer, while questioning the character he presented to his fellow prisoners, became ensnared in an infinite regression of “suspicion of suspicion.” “It appears that even the suspicion of suspicion cannot put suspicion to rest,” and “in the end it leads into a tragic circularity.”121 Bonhoeffer ultimately concluded the poem with a simple declaration of submission to God: “Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.”122 This may come as a shock to readers seeking further self-exploration, for “[t]he question that torments him remains unanswered.”123 Instead of appealing to “‘God’ into his soliloquy as the solution; it leads the solitary questioning ‘out’ to God, in whom all questions are absorbed and ended.”124 Wang and Bonhoeffer had remarkable convergence in their quest for self-identity. Both became deeply entangled in a cycle of “suspicion of suspicion” regarding their righteousness. Furthermore, their questions were finally dissolved, rather than answered, through ↩

114. “I am acutely aware that the concepts of character and narrative have received scant attention in recent moral theory.” Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 133. ↩

115. See Chapter 1, sec. 2.1. ↩

116. Wang Yi, “Sixiang jieju: Juedui quanli, juedui bu fubai” 思想截句：绝对权力，绝对不腐败 [Thought Fragments: Absolute Power, Never Corrupts], in Dasheng de moxiang, 215. ↩

117. Wannanwetsch, Political Worship, 291. ↩

118. LPP, 189. ↩

119. Ibid. 292. ↩

120. Ibid. encountering God. Rather than being the solution to our problems, God becomes the only problem for a true disciple. Wang writes in a poem: Thus, to believe in God is to endure God. Enduring the shattering of life’s illusions of perfection and immortality It’s like enduring bleeding gums while brushing teeth, or cuts while chopping vegetables125 Such expressions of simplicity underpin Wang’s discourse on martyrdom. After stating that “faith is discovering the subtle signs of God at work among us,”126 he swiftly turned to the theme of martyrdom. He judged that the persecution endured by house churches was precisely God’s “subtle signs.” This means that “God compels us to believe in grace, compelling us to leave a world we are reluctant to depart.”127 While this certainly presents a quality akin to Hauerwas’s apocalyptic discourse—a decisive break with the world—considering Wang’s mention of the fragmentation of self-identity, it subtly hints at the possibility of reaffirming the “world.” As he mentions in another poem: Lawyers carry lanterns to court Lawyers wear steel helmets to appeal Trains are packed with wronged citizens Trains are filled with weeping people I see mercy like flames descending from heaven ↩

121. Wang Yi, “Xiangxin Shangdi jiushi renshou Shangdi” 相信上帝就是忍受上帝 [To believe in God is to endure God], Wang Yi wenku, 15 August 2018. https://www.wangyilibrary.com. ↩

122. Wang Yi, “Moxiang xinxin” 默想信心 [Contemplating the Faith], in Dasheng de moxiang, 7. ↩

123. Ibid., 8. I see demons walking the earth Tonight. God is Ukrainian Tonight. God is Kunmingese128 For readers aware of Wang’s opposition to liberal theology and the agenda of sinicisation, his portrayal of Christ as both “Ukrainian” and “Kunmingese” may seem perplexing, even self- contradictory. However, I contend that this very tension marks the crucial distinction between the Lutheran understanding of God’s apocalyptic reality that informs Wang and the Hauerwasian one. Wannenwetsch’s insightful explanation clarifies how the presence of the apocalyptic kingdom in the church brings about “the double becoming of the world.”129 As he puts it: “Worship as the praxis which lives in an elemental sense from God’s creative activity… becomes therefore outwardly efficacious activity, activity which ‘brings something about.’”130 The world first emerges as the antithesis of “worship” as the creative activity of God. Here we must recall the monistic (anti-dualistic) character of Bonhoeffer’s theology itself, and how this influenced his definition of sin as nothingness. Thus, the perspective of “the world as the antithesis of worship” signifies that “the world” has no being of its own and—as still hostile to God—exists enhypostatically in the Church.”131 It is the “worship as an activity which brings the ‘world’ to be world should have been viewed as so dangerous.”132 This is the “first becoming of the world.” It echoes Hauerwas’s claim that the church’s correct worship enables ↩

