He Guanghu
Introduction
In January of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was beginning in the city of Wuhan but had not yet spread outside China, I promised to give a keynote speech on invitation to a conference on Christian studies in Los Angeles. For this purpose, I wrote an essay titled “‘Becoming All Things to All People’ and Resisting Dehumanization – Sino-Christian Theological Studies in the Context of Contemporary China.”
In this essay, I emphasized that a Christian spirit, namely the love of one’s neighbors or the love of all people, should feature amongst the basic principles of any Sino-Christian theology. This would also require us to leave the ivory towers of scholarship and face the important issues head on – those difficult problems that concern the Chinese people today, e.g., religious-cultural questions, political-economic problems, and the social-moral crisis linked to everyday life. Addressing these three clusters of questions, a contemporary Sino-Christian theology should endeavor to research in the areas of “cultural theology,” “political theology,” and “moral theology.”
On March 6, 2022, ten days after the beginning of the war in Ukraine, I wrote a public letter entitled “What should China do while lives are in mire and on fire?,” appealing to the Chinese government to fulfill its promise to guarantee the safety of Ukraine, to use its influence on Russia and to mediate for peace between the two countries.
On July 1, 2022, several weeks after China’s Covid policies had lifted the lockdown on Shanghai City, I again faced the question for contemporary Chinese theology at a conference in this field held in Yale. We must, I stressed, consider the following question: “What should theology do while lives are in mire and on fire?”
The idiom “lives in mire and on fire” (sheng ling tu tan 生灵涂炭) means that people are in an extremely terrible situation – they are, so to say, caught in a quagmire or atop a fire devil and unable to escape. The metaphor aptly addresses the situation in a war or a disaster.
[mehr…]
What Should Theology Do While Lives Are in Mire and on Fire? A Suggestion and an Attempt to Address the Present Situation
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