Quest for certainty: The life and thought of Chang Lit-sen (China)

The dissertation examines the life and thought of Chang Lit-sen (1904--1996), a conservative-evangelical Chinese Protestant theologian. Chang was first an educator and then a public official of the Nationalist government of China. He became a Christian in 1951; during the rest of his life he wrote numerous Christian books. The study shows that before his conversion, Chang had a deep sense of an impending crisis for China. He also had an intense desire to uplift China and to transform its culture.; Chang's conversion was not the result of an intellectual evaluation of Christianity or social expectations. Rather, by his own accounts, it was due to an encounter with the divine. The encounter of an other-worldly God gave him a this-worldly assurance of certainty about his life and the destiny of China. In his search for an adequate language to express this certainty, Chang adopted conservative-evangelical theology because it acknowledged the reality of the supernatural. In addition to this finding, the study shows that Chang's adoption of conservative-evangelical language was also influenced by his culture, personal character, and life experience. These findings contribute to understanding why Chinese Christians are predominantly conservative-evangelical in faith.; The study examines the continuity in Chang's thinking after his conversion, and proposes that it can be understood in terms of the construction of his pre-conversion project to uplift China and transform its culture. I discover a clear pattern in which Chang used the concepts of Christianity to enlarge, enrich, preserve, and redirect his pre-conversion concepts to construct his project. I also examine the discontinuity in Chang's thinking and discover that Christianity both prompted him to abandon many pre-conversion concepts and supplied new ones to replace them. I propose that the analysis of continuity and discontinuity will contribute to the study of conversion, particularly in understanding the convert as both active agent and passive receptor. The study ends with an evaluation of the relevance of Chang's theology to China today and Chang's contribution to the Chinese church.