Copyright holder: Tyndale University, 3377 Bayview Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2M 3S4 Att.: Library Director, J. William Horsey Library Copyright: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License Citation: Payk, Christopher. “Prevenient Grace and Chinese Theology.” April 29, 2021, Tyndale University. Toronto, Ontario: MPEG-4, 39:34 min. ***** Begin Content ****** Let me just take a moment, everyone, just to fix our attention and welcome our presenter. Yeah, so Christopher Payk is our presenter, I was going to say this morning, I shouldn't do that because where he's coming from, it's almost midnight. But Chris is going to present for us his next session. And for those of you who don't know him, he's he is an ordained Canadian Free Methodist minister serving in Taipei, Taiwan, at the Morrison Academy. He is a PhD candidate with the National Chengchi University researching indigenous Chinese theology. He is the author of Grace First Christian Mission and Pervenient grace in John Wesley and he is a Master of Theology from Tim Dell Seminary. And today he's presenting to us a paper titled Provenient Grace and Chinese Theology. And just before I hand it over, just a reminder to all of you watching and listening, just to help the stream, if you could keep your videos off and keep yourselves muted. But if you have a question, as Chris presents, if a question comes to mind, please put it in the chat box and at the end of the paper, we'll take some time to moderate your questions. And that's it. I want to turn things over to you, Chris. And Chris, just want to say thank you for speaking with us today. Thanks, Adam. I appreciate the opportunity to talk and just a few minutes ago got to connect with a few friends, so that was great. Nice thing for me, it's closing in on 1130 here, so it's pretty late, but I had a cup of coffee, so I remember Don Gert said to me that good ministry runs on a wave with caffeine, so I'm riding the wave right now. My talk today is about John Wesley's doctrine of prevenient grace and its importance for Christian mission in the Chinese world. And this presentation is very personal to me because it's the two areas that I've spent the most time thinking about and now writing about. Because you'll see there's four aspects to the presentation today. The first is looking at what John Wesley said about prevenient grace and particularly some things that he said that were important for the Chinese world. The next part is about Methodist missionaries that went to the Chinese world. The third part is Methodists in China before 1949. So these are actually Chinese Methodists. And then the last part, Chinese Methodist after 1949. And then a conclusion. So in 2009, I had the opportunity to work with Howard Snyder at Tyndale Seminary and we worked on this book called Grace First. And what it was was looking at what did Wesley say convenient grace was and did. And at the end of the book, I made 19 mythological implications for what he said. What does this all mean for mission and for the sake of methodism in China? I found four particularly useful after being in the Chinese world. I live in Taiwan have lived here for the past twelve years. I found four of them particularly interesting and useful. The first is that Wesley believed that after the fall, that the enlightening of the son, that true light, has reinscribed the moral law on everyone's heart, and that the faculty of conscience is not natural, but it's given to all people by convenient grace. And you can see the the references there. And if anyone wants a copy of this PowerPoint, I'd be happy to send it to them. You could just let me know. The next one is that prevenient grace is the source of the light of nature, which reveals God's omnipotence and divine being through the created order. The third thing is that those that don't have the special revelation of the Bible are given God's revelation through the creation and the partial reading description of the moral law. And as I said before, the restored faculty of conscience through prevenient grace. And this provides knowledge of certain things like the Golden Rule, which you can see in world religions around the world. And then the fourth is that Pravini grace explains the existence of human good works among those who are not justified by faith. So Wesley was even more scrupulous than the reformers were to ascribe anything good that took place in humankind to God's grace. Well, as the missionary expansion happened around the world, you had Methodist like this is young J. Allen, who went from the United States or England or Canada to the Chinese world. And he was a particularly interesting missionary because he had a large impact in China. So he arrived in 160, and he believed that the light of nature revealed God's omnipotence and divine being through the created order. But he was particularly focused on science, and that he thought that through science, the God of Christianity would be revealed to the Chinese mind. But in his writings, it's interesting. Although he was a Methodist and had great respect for Wesley, he doesn't make any references to Wesley or convenient grace, but he displayed an evolving attitude