Deification and the New Jerusalem Come to China...

First a small personal announcement, and then a much more important one following. Read on...

First, the personal: it turns out I'm now a published author in Chinese! Specifically my chapter "Deification and the Eschatological City: Exegetical and 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 recent English book Transformed into the Same Image: Constructive Investigations into the Doctrine of Deification (InterVarsity Press Academic, 2024), edited by Paul Copan and Michael Reardon. 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 in antiquity) pointed to by the early church fathers.

Interesting, sure. But there's a more interesting and far more important story here, and this on two levels...

Zooming out a bit now.

This book, Transformed Into the same Image, 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 who are 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 1920s China, where it was started by Watchman Nee. Nee, famously, was heavily persecuted by the Communists and was eventually imprisoned by the Communist Chinese government from the early 1950s until his premature death in a prison camp in 1972. The local churches he founded--comprising up to 10,000,000 Christian believers, and perhaps even more--were and still are heavily persecuted in China. I personally know members of these churches who were held and tortured in Chinese prison as ideological prisoners.

Hopefully this volume, both in its English original and its Chinese translation, 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.