The paradoxical co-existence of submissiveness and subversiveness in the theology of Yu-Ming Jia

Abstract

This thesis aims to study Yu-ming Jia’s theology from a postcolonial perspective. Yu-ming Jia (1880-1964) is a conservative Protestant theologian who was actively engaged himself in Chinese protestant churches and theological education during the first half of the 20th century. It was seen that he constructed his theology mainly in a hierarchical context, i.e., the subjugating relationship between missionaries and Chinese Christians appearing in missionary enterprise. This study will focus on three areas of Jia’s theology: christology, ecclesiology and soteriology, which will be analysed with Homi Bhabha’s three conceptions: ambivalence, mimicry and hybridity. These key concepts in postcolonial theory and discourse are regarded as the characteristic features and contributions of the theory. This study can provide a postcolonial perspective to understand Jia’s theology and subsequently brings about the paradoxical insights which have not been discovered by previous scholars who solely apply the approach of systematic theology and restrained themselves within a binary framework, Liberal/Conservative or Modernist/Fundamentalist, to study Jia’s theology. While subversiveness and submissiveness are both discovered in Jia’s theological discourse, the study concludes that there is a paradoxical co-existence of subversiveness and submissiveness in Jia’s theology.