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ONE CHINESE CHRISTIAN’S VIEW OF GOD


by K.H. Ting

Bishop K.H. Ting is President of the China Christian Council. Bishop Ting presented this
paper in the Union Theological Seminary in the Philippines on the occasion of the conferral of the Doctor in Theology (honoris causa) degree in November 1993 by the Union
Theological Seminary, Dasmaninas, Curiste, Philippines.




    First of all I want to thank Union Theological Seminary in the Philippines and the President of the Seminary for the honor you give the church in China and to me personally. J trust that what you do today will result in a closer relationship between our two peoples and our two churches. We in China have a high evaluation of the witness of the Christians in the Philippines to Jesus Christ, calling people’s attention to human worth as children of God and to democracy as the mandate of history in accordance to the will of God. We, the church in China, have much to learn from our fellow Christians in the Philippines. Thank you also for the invitation to address this distinguished group of church leaders, professors and students. This is a good opportunity for me to bring the warm greetings of your fellow Christians in China. Let me also thank the President for the kind exaggerations in his citations.

     I would like to speak to you on how more and more Chinese Christians, and I as one of them, have come to think of God as Love, as the only possible way to think of God at all. Perhaps I do not need to say that what I have to tell you is not so much for the instruction of Philippine Christians as a report to you on how we in China are trying to help our constituencies to grow into a more mature spirituality with a vision of God intellectually honest, spiritually edifying and morally challenging.

    Let me begin by telling you something about myself. I was born into a family in which the grandfather on my mother’s side was an Anglican priest. I received the larger part of my formal education in China. My career in the church can be simply divided into two periods. The first period was in working among students through the Student Christian Movement, first in China, then in Canada and then on the international scene. The second period has been with theological education and religious studies in China, centering in Nanjing Theological Seminary and Nanjing University. Both of these periods are important to me in my theological formation and reorientation.

     I would like to help you to see right away where I stand on your theological map. After the great social and political turmoil, called the Cultural Revolution, which cut off my theological and intellectual communication with the outside world for over ten years, I found upon resuming my international contacts three Western schools of thought most consonant with the fumblings and gropings of Chinese Christian intellectuals: liberation theology, writings in one way or another influenced by process philosophy, and the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin. This you will find understandable given not only the theme of change passed down from influential ancient Chinese classics, but also the motif of liberation and all the dynamism and zigzags of change and reform China has been going through.

     My early training made me think of God largely in terms of his omnipotence, his power, his might, his self-sufficiency, his self-containment, his changelessness. Yes, in terms of his love too, but love was not God’s supreme attribute and was often overshadowed by his righteousness, his severity, his anger, his judgment and his arbitrariness.

     The vicissitudes of all these years have moved me to a spirituality which affirms Christ’s place in God’s whole creative process and sees the kind of love embodied in Jesus in the four Gospels as the nature of God. Love is at the back of God’s whole creative process. Today, when I say Jesus Christ is the revelation of God, I mainly think of him as the revealer of God’s love. From struggling with the question of Jesus’ divinity and Godlikeness I have moved to the Christlikeness of God. Love becomes for me God’s number one attribute.

    I am fascinated by what Alfred North Whitehead says towards the end of his Process and Reality about what he calls the “Galilean vision” in which God is perceived as a being loving, creating, educating, persuading and expecting human responses. When the Western world accepted Christianity, he says, Caesar conquered. Let me quote:

     The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly... But the deeper idolatry of fashioning God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian and Roman rulers was retained. The church gave unto God the attributes which be-longed exclusively to Caesar.

     Whitehead laments over the fact that, in so much of Christianity, God is conceived in terms of “the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover.” China, of course, has no lack of our own autocratic rulers in whose image various Chinese religions have fashioned their God. But it is the all-encompassing love at the heart of reality, sharing the joys and the sufferings of the created order, and moving the world towards greater coherence and greater love, that Christ reveals.

