Dao 道, I've learned, is the favored Chinese translation for the Word (logos) with which the Gospel of John has God beginning (太初有道，道与神同在，道就是神 in one rendition) and feng 风 that for the "breath of life" (pneuma in Greek translation) which God gave to create the first man out of clay. Daofeng is a journal of "Sino-Christian theology 汉语基督教神学," a movement whose shortened name "Chinese theology 汉语神学" contains the unsettling possibility of a Chinese language 汉语 "theology" more Chinese than Christian. (Chinese church leaders apparently reacted to this movement with "mixed feeling [sic] of surprise, doubt, joy, fear, and so on."*)
Daofeng started in 1994 as an organ of the "cultural Christians 文化基督徒": university- rather than church-based humanistic writers in the PRC interested in Christianity as culture more than as a personal faith. Some were members of churches but most, I gather, and most of the readers of their work, were not. These folks and this movement are one of those things I'm looking forward to learning more about - I have a hunch, you'll recall,
that they may be in interesting ways like our own SBNR and "nightstand Buddhists." But of course this is interesting from a Christian standpoint, too, Christianity having been from the start a tradition in translation.* Sino-Christian Theology: A Theological Qua Cultural Movement in Contemporary China, ed. Pan-chiu Lai and Jason Lam (Frankfurt a. M., Bern, etc.: Peter Lang, 2010), 3
