What are the theological assumptions that charge foreign policy? How does theology impact public life abroad? In this episode, theologian Peng Yin (Boston University School of Theology) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to discuss the role of theology and religion in Chinese public life—looking at contemporary foreign policy pitting Atheistic Communist China against Democratic Christian America; the moving story of Christian communist political dissident Lin Zhao; and the broader religious, philosophical, and theological influences on Chinese politics.
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"There were a lot of people with moral courage to resist, to protest the communist revolutions, but few of them had the spiritual resource to question the system as a whole. Many intellectuals really protested the policies of Mao himself, but not the deprivation of freedom, the systematic persecution, the systematic suppression of religion and freedom as a whole—the entire communist system. So I think that's due to Lin Zhao's religious education. It's very helpful to have both moral courage and spiritual theological resource to make certain social diagnosis, which, I think, was available for Lin Zhao. So I would think of her as this exceptional instance of what Christianity can do—both the moral courage and the spiritual resource to resist totalitarianism." (Peng Yin on politically dissident Lin Zhao)
What are the theological assumptions that charge foreign policy? How does theology impact public life abroad? In this episode, theologian Peng Yin (Boston University School of Theology) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to discuss the role of theology and religion in Chinese public life—looking at contemporary foreign policy pitting Atheistic Communist China against Democratic Christian America; the moving story of Christian communist political dissident Lin Zhao; and the broader religious, philosophical, and theological influences on Chinese politics.
Show Notes
About Peng Yin
Peng Yin is a scholar of comparative ethics, Chinese theology, and religion and sexuality. He Assistant Professor of Ethics at Boston University’s School of Theology. He is completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Persisting in the Good: Thomas Aquinas and Early Chinese Ethics. The volume explores the intelligibility of moral language across religious traditions and rethinks Christian teaching on human nature, sacrament, and eschatology. Yin’s research has been supported by the Louisville Institute, Political Theology Network, Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, and Yale’s Fund for Gay and Lesbian Studies.
A recipient of Harvard’s Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Yin teaches “Comparative Religious Ethics,” “Social Justice,” “Mysticism and Ethical Formation,” “Christian Ethics,” “Queer Theology,” and “Sexual Ethics” at STH. At the University, Yin serves as a Core Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and as an Affiliated Faculty in Department of Classical Studies and Center for the Study of Asia. In 2023, Yin will deliver the Bartlett Lecture at Yale Divinity School and the McDonald Agape Lecture at the University of Hong Kong.
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
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Peng Yin: There were a lot of people with moral courage to resist, to protest the communist revolutions, but few of them had a spiritual resource to question the system as a whole. Many intellectuals really protested the policies of Mao himself, but not the deprivation of freedom, the systematic persecution, the systematic suppression of religion and freedom.
as a whole, the entire communist system. So I think that's due to Lin Jiao's religious education. It's very helpful to have both moral courage and spiritual theological resource to make certain social diagnosis, which I think that was available for Lin Jiao. So I would think of her as this exceptional instance of what Christianity can do, both the moral courage and the spiritual resource.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. The gargantuan forces of global superpowers is just mind boggling. The historical context, the closed door conversations between world leaders, the scare tactics and selective messaging of the media.
What hope is there for real understanding? Our guest on the show today is theologian Peng Yin of Boston University, and he observes it's too easy to think in stereotypes. Authoritarianism versus democracy, atheistic materialism versus Christianity, communist China versus Christian America. These generalizations are somehow both boring and uninformative, and at the same time, and perhaps for the same reason, alarming and scary.
And they're in full force right now, thinking about economic competition with China, the threat of a, quote, new Cold War, tensions around Hong Kong and Taiwan. So maybe a narrower focus might help. Peng is asking about the theological assumptions that often charge foreign policy debates. Looking a bit closer at the role of religion and theology.
in Chinese political thought. In this game of global superpowers, it's amazing how certain stories of real human beings can find their way out. One story The Punk shares today is the story of political dissident Lin Zhao. A woman who, from within her Christian and moral convictions, spoke out publicly against communism, advocating human dignity and freedom of speech.
Arrested and imprisoned in 1960, she continued her protests in writing from her cell. Not just in ink, but writing these letters and poems in her own blood, from her pricked finger. She was given the death penalty in 1968, with the Communist Party demanding payment from her family for the bullet that killed her.