     Let me help you locate me in your socio-political map too. My conviction in God as love and my conviction in socialism as the path China is to take strengthen each other. Socialism is love organized for the masses of the people. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European state power has had its effect on me, but has not shattered my conviction that, for China, neither feudalism, nor colonialism, nor capitalism is acceptable as an alternative to the social system we call socialism with Chinese characteristics which, in forty years has enabled twelve hundred million human beings to live more decently and gives us ground to hope that they can live still more decently by the end of the century. A longer view of history tells us that socialism is not an accident or a mishap that can now be erased. Socialism has only had a very short history. It has no charted course and no model to copy. While I am quite upset by many of the things done in the name of socialism, I still think socialism is a good name to describe the road for Chinese society that avoids the pitfalls of feudalism, colonialism, and capitalism all of which China has experienced and found disappointing. It is a road that liberates and develops the country’s productive power to an un-precedented extent, thus improving the people’s material livelihood, cultural level and self-respect.

    We attach our hope to socialism not so much because we know exactly in detail what the socialist way is, but because we are fed up by all the other choices open to us. What is common in these other choices is the large scale of private ownership of the means of production and the unfair distribution of wealth, requiring the masses of the people to bear the cost by enduring endless suffering. People in that state cannot easily recognize God as love. We look for a corrective to all social systems which believe that the nastiest of men and women with the nastiest self-interest will work for the benefit of the masses of the people. What is called for is a brake to the un-bridled search for private profit. The failure of the Soviet Union which was just one experiment in social planning has done nothing to improve the attractiveness of feudalism, colonialism and capitalism. It is quite unthinkable that China is now to switch itself away from its socialist path and return to the old ways. I do believe that, with the gradual rise in economic and educational level, we can expect an increase of democracy in this socialism with Chinese characteristics.

     Does the advocacy of atheism affect my support of socialism? No, it does not. I look at both atheists and ourselves as half-completed products in God’s creative process and that we are all becoming. There are atheists who are sincerely devoted to efforts to fashion a more humane society. Their cry against God is really a cry in favor of humanity. Their atheism is worthy of our sympathy in so far as it is a rejection of the false notions of God we religious people propagate. Who is the God they have in mind when they deny his existence? It is the tyrannical Jupiter who chains Prometheus to a cliff because he does good for humanity, or the ruthless underworld King Yen in Chinese popular religion who sends out emissaries to fetch people to be thrown in everlasting hell fire as punishment for their misdeeds. Atheistic humanism is actually one form of human seeking after God without its own knowing it, and can be our ally as it can help greatly to salvage authentic faith. We can join forces with humanitarians of many sorts to oppose the idolatry in those views of God that diminish human dignity and block human liberation. Some of my friends abroad are surprised that I sometimes speak as highly as I do of certain atheists and communists. There is a part of me as a Christian which utters a hearty “Amen” to what they advocate, a part of me that refuses to rebuke them, but rather warms to them and wants to work with them against forces we both want to combat, even though we get our orders in doing certain things together from different chains of command.

     The New Testament is the source of our knowledge about Jesus Christ and through him about God. The record is fragmentary and does not give us as complete a picture of the person as we like to have. But two portraits are unmistakable:

(1) Jesus the great lover of men and women.

     He tells us about the father who believes in the prodigal son and waits for his return, about the shepherd who has his ninety-nine sheep in the fold and yet cannot bear to lose one that is missing. We see a Jesus who weeps with those who suffer and rejoices with those who rejoice, a Jesus who refuses to condemn a person who has gone astray but protects her, a Jesus who has loved his friends and loves them to the end, one who tells his friends, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me.” This Jesus introduces a new scale of things in which Sabbath rules are subordinate to human needs. The picture we get of him in the New Testament touches the chord in all that is best in human nature: the lonely man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his outpouring of love and sympathy, his suffering and agony, his tender words on the cross, and the final victory over ruthless power. He lived and died as one who loves, a true lover.

(2) Jesus the Cosmic Christ.

