Christianity’s Asian Future

DAVID ARMSTRONG

“The most holy one of great wisdom is equal to emptiness,” wrote the author of the seventh century CE text Discourse on the One God. “He cannot be grasped. Only this one God is everywhere.” Which God are we talking about here?

In general, the language of “Emptiness” (Sanskrit: śunyata) in philosophical contexts is Buddhist and Daoist in origin. The manuscript is Chinese, and was discovered by twentieth century archaeologists in Dunhuang, still a city today in Western China with a population of just under 200,000. In another epoch, the city sat at a key pivot on the Silk Road, connecting the Indian subcontinent, China, Mongolia, and what is now greater Russia.

Buddhism was the Silk Road religion in the East: varieties of Mahayana, such as the Zen tradition, developed the language of emptiness as a key philosophical position. Essential to Buddhism is the Buddha’s teaching of anatta or anatman, “no-self,” the notion that there is no substantial, unchanging self beneath the stream of mutable phenomena we usually misperceive as a self (bodies, thoughts, etc.). Emptiness, especially as developed by the Buddhist metaphysician Nagarjuna (ca. 150-250 CE), was a way of expanding that observation to say that everything is devoid of substantial content, that there are no fundamental essences underlying the phenomenal world. Instead, all such essences are merely conventional, and everything interpenetrates everything else. 

Hence, Emptiness has a positive spin as a kind of nondualism: the emptiness of things means that everything, including the liberation of enlightenment and the freedom of nirvana, is already present to everyone, and is not locked away in some other world. Thus Emptiness also became the basis for the concept that the true nature of everything is really Buddha Nature, i.e., empty, luminous consciousness. For Mahayana Buddhists, this nondual, empty awareness is the true character of reality, the real content of liberation, and the potency of all sentient beings to be Buddhas. 

“Absence” (Chinese: Wu), a conceptual synonym to Buddhist Emptiness, is also an important metaphysical principle in Daoist literature—recurring a few times, for instance, in the Tao Te Ching and in later writings. In the Daoist tradition, Absence has this name “because it has no particular form”; and yet, it “shapes itself into the individual forms we know, the ten thousand things, then reshapes itself into other forms in the constant process of change.” It is for this reason that Mahayana and Daoism were blended together in the Zen tradition of Buddhism, in which “Absence” is equated with Emptiness or Buddha Nature. 

The reader would be forgiven, then, for thinking that the “God” of the Discourse quoted above is either a personification of or a metaphor for Emptiness as imagined by Buddhists and Daoists, who otherwise typically describe reality in non-theistic ways (though gods exist in both; they simply are not ultimate). That’s exactly what’s going on, but the author was neither a Buddhist nor a Daoist. The author of the Discourse was a Christian, and the God being talked about here is the God and Father of Jesus Christ.

Scholars pick 635 as the year of composition because its command of Chinese is poor, suggesting an early stab at translation from East Syriac, likely coinciding with the arrival of the Christian monk Aluoben in Western China. For context, the death of the Prophet Muhammad, traditionally dated to 632 but pushed by some scholars to 634, had just happened; the Third Council of Constantinople would not take place for another 45 years. And yet here were Christians, pushing their way to the far edges of the Silk Roads and beginning to operate in the languages of South and East Asia, talking about God as generative, formless “Emptiness” like Buddhists and Daoists.

We also see this tactic, of communicating Christianity through the language of philosophies and religions that were already popular in China, in the Jingjiao Stele, composed ca. 781 in Western China. The title translates as “the luminous religion,” which is the name Christianity was known by in the region. The Stele, like the Discourse, calls God “the one who is profound reality and spiritual emptiness, the one who is after all and has mysterious existence,” and identifies Jesus as “the illustrious and honorable messiah” who “established, through the pure Spirit of the Trinity, the new religion of no words.” Christianity itself is “[t]he true and everlasting Way,” “wonderful,” and “very difficult to name.” The reader is told that “Its meritorious results are luminously displayed, and we are forced to call it the Luminous Religion,” whose “holy ones” clearly resemble a variety of recognized monastic profiles from Chinese society. This is, in other words, a Christianity that a Chinese Buddhist or Daoist could fully understand and appreciate without having to significantly change their conceptual vocabulary. 

Who were these Christians? Orthodox and Catholic heresiology derides them as “Nestorians.” Over the centuries, the members of this community, the Church of the East–which persists as the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldaean Catholic Church–have adopted the term for themselves, effectively reappropriating it. But the name exaggerates the importance of Nestorius in their tradition (which was actually quite marginal), and it also overlooks Nestorius’s own perception that he had been vindicated at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, as recounted in the Bazaar of Heracleides, his only extant work. 

