Two Life Science

Ever since Christianity met Confucianism in Chinese society, communication between them has long been a perplexity in China's ideological and cultural circles. Causes for this predicament iare intricate and complicated. From the academic standpoint alone, immaturity of research methods is one of the important factors. As the academic realm, entangled in national interests and national sentiments, has all along been unable to get its mainstream utterance out of the confinement of making simple judgment, communication between the two heterogeneous thoughts, Christianity and Confucianism, becomes particularly intricate and difficult. When discussing communication between heterogeneous thoughts within the thinking frame of making judgments, philosophers tend to lapse into the vicious thinking circle of regarding their own ideas and those ideas that are the same as theirs right and those different from theirs wrong. Therefore, mutual attack becomes the keynote and the topic of communication is put aside. In order to avoid the understanding barrier caused by this confinement, this article , from the standpoint of comparative study instead of making judgment, tries to indicate the critical differences or divergences between Mencius' and Paul's philosophies respectively and truthfully and accordingly, promote their communication.Mencius and Paul represent two naturally different cultural traditions. One is Confucian tradition of humanistic philosophy, an independent tradition, the other being Christian tradition of God-centered faith, a prophet-apostolic tradition. In these two heterogeneous cultural traditions exist two different views on truth, one is Confucianism and the other Christianity. This means that in their respective utterance systems, Mencius and Paul think and talk about a series of important questions in the domain of life according to their own senses of right and wrong. Those that are thought to be "right" by Paul are regarded "wrong" by Mencius, and vice versa. The purpose of objective and neutral academic study is to reveal, through divergences between contrasting research objects, the peculiar wisdoms in different senses of right and wrong instead of judging the superiority or inferiority between the objects. When making judgments, researchers tend to be influenced by their own ideas, likes and dislikes, so objectivity and impartiality of conclusions cannot be guaranteed. On account of the above, this article will treat equally the divergent and opposite ideas and beliefs that exist in Mencius' and...