Besides narrating a bit of the inspirational story of Lin Jiao as an example of theological influence in Chinese politics, Peng also comments on the 20th century shift from Confucian values for virtue and benevolence toward the violence of modernity. of Maoist totalitarianism. He reflects on the nexus of democracy, equality, and theological principles.
He shares some of the historical impacts of religion in Chinese public life, particularly in Confucianism and Buddhism, and eventually Christianity. And he closes with a quote. Introspectively, reflecting on his own moral sources of hope and inspiration, which arise not from the state, but from a communion of saints.
Thanks for listening today.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Peng, it's really, really great to see you. And I'm thrilled to be able to talk to you in this context. Thanks for joining us. It's very good to be here. I wanted to start by asking you a kind of definitional and motivational question. China figures in the U. S. public imagination in a whole variety of different ways, usually with respect to economics and politics, maybe technology.
I know that you've done quite a bit of thinking about what you call Chinese political theology, and I'm curious if you could say what phenomena does that category help you illuminate? Why is it that thinking in terms of political theology is a helpful way for understanding something important in our world?
Peng Yin: I can think of three motivations for this project. The most immediate one is a historical one, exegetical one. The history of Christian, uh, Chinese political thought has often been narrated in very secular terms, but if one reads the documents, the histories, the archives, you will see religion permeating every dimension of Chinese political thought.
Including the Chinese Communist Party's own ideologies with huge indebtedness and negotiation with Christianity. So there is a desire to understand the theological currents, the religious currents of Chinese political thought. There is also a normative dimension now standing between two empires.
Communist authoritarianism and Christian nationalism. There is a desire for me as a theologian to think outside of those frames, to claim loyalty to neither of them, and to think about their respective competitive claims for superiority, for absolute authority. And third is, as you indicated, there is an international relations dimension.
Much of American foreign policy towards China is framed in terms of Um, this good, democratic, liberal America versus authoritarian, atheistic China. And this has a long history since the Cold War with Soviet Union. So it's very important for us to adjudicate the cogency of that kind of terminology, that kind of rhetoric of new Cold War discourse.
I think for a better relation, a more nuanced relation, uh, with China. We need to think theologically, religiously about those rhetoric.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So you've, you've already said something that surprised me a little, which is that even the articulations of the Chinese Communist Party over the course of its history have been laden with religious elements in one way or another.
And I'm curious if you could say something about what those are. You know, the popular understanding here is that if there's any sort of reference to religion, it's, it's in just sheer Rejection.
Peng Yin: Yeah, the rise of Chinese Communist Party faced a momentous challenge, which is Confucianism, which is a cosmology heavy with religious notions of mandate of heaven, sign of heaven, principle of heaven, all enter heaven.
So in order to compete with that ideology, the Chinese Communist Party has to come up with a similar, something of a similar religious form. Force so they borrowed extensively from Christian utopianism. As Marxist own formulation has been indebted to Christian utopianism has shown, and that notion of a so south figure replaced Confucian do with virtue cultivation to a belief about the super abundant communist future forever.
Postponed into, into indefinite future. So that's a, a ideological construction of a future.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So maybe could you, could you back up and, and give a, a quick sketch of that Confucian frame that you were contrasting it with? Yes. So
Peng Yin: for the, for centuries in China, the chief goal of. Politics is the cultivation of virtues, both in the rulers, but also in the common population, as well as welfare of the state.
There isn't anything utopic, a kind of another world, that's the talos of politics. Chinese Communist Party come to the scene by announcing this future of superabundance, the communist utopia, that as the new talos for political striving. And that for me seems to me to be a competition of, of ideals.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That's really helpful. So then you're seeing the ideal put forward by the communist party as at least formally or structurally similar to Christian patterns of thinking about, like you said, like a soul salvific figure here, not Jesus Christ, but. Perhaps the party.
Peng Yin: And it, despite its empiricist claim in its epistemology, this communist utopia, it's not really for survival.
It's not really open to empirical investigation. It's a belief, right? Rather than something to be realized, uh, here and now.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And that it's always possible that that super abundant future is. just around the corner, that it just hasn't quite come yet. So as long as it's delayed, it could always be still there.
That's, that's what you mean by not falsifiable?
