Liu Xiaofeng (academic)

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Liu Xiaofeng (born 1956; Chinese: 刘小枫) is a contemporary Chinese scholar and a professor at Renmin University of China. He has been considered the prototypical example of a cultural Christian (Chinese: 文化基督徒; pinyin: wénhuà jīdūtú), a believer who may lack a specific church identification or affiliation, and was, along with He Guanghu, one of the main forerunners of the academic field of Sino-Christian Theology (simplified Chinese: 汉语神学; traditional Chinese: 漢語神學; pinyin: hànyǔ shénxué).[1]

Biography

Liu Xiaofeng was born to a petite bourgeois family in Chongqing, China, in 1956.[2]: 178  After graduating from high school, Liu was sent to labor in a nearby village as part of the Down to the Countryside Movement.[2]: 179 

He completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in German language and literature at Sichuan International Studies University before beginning his Master of Arts in aesthetics at Peking University in 1982, completing it in 1985. At Peking University, Liu's studies focused on German philosophy.[2]: 167 

Liu's earliest academic writing focused on German Romanticism.[2]: 167 

He later received a scholarship to study at the University of Basel in Switzerland in April 1989, where he completed his Ph.D in Christian theology in 1993 on a theological investigation into Max Scheler's phenomenology and critique of modernity.[3] He also undertook an extensive translation effort of historical and contemporary Christian texts. He returned to Hong Kong in 1993 as a research fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.[2]: 185  Describing himself as a cultural Christian, Liu advocated Christian ethics as moral instruction for contemporary Chinese society.[2]: 185 

By the late 1990s, Liu concluded that his seeking of a Christian transcendence beyond politics risked becoming a secular liberalism.[2]: 168  Liu changed his stance and focused on the conservative political theology of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss and their exchanges on the theological basis of political authority.[2]: 168  On the basis of their work, Liu contended that reasserting a Confucian religion against secular Western enlightenment could guide moral conduct and national politics in China.[2]: 168 

In the 2000s, supporters of this position gravitated towards Liu and circles of Chinese Straussians became active in Guangzhou and Beijing.[2]: 168  These Chinese Straussians sought to promote classical learning, create elite liberal arts educational institutions, and opposed what they deemed as the harmful influence of Western liberal values in Chinese academia.[2]: 168  In 2009, Liu created the Center for Classic Studies at Renmin University.[2]: 199 

In 2013, Liu stated that the Confucian roots of the Chinese Revolution should be studied, and that Mao Zedong should be regarded as a "sage-king" and "founding father" of the socialist republic.[2]: 168  Liu contended that the "spiritual trauma" of 20th Century China was attributable to the harmful influence of republicanism which diminished spiritual solidarity and led to civil war.[2]: 201 

Writings

Liu's work encompasses the disciplines of theology, political philosophy, and aesthetics.[2]: 167 

Liu's second published monograph, Salvation and Easiness (1988), called to cast off Sino-Western cultural differences to confront the fundamental question of ultimate values.[2]: 182 

Liu's works played an important role in the development of the Sino-Christian theology movement.[2]: 167–168  Liu became well known for his critique of Confucian ethics as inferior to the other-worldly focus of the Judeo-Christian tradition.[2]: 167  Liu was widely viewed as one of the most prominent cultural Christians.[2]: 168 

Liu's essay Sino-Christian Theology and the Philosophy of History advocated that Chinese Christians should abandon their "obsession with 'indigenization' and 'Sinicization'" to accept the miraculous birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a divine revelation which "transcends all national-historical categories".[2]: 186–187  According to this essay, any culturalist trend to illustrate the Christ Event with Chinese examples would collapse the boundary between "the word of God" and "the word of man".[2]: 187 

A modern writer commented, "Liu's writings have had a major impact in China not only on those Chinese who think of themselves as Christian, but on those who are interested in broad analysis of China in the context of the world's current cultural and philosophical era."[4] However, his interpretation of Strauss and other modern Western thinkers has been criticized as one-sided and even deeply flawed, with critics claiming that his defense of the Chinese Communist Party, and Mao Zedong in particular, does not go well together with Christianity, nor with Classical Western civilization as described by Strauss and his disciples.[5]

References

  1. ^ Fällman, Fredrik (2008). Salvation and Modernity: Intellectuals and Faith in Contemporary China. Lanham, MA: University Press of America. pp. 21–39. ISBN 9780761840909.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u Tu, Hang (2025). Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past. Harvard University Asia Center. ISBN 9780674297579.
  3. ^ Fällman, Salvation and Modernity, 32.
  4. ^ Aikman, David (2003). Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc. p. 251. ISBN 978-1-59698-025-9.
  5. ^ Marchal, Kai (2017). Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in the Chinese-speaking World: Reorienting the Political. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. ISBN 978-1498536264..