Confucius for Christians

What an Ancient Chinese Worldview Can Teach Us about Life in Christ

Gregg A. Ten Elshof

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780802872487
• eBook ISBN: 9781467444125
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religions asiatiques

Shows how wisdom from an Eastern tradition can enrich the lives of Jesus followers everywhere
This unique book explores ways of using resources from the Confucian wisdom tradition to inform Christian living. Neither highlighting nor diminishing the differences between Confucianism and Christianity, Gregg Ten Elshof reflects on questions and issues in the Christian life with the Confucian worldview in mind.
In examining such subjects as family, learning, and ethics, Ten Elshof sets the typical Western worldview against the Confucian worldview and considers how each worldview lines up with the teachings of Jesus. Pointing to much that is good and helpful in the Confucian tradition, Ten Elshof shows how reflection on the teachings of Confucius can inspire a deeper and richer understanding of what it really means to live the Jesus way.

Chapter 1

Confucian Christianity?

I was born a Christian. And I was born a Westerner.

Of course, there’s a perfectly good sense in which neither of those things could be true. We all know that you can’t be born a Christian any more than you can be born a Marxist. And the same goes for the tendency to think in categories given to us from the Western wisdom tradition.

On the other hand, I’ve understood the world in Christian categories for as long as it has made sense to say of me that I’ve understood the world. I’ve been thinking in Christian categories for as long as I’ve been thinking. While I’ve had a conversion experience, I’ve never had a conversion experience that took me from some wholly other way of thinking about and understanding the world to a Christian way. Nor have I ever had a conversion experience that took me for the first time into a basic orientation of loyalty to and trust in the person of Jesus Christ. I’ve embodied a basic orientation of loyalty and trust toward Jesus Christ for as long as it has made sense to say of me that I’ve trusted anything or manifested loyalty to anyone. Such are the blessings of being raised in a Christian home. And the same is true of the Western wisdom tradition. Long before I had ever heard of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (not to mention Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard), my thinking had been deeply shaped by their suggestions about how to understand and talk about the world and my place in it.

So I’ve been thinking as a Western Christian for as long as I’ve been thinking.

It took me what now seems like an alarmingly long time to situate myself in those terms — to see and appreciate the fact that the Western wisdom tradition is one among many, and that a Christian understanding of the world informed by Western philosophical categories and emphases is one among many ways of understanding the world as a Christian. To deviate from stereotypical Western patterns of thinking is not to be unthinking. And to deviate from stereotypical Western Christian thinking is not to abandon Christianity.

Perhaps all of this should go without saying. But when I reflect on my own intellectual journey, it occurs to me that, at least in many settings, it must be said. I’m not sure where or when, but at some point in my intellectual training I took aboard the suggestion that the word “Eastern,” when used to modify nouns like “philosophy,” “thought,” or “religion,” had connotations like these: illogical, uncritical, nonsensical, relativistic, and dangerous. But a moment’s reflection is all it takes to recognize the absurdity of the suggestion that a philosopher’s location on the globe (To the East — of what? one wonders) should conduce to any of these characteristics. Be that as it may, this is how I had been taught to think.

It is, of course, not absurd to suggest that some religions, philosophies, and patterns of thought are illogical, uncritical, nonsensical, relativistic, and dangerous. Sadly, our world is replete with religions, philosophies, and patterns of thought that satisfy each (if not all) of these descriptors. But that these patterns should be concentrated on one half of the globe (the East side) is what should strike us as implausible on its face. And it takes no more than an undergraduate-­level survey of the history of Western thought to confirm the prevalence of these characteristics on the West side.

In 2005, the Provost of my university asked me to accompany him to China. The plan was to travel to several universities in Mainland China to give presentations to student and faculty groups on the nature of Christian higher education and scholarship. I had no real desire to go to China. I knew nothing of China’s history or culture. But my boss’ boss’ boss was asking me to go. So who was I to say no?

Our guide was Dr. Thomas Leung, a Christian scholar who had been working hard to establish centers for the study of Christianity in the state universities in China. He was the first person I had ever met who self-­identified both as a Christian and as a Confucian. This intrigued me.

In one of my early conversations with Dr. Leung, he explained one of the challenges facing Western Christian missionary efforts in China over the years. Well-­meaning Western missionaries, in their attempt to make a Christian understanding of the world compelling, were unknowingly busy trying to propagate Western Christianity — Christianity articulated in categories and with emphases at home in the Western philosophical tradition. As a result, Chinese audiences were being asked not only to embrace Christian thinking, but to abandon their native Confucian wisdom tradition — a rich tradition stretching back thousands of years and which informs the most fundamental structures of life and social interaction in China.

Audiences in the West are not characteristically presented with such stark options. Because the Christian story is articulated in categories and with emphases at home in the Western philosophical tradition, these audiences are offered the opportunity to embrace the Christian story without wholesale abandonment of the rich wisdom tradition that stretches back to Socrates and Plato and informs the most fundamental structures of life and social interaction in the West.