toward Confucianism. And I'm going to talk a bit about Confucianism today, and it's particularly interesting with regard to Wesley's belief that the moral law is inscribed on every human heart. Alan pgame convinced that the moral imperatives found in the Ten Commandments were especially similar to Confucian teaching. So there was some Confucian teachings long before Christian missionaries arrived on civil piety toward your parents, honoring your parents, the forbidding of killing, lying and stealing. But although he brought Wesley's a plain account of Christian perfection with him to China, we don't have any indication that young J. Allen was working with Wesley on these ideas. He was just finding it in the Confucian tradition and pairing it with similar ideas he knew from Christianity. Another person that's very interesting is William South Hill, because he came from England. A Methodist missionary in 1882 arrived in China, and he thought that Christianity was the fulfillment, not the destroyer, of Chinese religions. And he wrote in a book, A Mission to China, that the religions of China had been preparing, even though imperfectly, the way of the Lord who came not to destroy Confucius or Louse or Buddha, but to perfect their imperfections and complete their incompleteness. So he was going a greater step further than Yang J. Allen was in seeing Chinese religions as preparation for what Christ would bring. So he wrote he wrote about a great respect that he had for Wesley, but again, he doesn't refer to anything that Wesley said about prevenient grace. So he's seen in the Chinese religious tradition some parallels with what he knows from Christianity. This is going to get too complicated, so I'm just going to go on to Chinese Methodist now. So Chinese Methodist before 1949, you have now Chinese themselves who are converting to Christianity, and they are becoming leaders. One of the most renowned theologians was this man, Zhao Fujan, and he was a Methodist. He graduated from the Methodist College in Sujo and then went to United States Vanderbilt University. And he was a Methodist until 1941, when he became an Anglican. He didn't feel like he was particularly bound to any denomination, but he fought for the reconciliation of his Confucian heritage with his Christian faith. He was adamant in bringing the two traditions together, but he thought that superstition should be removed from Chinese Christian theology and a scientific worldview should be embraced. So he wanted to get rid of several what he considered superstitious teachings of Christianity, like what he thought was the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, the resurrection from the dead, because Christianity needed to be updated and indigenous in order to provide hope for China, because, in his opinion, Christianity could save the nation. There was all these save the nation strategies at the time of his writing that were hoping to provide hope for China on the other side of the spectrum. So Daljitan was considered a modernist. Those are the terms that they use on the other side of the spectrum. The fundamentalist side, which is, again, the terms that they chose to use, is John Sung or Song Shanti. And he grew up in the Methodist Episcopal Church and in Fujian Province. And in 1920, many of you know, he went to the United States, eventually earning a PhD in chemistry. He comes back to China through fascinating ordeal, and he's an ordained elder in the Hingwa Conference of Methodist Episcopal Church and became known as the John Westley of China because in the early 40s, he was a powerful evangelist. But fundamentalists like sun were in complete opposition to the theological updates that Dalton wanted for Christianity. And people like some wanted the indigenization of the gospel in China, felt that though that was important, it was not crucial to saving the nation. So again, the idea of saving China, but he thought that through being faithful to the teachings revealed in the Bible were the only hope because that would lead to a transformed life and greater populace in the country. So this created a theological division between Methodists on the one hand, the Modernist, on the other hand, fundamentalists, and some people in the middle of that. Another factor is that other leading Methodists like VKI Kwong or Jung Changwan, who was a Methodist bishop, was deeply involved with the political spectrum. So he was a student of Young Jae Allen at the school, and he became a bishop in the Chinese method of church. And he baptized Chenkaik, who would go on to become the leader of China before the Communist takeover. And he was asked an organization created by the Japanese when they occupied China in order to control the Christian churches. And according to Wang Ming Bal, who is another fundamentalist and known as the spiritual father of the House Church movement, because he was so closely connected with Chenkai Shek, he had deep connections with politics. And this was, according to Wang Mingdao, the reason that he accepted his role in Three Self Patriotic Movement. So that was the perception, at least among fundamentalists. Now, whether these statements are true or not, they do indicate that among