124. Wang Yi, “Xiao yaoli zushi: Di 64 wen” 小要理组诗：第64问 [Poem Series for the Shorter Catechism: The Sixty-Fourth Question], in Da jiaotang, 474. ↩

125. Wannanwetsch, Political Worship, 247. ↩

126. Ibid., 248. ↩

127. Ibid. ↩

128. Ibid. the world to know “it is the world” in the sense that “it does not willingly glorify God.”133 Here, the world that denies worship and the worshipping church present an antagonistic relationship. In this sense, such a Lutheran ecclesiological account certainly affirms the church as a counter-society. However, Bonhoeffer’s dramatic account of religion demonstrates how such ecclesiology might conversely recognise worldliness. Although the “first becoming of the world” stands as the antithesis of worship-centred apocalyptic reality, through the work of Jesus as the second Adam,134 “worship simultaneously makes it possible for the world to find a different kind of self-understanding, a new identity.”135 From “the first becoming” to “the second becoming”, the world undergoes a “salutary” transformation. This lends the church a more positive significance in understanding its mission of “praying for the peace of the city,” allowing the church to ask “how the political community can acquire for itself a share in the salutary existence in which the Church already finds itself.”136 For Hauerwas, serving as an apocalyptic alternative necessitates the church constantly distinguishing itself visibly from any worldly ethics. However, from a Lutheran perspective, as Ulrich observes, this does not necessarily require churches “to constitute a church as a polis that is intentionally contrastive with the ‘secular’ polis,” but sometimes requires them to “coexist with and provide creative tension with the polis.”137 On this basis, Ulrich affirms that “[c]ivil society can be seen as a grouping formed by people who commit themselves to any ↩

129. Stanley Hauerwas, “The Liturgical Shape of the Christian Life: Teaching Christian Ethics as Worship,” in In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 157. Cited in Wannanwetsch, Political Worship, 247. ↩

130. This description itself carries an implication of reaffirming natural life. “As Paul puts it: ‘The first man Adam became a “living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit’ (1 Cor. 15:45). As the first-born of the new creation, Christ restores creation by helping those who after the Fall have to live ‘natural lives’ to reconnect with the divine purpose of all creation so as to become what they have been destined for in the beginning.” Bernd Wannenwetsch, “Creation and Ethics: On the Legitimacy and Limitation of Appeals to ‘Nature’ in Christian Moral Reasoning,” in Within the Love of God: Essays on the Doctrine of God in Honour of Paul S. Fiddes, eds. Anthony Clarke and Andrew Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 210. ↩

131. Ibid., 249. ↩

132. Ibid., 251. ↩

133. Ulrich, Transfigured not Conformed, 122. task that is of interest to other people.”138 Citizenship and civil society can go beyond the nature Huen criticises—that of protecting private interests—and instead be lived out as a form of life that follows Christ, crying with him for the impoverished life as he suffered for human sin in the Garden of Gethsemane. But in this sense of suffering as well, Ulrich insists that such participation must always function as a critical hermeneutics. In concrete contexts, it employs the discernment renewed by God’s word in worship to maintain a creative tension with the social status quo, continually asking: “How to remain God’s people?”139 Of course, this does not imply that from the very outset of proposing the mission of publicisation, Wang already possessed such a mature Lutheran theological understanding as the rationale for the church’s public mission. Rather, I contend that the house church gradually groped its way, experimented, and was guided toward this direction amid the tension of needing to protect worship from political influence in a narrow sense while refusing to abandon its public mission. Theological propositions are understood, recognised and confirmed in the process of practice, yet simultaneously remain open to revision or fresh interpretations due to the dynamic nature of that practice. I regard Wang’s series of poems for the Westminster Shorter Catechism as representative of this dynamic theological proposition.140 As Wang writes in a poem: Language without poetry has no radiance If a word has not graced a poem for ten years it is like lips untouched by a kiss for a decade ↩