    He is not just the crucified one on the cross, the only image that has meaning to many Christians. He is the one who sustains the universe by his word of power. His is the primacy over all creation. He exists before all things, and all things are held together in him. He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation. In him all things were created, things visible and in-visible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers. It is not that God carried his work of creation for six days and then stopped and ceded its control to the successful rebellion of Satan, and then the redeemer came into the world to rescue some individuals out of it to be returned to God, leaving all others to eternal damnation. As creativity is inexhaustible and creation a long, on-going process, Christ has been and is with God, in all the creative work in the universe to this day. He has to do with creation just as much as he has to do with redemption. Redemption is a part of God’s ongoing work of making a world of his design. The New Testament does not allow us to think that God is the creator and not the redeemer, and Christ is the redeemer and not the creator.

     Now the essence of Christianity is the appeal to the person of Christ as revelation of the nature of God. When these two portraits of Jesus, Jesus the lover of men and women and Jesus the Christ in whom all things are created, are put together, we come to know God whom Christ reveals as the Cosmic-Lover, or Creator-Lover.

     It is unfortunate that this is not the God many Christians in China, and I suppose, elsewhere know to be God.

    The most commonly recognized attributes of God are his almightiness, his omnipresence, his omniscience, his severity, his unrelenting judgment of non-believers. We talk of love as an attribute of God too, but his love seems to be very arbitrary and enjoyed only by a few who are specially selected, or who please God in special ways. To the others, God is essentially a punisher-rewarder, a being hard to please. Hence, fear of God’s displeasure is the mark of much that goes under the name of Christianity.

    I was brought up in a Christianity very much like that. We went to church every Sunday to curry God’s favor. If there was illness within the family, it was God’s punishment for some hidden sin. When I went to be a theological student to prepare myself for the ministry of the church, the common notion in the family and in church circles was that such an act of dedication would win God’s pleasure and bring health and well being to myself and my family.

     Today, as I move about the Chinese church at its grassroots, I find that this is still the level of spirituality many are at. In some villages as many as half of the Christians became Christians when there was illness on the part of some family members who supposedly got healed when Christians came to pray and drive out the evil spirits. Many Christians at the grass-roots enjoy “testimony meetings” in which anybody can speak. At such meetings a common pattern emerges: some misfortune happens to a person, he or she searches for his or her sin or sins; after identifying the sin or sins and confessing to God and much praying, God moves away the misfortune. On the other hand, misfortune lingers and intensifies for those who are hard-hearted and do not repent, culminating in unending suffering and death in the family.

    Holding on to this image of God is accompanied by a spirituality of acquisition and utilitarianism. We give God praises and honor and get, in return, health, wealth, protection from catastrophe in this life and eternal bliss in heaven. It is highly ironic that, while Christ was laughed at for his ability to save others but not himself, so many of his followers are only eager to save themselves by getting on the church as Noah’s Ark without a faith that concerns itself with the welfare of the people outside.

     The image of God we find here is essentially what Whitehead calls that of the “ruling Caesar” with all his power over human fate. It is so far from the Christ we have come to know, to love and to adore as we read the four Gospels, with all his tenderness and rejection of power and coercion over men and women.

    To say that God is love is to affirm God as the Cosmic Lover and to see love as the force directing God’s ever continuing work of creation, redemption and sanctification. Love is the supreme attribute of God, above all other attributes and subordinating them all. Christians make Christlike love the definition of God, the motivation in all God’s work of creation in nature and history. It is first of all in the ongoing process of creation that we are to see the supreme expression of God’s love. It is not a mark of higher religion to discern God’s love in terms of personal fortunes and misfortunes. God looks forward to and is working towards the emergence of a commonwealth of human beings who, out of their free will, choose to be co-creators with him of goodness, truth and beauty and of all things of value to God and to humanity. God’s love does not coerce. It works through education, persuasion, transfiguration and sanctification. In God’s creative process the world and all of us are thus far half-made products. Through this process men and women are being transformed from obedience to arbitrary commands to willing acceptance of the invitation of love, i.e. transferred from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

