What does it mean to do theology as a person of mixed linguistic, cultural, and geographic heritage who honors both tradition and context? This question animates our exploration of “Sinophone Theologies” as a potential framework for engaging the plurality of experiences that make up the Sinophone world.
In my first post, I posed four questions for consideration: How many forms of Chinese do you speak? What place do you consider home? As a Christian, what are you against? As a Christian, what do you support? The first two questions were asked to illustrate the contextual conditions of Sinophone Theologies, which are not only pluralistic in expression but also rooted in place. The third and fourth questions shift our attention toward Christian values, providing us with a pathway to consider the sources from which theological commitments are made.
CONTEXTUAL CONDITIONS FOR SINOPHONE THEOLOGIES
To summarize our last post, I define Sinophone as all people who use a Sinitic language as a primary means of communication alongside other languages, across many identities and cultural affiliations. This definition emphasizes the social reality of pluralism in Chinese experiences, illustrated by the many forms of Chinese (Huayu) used around the globe and the many places where Sinophone communities call home, including mine as a second-generation Chinese American who thinks and prays in a creolized Chinglish. Taken together, they constitute two Contextual Conditions for doing Sinophone theology:
- Embrace of Linguistic Cacophony: Membership in the Sinophone theological world is determined not by ethnicity or nationality but by participation in a Chinese-language world, however partial, contested, or historically imposed. The in-between-ness of Sinophone speakers is not a deficiency to overcome but a primary site of theological insight.
- Polycentric Geographic Inheritances: Sinophone theology insists that all Sinophone communities (e.g., Malaysian Chinese, Hong Kong diaspora, indigenous Taiwanese, Chinese Indonesian, and other overseas Chinese communities) contain their theological truths built upon their own unique foundations. They are not peripheral variations of a centered conception of Chinese civilization or culture.
In short, Sinophone Theologies are shaped by a linguistically mixed, geographically dispersed, and sociopolitically diverse Sinophone world as their basis, without taking any single imagined cultural “China” as their center.
THEOLOGICAL SOURCES FOR SINOPHONE THEOLOGIES
Given these contextual conditions, I propose three Theological Sources from which Sinophone Theologies are discerned: autobiographical experience, biblical formation, and cultural reflexivity.
- Autobiographically Grounded: Rather than beginning with Western systematics or classical Chinese philosophy, Sinophone theology begins with the theologian’s own mixed, hyphenated, in-between experience as its primary epistemological source, guided by the Holy Spirit’s indwelling within the Image of God, from which all humans are marked.
- Biblically Formed: Christians interpret their lives and worlds through the teachings of Scripture, and Sinophone Theologies require careful attention to how the language, context, and history of the Bibles we read in worship, prayer, and everyday life are composed, translated, and used to form distinct Sinophone Christian lifeworlds. In other words, Sinophone Theologies recognize that Scripture translations are culturally embedded and interpreted.
- Culturally Reflexive: Sinophone Theologies draw on not only self and scripture but also the multitude of cultural texts that arise from their contexts. God created humanity to be creative, and through our creativity we can understand Sinophone expressions of hope and fear. From poetry and plays to movies and music, a critical awareness of these cultural expressions and their layered meanings is essential.
These three theological sources demand a near-constant dialogue among one another, in which awareness of the self’s multiple identities, languages, and cultures guides us in discerning the presence of God within the plurality of voices embedded in Scripture and culture.
THEOLOGICAL COMMITMENTS OF SINOPHONE THEOLOGIES
One of the most important dimensions of doing theology is not only its sources but also its effects on how Christians live. It is important to stress that pluralism does not mean relativism and that a diversity of voices does not necessitate division. When built on the right foundations, emphasizing Sinophone diversity as a theological starting point can reveal more about God’s work than any single binding story.
