The God Who Could Not Save Him: Wu Yaozong, Immanentized Eschatology, and the Cultural Revolution's Bitter Fulfillment

This paper reads Wu Yaozong's 1943 theological work, No One Has Seen God (没有人看见过上帝), as a case study in the dangers of collapsing divine transcendence into historical immanence. Wu's two-dimensional ontology, indebted to a Spinozist philosophical imagination, ultimately dissolves the vertical reality of God into the horizontal movement of revolutionary history. The paper traces three interlocking developments: 1) the subordination of transcendence to material process, 2) the silencing of classical eschatological hopes such as resurrection and the return of Christ, and 3) the conferral of final, eschatological meaning upon revolutionary praxis. Wu's move is not Bultmann's existential reinterpretation but something more consequential; namely, the structural erasure of a God who can speak against history. The bitter irony is that when Mao's Cultural Revolution turned against Wu himself, his theology had already surrendered the only ground from which resistance, grief, and hope beyond history might have been spoken.