Dr Jacob Chengwei Feng
Dr Jacob Chengwei Feng (冯成伟) was born and raised in China, where he earned a BE in Engineering Physics from Tsinghua University. He began doctoral study in physics in the United States before transferring to Electrical and Computer Engineering, completing an MA at Rutgers University, and then worked for nearly a decade in quantitative finance on Wall Street. He subsequently undertook theological studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, completing an MA in Theological Studies and a PhD in Theological Studies (2024).
He currently serves as Affiliate Assistant Professor of Theology and Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he is also a Second Mentor for PhD Students in the Center for Advanced Theological Studies (CATS) program. He is Affiliated Research Professor and Advisory Member of the Council Committee, Public Theology and Science Council for East Asia (IPTFC, Berkeley). He also serves as University Lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, and as Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University. His scholarly interests lie in world Christianity, Chinese theology, and theology and science, with particular attention to Chinese pneumatology, the doctrine of deification, and the history of Christianity in China from the Tang dynasty to the present. He is the author of two monographs published in 2026: Science, Religion(s), and Spirit(s) in China (Brill), a study of the Church of the East in Tang China built from a new translation of its Syriac and Chinese sources, and Spirit(s) and Chinese Religiosity: Retelling the History of Chinese Christianity from a Pentecost Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan), and co-editor (with Brian Chiu) of Chinese Christianity and Bible Translations: From the Perspective of World Christianity and Theology) (Asia Research Center Press).
Research Focus at Cambridge
During his visiting scholarship at the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology, Dr Feng is extending his published research on Chinese pneumatology and the doctrine of deification into the study of ecclesiology, asking what a doctrine of the church built from Chinese and Syriac Christian sources contributes to the wider ecumenical conversation. The project reads two moments in Chinese church history alongside one another: the Church of the East’s presence in Tang China (635–845), documented in the Xi’an Stele and the wider Jingjiao corpus, and the twentieth-century ecclesiology of Watchman Nee and the Chinese Local Churches movement. Read together, they suggest that indigenous Chinese ecclesiology is not a regional variant of Western models but a constructive resource in its own right.
Methodologically, the project works from primary sources in Syriac and Chinese — the Brill monograph’s own translation of the Jingjiao corpus for the Tang material, and Chinese-language ecclesiological writings for the twentieth-century case — read alongside the Buddhist and Daoist cosmologies each period’s Christianity had to explain itself against. The aim is a constructive account of Chinese ecclesiology built from where its sources actually are, rather than one assessed against a category imported from elsewhere.