Musing with Confucius and Paul

The book is a manifesto or apologia for Chinese Christians. It seeks to articulate how it is possible to maintain a Chinese identity and a Christian identity at the same time without capitulating to some western or other cultural model of Christian identity. To be a Chinese Christian is to adopt a distinctive, unique identity that owes much to both traditions but is sui generis. Providing great resources for the construction of a Chinese Christian theology, Confucius and Paul converge across a surprisingly broad front. Yet, the Christ of the Cross completes or extends what is merely implicit or absent in Confucius; and Confucius amplifies various elements of Christian faith (e.g., community, virtues) that are underplayed in western Christianity. The Christ of God as found in Paul's letter to the Galatians brings Confucian ethics in the Analects to its fulfillment while protecting the church from the aberrations of Chinese history and while protecting China against the aberrations of Christian history in the west. Chinese Christianity has something to give the church that needs to be heard. China can develop its distinctive vision of Christianity for the sake of the church universal. Chinese Christianity will have its global mission if it can find its own authentic Chinese-Christian identity. Insofar as that identity brings the best of the Confucian tradition into the Christian story, it will help revivify global Christianity.

""This brilliant book confronts two fundamental challenges for culture and faith in the globalizing world of the twenty-first century: how can the Chinese honor their rich Confucian heritage yet be transformed by Jesus Christ? And how can the church universal be reformed through its encounter with a Chinese Christian theology? Yeo's immensely creative juxtaposition of core Confucian concepts with key elements of Christian theology persuade us that Chinese Christians must not jettison in toto their Chineseness . . . Yeo writes with a sociological sensibility that infuses the entire volume and engages the most vexing social problems of our time. He offers wonderfully nuanced and evocative theological reflections on the self, trust, social identity, civil society, social harmony, inequality, and political domination. Read this book imaginatively . . .""
--TERENCE C. HALLIDAY
Co-Director, Center on Law and Globalization

""With his expertise in Paul and Confucius, K.-K. Yeo has produced a brilliant inter-textual study of Galatians and the Analects. By putting these two works in dialogue with each other, he illuminates each in fresh ways by mutual interpretation, enhancement, and correction. Through autobiographical reflection, he combines the complementary strengths of both writings to forge a creative and innovative Chinese-Christian theology. The result is a profoundly liberating vision of communal life in which unity does not compromise difference as a blessing. Yeo models for all of us the truly cross-cultural nature of all interpretation. Scholars, pastors, students, and general readers will find this volume to be a fascinating and worthwhile study.""
--DAVID RHOADS
The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

K. K. Yeo is Harry R. Kendall Professor of New Testament at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary, an advisory faculty member of the Graduate School of Northwestern University, and a Visiting Professor of Peking University. He is the author of Rhetorical Interaction in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 (1995), What Has Jerusalem to Do with Beijing? (1998), and Chairman Mao Meets the Apostle Paul (2002). He is also the editor of Navigating Romans through Cultures (2004).