Does this confess the 'faith of the church'?

Late last year, I began pondering what issues I would want to contribute to a contemporary statement of the church's trinitarian faith. This was prompted by several factors. Conversations in China last November with colleagues from the United Church of Canada reminded me of that church's history of writing statements of faith. The encouragement of my own church's Basis of Union to confess the church's faith in fresh words and deeds is a constant presence to my theological work. More sustained teaching in Christology and Trinity in recent semesters has led me to engage more explicitly with the continuing discussions about gender, the theological significance of the specifics of Jesus' humanity, and the eschatology of the New Testament - all issues where the classical creeds are problematic. At the same time my conviction grows that the 'faith of the church', including its trinitarian content and structure, remains a fruitful source of wisdom; it warrants critical re-articulation rather than dismissal on the grounds of either its allegedly primitiveworldview or its alleged captivity to Greek metaphysics. For that reason I believe that any contemporary statement of faith succeeds to the extent that it is a fresh confession of the faith of the church and it fails to the extent it that it is an idiosyncratic statement of individual belief. Learning to use statements of faith as confessions of who we 'trust' rather than as lists of things to 'believe' is, in my view, an important spiritual challenge for the contemporary church. 

The result of these various promptings is below. It will be evident that some of my criteria are in tension with each other (e.g., I've deliberately retained the word 'Lord' to reflect the biblical witnesses' own re-framing of the term). Specific echoes of the Basis will be very easily heard. I post the statement here for reflection and comment. It remains a work in progress and I'd value both critique and suggestions for improvement.

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We trust one God: the Love, Life and Truth who is the source and sustainer of all that was, is and will be.

We trust Jesus Christ, Love from Love, Life from Life, Truth from Truth, Eternity’s Wisdom, Creation’s Lord, Israel's Messiah, God among us.

Sent from the very heart of God's love for the world, he became human in the womb of Mary. He came not to be served but to serve.

Hailing from Nazareth, he proclaimed the long-promised and coming reign of God; he befriended outcasts, healed the sick, forgave sinners, confronted falsehood, and showed mercy to his enemies.

Reaching Jerusalem, riding a donkey, prompting hosannas, he offered himself as the servant Lord; he was rejected, abandoned and betrayed; he was crucified on a Roman cross as a false Messiah. 

Dead in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, God raised him; the human verdict was reversed; his mission was vindicated; his reconciliation of the world to God was declared.

Appearing, speaking and eating, his transformed body provoked fear, doubt, joy and hope; his resurrection announced the defeat of death; he reassured his confused followers and commissioned them as witnesses to his way, truth and life.

Returning, now scarred and bruised, to the One who sent him, he shares in Love’s rule and receives the worship of his sisters and brothers from every culture, class and nation.

We trust the Holy Spirit, the loving and lively breath of God, who flows in, around and within the whole creation.

This same Spirit spoke through Israel's prophets, inspired Jesus' ministry, and gathers a community, the church, through which Christ bears witness to himself.

Sent by the Spirit, the church, like Jesus, is called to serve; in ever-fresh words and deeds, it is to proclaim the risen crucified Jesus Christ; its vocation is to witness to God's renewal of all creation, for which it waits with an impatient but sure and active hope.

This is the church’s faith. In this Triune God we trust. God grant us so to live. Amen.

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My thanks to Jason Goroncy, Katharine Massam and Rachel Kronberger for responses to earlier versions of this statement. None of these colleagues should, however, be taken to endorse this version or any part of it.

Canada, China, Church: An Observer's Observations

Two weeks ago I had the privilege of being an 'observer' at a forum between the China Christian Council and the United Church of Canada.  It was held at the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary. My presence there was part of growing partnership between the CCC and the Uniting Church in Australia. We had held a similar joint forum with the CCC in 2013 and hope another one might eventuate in the near future.

