Jordan Zhixi Wang, PhD

Assistant Professor of Christian Studies; Associate Director, Mandarin Theology Program
My calling is to keep learning—and to invite others to join me—how to interpret the choices people made in the worlds they inhabited. In doing so, we may confront human sinfulness without despair, and celebrate human faithfulness without naïveté. Together, we cultivate our hearts and minds to live our lives with the insight we gain from those choices and their interpretations, and to love the One who steps into our history to redeem our story.

Jordan Zhixi Wang is a historian of World Christianity. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, focusing on twentieth-century Christianity in China. He served as a volunteer pastor at Evangel Baptist Church in Edmonton, Alberta, before joining TWU. He co-founded AI-demia, an academic consultancy startup.

https://twu.academia.edu/ZhixiJordanWANG

  • Master of Arts in History (University of Alberta; 2024)
  • PhD in Religious Studies (The Chinese University of Hong Kong; 2017)
  • Master of Arts in Theological Studies (The Chinese University of Hong Kong; 2014)
  • Master of Arts in Christian Studies (The Chinese University of Hong Kong; 2013)
  • Master of Laws in Jurisprudence (Xiamen University; 2012)
  • Bachelor of Laws (Xiamen University; 2009)

Expertise

Scholarly interests: History of Christianity in China, History of Diaspora Chinese Christianity, History of Canadian Christianity, Public Theology, Biblical Reception, Christian-Communist Encounters, Generative AI for Higher Education, Historical/Theological Studies, and Church Ministries

Recent Publications

Selected:

  • Jordan Zhixi Wang, “From Institutional Church to Inner-City Prophet: All People’s Mission and the Social Gospel as Urban Religion in Edmonton, Canada, 1908-1975,” Urban History Review 52, no. 2 (September 2024): 362-84.
  • Zhixi Wang, “Repressed Religious Modernity: Zhu Weizhi and the Rise of the Bible as Literature in Modern China, 1925-35,” Literature and Theology 34, no. 4 (December 2020): 430-49. (A&HCI-Indexed; in English)
  • Zhixi Wang, “‘What Has Jesus to Do with Socialism’? Protestant Intellectuals, Political Use of the Mandarin Union Version, and the Remaking of a Socialistic Jesus in Republican China,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 30, no. 1 (January 2020): 105-17. (A&HCI-Indexed; in English)
  • Zhixi Wang, “The Gospel According to Marxism: Zhu Weizhi and the Making of Jesus the Proletarian (1950),” Religions 10, no. 9, 535 (September 2019): 88-99. (A&HCI-Indexed; in English)
  • Zhixi Wang, “‘In Pursuit of Socialism in the Bible’: Hottinger S. C. Chang’s Christian Socialism, Interpretation of the Gospels and Images of Jesus,” Thought and Words: Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 57, no. 2 (June 2019): 139-200. (THCI Core-Indexed; in Chinese)
  • Zhixi Wang, “A Non-Violent Jesus? Pacifism, Christian Intellectuals’ Interpretation of the Gospels, and the Publicness of Images of Jesus in Republican China,” Sino-Christian Studies, no. 27 (June 2019): 93-139. (A&HCI-Indexed; in Chinese)
  • Zhixi Wang, “‘Evangelist of Jesusism’: Hottinger S. C. Chang as a Christian Socialist,” Logos and Pneuma: Chinese Journal of Theology, no. 46 (Spring 2017): 189-228. (A&HCI-Indexed; in Chinese)
  • Zhixi Wang, “Chinese Christians’ ‘Biblical Patriotism’? Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the Magazine of Tian Feng and Political Hermeneutics in Reform China,” Sino-Christian Studies, no. 22 (December 2016): 65-94. (A&HCI-Indexed; in Chinese)
  • Zhixi Wang, “Chinese Christians’ Another ‘Marriage Law’: Sexual Ethics and Biblical Texts in the Chinese Christian Journal of Tian Feng, 1983-2013,” The Journal of History of National Chengchi University, no. 46 (November 2016): 215-54. (THCI Core-Indexed; in Chinese)
  • Zhixi Wang, “Towards a Political Hermeneutics of Incarnation: K. H. Ting’s Interpretation of the Gospels, Images of Jesus and Their Appropriation,” Cheng Kung Journal of Historical Studies, no. 50 (June 2016): 255-96. (THCI Core-Indexed; in Chinese)

Affiliations & Memberships

  • American Academy of Religion
  • Association for Asian Studies
  • China Christianity Studies Group
  • American Society of Church History
  • Canadian Society of Church History
  • Canadian Society for the Study of Religion
  • Canadian Historical Association
  • Society for the History of Christianity in China (Hong Kong)

  • HIS 541 History of Christianity II (History of Christianity in China)