Rev. Professor Choan-Seng Song (1929-2024)

It is with great sadness that New College reports the death of Rev. Professor Choan-Seng Song.

Rev. Professor Choan-Seng Song (C. S. Song) was a pioneering theologian and ecumenist, former principal of Tainan Theological College (1965–1970) and former president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (1997–2004). He was an alumnus of New College, completing his BD in 1958, and later returned to his alma mater to deliver the Gunning Lectures in Autumn 1989 and to receive an honorary Doctorate of Divinity in 1996.

Colour head and shoulders photo of Rev. Professor Choan-Seng Song
Rev. Professor Choan-Seng Song

Song began his theological journey steeped in the thought of major Western theologians, studying Karl Barth’s writings through his Edinburgh tutor T. F. Torrance, and completing his ThD dissertation on Barth and Paul Tillich at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1965. As principal of Tainan Theological College, succeeding his mentor, the renowned theologian Shoki Coe, Song was shaken by the sociopolitical unrest in Taiwan under martial law and was increasingly convinced that God was a political God. He began to see the task of theology for Asian Christians was to pursue the incarnation or transposition of theology from Israel to Asia, as had already begun amongst American black theology and Latin American Catholic liberation theology.

This is best seen in Song’s most important work—his magnum opus, the trilogy, The Cross in the Lotus World. The first volume of the trilogy was based on his Gunning Lectures delivered in Edinburgh, Jesus, the Crucified People (Fortress 1990) in which he writes:

 

Jesus, in short, is the crucified people! Jesus means crucified people. To say Jesus is to say suffering people. To know Jesus is to know crucified people.… We cannot know Jesus without knowing people at the same time.… By people I mean those men, women, and children, in Jesus’ day, today, and in the days to come, economically exploited, politically oppressed, culturally and religiously alienated, sexually, racially, or class-wise discriminated against.

For Song, theology was not simply human speculation about an abstract notion of God, but a human attempt to give account of the mystery of God in human experiences. Hence, Song was also an early advocate of the importance of stories in theology, drawing on Asian folkstories as parables for theological meaning and to express the power of people’s suffering and self-sacrifice. Furthermore, Song called the World Church, especially in Asia, to be at the forefront of advocating for justice and liberation.

We extend our heartfelt condolences to his family and the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan.

 

Dr Alexander Chow

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