Peng Yin: Yes. At the same time, there is a historical claim by made by many sociologists to religion to say that, um, the communist party did learn from missionaries in terms of organizational structure. So if Confucians for the longest time have been preoccupied with individual self cultivation.
Communist Party now comes to the scene to claim a kind of a collective cultivation, group ethos, asceticism, very deep unification of goals towards a collective aim. Uh, and those are, there's a change in cultural ethos, political ethos as well.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So given this context, how do, or how have Chinese Christians thought about politics and the theological Valence of politics.
Peng Yin: Yes. Being a religious minority, the complex negotiations by Chinese Christians are very hard to pin down. On the one hand, there is embrace of official space being allowed to the Chinese Christians in established churches. There are house churches who seek, uh, Great area in order to survive, but there are also open dissidents, um, especially Christian lawyers who protest state's policy.
I want to emphasize that there is a intrinsic, logical incoherence in the states religious policy, the states. It's a vly, atheistic, and secularist, yet it claims to be able to adjudicate the difference between heterodoxy and orthodoxy, able to insist on. So, how can you be a valid atheist and yet claim a kind of theological expertise and prestige and that really creates, that's the root of the problem for many Chinese Christians.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So the purported idea isn't just we're a valid atheist, we'll permit this church because it's true. friendliest, but rather because it's most authentic is there's a kind of claim to be to making a theological judgment about the various churches?
Peng Yin: Yeah, they claim to be pronouncing theological judgment, but in fact, they are reducing religion in a very functional terms, right?
You are a good religion insofar as you embrace the communist Socialist agenda, you are patriotic, you are pro social. That's good theology. So the autonomy of theology is entirely subsumed to a civilizing, modernizing goals. And that for me is problematic.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: How do you see these sort of tensions being worked out in the present day?
I mean, they're kind of long running now. But in the world right now, what are the kind of live issues for these sort of debates or disagreements or the ways that political theology is at play in Chinese life?
Peng Yin: One thing me as a historian of ideas, as a political theologian want to do is to recover a long view.
Many people want to say that it's the anomaly, it's the uniqueness of Chinese Communist Party who are. Suppressing, constricting religion, but I want to claim that it has been the case since the very start in both imperial forms and post imperial forms across the Republican Communist parties. The state co opting has been there from the very start.
So it amounted to a habit of hearts that's harder to resist than a shifting political party. So a bit perhaps realism is called for in seeking religious freedom. That's one dimension. The other dimension is a very sober shift, a sober realization that the contemporary Chinese Communist Party has shifted from authoritarianism to totalitarianism with Xi Jinping's new policies and his abolishment of term limits.
Um, and the democracies within the party is now undermined, which can create a lot of whimsical religious policies. So this bracing oneself for perhaps most severe persecution is also called for. The third one is to restore certain memories within the history of Chinese Christianity, right? So for example, the historian Lin, uh, Lin, uh, Lin Xi has written a powerful book on Lin Chao.
Um, the only person who openly protested during the Cultural Revolution during the 10 years of Cultural Revolution. So figures like those can perhaps serve as a source of empowerment for Chinese Christians.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Could you tell us a little bit of the story of that protester? I don't know that it will be familiar, it's not familiar to me, honestly.
Peng Yin: So Lin Jiao, it's a very interesting figure who was a communist who favorably pursued the communist agenda. And as a Christian, it was out of her Christian social gospel desires that she joined the communist movement. And she was later disillusioned by its violence, linguistic, bodily, institutional. And because of that, his, her open protest put her to sentence until her, her persecution, fatal persecution.
She would write with her blood during, in the prison during those decades, um, protest. And. The interesting part is that there were a lot of people with moral courage to resist, to protest the communist revolutions, but few of them had the spiritual resource to question the system as a whole. Many intellectuals, uh, really protested the policies of Mao himself, but not the deprivation of freedom, the systematic persecution, the systematic suppression of religion and freedom.
as a whole, the entire communist system. So I think that's due to Lin Zhao's religious education, that she was educated in missionary schools. And so it's, it's very helpful to have both moral courage and spiritual theological resource to make certain social diagnosis, which I think Lin Zhao, that was available for Lin Zhao.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So you mentioned Christian Social Gospel. Could you expand a bit more on on the sort of spiritual resources that she was bringing to her protest?
