Dissertation Defense: Easten Law
Candidate Name: Easten Law
Thesis Advisor: Peter Phan, PhD
Title: Discerning a Lived Chinese Protestant Theology: Christian Identity, Everyday Life, and Encounters with the Other in Contemporary China
This study advances a theo-social method of analysis to discern a lived theology among mainland Chinese Protestant young adults in the contemporary Shanghai and Hong Kong regions that bridges empirical research with theological construction. Inspired by sociological methods in abductive analysis, a multi-disciplinary process grounded in qualitative interviews and guided by a religious formation framework based on lived religion scholarship is used to identify experiences of God’s presence among forty-one informants. A key finding shared by multiple informants includes experiences of inner peace and ethical guidance amidst everyday life. Additional cycles of research, analysis, and theological reflection reveal how these experiences are negotiated and expressed across multiple boundaries of cultural diversity, inter-religious encounter, and community belonging within the very different contexts of mainland China and Hong Kong.
When embedded in the larger context of modern Chinese society’s ambivalent religious history, my informants’ experiences can be understood as products of “liquid religiosity” worked out among China’s multiple modernities: a process of selective re-enchantment, the pursuit of a common or everyday cosmopolitanism, and a search for familial belonging. Relying on insights from the growing field of theological ethnography and David Tracy’s analogical imagination, this triple negotiation is bridged with the theological principles of incarnation, revelation, and the image and mission of God via a process of “semiotic parallelism.” This process recasts observations of religious formation as a missionally framed process of Christ-like formation, arguing that experiences of disruption and migration ought to be understood as abductive moments through which God is actively shaping the faithful.
To embed this argument in Chinese theological discourse, the lives and ministries of three important modern Chinese theologians (Zhao Zichen, Ding Guangxun, and Ni Tuosheng) are highlighted as examples of how Christ-likeness is formed in experiences of disruption and negotiation. Seen through the lens of lived theology, Zhao’s Christology, Ding’s missiology, and Ni’s theological anthropology and ecclesiology provide valuable resources for negotiating faith in contemporary China. In conclusion, this study’s theo-social analysis links God’s active presence with the boundary crossing experiences of my informants to articulate a lived theology of migration consistent with contemporary Chinese Christian experience in an interconnected world and church.