134. Ibid., 118. ↩

135. Ibid., 134. ↩

136. See Wang, Da jiaotang, 399-525. or a body unembraced Language without poetry cannot be used for praise only for reports leave requests, homework, lawsuits, and quarrelling with one another141 For Wang, poetry holds a closer affinity to life than other linguistic forms. Thus, his act of composing verses for each article of the Westminster Shorter Catechism may reasonably be seen as an endeavour echoing 2 Corinthians 3:6: “For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” These poems re-vitalise the theological form of life that has solidified into propositional expressions (the letters), rescuing the Reformed theological grammar (the spirit) from the potential crisis of ossification. This resonates with postliberal theology’s emphasis on the primacy of lived practice. Consequently, Wang’s theological thought possesses a dynamic quality akin to Hauerwas’s, making it difficult for scholars to pinpoint a neatly organised systematic framework. Instead, a more appropriate approach requires grounding interpretations in the church’s practice and witness. The practice of martyrdom willingly embraces self- fragmentation while continually discerning, in the present circumstances, how to follow Christ in Gethsemane and stand by the voiceless sufferers. This renders the mission of publicisation not merely a manifestation of the church’s visibility, but an embodiment of its hiddenness. 4.4. The Relinquishment of Right Is the Beginning of a Civil Society I argue that Wang’s Lutheran-inspired apocalyptic theology, particularly when situated within the contemporary Chinese-speaking context, offers a more constructive alternative to ↩

137. Wang Yi, “Ciyu (Zhi er)” 词语（之二） [Words (Part two)], in Da jiaotang, 52. the Hauerwasian approach. Not only does it affirm the church’s active participation in the work of sustaining the public life of civil society, but it also provides a more adequate framework for interpreting Bonhoeffer’s life testimony without becoming entangled in unnecessary controversies. Hauerwas’s emphasis on virtue ethics—especially its concerns with virtue cultivation and moral authenticity—tends to compel him to argue that Bonhoeffer was not deeply involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler, in order to preserve Bonhoeffer’s character as a disciple committed to pacifist witness. By contrast, the position advanced by the Hong Kong Hauerwasian, Tang, represents the opposite conclusion generated by the same virtue-ethical logic. Tang does not deny Bonhoeffer’s deep involvement in the conspiracy, but instead interprets it as a failed witness. He further contends that this failure reveals a decisive deficiency in Bonhoeffer’s theological resources, namely “the absence of the Anabaptist tradition,” which Tang regards as necessary for confronting the violent reality of the Hitler regime.142 Although Hauerwas and Tang arrive at divergent evaluations of Bonhoeffer on the basis of different historical judgments, both operate within the same virtue-ethical framework. On this view, a mature form of Christian pacifist life should be embodied as a disciple’s human moral agency and remain continuously visible in concrete actions and decisions in order to satisfy the demand for authenticity. By contrast, the Lutheran doctrine of hiddenness makes it unnecessary to interpret Bonhoeffer’s life testimony as depending on the contested historical question of the extent of his participation in the assassination plot. As Ulrich argues: ↩

138. Ulrich, Transfigured not Conformed, 68. ↩

139. Ibid., 202. ↩

140. Ibid., 78. ↩

141. Ibid. of human action, in which the disciple acts for the sake of the neighbour while relinquishing any claim to moral self-justification. Bonhoeffer’s witness thus lies not in the correctness of the act itself, but in the willingness to bear guilt and to entrust the final judgment of action to God. Within this ethical framework, Wang’s conception of rights and civil society finds its proper place. If Bonhoeffer’s life testimony demonstrates that disciples in some circumstances must relinquish the right to seek self-justification for their actions, Wang’s political theology resonates with this logic by offering a political-theological account of rights. In his view, for Christians, rights are not primarily possessions to be defended but resources that can and should be relinquished.147 Yet this relinquishment of one’s own rights does not signify withdrawal from public life or abandonment of political action. On the contrary, precisely by relinquishing the primacy of asserting one’s own rights, Christians gain greater freedom to engage in the public practice of defending neighbours’ rights and sustaining civil society. ↩