In Search of Yijing Theology: Attempts of the Jesuit Figurists, Protestant Missionaries, and Chinese Christian Intellectuals
摘要
The cultural impacts of the Yijing (Book of Changes) as a highly venerated Chinese classic have extended to other parts of East Asia—notably Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—and well beyond to Europe and North America. The multifarious symbolism of the sixty-four hexagrams in this influential Chinese canon captured considerable attention from Christian missionaries and converts in late imperial China, as well as some Chinese Christian intellectuals in the twentieth-centur. To trace the trajectory of the encounters between the Yijing and Christianity over the past three centuries, this chapter aims to survey and scrutinize several major Christian interpretations of the Yijing from the early Qing period to the twentieth-century in the search of Yijing theology. They include predominantly the perspectives of the Jesuit Figurists, Protestant missionaries, and Chinese Christian intellectuals and theologians. Their main concerns are the conversation between Christianity and Chinese culture, integration of Christian and Chinese identities, interreligious dialogue, and the construction of indigenized Chinese theology, particularly against the contexts of the new culture movement and modernization of early twentieth-century China, as well as the unique religious and socio-political landscapes of post-1949 Hong Kong where some diasporic Chinese Christian intellectuals resided.