Peng Yin: Yes, one part of her protest was just how free she was in terms of drawing spiritual resources. Um, her protest is inspired by this Confucian notion that one, Cares for all and heaven.
One worries about the world before everyone else. And the blood letter itself is a Buddhist literature form. And of course, her own impetus was Christian in origin. This notion that democracy is a gift from God, even our life is not just to be fed, but to seek freedom, regardless of consequences, this deontological notion of the need for democracy.
So this freedom for combining religious resources, this non negotiable quality of human freedom, I think for Lin Zhao, still has a lot of contemporary relevance.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: How involved was she in the communist movement before, was it before 1949 that she was involved? And when did she turn? When did her judgment start to shift?
Peng Yin: Yeah, that's a very interesting theological question. I mentioned she was enamored by the social gospel movement, thinking that communism and Christianity could be spoken in one breath. These were almost synonymous. But seeing the fragile human nature displayed in communist violence, she began to question the kingdom coming to earth progressively in a linear, civilizing manner, and decided to opt for millennium, or more radical break in terms of the coming of the kingdom, not just the total history realizing God's kingdom, but perhaps in certain rapturous movements.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So her interaction with the historical developments in her context went hand in hand with this kind of development and shifting of her, what we'd say in theology, her eschatological perspectives, not, uh, from a kind of progressivist where you might hope that the revolution is a real step towards the realization of God's kingdom on earth to something that involves a more critical stance towards historical progress and historical changes.
Yeah, exactly. That's fascinating. And how do we know her story?
Peng Yin: Oh, it's a turn of historical irony because the communist party needed to persecute the political prisoners. So they capped assiduously the record of all the writings of the prisoners, however revolution, counter revolutionary, however critical.
Those documents were about the state of Mao himself. So because of some conscientious party members after the 1978 reform and opening up, so a lot of these prisoners were given, uh, the, the cases were turned. Uh, the, the documents was returned to the family and the family distributed the documents, some to the Hoover Institution at Stanford, others to professional historians.
And that's how we got them.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Wow. Okay. So it's the kind of the bureaucratization of persecution leads at some level to the, the availability of this critique of, wow, that's, that's an amazing story. Thank you for sharing it with us as we, as we look at a figure like that, I guess personally, how do you think of her as kind of a hero of the past, an exemplar, a prophet, what, what sort of.
Where does she figure in your imagination for, for our lives today?
Peng Yin: I think I agree with the historian, her biographer, Lian Xi, that she's a martyr. We shouldn't idealize her as a saint. She herself participated in some of the earlier communist violences, which she regretted deeply. We also shouldn't think of her as this model for every Christian.
Because we don't want all Christians to, Chinese Christians, to sacrifice their lives in this martyrdom complex. So I would think of her as this exceptional instance of what Christianity can do that both the moral courage and the spiritual resource to resist totalitarianism. It's very much an individual call rather than obligation, spiritual obligation.
So the council of perfection may be rather than.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, she exemplifies a vocation, not, not the kind of essential facts of discipleship or something like that. Maybe to shift gears a little bit and go from, from the story of an individual to stories that people are telling about the world right now. You have, have used the term, the new Cold War discourse to talk about some of the ways that contemporary discussions of international relations.
Go today. I wonder if you could give us a little overview of what that term means, what, what that discourse is, and then a bit of your assessment of the extent to which it's, it's getting things right or is somehow distorting the state of affairs and, and, and, and. Putting our focus in the wrong place.
Peng Yin: Yes.
I name made a new Cold War discourse because I don't want to say that it's a reality or that's where the history is going. The present is going to head into, um, this is very much on the lips of American diplomats. For example, just the past Sunday at the time of recording, 60 Minutes did a episode on. U.
S. China competition interviewed the Ambassador of China. The episode ended with this allusion to the Cold War and with the Ambassador saying that this is a battle of ideas. This is a competition of ideas versus democracy. Democracy versus authoritarianism. So this is very much in the mind of American diplomats.
This is not purely economic, military, but it's a battle of ideology, battle of ideals. My own sense, my own worry about this kind of idea is that it can become a self fulfilling prophecy. But it also exonerates oneself, right? At the moment America position itself as purely democratic, then it has to see other regimes in an all or nothing manner, right?