fundamentalists like Wang Mingdao and Jung Sung that modernists like Jang Changtwan were connected to political power. And so their commitment to authentic Christian teaching was compromised, creating a greater divergence between the group. And with fundamentalist Methodists like John Sung looking with suspicion at modernist Methodists like Style BUNCHAN and Jean tungwan due to their differences in theology and political involvement, any talk of the continuity with Chinese religions that the earliest earlier generations of missionaries like Yang Jay Allen and William Southeast described were not at all well received by fundamentalists. So much more prevalent was the teaching for a radical break with the past in order to provide hope for the future. And then with regard to Wesley, after the May 30 movement in 1925 and earlier, the May 4 movement in 1919, both fundamentalists and modernists didn't want to be seen as connected with Western cultural imperialism. And so to refer to an Englishman like John Wesley would not have been seen helpful to fundamentalists like them. So 1949, as we all know, the Communist takeover happened in China. And the theology of this period, 1940s, like late 1940s to the 1970s, is in keeping with the era, either activists or quiescent. And the overwhelming theological concern was what is the church's relationship to the state? So again, this was not the time for John Wesley as a theological mentor. But Gauchanyan, who is a researcher at Academia Sinica here in Taiwan, did his PhD research in this area in Ping Tian Fujian Province in 2004 2005, right here where the arrow points. And he found that during his time there, after the Three Self Patriotic Movement was the official churches in mainland China, there were still chapels where most people identified with the Methodist tradition. Although all ties with American churches have been severed, galchenyan found that in a so called post denominational era of Chinese Protestantism, many lay Protestants in Ping Tian still identified themselves as Methodists. And in 2004, the Methodist branch of the Three Self Patriotic Movement claimed around 45,000 members among the inhabitants of Pink Tian. And that's from his PhD, which was put out in 2009. Now, as we all know, things happen very quickly in China, and between 2009 and 2021 there's been a lot of development. But at least at this point, there were still people who identified themselves with the Methodist tradition in mainland China. But also, as we know, the Chinese world is beyond simply mainland China. And so what we find in around 2011, from what my research shows, is that Methodist, Chinese Methodists around the world start going back to Wesley. And this is a fascinating phenomenon because you have, say, for example, here in at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, you have this group of theologians, and some of them are Methodists that wanted to look at John Wesley's concept of grace. And they put out this publication in 2013 in which many of the articles refer to Wesley's doctrine of preventing grace. Then also in Hong Kong, you have Peter Lee, who was a chaplain at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, did his PhD in Boston, and he gave two presentations at the Oxford Institute of Methodist Studies in 2013. And he found in his writings, he published this book, john Wesley's Creative Theology. Some interesting things about prevenient grace in the Chinese world. He was the director of an academical study center in Hong Kong, and he found that prevenient grace was specifically helpful when considering the Christian faith in relation to nonchristian faith. So he wrote that pervenient grace splits. And at points where Christians in dialogue with non Christians find converging issues like the virtue of life and the relentless search for excellence and pravinia, grace comes in when grace connects with innate good conscience and receptiveness to goodness even in nonchristian people. So these are his words. Prevent grace may not be nicely or let's say, neatly defined, but then it's unpredictable outside of Christian boundaries. So this was his presentation at Oxford. And he notes that prevenient grace, as understood by Wesley in his sermon, helped him to make sense of how in a place like Hong Kong, in similar areas, with so many people, feeling a deep sense of lostness and moral and sensibility. Some people were touched by pervenient grace in his words and can begin to move toward God. Well, we also have in Malaysia a man named Ling Jongchang who wrote a thesis on seeing God's sovereignty and salvation from John Wesley's view of provenian grace. Hong Kong, Malaysia and then in this thesis, he attempted to show how John Wesley's doctrine of preventing grace safeguards God's sovereignty in Wesley's superiorology and allows for a unique methodist understanding of salvation. Now, in Taiwan, where I live, this is Bishop Pangunwa, who is currently the bishop of the Methodist Church here. He did his education in Hong Kong and now he lives here in Taiwan. And he wrote this paper on Methodist small groups in the church renewal movement. And he found that the development of these small groups who are recovering the