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Palmer praises this last notion (which finds echoes in some modern New Age and Hindu thought) as a "radical" shift from "classical Western nonreincarnational beliefs." But the church fathers rejected rebirth because they thought it untrue (Augustine's arguments on the subject still seem persuasive), not because the idea was unfamiliar or exotic. Nor is reincarnation so central to Chinese thought that denial of the doctrine has often proved an impediment to the gospel.
In terms of social ideals, the first Chinese Christians come across as an attractive and progressive community: vegetarian, nonviolent, treating men and women equally, refusing to own slaves. It may be unfair of Palmer to credit the Jains of India for these innovations, considering traditions in Western Christianity of gospel feminism, pacifism, and (in St. Paul, Gregory of Nyssa, and others) incipient anti-slavery. But it is heartening in any case to note the emphasis the earliest Chinese church put on social compassion.
Striking and poetic, and generally accurate, as Palmer's translation appears, he occasionally engages in a bit of wishful unorthodoxy. Palmer thinks the Nestorians disbelieved in original sin, for example. He translates the stele as saying God gave Adam and Eve "the original nature of goodness." An earlier translator read the same phrase as "an excellent disposition"—more stodgy, perhaps, but following the original more carefully. Palmer also thinks the Chinese Nestorians more ecologically sensitive than their Western cousins. Thus, God appointed Adam and Eve "guardians of all creation," rather than "governors" or "rulers" (although zhen does in fact imply hierarchical rule). Palmer then generously praises the Taoist Christians for a sensitivity toward nature that he himself has interpolated.
Palmer also suggests the Chinese Nestorians can help us overcome the burden of the doctrine of original sin, which he blames on Augustine:
In these Christian sutras from China is the shape or outline of a post-Augustinian theology that the West itself needs in order to be free from the burden of original sin and thus reconfigured to rediscover Christianity.
Ironically, some modern Chinese thinkers have come to the conclusion that what Chinese culture requires from "the Christian spirit" is precisely the teaching of original sin. Yuan Zhimin, a philosopher active in China's Democracy Movement, has argued that the Christian emphasis on sin provides "the ultimate philosophical base for the establishment of social covenants, checks and balances of power, and the rule of law. … Denial of man's sin and limitations is the spiritual root of tyranny; our awareness, the beginning of democracy."1
The Jesus sutras exhibit an attitude toward government that seems to justify Yuan's critique. One strains to see a hint in these texts of the bold Christian tradition of believers standing up to tyranny, of Justin Martyr ("You can kill us, but you cannot hurt us"), of Bonhoeffer, Solzhenitsyn, or Wang Mingdao. Instead: "The Emperor is who he is because of his previous lives which have led to his being placed in this fortunate position." By contrast, "If someone is seriously ill or handicapped do not mock, because this is a result of karma." If status is based on the merit of past lives (or lack thereof), what could be more perverse than to disturb the harmony of a hierarchical society by dreams of political equality? It would be a disappointing end to an Indiana Jones movie if, when opened, the Ark of the Covenant visited its wrath, not on tyrants or Nazi goons, but on the damsel in distress, or on low-caste Indian children laboring in mines for (presumable) past-life trangressions.
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