It fails to see democracy as a talos, as a striving, as a goal, as a labor, as work, as a Uh, negotiation as discernment, right? It's not a finished identity. It's not a finished product. So to think of the world in such absolute hierarchies is to be self righteous. We have Rahul Nibar himself, many decades ago, warning us against that kind of notion.
It also assumes a kind of incompatibility between China and U. S. It assumes, so this is also, A later stage for, for, for the past few decades, uh, American foreign policy towards China has used a kind of evolutionary thinking, assuming a kind of universal human nature. And in the words of George W. Bush, thinking that there is a providential, dimension.
The moment people become more well off, become more middle class, they will become more democratic, right? That's the impetus for US to push China to join the WTO. So all these ideas, foreign policies are simply charged with theological assumptions that I think we need to investigate very carefully.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: You spoke rather movingly about democracy as an ideal right now.
Would you be willing to share some of your own theological and moral convictions that, that underlie that way of imagining democracy?
Peng Yin: Yeah, this is a poignant personal story. Perhaps those of us who escape a totalitarian regime in search of democracy have in recent years, for obvious reasons, encountered a kind of disillusionment.
This is no longer democracy, perhaps oligarchy. We know voter suppression. We know campaign financing overwhelmingly determine election results. We know all sorts of suppressions and democratic decays in Euro American world. So that's one. One sense why I think democracy is this ceaseless project and ideal.
The other sense is the latest incarnation of liberal democracy has hidden within itself a number of problems. For example, equality is increasingly defined in terms of equality of opportunity rather than outcome. So opportunity, the language of equality of opportunity is used to justify scandalous inequalities.
Outcome. Freedom is increasingly defined in terms of liberty of capital and consumption, and that is a recipe for enormous inequality. So democracy for me is a very ambivalent term. It cannot be a badge of honor that one can carry safely 24 7.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Less a badge of honor and more a task or a work to be undertaken.
We've talked a good bit about the contemporary state of things. Could you tell me a little more about that long history of political theology in China, how it's been there all along?
Peng Yin: Yeah, if we think about Chinese political authority being shaped by Confucianism. And if we think about the imperial authority being sustained by Confucian cosmologies, for example, the emperor as the sole mediator between heaven and earth, the emperor has the sole prerogative of making sacrifices for heaven, and the emperor himself given The semi divine title D.
It's very clear that imperial authority across centuries have been sustained by theological notion, especially in terms of the emperor's relation to the ancestors of gods and spirits, his religious power, and that's creating a political ethos of uniformity, orderliness, hierarchy, conformity, continuity, shareability, negotiation, harmony, right?
Does this political ethos were very Confucius, but. There were many challenges, for example, from philosophical Taoism, very much regarding personal freedom, questioning Confucian meritocracy, there were,
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: How early does that crop up?
Peng Yin: From the very start, so these are During the warring states, there were a lot of different political conceptions, Confucianism, uh, merging with legalism one the day.
But there were other notions of moist justice or Daoist, or pro proto Daoist notions of personal freedom. Uh, were there from the various start and later religious doism, which actually have protests. a revolt. So this, this worry about popular revolt has been both a philosophical, political question as well as historical reality.
There's also an interesting fact that Daoism, religious Daoism, permeated the imperial courts. Many emperors were relying on Daoist specialists to predict omens and to think about, to seek drugs for immortality. And that very seeking for immortality, they will seek a recipe which is available for commoners and emperors alike, served as a contradiction to the images of immortality and divine figure that's assiduously maintained by the imperial ideology, Buddhism.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So the ideology says the, the, the emperor is, is kind of ideologically, Immortal, but the flesh and blood emperor has to look for it. And if you have to look for it, you don't already have it.
Peng Yin: It has to look for it like everyone else, right? Going, going on big trips and to see certain religious specialists living in reclusive mountains.
Buddhism also played in a very important roles and Buddhist practices, for example, Sangha, celibacy. Refusal for conscription or paying homage to emperor or devoting themselves to so called wasteful practices. Those are all affronts to Confucian ideologies, right? So Buddhism has historically served as this positing of an alternative way of life, the polis, the Confucian Political realm is not the NLMB or political striving, human striving.
