God's Chinese Son (46 page)

Hong feels that certain aspects of these divine relationships are still not clearly understood. The fact that he and his brother naturally see their Father does not mean they in any way claim parity with Him: "I now proclaim clearly," says Hong, "that in Heaven, upon earth, and among mankind, the Heavenly Father, God, is alone the most revered. Since the Creation, this has been the greatest principle." To emphasize this point, Hong orders that the "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom" be renamed "God's Heavenly Kingdom." All state seals must be recut to reflect this new real­ity. All honorific titles held by his officials, and all future grants bestowed, shall reflect the same change, from Taiping to God.
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Edkins and Roberts should not be surprised that they do not see Hong in person, and that he reaches them by commentary, poems, and procla­mations. Virtually nobody gets to see the Heavenly King any more, save for a tiny circle of his family and his closest confidants. With the exception granted on one occasion only to Issachar Roberts, foreign missionaries, even if promised a personal audience and brought to the palace in a glitter­ing retinue under yellow banners, sit in vain for hours before his empty throne, listening to the chanted hymns, and watching the smoke curl lazily from the sacrificial fire, above which are laid out offerings of rice and meat.
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And Western consular officials, demanding their new treaty rights, can even angrily force their way through the seven miles of wide streets of the capital and sit in Hong Xiuquan's own antechamber, hour after hour, among baskets of charcoal, pails of steaming water, and stacks of firewood, peered at by crowds of boys, or the bolder palace women, listening to the booming of the gongs, and watching the royal proclama­tions carried by on rolls of yellow silk, but Hong himself never appears.
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Seen from outside by other foreign visitors, the gates through the huge walls of Hong's palace open at intervals to allow the palace women and attendants to pass through with special gifts of food, while in a kind of shed outside the gates, beached now, lies the great gilded dragon boat in which the Heavenly King first glided down the river to his capital.
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In the outer courtyard—under gleaming lanterns hanging from silken cords, one all of glass, brought from the Qing governor's mansion in Suzhou— sits an old servant who has known the Heavenly King since his young days in Canton. He lets no one pass. Above the gilded columns is the inscription "Of the True God, the Sacred Heavenly Door," reflecting Hong's changing of his kingdom's name from peaceful to divine. Spiritual matters are now the focus of Hong Xiuquan's own life, he tells his follow­ers. Henceforth it is his son Tiangui Fu who will handle "common things."
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The challenges posed by Issachar Roberts and Joseph Edkins have intermeshed perfectly with the current "spiritual matters" that occupy the time of the Heavenly King. For months, perhaps for years, he has been writing his own commentaries in the ample margins of the Bible—both Old and New Testaments—that he has already corrected. These commen­taries link him to the text by verse or chapter, but apart from that limita­tion his thoughts are free to wander. For whereas in revising the Bible's text, Hong felt constrained to fit his thoughts to the exact space available in the altered sections, in his own commentary he writes what he feels, at any length he chooses.
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This freedom to browse and reflect, coming so soon after his careful revisions of the aspects of the Bible that disturbed him, means that though he has never been trained as a preacher Hong can often respond to Edkins and Roberts with chapter and verse.

Most of the seventy surviving comments by Hong written in the mar­gins of his revised New Testament—and perhaps in scores of others, as in the case of John's Gospel, that now are lost—show his concern with the dual themes of family relationships and the uniqueness of God as Father. Again and again, Hong emphasizes that Jesus cannot be God, is not God, just as he Hong is not God, can never be, and will never claim to be. The role of Yang Xiuqing, the East King, the Comforter, and carrier of Divine Breath or Holy Spirit, is often invoked as well, to prove that there is no parity in what others call the Trinity, for God is the Holy Spirit, but Yang as breath of God cannot himself be God. Hong reminds his followers that "God the Father knew that the New Testament contains mistakes; therefore he sent down the East King to testify the truth that the Holy Spirit is the same as God, but that His breath is the East King." By the same token, writes Hong, "since God knew that some people on earth erroneously believed that Christ is God," therefore "Christ himself sent down the West King to make it clear that he was [merely] the Heir Apparent. For the Father is the Father, a son is a son, the Elder Brother is the Elder Brother, and a younger brother is a younger brother." If there is such a concept as a "three in one," then it refers to God's three children, Jesus, Hong, and Yang, three brothers born together: for "the East King is [also] God's beloved son, born of the same mother as his Eldest Brother and myself; before Heaven and earth existed, we three were all sons of the same Father."
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Hong constantly re-emphasizes the nature of the family bonds. The pas­sage of Mark's Gospel, chapter 12, verses 35 to 37, where Jesus talks with the scribes in the temple at Jerusalem, before the Passover, debating the proposition that the Messiah would be the "Son of David," prompts Hong to a counterargument. As Hong puts it, "If Christ were God, and ascended to Heaven where he and God became as one, ... then how could it be that when I myself ascended to Heaven I saw that in Heaven there was God the Father, there was the Heavenly Mother, and there was also the Elder Brother Christ and the Heavenly Elder Sister-in-law? And that now I am come down to earth there are still the Heavenly Father, Heav­enly Mother, Heavenly Elder Brother, and Heavenly Elder Sister-in- law?"
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And Hong gladly accepts the words of Stephen, just before his martyrdom, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, to be a support of Hong's own interpretation. When Stephen calls out to the crowd, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God," Hong points out, this "clearly proves one is Father and one is Son."
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Surely, as Hong writes in another comment, "whether ascending to Heaven or descending to earth, it is always the same: hearing with one's ears is not as good as seeing with one's own eyes."
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In other comments, Hong shows that he has in no way forgotten the earlier debates, held between Yang Xiuqing and Mellersh and the "synod" aboard the
Rattler
on the materiality or immateriality of God. Whenever the New Testament reports that Jesus physically touches someone, Hong makes sure to emphasize by his comments that God, while not
being
Jesus, is separately and yet physically at the scene, and that Jesus gains his powers from God's literal presence. In Matthew's Gospel, for example, when Jesus heals the mother of Peter's wife by touching her hand with His, Hong writes, "God being present in the Elder Brother, when He spoke and reached forth His hand, thus was she healed."
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Or also as described by Matthew, when Jesus "touched the eyes" of two blind men to cure them, Hong comments, "God being present in the Elder Brother, therefore when He touched their eyes they were able to see."
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God is present "above" Jesus when he cures the man sick of palsy, and when Jesus cures a leper by touching him, it is because God is at the scene, even more literally, "upon the head" of Jesus.
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Even when Hong does not place God in person at the site of an apparent miracle, as when Jesus raises the only son of a widow from the dead by "touching the bier," Hong is careful to explain in his commentary that Jesus acts here only as a "prophet" sent by God, not in any sense as God Himself.
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The New Testament offers, Hong tells his followers, signs or answers to many of the enigmas that attended the founding of the Taiping Heav­enly Kingdom. Thus the "Earthly Paradise," the "Xiao tiantang" of which he spoke on Thistle Mountain and again in the dark days in Yongan, can be explained in the light of Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 15, which states that "as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly." In this sense, the "Little Heaven" or Earthly Paradise, the current "Heavenly Court" of Nanjing, is God's kingdom for men's physical bodies on this earth, whereas His "Greater Heaven" is where their souls will ascend in glory.
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In Acts 15:14-16, also, the prophecy of the rebuilding of the tabernacle fits well with current Taiping goals. In the words of the Bible:

Symeon hath declared how God first did visit the nations, to take out of them a people for his name. And to this agree the words of the prophets, as it is written: After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down; and 1 will build again its ruins, and I will set it up. ...

As Hong comments, this passage prefigures the way in which "God and Christ have come down to earth to rebuild God's tabernacle in the Heav­enly Capital at the Heavenly Court."
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What Hong Xiuquan does not tell either Edkins or Roberts is that he has grown convinced he speaks with the voice of Melchizedek, at once God's highest priest and king. Hong has found the two Bible passages that discuss Melchizedek most clearly. The first is in Genesis, chapter 14. It is only a fleeting reference to Melchizedek, but it is enough for Hong to build on. As Genesis 14:18 explains, when Abraham returned victorious from his battles, "Melchizedek, King of Salem, brought forth bread and wine; and he was the priest of the Most High God." Hong has already made three revisions to this single verse, so that in the Taiping Bible it now reads, "Melchizedek, King of the Heavenly Realm, brought forth bread and cakes; and he was the highest priest of the Most High God." In his commentary, Hong explains the newly rewritten text as follows: "This Melchizedek is I myself. In former times, when I was in Heaven, I came down to earth to make these traces plain, and to provide the proof that I would descend to earth at the present time to be your King. For with everything that is carried out by Heaven, there must [first] be a sign."
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Hong continues this train of thought in his commentary on Genesis, chapter 15, where God offers his own promise of blessings and a rich posterity to Abraham. Hong writes:

When God came down to earth to rescue Israel from out of Egypt, it was the sign that in our present age God would come to earth to direct the founding of the Heavenly Kingdom. When the Elder Brother [Jesus] descended to be born in the country of Judea and redeem the sins of the world, it was the sign that in our present age the Elder Brother would come to earth to help us with our heavy burdens. When I myself came down to earth to give solace and blessing to Abraham, it was the aptest sign that in our present age I myself would come down to earth to direct the salvation of mankind. Thus does each of God's sacred decrees have plentiful modes of expression, evidence and proof. Respect these words.
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The second passage, or rather cluster of passages, on Melchizedek occurs in Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews. There Paul writes of the "hope we have as an author of the Soul, both sure and steadfast, ... even Jesus, made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek."
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Paul sees Melchizedek as "without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually" (Hebrews 7:3). And even Levi, from whom the later high priests claim their authority, "was yet in the loins of his father, when Melchizedek met him" (Hebrews 7:10). In the margin above these verses, Hong has written:

This Melchizedek is none other than myself. Formerly in Heaven our Old Mother bore the Elder Brother and also all those of my generation. At that time I knew the Father was going to have my Elder Brother born of Abra­ham's descendants. Therefore I comforted the officers and troops, and con­gratulated and blessed Abraham, for Abraham was a good man. The Father's sacred proclamation says, "Hong shall be ruler and save the virtuous man." This was said to serve as a sign that at the present time I would come down to earth to be the ruler. Respect these words.
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"The time I spent in Heaven, during the days of Abraham," Hong has written elsewhere in the margin of his Bible, "is still quite clear within my memory. I knew that God was going to send the Elder Brother to be born of Abraham's descendants; therefore I went down to earth to save Abraham and to bless Abraham."
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Edkins has also challenged Hong Xiuquan to respond to the Protestant view that the depiction of God in the fourth chapter of the Book of Reve­lation is figurative, and been bluntly rejected by Hong with the words that the depiction is "real." Hong's commentary shows that he knows the context of Edkins' example in considerable detail. For instance, next to the passage in the Book of Revelation, chapter 3, verse 12, that "the name of the city of my God ... is New Jerusalem, which cometh down out of Heaven from my God," Hong has written in the margin:

Now the Elder Brother is come. In the Heavenly Court is the temple of the Heavenly Father, God, the True Deity; there also is the Elder Brother Christ's temple, wherein are already inscribed the names of God and Christ. The New Jerusalem sent down from Heaven by God the Heavenly Father is our present Heavenly Capital [Tianjing]. It is fulfilled. Respect these words.
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