To dismiss these Christians merely because of their association with Nestorius would be to miss out on rich aspects of our Christian tradition. One way of understanding the controversy surrounding Nestorius is to see it as part of the rivalry between the theological academies of Alexandria (where figures like Athanasius and Cyril were taught) and Antioch (the training ground of Theodore of Mopsuestia and John Chrysostom). Antioch’s geographic proximity to the Syriac-speaking East, and to scholarly cities of deep Christian learning like Edessa and Nisibis, meant that Antiochene Christology was dominant in those regions and that language (a late form of Aramaic, one of Jesus’s daily tongues). Hence, Nestorius’s condemnation, which is still treated by Catholic and Orthodox Christians in their sacred histories as a major event, only registered among Christians in Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Iran because it constituted a rejection of their intellectual lineage. 

Beginning in the eighth century, shortly after the Discourse was written, the patriarch of the Church of the East lived in what is now central Iraq, and he was at least theoretically the head of Christians as distant as the Western Chinese steppe. For all the Catholic-Orthodox infighting there has been about legitimate succession to the ancient Church, both claims are simply dwarfed by the premodern immensity of the Church of the East, which boasted millions beyond the borders of the Roman Empire at its height. 

This church and its missionary accomplishment were the stuff of legend for Western Christians for centuries. The full extent of the synthesis is lost to us now in the wake of the church’s decline, but the picture that emerges from the sources that do remain is of a Christian tradition thoroughly engaged with other faiths and philosophies indigenous to Asia, one that fit right in among the various cultures that East Syrian Christians sojourned among. When Rabban Bar-Sauma (1220-1290), a Uyghr Christian monk, made his own “Journey to the West” from China to Jerusalem, and then on to Rome, as an ambassador of the Church of the East, it was a seismic news story for late medieval Europe. When around the same time Marco Polo (c. 1254-1324) traveled on behalf of the court of Kublai Khan, he met Nestorian Christians in the Khanate’s borders. Significantly, later Christian missionaries from the West, primarily Catholic and Protestant, would be less accommodating to the indigenous cultures of Asia and less appreciative of the humanistic and religious wisdom already present there. 

The Christianity that is now rapidly growing in Asia can be described in a similar way. Its cultural and intellectual origins are Western, derived from European Catholicism and American evangelical Protestantism. Yet like the premodern Nestorians, modern Christians in China, India, and Southeast Asia are, together with Christians in the rest of the Global South like Africa and Central and South America, the fastest-growing Christian body in the world. China, for example, is on track to encompass the largest population of Christians in the world by 2030. This raises the question: will Christianity’s future in Asia be that of an Asian religion, or a Western religion in Asia?

This demographic, religious trend is part and parcel of the wider angst for the “Asian century”: that is, the cultural and economic shift of the world’s global center to the Asia-Pacific in light of the cultural ascendance of countries like China, Japan, and India. My concern, though, is that whether or not we have an “Asian century” politically and economically, a Christian “Asian century” seems doomed to be a Western export in Asian lands. It doesn’t have to be this way; the alternative is a genuinely inculturated, indigenous product of synthesis between Christianity and its new-old intellectual environments—in spiritual ecosystems still inhabited by brahmanic deities, bodhisattvas, immortal sages, magic, and folk religion (but also, more recently, by atheistic secularism). My hope for Christian communities in Asia is that their experience will be one more like their premodern forbears than like those of their more modern ancestors: one defined by dialogue, sharing, and, yes, rich syncretism.

I acknowledge that for some Christians, including for many Asian Christians themselves, that hope will raise an alarm. Am I trying to dilute the purity of the gospel with accommodation of non-Christian religions and philosophies? But we should recall that Mediterranean and Near Eastern Christianity became what it did by the same means, assimilating the intellectual sophistication and conceptual catalog of Greco-Roman philosophy to reimagine the meaning of its originating Jewish apocalyptic movement. Indeed, doing so offered the language that made possible certain ideas that now mark Christianity as a global faith, like the dogmas of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the union of divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ. 

So why not expect a similar gift of perennial import to come from the Christian dialogue with Daoism, Buddhism, or Hinduism, not to mention Islam and Sikhism? Why not, for example, see the possibility of describing God’s nature as “Emptiness” not just as a local oddity of Asian Christianity?

Certainly, the language of God as “Emptiness” can be jarring for Westerners–among whom, from this global perspective, the “Eastern” Orthodox have to counterintuitively count themselves–but it also might have much to offer us. For example, God as generative “Emptiness” offers a way out of some of the modern debates in theology about the unknowability of God’s essence. This is not even a totally alien idea from the Orthodox tradition itself: one way that Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite describes God is as “the all, and no thing” (DN I.6), as “unconfined by form” (IV.3), as the basis for “the interrelationship of all things,” the “intermingling of everything,” and the “unceasing emergence of things” (IV.7). 

These are all ideas represented in Buddhist and Daoist traditions, precisely by the language of “Emptiness”--which is why the authors of the Discourse and the Stele drew on those terms. The possibilities of an Asian future for Christianity then come from asking ourselves: what else do those traditions and others say that can enrich our experience of Christianity through integration? In that vein, one hopes that the Asian Christianity of the future will instead be the kind that is able to find new syntheses with traditional and modern Asian cultures that are as winsome, critically informed, and imaginative as the God who, himself formless, continually generates ever new and marvelous forms of being, mind, and life.