The Divine–Human Encounter in the Hebrew Wisdom of the Writings and the Confucian Analects

Abstract

It is commonly believed that there are some shared basic quests for the understanding of the human and the divine in religious writings. Most scriptures did not develop in isolation, nor were they interpreted without interaction with other scriptures in the historical sociopolitical processes. This reality is especially true in the world of religious plurality and close proximity of religious communities in the globalized world of today. But academic approaches in the field of comparative studies of Confucianism and Christianity usually tend to generalize and polarize these two traditions based on the different notions of the divine and the human: biblical religion is on the whole seen as theocratic and transcendental in nature, while Confucian tradition is basically anthropocentric and humanistic in its outlook. It is the intention of this article to scrutinize this characterization by the method of cross-textual reading of the Hebrew Wisdom and the Confucian Analects to recover often neglected aspects in the two respective scriptural traditions.