On November 16, 2017, Zha Changping, a biblical scholar and a Christian, gave a lecture titled "Possibilities and Impossibilities of Religious Communities" in Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts.
The lecture was included in the series "The Publicity of the Community" held by the Public Art Coordination Center in Shanghai.
The lecture mainly talked about the concept of a community, the distinction between religious communities and artistic or academic communities, and the possibilities and impossibilities of religious communities using churches as examples.
Born in Chongqing in 1966, Zha, whose penname is Xi Meizheng, is the editor-in-chief of the Journal for Humanities & Art. He obtained a doctorate in Christianity from the Renmin University of China in 2004. His research fields cover art criticism, biblical studies, and history-logic and he can use English, Japanese, Greek, and Hebrew for academic research.
He said that faith is his inheritance, teaching his career, academics his love, criticism his calling, and translation his part-time job. His academic philosophy is to explain the logic of human history through his original worldview logic and to lay the foundation for humanistic scholarship in China. He has published over 200 academic papers.
He now teaches New Testament Greek, Hebrew in the Bible, biblical theology, systematic theology, reading Christian classics, and Christian art and aesthetics at the Institute of Chinese Daoism and Religious Culture Studies of Sichuan University.
- Translated by Karen Luo