     We have been trained to think of God largely in terms of superior power which can either crush us or make us powerful. This is often a projection and legitimation of our power-hungry, exploitative, monopolistic social structures and attitudes. But, in the New Testament, God’s power comes out of weakness and he exercises sovereignty through crosses, not through conquests. We must not fashion God in the image of Egyptian, Persian, Roman and Chinese potentates, thereby giving to God the attributes which belong exclusively to Pharaoh, Caesar and their like. We need to relegate to the side all those attributes such as his absolute power, his absolute knowledge, his absolute changelessness, his absolute dominion, his arbitrariness and intolerance, imposed on God as a reflection of an absolutization of human beings’ own cravings, especially those of male human beings. These attributes need to be deabsolutized and subordinated to God’s supreme attribute of love.

     God is no cosmic tyrant who forces obedience. He lures, invites and waits for free responses and does not resort to scolding and reprimanding. That is why we in China find the Gospels’ analogy of transformation of seeds and the growth of plants and trees in air, rain and sun more appealing than the image of the sheep which are constantly treated with rod and staff. God is the will to fellowship, not the will to power. We want to depart from a severe and intimidating God, a bulldozer God, who is not the Chrislike God the four Gospels lure us to want to believe in. We like the image of God in Hosea 11:4, of one who secures us with reins, leads us with bonds of love, lifts us like a little child to the parent’s cheek, and bends down to feed us. When I was a theological student, I wrestled with the problem of Christ’s two natures, ending up with his divinity. Today, it seems to me that to confess that Christ is Godlike is not half so important as to affirm that God is Christlike and that Christlike love is the way God runs the cosmos.

     You have seen that, in affirming love as the supreme attribute of God, I have relegated his omnipotence and omniscience to the second place. We cannot think of God in his self-contained existence, in abstraction from the world, but in terms of his creative activity in the world. He works in his creation tirelessly and inexhaustibly to bring about the realization of the potentialities which he has implanted there. God in his love craves for the emergence in the universe of persons whom he can have fellowship with. Fellowship implies freedom. Human enjoyment of this freedom implies God’s respect for human choices and therefore the curtailment of his own omnipotence. In so far as human beings have the right to make choices, including wrong choices, and in so far as God respects this right, God does not have a pre-knowledge of how a person will exercise his or her freedom or right to make choices. Thus, God’s omniscience is also relativized. By permitting freedom to his creatures and accepting their misuse of it, God can bring about results more attainable than in any other way. The possibility of disobedience is the price of liberty, and liberty is the condition of selfhood and selfhood the preliminary to fellowship.

     There is a popular Chinese movie condemning feudalism in which a young woman’s fiance has died but she is still compelled to marry into the family as daughter-in-law. After the tearful wedding she enters the bridal chamber, only to find a five-foot long trunk of a tree on the bed. She is expected to live the rest of her life with that log as her husband. How can she have fellowship and communion with such a non-person?

     God being love, more and more of us are seeing that the father figure is not necessarily the only or the best analogy for characterizing him. For centuries and to this day, in China anyway, what is taken for granted in the father is his severity, and in the mother her loving kindness. In fact, the proper Chinese way to refer to one’s own father in polite conversation is the “severe one in my family,” while “the loving one in my family” is reserved for the mother. We all know of fathers of whom love is hardly an attribute. There are Biblical passages which show no hesitation in using the image of the mother to indicate how God loves. In Isaiah 66 and 49, God says: “As a mother comforts her son, so shall I myself comfort you,” and “Can a woman forget the infant of her breast, or a mother the child of her womb? But should even these forget, I shall never forget you.” And in Psalm 131, the Psalmist says, “I am calm and quiet like a weaned child clinging to its mother.” Thus, to say that God has the attributes of the father is not to say he does not have the attributes of the mother.

     To assert the cosmic dimension of Christ’s role and to ascertain God as the Cosmic Lover does not mean that everything that happens in nature and history is God’s work and design. Many things are happening that contradict God’s loving kindness and are harmful to the welfare of the world. Creation is a long process yet incomplete and, as Paul insists, imperfect and subject to frustration, especially as it involves the making of free human beings who are not slaves but children of God. A world still in the making must be one in which ugliness and devilry have their place. Events all over the world are telling us how tortuous the way is towards the perfect community of free, loving children of God, and how dear a price in suffering God and human beings have to pay for every inch 6f progress towards that goal.

