"[5] However, in the spring of 1954, after being visited by officers of the Bureau of Religious Affairs for several hours,[5] he officially joined the TSPM and was elected as one of its seven vice-chairpersons.
[10] Having been reportedly baptised with the Holy Spirit in 1940 in Shanghai,[11] Jia self-identified as a fundamentalist,[12] although he regarded most of the characters in the Old Testament to be metaphorical.
[13] Heavily influenced by dispensationalism as articulated by John Nelson Darby, which held that the world prior to Jesus' Second Coming was "hopelessly corrupt", Jia had a disdain for non-believers and reportedly only interacted with fellow Protestants,[14] although he expressed hope that there would one day be billions of Chinese Christians.
"[17] Jia championed the theory of "perfect salvation" (Chinese: 完全救恩; pinyin: wánquán jiù'ēn) as the ultimate goal of all Christians.
[20] Jia elaborated that a believer's rational mind had to be "spiritualised" in order to comprehend spiritual mysteries.
[20] Sze-kar Wan posits that Jia's views, while containing traces of Neoplatonism, were most informed by the Lu-Wang branch of Neoconfucianism which read Chinese classics as a moral guide.
[20] John Yieh argues that Jia's apparent belief in theosis (union with God) could have been due to his "life experience with the devastation of wars and violence".
[13] He was also, in Wai Luen Kwok's words, "representative of Chinese fundamentalist theologians of the first half of the twentieth century.