image of God, the new creation and responsible grace. And he knows that it's convenient grace that gives human beings the motivation to begin the journey to respond to God, establish positive relationship with other people and become holy people of God. And in a personal interview I did with Pastor Pong, Bishop Pongo, he mentioned that Taiwanese Methodists have not done a lot of work in developing the implications of Westby's doctrine proven at grace. But it was through interpersonal conversations that Chinese Taiwanese methods have had with people who are followers of Chinese religions at the academic level along convenient grace lines, through interreligious dialogues that they've had interesting conversations of parallel phenomenon happening. So Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan and Singapore. This is Wilfred Ho, who is a professor in Singapore. And he wrote, behold, John Wesley, a soterio pastoral theologian. And that's in Chinese. And Pastor Bishop Panguinwat wrote that this is, according to his knowledge, the most comprehensive work on John Wesley's theology in Chinese. And he wrote, ho's analytical perspective of Wesley is, to use his phrase, to have the mind of Christ in walking as he walked, to think and live theologically. Convenient grace is the grace that comes in advance and provides the resources to begin this theological journey. And particularly interesting is Ho's use of Wesley's connection between proper thought having the mind of Christ and proper action walking as he walked. And for any of you that have read the analytics or mentius, you'll know that the connection between proper thought and proper action is integral to Confucian morality. So, in conclusion, what we see is Methodist missionaries, as we started at the beginning of the presentation to China in the 19th century, like Young J. Allen and William South Hill, although they were familiar with Wesley, did not develop his ideas related to convenient grace directly. But they observed in the religions of China, and particularly in Confucianism, some ideas that were consistent with the Wesleyan understanding of Christianity, such as the idea that morality is inscribed in the hearts of all people and then that the moral law was revealed by the light of nature. Now, some people, like Lee Rainey, will say that they were finding in Confucianism what they wanted to find, like the earlier Jesuit had. However, there's no question that a Chinese Methodist like Jao Tuchun and fundamentalists like Wang Mingdao also found in Confucianism a preparation for the Gospel that Jesus Christ fulfilled. So then, when we get to the early 20th century, the breach between Christian modernist and fundamentalists in China, which continues to this day in the unregistered and registered sections of the Church hampered the development of seeing God at work among people who were not directly connected with Christianity. Some modernist Methodists like Jal Zhang saw Christianity as being the fulfillment of confucianism. But fundamentalist Methodist like John Sung emphasized a radical break with Chinese religion and saw a little good in them. The political connections of modernists like Bishop Jiang Tankwan further alienated these two groups. And then, due to the impact of the May 30 movement in 1925 and resulted in desire to separate Chinese Christianity from foreign churches, neither group would be inclined to refer to John Wesley for theological support for their theology. But in recent years, particularly 2011, to the present, Methodists throughout the Chinese world, in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan have rediscovered the theology of John Wesley. And you could say the same has happened in the west. And since 2011, these theologians in the Chinese world have been using the theological category of convenient grace to explain and understand phenomenon in the Chinese religious world, both Christian and beyond. Many of these theologians were trained in Methodist schools in the United States and England, like traditional good Methodists were supposed to, but also in places like Hong Kong and Singapore and Malaysia and now Taiwan. So no doubt the implications of this doctrine, the Chinese bug, will continue to develop as Chinese Christians encountered the God already at work among the Chinese people. And I just have 1 minute to show you this. Hopefully you can see that this is Hildy Marie Ogreed Movafas PhD dissertation and she just sent it to me. She's going to defend it in a few days. This is called broadening. This perspective prevenient grace and contemporary Methodist theology. And she's looking at Westerners who are rediscovering Wesley's theology of prevention grace. But what's interesting in my part of the world is that Chinese theologians, chinese Methodists are also rediscovering the theology of John Leslie and they're finding the doctrine of convenient grace particularly helpful as they're doing theology. And they're going about their work, whether that's in academia or in the Church or in the bishopric, as Pang Junha has expressed in his paper. So that's my presentation to this point and I'll stop there and go forward if case anyone has any questions. Thanks, Chris, that