And of course, Christianity had, had, had a huge influence. We, the founding of the first republic of China after the Qing dynasty was a Christian. So, uh, Some of the later presidents. We tend to, and a very, very interesting story is this Taiping Rebellion, which might not be very well known for your listeners.
It's this very interesting heterodox popular revolt with 20 million lives lost, perhaps the most tragic, the most deadly popular revolt in human history period. And the theology there is interesting, right? The leader thinks that. During the Aryan Controversy, the Council of Nasir was wrong. Arius was right that their, the, the, the revelation understanding of God sitting in heaven is not figurative, metaphorical, it's actual.
And he therefore imagined himself or claimed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus. And thus, occupying this undisputed authority. Um, so you see a, a kind of heterodox Christian belief ended up founding the largest popular revolt in China, which is a really astonishing thing to remember. Um, the other part of Christianity's influence is the sense that Christianity has, uh, we, we tend to focus on the influence of Christianity on the converts, but it had wide, widespread influence among the non converts.
As I mentioned, Westernization, modernization were synonymous, and these people began to import Christianity as the model for what religion is truly is, and Christianity maybe even is the secret for Western modernization. dominance in the world. So they used Christianity as the model to judge indigenous religions, and they began to think, as missionaries have judged, that it's the idolatrous pagan Chinese religions that doomed China's weak status.
And so they began to smash temples and destroy Confucian canons and so on and so forth. So for the longest time, the distinction, the imperial distinction, the worry is, To judge between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, now the worry, the concern is to adjudicate between religion and superstition. And that's a momentous shift, and that shift has to do with Christianity as this model of religion.
We all know religion is very foreign term, it's a late invention, and that really had a huge impact on Chinese religious life.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: How do authorities today relate to this complicated history of diverse theological and religious claims and ways of life cropping up and influencing Chinese public life?
Peng Yin: That's a very helpful question with very little noted political consequences because the Chinese Communist Party right now claims to retrieve Confucianism, a very selective retrieval of Confucianism as a legitimating force.
With that assumes a certain level of ideological purity, right? This is a native religion, the native Confucianism marrying with communist ideals and communist ideologies. Uh, with that is the. Exclusive claims or the sense that Buddhist, Christian, Daoist, Islamic, religious ideas didn't contribute to China's political thought and certainly wouldn't contribute to the communist ways of operating in the world.
Associated with that is perhaps a transhistorical notion of Chineseness as. territorially bounded, but also arising out of history, very stable boundary. And that, for me, is a premise of China's treatment of Taiwan or South China Sea. But it's also a premise for a certain notion of cultural distinctiveness or even cultural superiority compared to its Euro American counterparts, or The sense that because we're so unique, we're not amenable for foreign external criticisms.
So oneself by positioning oneself as this Confucian pure core amounted to the result of immunity from external criticism, right? This idea that you can be harmonious without conformity very much served as one's exemption from external critique.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So how, how do you, as somebody who has studied this diverse history and is thinking about the contemporary world and implications as somebody who comes from China and lives in the United States.
And so straddles kind of intellectually, personally, spiritually, the various divides that we've talked about. Where do you look for hope and direction as you try to navigate?
Peng Yin: Ryan, for this question, this moment of introspection. Many Chinese Christians escaped China during moments of persecution, especially after the 1989 Tiananmen movement. and also know that many people began to conjure up ideals about the West as the As this undisputed good to judge their own native land, I find myself in some way very different from them.
Instead of finding my new inspiration from a particular land, space, nation, state, I find myself distancing from those spaces and perhaps assuming a kind of negative theology, this anti idolatrous theology. The notion that God's judgment is beyond this world, God's desire for human happiness is not simply embodied in one particular nation in an ambiguous term.
So this perhaps breeds a kind of pilgrimage sensibility, as Augustine would say, or resident alien sensibility, as Stanley Howes would say. At the same time, Imagining more trans historically, more globally in terms of a communion of saints, Oscar Romero, Lim Chow, Dorothy Day, these, these Christians with whom I form a communion across history, and that's my moral source.
Instead of the Particular performance of a particular nation state.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Peng, thank you so much for coming and chatting with me today. I've learned a lot and I know our listeners will too. Of course.
Peng Yin: It's been a pleasure.
Evan Rosa: This is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologian Peng Yin and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, production assistants by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.
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