Convinced by Alopen of the validity of the Christian faith, Taitsung ordered the building of a monastery and the translation of some Christian papers the monks had carried with them. By 638, just three years after Alopen’s arrival, at least 21 monks were active in China. In the course of time, Persian monks (who became fluent in the languages of the places where they settled) translated the New Testament and portions of the Old Testament into Chinese. Being highly educated, they also produced Christian literature that appealed to the Chinese nobility. For example, Jesus Messiah Sutra, the main text produced by Alopen on instigation by Emperor Taitsung, described Christ’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection, endorsed monotheism, and attacked idolatry.

In 635, Emperor Taitsung (598–649) of China found Christianity so impressive that he wrote: “The meaning of the teaching has been carefully examined; it is mysterious, wonderful, calm; it fixes the essentials of life and perfection; it is the salvation of living beings; it is the wealth of man. It is right that it should spread through the empire.”
He had first heard about Christ from a Persian monk, Alopen, who walked all the way to the capital of China (today’s Xi’an) to bring the gospel to the Chinese. He was probably sent by Patriarch Ishoyahb II of Baghdad, who also sent missionaries to Iran, Afghanistan, Ubzekistan, and India. Most likely, Alopen had been ordained a bishop because he was able to appoint men to pastor the churches he founded. What little we know about his arrival in China and the history of the work that followed is recorded on a monument erected in Xi’an in 781 and discovered in 1625.
The Church of the East
Alopen was one of the many missionaries of the so-called Church of the East, a church that flourished well before the Roman Emperor Constantine I recognized Christianity in the west. Like other missionaries to the east, Alopen probably traveled along the Old Silk Road, a route followed by merchants. Carrying only a staff, a satchel, and a copy of the Scriptures, these missionaries stopped in monasteries other monks had built along the way. In fact, Timothy I (727-823), one of the most influential patriarchs of the Church of the East and great promoter of missions, used the simple life of these monks as an example to shame a bishop who wished to retire in comfort in Baghdad.
The Church of the East first blossomed in Edessa (now Urfa, Turkey) and in the renowned theological school of Nisibis (today’s Nusaybin, Turkey), where the famous poet Ephrem[1] served as deacon. It continued to thrive in what is now eastern Turkey and Iraq.
It’s often known as the Nestorian Church, even though its connections with Nestorius are tenuous at best. The name is probably due to the fact that this church refused to recognize the 431 Council of Ephesus where Nestorius was condemned for his views of the two natures of Christ. For the most part, however, the reason for this refusal was cultural rather than theological. It was a way to assert the church’s independence from the Byzantine Empire. (While it’s true that Nestorianism spread to the eastern regions, many scholars agree that defining the Church of the East as Nestorian is unfair).
The Church of the East held its first official council in 410. In 424, it declared its independence from the west. The official language of the Church of the East was Syriac (a form of Aramaic), one of the first languages in which the Scriptures were translated. By the eighth century, this church had spread over much of Asia and Arabia, becoming the most widely spread church in the world.

Read More

Evangelicals require a new strategy for understanding whether a theological “meeting of the minds”—that is, fellowship in the truest and deepest sense—can be possible between those who disagree about political and cultural issues. 