was excellent and fascinating to hear. I was particularly intrigued there at the end. So if you have questions for everyone, please submit them in the chat. But just the running parallels with, as you said, the Western phenomenon of rediscovering prevention grace and the ties, particularly when you talk about Peter Lee and the convergence with Confucianism and this desire, this aim to do good. Could you explain a little bit more about that foundational piece of Confucianism because it brings up the Western parallel of the cultural presumption now of being inherently good and what kind of groundwork that lays now for evangelism. So could you unpack that a little bit more for us. Well, what I'll do is I'll talk about someone who I'm more familiar with because, of course, I'm not Chinese, but many people know the Beijing pastor of Wang Mingda. He is considered the spiritual father of the House Church movement. And he would say, which surprises many people because he was a fundamentalist Christian, he would say that Confucius preached the Tao or the Way before Christian missionaries came and preached the Tao or the way found in Jesus. And so what we find some Confucian Christians doing, like Jaltechn Udechuan and fundamentalist Christians, even like Wang Ming Dao, saying is that Confucius provided the moral enlightenment to how people should live. And when Christian missionaries came and preached the gospel, they fulfilled that teaching. And Wang Mingawa in particular, would say, provided the power to live it out. So when we look back at what Wesley was saying, that the reinscription of the moral law, the faculty of conscience, these are things that Chinese Methodists now are looking back and saying, yes, this is in our Confucian tradition. This is clearly in the analytics and dementia. These are things that we believed long ago because God has not left the Chinese people without a witness. And so that's a fascinating idea. And I think that recently, the Chinese Methodist Christians are putting that together, and Western Chinese Christians are putting that together, as Hildy's, PhD in Norway is showing us. And so all around the world, interesting things are happening on this topic. Yeah. Wow. And I appreciate too I can't recall who you were quoting, but the language of perfecting the imperfections, right. And so not denying the common ground, the solidarity in spiritual aim, and yet building upon them to bear witness. Also, I was curious, like you mentioned with Zhao Shishen. Like that's the refuting of superstition in place of a scientific worldview and just building upon, like also this proclamation of fulfillment or perfecting the imperfection of curious how that? Was either has continued to evolve or if you've seen something different there. Particularly in the mainland. You can't talk about Chinese Christianity without talking about the relationship to the States. So that's a fundamental idea because everything revolves around the church's relationship with the state. So just the idea that, well, let's go in this direction, that definitely is taking place in many different spots. So right now, we have going on in June, we have the Yale Conference on Chinese Christianity, and many of the presenters are from China. And they're bringing up all these different interesting theologies which are showing goddess work in the Chinese past and connecting that with different works currently happening in China. And then you have a broader perspective in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia that are connecting the work from the past to today. So definitely, it's happening. Mainland China is, we know, a complicated place. And what's happening between the unregistered church and the registered church and academia are three different things. And then even in regionally, we have to talk about regions of the Chinese world. And so what's happening in Taiwan is significantly different than what's happening in, say, Beijing. But definitely we're seeing connections to the past developing into the present with God at work among all people. Awesome. Appreciate that. Got some comments and questions coming in for you, Karen. Just wanted to say excellent presentation. I would see similar issues with theology concepts from those who come from an indigenous thought process thing in North American. Indigenous thought process. Great to connect this to prevenient grace, have you just, in your own journey, experienced any of that account of indigenous thought process? Yes. The one that comes out most clearly was teaching in Nepal. I was teaching at a pastor's conference in Nepal and talking about in Leviticus the sacrifice. And one of the pastors from Nepal came and asked me, where is that from? The sacrificial lamb? And I talked to him about it, and he said, that's really interesting because we have these sacrifices that happened. He was part of a tribe in the northeast portion of Nepal, and we have these sacrifices that bear a lot of resemblances to what you're describing from the Book of Leviticus. And so we see in places all around the world and this is not new, we can think of all kinds of examples of this around the world. And missionaries have written