Here are a few highlights and learnings:

• Since I had a gap in my diary, I arrived at the Seminary a few days in advance of the conference. This gave me the chance to work in the library as well as to have conversations with staff and students as opportunities arose. As I've reported in blogs following previous visits, the Seminary is the focus of a very different world of theological education than ours in Australia: 350 residential students, nearly all of whom are under 30, some straight out of school. Within a few years, all these students will be pastors in churches with 100s and even 1000s of members. Still, even this number of students - together with the smaller numbers at the regional seminaries - it is going to take a while to change the present ratio of 1 theologically-trained ordained minster: 18,000 Protestant Christians. The enthusiasm and dedication of both students and faculty is exemplary and inspiring. A cohort of about 25 graduate students sat in on the conference for its duration and often asked very probing questions.
• The Canadian delegation was made up of 22 people, including the Assembly Moderator, the General Secretary, and a range of other leaders and members; the delegation also reflected the cultural and ethnic diversity of the UCC. An indigenous elder among the delegation opened the Canadian presentation with an indigenous ritual used when starting communication with new friends. It also included a retired UCC theologian who had spent 2002-2007 teaching at the seminary. He was warmly welcomed back to Nanjing.
• Listening in to the various presentations and the interactions which they produced,  I was struck at how often the conversations replayed the dialogue the UCA and CCC had undertaken in 2013. It didn't take long for questions such as these to emerge: How is the unity of the church articulated theologically? What is the relationship between gospel and culture? What are the demands and opportunities of being
  
  post-denominational and post-Christendom churches in both China and Canada? How does the church co-operate with the state in the provision of community services (a new possibility for the Chinese church which was prevented from doing so until 2011). I think that united and uniting churches work, at least implicitly, with ecclesiologies that are not easily mapped on to the ecclesiologies of Christendom. I think that in exploring these questions the UCA, the CCC and UCC are fellow-travellers.
  
  
• For me a real highlight among the presentations was a paper, "Gospel and Culture: A Chinese Christian's Understanding" by Rev Dr Yongtao Chen from the Nanjing faculty. It was a very illuminating perspective from within the Chinese context of how Christianity appropriates elements of Chinese culture and what it is that Chinese Christianity can contribute to Chinese culture. He offered a very interesting reading of Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4 as a paradigm for the encounter between Jesus and another culture. A fuller version of Dr.  Chen's paper is available in Christianity and Chinese Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) edited by Mikka Ruokanen and Paulos Huang.  
• Both before and during the visit I took the opportunity to delve more than I have in the past into the truly vast and rapidly expanding body of contemporary scholarly writing on Chinese Christianity. I would simply mention the following as a fairly random sample of the literature which I myself have only skimmed and which others might also find helpful:

Daniel H. Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

Jason Kindopp and Caroll Lee Hamrin, God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of Church-State Tension (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution 2004).

Justin Tan,  "Chinese Protestant Christianity" in The Church in China (Adelaide: ATF Theology, 2010) 83-120.

Yang Huilin, China Christianity and the Question of Culture  (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014). 

Gloria S. Tseng, "Revival Preaching and the Indigenization of Christianity in  Republican China", International Bulletin of Missionary Research 39 (2014): 177-182. 

Alan Hunter and Kim Kwong Chan, Protestantism in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 

Several themes emerges from even a rapid engagement with these works: the sheer complexity of the history (ancient and recent) of Christianity in China; the immense diversity of Christianity in China, a diversity which extends from the impact of contemporary Pentecostalism to alliances between Christianity and folk religion; and the challenges of being the Christian community in a one-party state (a challenge which is not reducible to the status respectively held by the registered and unregistered churches); and the need for Westerners to recognise that 'state' oversight of religious activities has been part of Chinese culture and society for over a millennium. I would also draw particular attention to the work by Yang Huilin mentioned above. Huilin is a leading Chinese academic, presently the Vice-President of Renmin University in Beijing. Huilin is among a group of Chinese intellectuals - only some of whom are Christian - who engage with Christian theology as an intellectual discipline in its own right. In this particular book Huilin engages Christian ethics, the place of theology in the humanities, Zizek's post-secular appropriation of Christianity, and even a chapter on Scriptural Reasoning, as tools for dialogue between China and the West. Whilst I understand there is some ambivalence from the church theologians towards this enterprise, it is fascinating - and perhaps salutary- that intellectuals outside the church find Christian ideas interesting precisely as ideas which have contributions to make to the welfare of Chinese culture.

Once again, I returned from a visit to China deeply grateful for the opportunity to be exposed to this growing church, and on this occasion also to learn about another united/uniting church, i.e., the United Church of Canada. The blog which the UCC delegation produced throughout its visit can be found here. I'm grateful to both delegations for letting me eavesdrop on their conversation.