If, as it has been often suggested, the whole of the Western philosophical tradition is a series of footnotes to Plato, then most Christians in the West — insofar as their thinking is informed by the Western philosophical tradition — are Platonic Christians whether they’ve heard of Plato or not. But if the Chinese philosophical tradition is a series of footnotes to Confucius, then why should there not be Confucian Christians as well?

This is not to say that everything that Plato or Confucius taught can be reconciled with the claims of Christianity. But is there any reason on the face of it to think that the wisdom tradition that developed in the East should be more difficult to reconcile with Christianity than is the wisdom tradition that developed in the West?

In any case, Dr. Leung’s diagnosis of Western missionary efforts in China sparked in me a curiosity about the Confucian wisdom tradition and about the possibility of integrating Confucian categories and emphases with Christian commitment. In the years since that first trip to China, I’ve been studying the Confucian tradition. I’ve found it compelling and beautiful in many ways. And I think I’ve been brought further up and further into the Way of Jesus as a consequence of having interacted with it. I understand better now than I did several years ago what it might mean to be a “Confucian Christian.” This book is a collection of my reflections along the way. My hope is that they will, in some small way, allow those already moving in the Confucian way to see how a life of Jesus-­following might be understood in familiar terms. Closer to home, my hope is that folks who have come up in environments like mine (Western Christian folks who’ve been trained into suspicion of anything from the East) will find that there is much that is deep and helpful in the Confucian tradition — that reflections on the teachings of Confucius can inspire a deeper and richer understanding of our master and savior, Jesus Christ.

A word is in order here about how this book compares with other books and book chapters written by Christian authors on Confucianism. These usually fall into two categories:

First there are the Christian apologists. The apologists treat Confucianism as one of the world’s great religions. As such, Confucianism competes with Christianity (and all of the other religions) for the allegiance of would-­be practitioners. The apologists typically emphasize what they take to be the important differences between Christian thought and Confucian thought and recommend siding with Christianity.

Second, there are the Christian pluralists. The pluralists think that all of the world’s great religions represent equally legitimate expressions of the human response to the Divine (or to Being or to The Real or whatever). The Christian pluralist, while self-­identifying with the Christian tradition, will not think of this identification as having any privilege, advantage, or priority vis-­a-­vis an identification with one (or more) of the other great religions. These writers typically emphasize what they take to be the similarities between the world’s great religions.

There are plenty of books authored by Christians that address Confucianism from the perspective of the apologist or the pluralist.

This book, though, is intended neither as a contribution to Christian apologetics nor to Christian pluralism. These approaches have in common that they treat Confucianism as one of the world’s great religions — either one that competes with Christianity or one that is on equal footing with Christianity.

But it’s a matter of some controversy among scholars whether or not Confucianism is, in fact, a religion. The question turns on complicated issues having to do with the defining marks of a religion. I’ll not interact with those issues in this book. What is not controversial is that Confucianism (whether or not it is a religion) is a deep and influential wisdom tradition. And there are embarrassingly few books written from a Christian perspective that explore the possibility of integrating this deep and powerful tradition with a life of Jesus-­following.

So in this book, we’ll interact with Confucianism as a wisdom tradition — more like Platonism than like Islam. Confucianism will be thought of as one trajectory of thought to which to turn for deep reflection on the great questions that move human culture — questions about our world and our place in it. This book seeks neither to highlight the differences between Confucianism and Christianity nor to argue that there are no points of tension between the two. It rather seeks to experiment with reflection on perennial questions of human interest with the teachings of Jesus and Confucius in mind.

As a Christian, my fundamental allegiance is to Jesus Christ. For most of my adult life, I’ve helped myself to categories and emphases characteristic of the Western wisdom tradition in my attempt to think carefully about what a life of Jesus-­following looks like. While I’ve not found the thought patterns of the Western philosophical tradition univocally friendly to Christian commitment and practice, I have found much to appreciate in the Western tradition and I’m better, and better equipped for following Jesus, for having studied it and taken aboard much of what I learned. In recent years, I’ve been helped in new ways by reflection on the Confucian tradition in the East. The following pages represent my attempt to articulate some of the dimensions along which I’ve been helped.

In a conversation with some students not long ago, my friend Tom put forward the suggestion that we approach the world’s great wisdom traditions as scientists of the good life. Just as a Christian biologist might study and reflect on the body of collected human knowledge concerning biological organisms in order better to fulfill the biblical mandate to care for the created order, we mine the great traditions of sincere human reflection on the human condition for anything that can be of assistance in our attempt to understand deeply who we are, how our world works, and how best to fulfill the biblical mandate to promote human flourishing.

This is not a commentary (Christian or otherwise) on the Confucian Analects. It’s not nearly so systematic or complete as all of that. It’s rather an attempt to give expression to those ideas in the Confucian tradition that have been helpful for me as I’ve tried to make my way further up and into the Way of Jesus. My hope is that you will be similarly helped as you read them.

Chapter 2

Family

The gentleman applies himself to the roots. Once the roots are firmly established, the Way will grow. Might we not say that filial piety and respect for elders constitute the root of Goodness?

Analects 1.2...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Confucian Christianity?
• 2. Family
• 3. Learning
• 4. Ethics
• 5. Ritual
• 6. Sam