Two Questions on Authority
Over the last several years, American evangelicalism has become increasingly divided. And while that claim is certainly nothing new—particularly for readers of American Reformer—what’s particularly striking about this rift is how ambiguously defined the core concern still seems to be. Political commentators, to be sure, have been keen to lay the blame at President Donald Trump’s feet, arguing that the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were crucial litmus tests.1 But that causal story does little to explain why these disagreements have lingered into 2022, with Trump no longer on the ballot. Whatever is driving this cleavage within the evangelical movement, it is something larger than electoral politics.
The obvious answer to this question, for many, would be the rise of “wokeness” or “cultural Marxism” or “progressivism” or something similar—a novel “successor ideology”2 diametrically opposed to Christianity in critical ways, and now spreading like a virus through congregations and other institutions. This ideology, for its part, is understood in terms of the distinctive complex of political beliefs and values dominant within secular white-collar environments in contemporary America: a strong emphasis on the salience of race, valorization of marginalized or “subaltern” groups on the basis of the fact that they are the subaltern, an embrace of “intersectionality,” and so forth.
There have been many efforts in recent years to nail down a workable definition of this thing called “wokeness.” And those efforts are entirely understandable. After all, to define a thing is to wield power over it. (A familiar trope of horror literature is that a demon can’t be exorcised until its name is known.) Defining “wokeness”—and in particular, defining it against Christian orthodoxy—allows a clear line in the sand to be drawn between Christians and the “woke.”
But it is time to confront an important fact: these efforts have largely failed, because no one actually agrees on what counts as “wokeness.” There is no catch-all definition of the term that can do the work that many evangelicals want it to do. Indeed, the quest for such a definition—at least within a Christian context—may be futile in principle.
Now, that observation certainly isn’t meant to suggest that the concerns of many evangelicals about the trajectory of their denominations and institutions are misguided. They are not. Rather, ongoing efforts to distill a fixed “essence of wokeness,” which can then be used as a criterion for categorizing individuals as either “woke” or “Christian,” are probably destined to fail, for reasons that are distinctive to the Christian tradition.
Without a better understanding of what is actually meant by “wokeness,” evangelicals concerned about the disintegration of their institutions risk stumbling into the dynamic that writer Samuel James has called “the hamster wheel of anti-wokeness,” in which “[m]istakes and misjudgments by major evangelical institutions galvanize the anti-woke into periodic mobility, which lead them into their own overstatements and exaggerations, which in turn give credibility back to mainstream evangelical leaders.”3 No progress in understanding is made, relationships are damaged, and the Church suffers for it.
Accordingly, evangelicals require a new strategy for understanding whether a theological “meeting of the minds”—that is, fellowship in the truest and deepest sense—can be possible between those who disagree about political and cultural issues. This strategy must be one that takes the how of theological reasoning every bit as seriously as the conclusions reached through that reasoning. And it is a strategy that relies on just two very simple questions.
But first, some groundwork must be laid.
In his popular recent volume Christianity and Wokeness, Owen Strachan defines “wokeness” as “[t]he state of being consciously aware of and ‘awake’ to the hidden, race-based injustices that pervade all of American society; this term has also been expanded to refer to the state of being ‘awake’ to injustices that are gender-based, class-based, etc.”4 For present purposes, this definition will suffice as a reasonably representative one.
Arguments against this “wokeness” tend to rely heavily on origin stories, which often look something like this: First, there was Western civilization, in all its strength and glory. Then came an evil influence from outside, an intellectual poison that ensnared the minds of the unwary. And it was a one-way train from there to the toxic, cancellation-happy culture that predominates today.
But there are at least two different historical stories, or genealogies, of “wokeness.” And assuming there are certain elements of truth in each, one is left with a messy intellectual account that does not make for effective polemics, and left without a stable criterion for maintaining doctrinal boundaries in practice.
The first narrative—the “discontinuity narrative”—lays the blame at the feet of 1960s-era academics, many of whom were disillusioned Marxists, who are accused of introducing a disruptive poison into the West.5 According to some versions of this narrative, Marx’s account of economic oppression was transposed into a “cultural” key, honed and refined by the Frankfurt School, and mainstreamed in Western universities.6 Where this narrative controls, those opposed to “wokeness” tend to think of it as a kind of heathenism, an anti-Christian rival faith. (The best-known version of a narrative like this one is probably Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories.)
The second narrative—the “continuity narrative”—locates the seeds of “wokeness” within the Christian tradition itself. Friedrich Nietzsche was keen to point out that Christianity has always been particularly concerned for the oppressed—and indeed, the faith’s care for the vulnerable and downtrodden was one of the key factors that distinguished early Christianity from its Roman pagan surroundings. As Joshua Mitchell argues in American Awakening, it is not difficult to see echoes of this concern for justice—for a final eschatological reckoning and the casting down of the mighty from their high places, one might say—in contemporary political discourse that often gets characterized as “woke.”7 Where this narrative dominates, critics of “wokeness” see their target less as heathenism—a rival faith—than as heresy, a “sub-Christian” deviation ultimately springing from a common root.
The difference between these two narratives can be summarized simply: Is “wokeness” a self-conscious subversion of the Christian tradition, or a conscious extension of it?
And here the definitional problem comes into view. For one thing, whenever “wokeness” is formally defined, that definition inevitably tends to be overinclusive, implying opposition to efforts to become aware of, and to fight, injustice in general. Was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s really “woke” in the modern sense? Intuitively, it feels anachronistic and wrong to project this definition backwards into the past.
More importantly, the Christianity/wokeness dichotomy that underpins Strachan’s book—and others like it—is a dichotomy that depends on the premise that “wokeness” is, in its essence, something anti-Christian. But identifying and fighting injustice is clearly a significant element of the Christian tradition, historically speaking. Indeed, those Christians who would advance “woke” arguments—who would allege, for instance, that the deconstruction of oppressive power relations lies at the heart of the faith—simply reject Strachan’s dichotomy on the basis of the continuity narrative (they would, of course, also reject any characterization of their views as “heresy”).
In short, because there are two dueling narratives about the origins and nature of “wokeness”—one of which happens to be a plausible account of “wokeness” as an extension of Christian ideas about justice and inherent equality—it simply doesn’t work to label some cluster of concepts and priorities as “woke,” and assume that this can self-evidently mean “anti-Christian.” Or, put differently, it is hard to question the influence of “wokeness” on theology in a context where both parties self-identify as Christians, because all one needs to do is label themselves as such. And given the continuity narrative, there’s at least a plausible “hook” for both parties to do so.
The crucial flashpoint is what it means to address an alleged injustice Christianly. And this question is a “how-question”—a matter of the way in which a Christian makes his or her case for a revision of existing teaching or practice, rather than being about any single teaching or practice as such.
When conservative federal judges interview applicants for law clerk jobs—one-year positions, in which young lawyers serve as research and drafting assistants for sitting judges—one of the most important considerations is whether the applicant is an “originalist.” Originalism, generally speaking, is the judicial philosophy that the original public meaning of the Constitution—in all its historical particularity—ought to govern how present-day judges interpret the text.
Read More
Related Posts:

When done properly Christian worship does not just target the intellect, but also the whole person. The singing and praying, the sermon, the sacraments of baptism and communion, the entire liturgy, appeals to multiple senses—the ear gate, the eye gate, the nose gate, the taste gate, the touch gate. Worship, therefore, is incarnational, affecting both head and heart—both soul and body—which are not separate entities but enmeshed.

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
— Augustine

As James K. A. Smith reminds us in You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, Augustine’s prayer reveals several aspects about the human condition. First, human beings are made by and forthe Creator. Furthermore, to be human is to be for something—for a vision or some perceived good. Finally, the heart is just as important as the head. That is to say, the pull of a vision toward a perceived good is not primarily a pull of the intellect, but the heart.
Bob Dylan put it this way:
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you’re gonna serve somebody, yes
Indeed, you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Or think of it like this: A guy goes to a marriage counselor and says, “I want a divorce from my wife.” The counselor says, “Why do you want to divorce your wife?” The man says, “Because I don’t love her anymore.” The counselor says, “Well, who do you love?”
Augustine (and Dylan) are saying it’s not a question of whether you love something because we all love something. You cannot not love. The more difficult question is who or what do you love? All people have a longing for God because it is built in—a distant echo from the Imago Dei. The problem is that sin has warped this longing. So, people spend a great deal of time trying to fill this vacuum. In doing so, they are all looking for some version of the Good—some version of the Kingdom.
Smith reminds us that people live for what they love. They get up in the morning and they do their thing day after day and this forms them. Our loves are formed by what we think and do—our habits. The ancients said that good moral habits constitute virtues and bad moral habits constitute vices. From a Christian perspective, virtue is what we mean when we talk about godliness. Likewise, vice refers to ungodliness.
Essentially, Smith’s book addresses the subject of sanctification, which is described in the Bible as a two-step process: renouncing and reorienting. Paul says, “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age” (Titus 2:11-12 ESV).
In the same way, Paul says in Ephesians that the way of Christ teaches us to put off the old self, which belongs to our old way of life corrupted through deceitful desires, and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in righteousness and holiness (Eph. 4:20-24).
Perhaps the most significant contribution of Smith’s book is his notion of cultural liturgies; that is, the daily rituals or routines that take up our time and affections, which tend to form our loves. For example, Smith says the American affection for shopping is a kind of cultural liturgy that holds out the good of consumerism.
Likewise, one could say the time we spend in front a television screen is a kind of cultural liturgy that holds out the good of entertainment. The time teenagers and preteens spend with their cellphones—taking it to bed with them—is a habit of the heart that constitutes a cultural liturgy. Facebook time is a kind of cultural liturgy in its own right, especially if the first thing you do in the morning is turn on your computer to see if someone has messaged you.
Of course, not all of our pursuits are not necessarily bad within themselves, but they shape us in ways we don’t always realize. Here is what we need to understand: People who design cellphones, build malls, or produce television programming don’t really care what you think, but they very much care about what you love.
Read More