books on it where people are explaining indigenous ideas of sacrifice of animals, this idea that there must be a sacrifice for sin, and connecting that with the cross and what Jesus did as a final sacrifice. So I would say that, yeah, I see that. Okay, awesome. Amy's written. Thanks, Chris, for your presentation. As you see the discovery of Wesley in the Chinese context, seeing those connections and residences are encouraging. Is their influence going in the other direction? Are there teachings in the Chinese church that could bless the Western church? I'm particularly familiar with the modern Taiwanese context and the theology of Wang Mingdao. So when I think about what I've gained from being here, I would say definitely the emphasis on prayer as being a priority. I think that the average Taiwanese church is unusually focused on prayer. And you can see this in Korea, too, unlike what I've experienced in any church in Kansas. And then what we see in mainland China among some unregistered Chinese Christians who are willing to who are willing to sacrifice everything for what they think is what God wants them to do. I would say that both of those things have been both of those ideas that have prayer and that of sacrifice are things that the Western church definitely would be blessed by. Absolutely. Thank you. I think our final question is from Eli. Was there inherent aversions to politics among Chinese, especially pre 1949, like we see in many North American Christian churches? Well, yes and no. So we have a very significant split that happened in missionaries between what we would call, let's say, conservative and liberal, and that went into Chinese Christians, and they chose the terms modernist and fundamentalist. The fundamentalists largely wanted to move away from politics. So people like Wang, Mingda and Johnson and Watchman Meet, they were moving in an independent direction from not only Western denominations, but politics. So Wangdao says in 1924, he made a conscious decision to turn his back on the world and focus on the cross, whereas other Chinese Christians join in mostly not exclusively, but mostly with the modernist movement and become leaders in what's currently three self patriotic movement. And that's become very muddied today because, of course, over the decades, things become very complicated and people move around, and some evangelicals are here and some modernists are there anyway. So modernists largely moving into the three self church are very involved in politics. So you have people that are all along that spectrum. But Chinese Christianity, especially in the mainland, is a very divided church currently between the unregistered people call them house churches or underground churches, probably a better term is unregistered, and the registered churches, which are the three self patriotic movement recognize churches. So, again, Unregistered is largely not wanting to participate in politics. Registered three self patriotic movement are willing to engage with politics. Okay, yeah, well, yeah, that relationship of with the state right. Relevant worldwide, certainly, and all the more so in our context here as well. Thank you for that, Chris. A reminder that maybe we have time for one more question, but just a reminder for folks that want a copy of Chris's presentation. Mona Moore, you've already sent in a request. If you could send your email address to Tabitha. She's looking after all the specifics there, and she'll make sure that you get a copy of Chris's presentation. So send your email to Tabitha privately here in the chat. Chris, are you going to do one more? Sure. Okay. Yeah. It's only midnight. Fair enough. Okay, here you go. Here's your Strike at midnight question. Is there any research looking at Pravini grace in the earliest Christian missions. As. We see it in the Jesus Sutras? Nice to hear from you, Donald. Is there any research looking at prvini grace in the earliest Christian missions as we see it in the Jesus Sutras? There definitely is. I'm not an expert on this field, but probably the best person to look at would be Chloe Starr at Yale Divinity School, who is a professor of Christianity and China, and she's actually a synologist, and her expertise is in the area of going back from the Jesuits to modern Chinese Christianity. And I did a presentation with her, and she said to me, doesn't this have roots back in the Jesuit missionaries? And I had to say, I don't know because that's not my area of expertise. But she does. And I read her recent book, which. Is Chinese theology. And if anyone writes clearly on research and previewing grace in the earliest Christian missions it's heard. And she does write it about Matteo Ricci and Verbias and other Jesuit missionaries. And that would be where to go for that. Chloe Star, chinese theology from Yale Divinity School. Okay, great. Thank you for the and thank you for your time and your incredible presentation, chris, we really, really appreciate your work and sharing it with us. And I know everyone wants to express their appreciation for you. ***** This is the end of the e-text. This e-text was brought to you by Tyndale University, J. William Horsey Library - Tyndale Digital Collections *****