Zhou Gong Came to Serve
On the Personal Substance of Confucian Religious Consciousness
Keywords:
missiology, religious consciousness, ConfucianismAbstract
This paper proposes a Reformed theological method for missiological interpretation of culture and cultural dialogue in terms of religious consciousness and uses classical Confucianism as a case study. The thesis of the paper is that, on the basis of the proposed method, a man called the Duke of Zhou was a Christlike figure for Confucius, and that therefore Confucius, for his immense influence, may or perhaps should be thought of as a herald, or rather a guardian, even an apostle untimely born, of the restorative ethic embodied in the Duke of Zhou.
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