Christianity and Confucianism: Culture, Faith and Politics

Christianity and Confucianism: Culture, Faith and Politics, sets comparative textual analysis against the backcloth of 2000 years of cultural, political, and religious interaction between China and the West. As the world responds to China's rise and China positions herself for global engagement, this major new study reawakens and revises an ancient conversation. As a generous introduction to biblical Christianity and the Confucian Classics, Christianity and Confucianism tells a remarkable story of mutual formation and cultural indebtedness. East and West are shown to have shaped the mind, heart, culture, philosophy and politics of the other - and far more, perhaps, than either knows or would want to admit. Christopher Hancock has provided a rich and stimulating resource for scholars and students, diplomats and social scientists, devotees of culture and those who pursue wisdom and peace today.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Abbreviations Acknowledgements Preface Introduction: Images, Issues and Impressionism 1. Confucius, 'The Master', and Cultural Decay 2. Jesus, 'The Christ', and Spiritual Renewal 3. Heaven, Earth and 'Harmony' 4. Humanity, Society and the Search for Worth 5. Character, Purpose and Morality: China and Enlightenment Habits and Values 6. Truth and Truthfulness: The 19th-Century Crisis in China and the West 7. Memory, Rite and Tradition: The Chinese Origin of a Western Movement 8. Sickness, Death and the Afterlife: On Making Sense of Everything and Nothing Conclusion Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Christopher Hancock (PhD) is former Dean of Bradford Cathedral, UK, and is Director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in China, King's College, London, UK

Review :
An extraordinary piece of scholarship. It contains and constitutes an entire curriculum for comparative cultural studies, Confucian Christian dialogue, ecumenical theology, besides which it is beautifully written and a great pleasure to read. I expect that it will a fundamental part of the curriculum in Sino-Christian study programs. Hancock's prodigious study of the long and multifarious relationship between China and the West constructs a vivid image of how intellectual and religious exchange between cultures equivocates, evolves, and harmonizes. This work brings together an impressive panoply of voices, from Confucius to Derrida, to illustrate how the global trade of ideas, as he puts it, has produced “millennia of mutual formation and interaction.” This deeply researched and lively work shall be among the most important contributions to our understanding of Sino-Western exchange. One of the ways we make sense of the present is through narration of the past. Telling the story of the complex dialogue between China's Confucian tradition and Christianity is mutually illuminating: it provides a deep, historic sense of rootedness to the form and order of contemporary East-West engagement. Christopher Hancock offers several fascinating historical cameos of Confucian-Christian dialogue that make this volume of value to readers inside and outside the Academy. Christopher Hancock offers us a uniquely accessible, scholarly and comprehensive consideration of the interaction between Confucianism and Christianity. He rightly stresses that the mutual influence of China and the West is old and complex, involving much convergence, while not losing the fascination of the different. His focus on a shared Christian-Confucian link of a virtue-ethic with a unified transcendence and on the primacy of peaceful harmony opens out a space of hope for our single global future. The common pursuit of human wisdom and the borrowings and insights shared between China and the West over two millennium stand out vividly in Christopher Hancock's masterful cultural history of Christianity and Confucianism. The range and depth of the work are remarkable. The ideas of the 'founding fathers' of their respective cultures are discussed authoritatively and sympathetically, as are the issues and dilemmas – including the self, society, meaning and the afterlife – that thinkers in both 'camps' have wrestled with over the centuries. Here is wisdom writ large, the fruit of a global exchange in ideas all too easily overlooked at a time of rivalry and mutual incomprehension between China and the West. Hancock has made a major contribution in the history of ideas as well as the comparative study of cultures. A rich treasure store which shows in particular how Europeans at the dawn of the modern era began to engage with the world view which has done so much to shape the Chinese identity.