     That God is the great lover working out his purpose for the world brings in its train an understanding of all reality not as being so much as becoming. It gives us hope for history and beyond. We have no idea as to how the end of history as we know it will come about, but can be sure it will be the triumph of love and grace.

     We receive great consolation in reading Romans 5:15-17 where a comparison is made between the effect upon the world of Christ’s grace and Adam’s fall. There Paul speaks of the infinitely greater impact of Christ on humanity than that of Adam, using such expressions as “much more,” “vastly exceeding,” “in far greater measure,” and “out of all proportion.” We are elated and get a sense of liberation upon reading this. The Incarnation profoundly affects human and cosmic life in all its aspects. It is inconceivable that any area of human endeavor should be permanently affected by Adam’s fall and unaffected by grace. Too often, Christians make the effect of Adam’s fall universal while limiting Christ’s grace only to the few who profess a belief in him. It really amounts to saying that the Incarnation of the Son of God has made less of an impact on humanity than the fall of Adam. But this is not a view that can go along with the vision of God whose name is love and whose concern is to bring about through redemption, education and sanctification a humanity that will reach perfection as free, intelligent and voluntary co-creators with God.

     The way from alpha to omega is not always a straight line, but love accompanies the pilgrims. “The Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” in Dante’s great words, becomes a Love which brings meaning to human existence and hence redeems men and women from triviality, frustration, cheapness and lovelessness. We do not have to through tortuous ways, but we remember Christ’s words: “A woman in labor is in pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets her anguish in her joy that a child has been born in the world.” We see the darkness that appears before dawn as well as the dawn that will surely arrive after darkness. As is so well said in Psalm 30: “Tears may linger at nightfall, but rejoicing comes in the morning.” This view of nature, history and ourselves as becoming instills life with meaning and direction. This is essentially a long-ranged and forward-looking worldview. Tielhard de Chardin makes a moving prophecy when he says, “Someday, after we have mastered the wind, the waves, the tide and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love; and then for the second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.” I also like the cosmology and view of history Lu Shun, the greatest modern Chinese writer, presents so beautifully:

     Myriads of beautiful people and beautiful deeds weave a heavenly tapestry, moving like tens of thousands of flying stars, spreading far and wide, even to infinity. Things and their reflections dissolve, flicker, expand, melt into each other, but then draw back, approaching a semblance of their original selves. Their edges are variable as those of summer clouds, shot through with sunlight, emitting flames the colour of mercury. All things without exception mesh and intervene into a fabric, ever lively, ever unfolding.

     Christians as a little flock are heartened by the vision of Christ leading the whole creation towards the goal of unity in God. In this saving work of his, all human movements of progress, liberation, democracy, humanization and love are joined. The church is important as a place where Christ is explicitly known, confessed, adored and preached. The world needs the church’s gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation and peace. But God’s saving work is not coterminous with the boundary of the church. It has the whole cosmos as its arena. As Vatican II says, “Many elements of sanctification and truth are found outside the visible structure of the church and so the helps necessary for salvation are always and everywhere available to all who are obedient to the dictates of conscience.” I like to think that, if these elements are arcs of a circle, Christ is the perfect round in whom they will all be completed, fulfilled and united.

    In spite of the darkness human beings in many parts of the world find themselves in, there have always been courageous souls with their firm belief in the final triumph of God’s grace. I like to close with a few inspiring lines left us by Victor Hugo:

    Will the future ever arrive? – Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pinpoint, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it; nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.

     Human beings are fumbling and groping for a faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ. We all see in a mirror, dimly. This address tells you where I am, and where many of my fellow-Christians in China are, that is, the sort of spirituality the Holy Spirit is guiding us to in our pilgrimage. I will want to be open to any help that enables further growth in understanding.
 

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