From East to West (and back): Asian Theology in a Scriptural Mode
The names of Watchman Nee and John Sung are rarely found in Asian theological discourses or handbooks on biblical interpretation. Fortunately, recent interest in popular Christianity in China has led academics to reconsider Nee and Sung’s work.1 For the most part, however, their theologies and interpretations of Scripture are still overlooked, as most Nee and Sung studies confine themselves within the boundaries of history or mission studies in China. The goal of this chapter is to counter that unnecessary confinement. I contend that Nee and Sung’s approaches to Scripture were not just influential in the past but remain influential today. In other words, their hermeneutics should be studied not just in the context of Chinese history, but also to understand how grassroots Chinese Christians approach their Bible today.
To this end, I have structured the present chapter as follows. In the first section, I will bring Nee and Sung into conversation with each other, summarizing their approaches to Scripture by highlighting several key tenets that they share. I will then restate the argument I made in Chapter 1 by engaging a typical interpretation of Nee and Sung’s work that dismisses their theology as non-indigenous. My aim here is to repeat that that was not the case.2 In the second section, I will provide a sketch of contemporary Scripture readings and practices among Chinese Christians both in China and in Indonesia while pointing out Nee and Sung’s direct and indirect influences along the way. At the end of these two sections, which comprise the bulk of the chapter, I suggest that many Chinese Christians today approach Scripture in a similar
1 See Xi, Redeemed by Fire.
2 I have argued this for Nee and Sung individually in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, respectively. But here I will treat Nee and Sung together and summarize my argument rather briefly.
fashion to that of Nee and Sung. Lastly, I will offer some concluding thoughts on Nee and Sung’s lasting influence on Chinese Christianity.
Nee And Sung’s Approach to Scripture: A Summary
In previous chapters, I provided a multifaceted description of Nee and Sung’s
approaches to Scripture and suggested that theirs are grassroots hermeneutics that deserve to be explored further and seriously engaged with. While there are certainly differences between them, they are mostly minor and usually focus on questions of emphasis and expression.3 Indeed, I would argue that Nee and Sung share many fundamental theological-hermeneutical convictions about Scripture, which I will summarize under five points below. After the summary, I will briefly engage the work of one contemporary scholar who dismisses Nee and Sung’s theology and hermeneutics as insignificant for Asian theology’s self-understanding.4
3 Perhaps one significant exception to this claim pertains to ecclesiology (that is, if one considers ecclesiology as closely related to scriptural theology and interpretation, as I do). As we recall from his exegesis of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2, Nee has a very high view of the church as a divine-human corporate being. Sung, on the other hand, seems to have a rather low, instrumental ecclesiology—a subset of his (more important)
evangelistic soteriology.
4 It should be noted here that Nee and Sung’s approach to Scripture were not entirely unique to them.
Many of their contemporaries, such as “the dean of the underground church” Wang Mingdao (1900-1991), the influential devotional writer Chen Chonggui (Marcus Cheng, 1883-1963), and the popular biblical commentator Jia Yuming (1880-1964), arguably shared these five basic convictions about Scripture as well. Like Nee and Sung, they were all influenced by a mixture of Western evangelical traditions and Chinese culture, and thus are too commonly dismissed by scholars as not truly indigenous theologians. Their approach to Scripture is typically classified as a kind of Chinese “spiritual interpretation” (lingyi jiejing), as with the case of both Nee and Sung (see Chapters Three and Four respectively), which is, as I have argued, a form of traditional figural reading of
Scripture. For a quick survey of their hermeneutics, see Sze-Kar Wan, “Competing Tensions: A Search for May Fourth Biblical Hermeneutics,” in Reading Christian Scriptures in China, ed. Chloë Starr (New York: T&T Clark, 2008). For a few studies that argue for their significant-yet-subtle indigenization theology, see the works of Wai-luen Kwok, Fuk-tsang Ying, and Thomas Harvey, on Jia Yuming, Marcus Cheng, and Wang Mingdao
respectively. Wai-luen Kwok, “The Christ-Human and Jia Yuming’s Doctrine of Sanctification: A Case Study in the Confucianisation of Chinese Fundamentalist Christianity,” Studies in World Christianity 20, no. 2 (2014): 145–
165; Fuk-tsang Ying, The Praxis and Predicament of a Chinese Fundamentalist: Chen Chong-gui (Marcus Cheng)’s Theological Thought and his Time (Hong Kong: Alliance Bible Seminary, 2001); Thomas Alan Harvey,
“Challenging Heaven’s Mandate: An Analysis of the Conflict between Wang Mingdao and the Chinese Nation-State” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University, 1998).
1. Five Key Tenets of Nee and Sung’s Approach to Scripture
As we compare Nee and Sung’s approaches to biblical interpretation, there are at least five common key elements that are integral to their theology of Scripture. First, Scripture is taken to be the literal word of God. I have shown that Nee’s conception of Scripture has some similarities to Barth’s in that it emphasizes the dynamic character of revelation as divine encounter, whereas Sung never really lays out his theoretical understanding of Scripture. But there is no denying that both Nee and Sung see Scripture as divinely inspired and God as the ultimate author of Scripture. For them, Scripture is the full revelation of God, complete in itself—although Nee argues that it needs to be “re-spoken” again by the Holy Spirit, and maintains that the Spirit would not (indeed, cannot) speak from outside this Scripture. In this view, there is no need for anything outside Scripture, for Scripture, as God’s word,
encompasses everything—from theological knowledge, historical facts, scientific claims and spiritual truths to day-to-day realities. This does not mean that Nee and Sung simply perceive Scripture as a historical or scientific handbook. It means that when their interpretation of a given passage stands in direct conflict with the modern historical/scientific consensus, they always contend that (their interpretation of) Scripture has the last word on the subject in question. As God’s word, Scripture holds final authority in all matters.
Second, Scripture reading is perceived primarily as a spiritual practice. This is closely related to the first point above. Since Scripture is God’s word in a real, ontological sense, then approaching Scripture amounts to approaching God. This has at least two implications. First, since Scripture is God’s word, the role of the Holy Spirit is crucial in the reading and
interpretation of Scripture. Second, only those who are born of the Spirit can truly understand what they are reading in Scripture. Both Nee and Sung stress that the Holy Spirit is necessary in the whole interpretive process of reading Scripture. Sung’s practice of waiting on his knees for