As we begin to ponder theological commitments, let’s return to the question of what Christians stand for or against, given their commitments to Christ. Among the 57 respondents at the Society of Chinese Public Theology meeting, there were nearly no identical answers about what Christians should stand against. Answers ranged from broader concepts like legalism, sin, oppression, hypocrisy, and division to more specific issues like war, homosexuality, and cohabitation before marriage. In contrast, when asked what Christians ought to support, many answers coalesced around a few primary themes: truth, love (for God and humanity), grace, and justice. This informal survey shows that even when Sinophone Christians share theological commitments about what they should stand for, they still view a plurality of issues as contrary to those commitments. How standing against war or homosexuality is tied to commitments to love, grace, and truth is therefore a product not of scripture, culture, or personal experience alone but of a complex convergence of all three that requires further reflection and analysis.
At this juncture, I propose four Theological Commitments that ought to undergird Sinophone Theologizing across every context, providing a common foundation grounded in the logic and values of the Gospel.
- Critically Oriented Toward Power—Sinophone theology carries an anti-colonial impulse that turns inward as much as outward, claiming the freedom to critique any cultural inheritance that frames itself as normative over others—Confucian or Reformed, progressive or evangelical—as much as any external domination.
- Compassionately Attentive to Silenced Voices—Sinophone theology must reckon honestly with the large portions of the Sinophone Christian world that operate under conditions where certain things cannot be said, refusing to speak over or for those voices in ways that increase their risk. It prioritizes listening before speaking, especially to Sinophone communities that are generally excluded from dominant conceptions of what it means to be “Chinese.”
- Justice-Oriented Action—Rather than pursuing harmony between Chinese culture and Christian thought or practical unity with oppressive systems, Sinophone theology takes sides with the displaced, the constrained, and the minoritized as a theological commitment continuous with the Gospel, seeking means to express solidarity with the fatherless and the widowed.
- Interculturally Creative—The goal is not merely to correct existing Chinese theology’s blind spots but to generate theological voices that could only emerge from the particular friction and resonance of the Sinophone world’s diversity with multiple cultural lifeworlds in intercultural negotiation and expression.
These four commitments emerge from critical reflection on the three theological sources embedded in the two contextual conditions introduced above and, together, make up the methodological foundation from which we believe Sinophone Theologies ought to be articulated.
DOING THEOLOGY AS A DIVERSE SINOPHONE COMMUNITY
While an extensive treatment of how these theological commitments have formed through autobiographical, biblical, and cultural negotiations in the Sinophone world’s linguistic cacophony and polycentric geography is beyond the scope of this essay, one important dynamic is worth highlighting. This collection of conditions, sources, and commitments that make up this definition is the product of conversation and community. Over the summer months, Dr. Matthew Tsz Him Lai and I convened a small but intentionally diverse group of Sinophone Christian scholars from different nations and disciplinary backgrounds to discuss the concept. This working group of constructive and practical theologians, historians and ethicists, biblical scholars, and missiologists, with scattered roots across Australia, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, constitutes the very contextual conditions needed to make Sinophone Theologies possible. In prayerful reflection together, we are seeking to be faithful scholars who engage theology, culture, identity, and mission in a dynamic and open way, inviting the Holy Spirit to do something new within our minds and hearts.
A TENTATIVE DEFINITION
Bringing these aspects together, our tentative definition of Sinophone Theologies is as follows:
Sinophone Theologies are shaped by the Chinese-language world as their context without taking any one concept of China as their center. They are grounded in autobiographical experience and negotiated between the scriptures and cultures of linguistically mixed, geographically dispersed, and politically diverse Sinophone peoples. They are committed to Christ, with the freedom to critique any cultural or political inheritance from within; they are oriented toward the margins rather than the empires of Chinese civilization; and they aspire to generate creative theological voices from intercultural inheritances for which the existing landscape of Chinese theology has not yet made room.
Given that this definition is still being developed within the community, we present it with an open invitation to dialogue and feedback. In the coming weeks and months, members of our working group will share reflections on how this concept of Sinophone Theologies resonates with their particular social location and/or scholarly discipline as part of the broader ChinaSource series, “Polycentric Christianities in a Diverse Sinophone World.” As we explore these perspectives, we pray and hope this academic definition takes on flesh and spirit in ways that resonate with you as well.
