First, the personal: it turns out I’m now a published author in Chinese! Specifically my chapter “Deification and the Eschatological City: Theological Connections in Early Christian Thought” [成神论与末世之城：早期基督教思想中的解经和神学联系] in this Chinese translation of the English book “Transformed into the Same Image: Constructive Investigations into the Doctrine of Deification” (InterVarsity Press Academic, 2024). The chapter has to do with the frequent juxtaposition of Rev. 21-22 (the New Jerusalem) and Psa. 82 (a classic passage pointing to deification pointed to by the early church fathers).
Interesting, sure. But there’s a more interesting and important story here…
Zooming out a bit now.
This book was in fact a groundbreaking book in English when it was released in 2024. First, because it’s the first ever collective volume on deification that consists entirely of contributions from theologians active within the Protestant traditions.
But it’s also groundbreaking for a second reason: It has a number of contributions from theologians active within the so-called Local Churches movement, a circle of Christian fellowship with roots in China, where it was started by Watchman Nee, who was heavily persecuted and eventually imprisoned by the Communist Chinese government until his premature death in 1972. The local churches were and still are heavily persecuted in China. I personally know members who were held and tortured in Chinese prison as ideological prisoners.
Hopefully this volume can help shore up the orthodoxy of the great doctrine of deification amongst Evangelicals and Protestants, while at the same time continuing the long task of turning the tide of the local churches’ reputation in the Far East, and indeed in the West as well.
The Chinese translation of the book is published by the Asia Research Center (presumably in cooperation with IVP), and should probably be available soon from their webpage here: https://asiaresearchcenter.org/.
P.S. This, together with Paul Chang’s new intellectual biography of Watchman Nee (Oxford University Press) is great news for Chinese Christianity, and indeed for the Body of Christ as a whole.
