Response to “The Primary Colors of Sin” by Guo Muyun

This essay was surprising, enlightening, and fascinating. Employing a multitude of cosmopolitan worldviews, it draws upon Chinese, Greek, Russian, Indian, Northern European, and Semitic source materials to construct what might be deemed one of the most world theologies I have yet seen. Yet, it was still situationally-rooted: the Chinese sensibility of this piece was strong, to be sure, given the author’s ethnic/cultural background and upbringing/education.

But in many ways, this is not dissimilar to Jesus himself. He is a very culturally-situated Messiah: a first-century Aramaic-speaking Jew in Roman-occupied Palestine; but, at the same time, the universal Savior of the world. This is what missiologist Andrew Walls calls the “Indigenizing Principle” and the “Pilgrim Principle.” The former idea is that all humans—and that includes all Christians—are embedded in culture and cannot communicate apart from it. It is an inextricable part of who we are and we do not need to fear it as if it were somehow sinful. It is part of the way the Lord has created us. On the other hand, the latter idea is that, as Christians, we are all aliens and strangers in this world. We belong to the City of God, not just the City of Man, and as such we should always be countercultural to this world. These two ideas should exist in tension, but not in contradiction, to each other. Just as Jesus himself was fully man and fully God, we are to be “in the world and not of it.”

Guo Muyun’s connection of the “through-line” of sin from Genesis to Gospel to epistle, was reve- latory for me. I think, too often, we just assume we know what is meant by “sin.” But the tripartite Johannine “the desires of the flesh,” “the desires of the eyes,” and “the pride of life,” really do map so well onto the Fall in the Garden (where the receivers were unsuccessful in deflecting them), and the Temptations in the Wilderness (where the Receiver was successful in deflecting them). It is also an artistic way of framing these as “red,” “green,” and “blue” sins, respectively, with corresponding vices in the modern world: communism, Islam, and western liberalism. This evokes the idea of Samuel Huntington’s famous 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations, where he theorized that the 21st-century would be dominated by the three mega-powers of the West, China, and Islam. His prediction turned out to be eerily true post-9/11.

However, I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that the transliteration of “Odyssey” into Chinese—Ao De Sai, meaning “mystery,” “democracy,” and “science,” also correspond to the red, green, and blue sins. However, that is a creative mnemonic, if we want to just leave it at that—not unlike what the Jews did with the Old Testament, e.g. each section of Psalm 119 corresponded to a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This is a very Eastern sensibility and as such can be granted some artistic license for the sake of cultural communication. It is said that the Old Testament is more “right brain,” and this is seen in how Hebrew is more poetic; and the New Testament is more “left brain,” and this is seen in how Greek is more precise.

Recently authors such as Jayson Georges have tried to unpack a “3-D Gospel,” with the idea that the three most primal and immediate responses to sin are not just guilt, but also fear and shame. And the last two are perhaps even more primal than the first, as seen right after the Fall when Adam & Eve hid themselves because they were afraid, and covered themselves because they experienced shame (Gen. 3:10). As such, the gospel is an antidote to those three responses to sin, in that they provide innocence, power, and honor, respectively. Maybe it is actually not too far off to say that fear is “red,” guilt is “green,” and shame is “blue.” Georges and others have also endeavored to tie these three binary pairs to particular cultural worldviews (e.g. Easterners are more honor-shame, Westerners are more innocence-guilt, Southerners are more power-fear), though they have sometimes been accused of painting with overly broad brushstrokes. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between the Indigenizing and Pilgrim Principles: while certain cultures do lean toward certain “colors,” in truth all of these colors are inherent to all humans, so there is a universality about them too. Certainly in our younger generations in the West (Gen Z), we are seeing much more honor/shame prevalence than in previous generations, for example.

Similar to his unveiling of multiple dimensions of sin, Guo’s unpacking of what “grace” is, was equally stunning: “when an external force outside of yourself destroys your false worldview, either from inside of you or from outside of you, and often it is both.” We often do not think of grace as destructive. But for him, destruction is necessary before reconstruction—although with an important caveat: the reconstruction must be swift lest the person be left bereft of scaffolding, which is a very dangerous place to be, untethered to any certainty. But if the new and correct worldview is administered quickly, then the person is not left to simply topple and crumble.

What is important about Guo’s findings—and it is worth noting that he incorporated his own personal journey and feelings of anguish and recovery, not unlike Augustine’s Confessions—is that they lead to a rediscovery of what the gospel is. The idea that he posited is that tracing a journey backward, while it traverses the same terrain, provides a whole new perspective. For too long, we have associated the gospel as belonging to the West. But really, it originated in the East. And in returning to Asia (I think Guo was alluding to the “Back to Jerusalem” movement which saw Christianity as originating from Israel, traveling westward through Europe, across the Atlantic to North America, and now across the Pacific to China), there is a sort of “homecoming” as Chinese endeavor to carry the gospel even further West across the Silk Road and eventually landing back in the Promised Land, its birthplace. Christianity is originally Middle Eastern, and though it has taken on Western guise for a long time, perhaps once again it is returning to its incipient form. This is culture-affirming stuff, that Easterners can “own” the gospel for themselves, that it truly belongs to them and is not foreign. And maybe the true “Journey to the West” is not to India, but to Israel. “Tolle lege!”

Dr. Allen Yeh is Associate Professor of Intercultural Studies and Missiology at Biola University. His areas of geographical expertise are Latin America and China. He earned his B.A. from Yale, M.Div. from Gordon-Conwell, M.Th. from Edinburgh, and D.Phil. from Oxford. Allen has been to over 60 countries on every continent, to study, do missions work, and experience the culture. He is also the author of Polycentric Missiology: 21st Century Mission from Everyone to Everywhere (IVP, 2016), and co-editor (along with Tite Tienou, former Dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) of Majority World Theologies: Theologizing from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Ends of the Earth (William Carey, 2018). He serves on the Board of the Foundation for Theological Education in Southeast Asia (FTESEA), and the Board of the Evangelical Missiological Society (EMS).