Nicolas Berdyaev's God-man Idea and the Problem of Chinese Spiritual Literature

The "God-man" discussion in Russia, represented by Nicolas Berdyaev, is a new interpretation of the spirit of Christianity in the modern context. According to Berdyaev, the core of Christianity is Jesus Christ the person rather than the doctrine of Christ. Jesus Christ is the "God-man", and God has an eternal human nature. Because God is the origin of freedom and has given to man this freedom, human beings are not dispensable to God. Human beings are the other to God with an indispensable function in God's dynamic existence. The purpose of God's incarnation is to restore to man his lost freedom, with which he can creatively participate in the dialectic of this God-man existence. Subsequently, after Berdyaev, literature which drew from Christian sources became "God-man" literature. In our modern Chinese context, the neglect of the God-man view in Christianity handicaps us in our effort to resolve Chinese people's existential dilemma. It also hinders us in further discovering the deeper mysteries of the human soul in the realm of literature.