The Trinity, the Church and China’s Harmonious Society:A Virtue of Persuasion

(After a month struggle of writing up the paper, I come to finish. This is the introduction of the paper.)

In contemporary China, religion does not have its own right of existence. Rather religion has been assigned a social role to perform. Since the introduction of the idea of harmonious society in 2004 by the government, religion is expected to be one of the social forces contributing to the realization of a harmonious society. The purpose of this paper is to review how Chinese Christianity responds to and reflects its expected role. Due to political reasons, Chinese Christianity does not have full autonomy to develop its theological reflection freely, but this does not imply that the church would not be able to develop a sound and relevant theology. A certain degree of theological accommodation should not be negatively criticized as handing over the faith, for different degree of accommodation cannot be avoided in relationship, even in divine-human relation. (Balserak, 2006) On the other hand, the recent emergence of exchange politics in China has provided Chinese Christianity a relatively wider room to participate into public life. (Kung, 2010) Since God has been involved in his world, whether the Trinitarian God should serve as a model for human community is not the concern of this paper, but rather the matter is in which respects and to what extent it would do so in the Chinese socio-political context. This paper suggests that persuasion as virtue reflected in the Trinitarian God inspires Christian engagement with society, and challenges the propaganda-form of communication.