A New History of Christianity in China E-Book

Daniel H. Bays

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Blackwell Guides to Global Christianity
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 532

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A New History of Christianity in China, written by one of the world's the leading writers on Christianity in China, looks at Christianity's long history in China, its extraordinarily rapid rise in the last half of the twentieth century, and charts its future direction. * Provides the first comprehensive history of Christianity in China, an important, understudied area in both Asian studies and religious history * Traces the transformation of Christianity from an imported, Western religion to a thoroughly Chinese religion * Contextualizes the growth of Christianity in China within national and local politics * Offers a portrait of the complex religious scene in China today * Contrasts China with other non-Western societies where Christianity is surging

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Blackwell Guides to Global Christianity

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Nestorian Age and the Mongol Mission, 635–1368

Prologue

Nestorian Christians in Tang China

Christians and Mongols (Thirteenth to Fourteenth Centuries)

Chapter 2: The Jesuit Mission of Early Modern Times and Its Fate

Prologue

Background and Context

Ricci, the Jesuits, and the Larger China Mission

Chinese Christians and Christian Communities

The Rites Controversy

On their Own: The Long Eighteenth Century and the Life of the Church in China

Chapter 3: Protestant Beginnings, Catholics Redux, and China's First Indigenous Christians, 1800–1860

Prologue

Waiting on the China Coast

The Treaties (I)

Between Treaty Rounds

The Treaties (II)

Conclusion

Chapter 4: Expansion and Institution-Building in a Declining Dynasty, 1860–1902

Prologue

Broad Patterns of the Times

Jiaoan and Issues of Local Violence

Chinese Christians and the Making of a Chinese Church?

Christianity at the End of the Century: Reformists, Revolutionaries, and Boxers

Christians and the Boxers

Chapter 5: The “Golden Age” of Missions and the “Sino-Foreign Protestant Establishment,” 1902–1927

Prologue

Patterns of Protestant Growth

Origins and Course of the “Sino-Foreign Protestant Establishment”

Diversification of the Christian Scene

Aftermath of the May Fourth Movement and the Christian Movement in China (I)

Aftermath of the May Fourth Movement and the Christian Movement in China (II)

Chapter 6: The Multiple Crises of Chinese Christianity, 1927–1950

Prologue

Continued Forward Movement

Protestant Christianity in the “Nanjing Decade,” 1927–1937

Statebuilding, Social Reform, and Soul-Saving: The Rise of Independent Chinese Christianity

Roman Catholics from the mid 1920s until War with Japan

Chinese Protestantism during the War of Resistance against Japan, 1937–1945

End Game: Christianity and the Civil War, 1946–1950

Roman Catholics 1937–1949: Vulnerabilities

Chapter 7: Christianity and the New China, 1950–1966

Prologue

Protestants 1949–1954: Compliance

The “Christian Manifesto”and Growth of the Three Self

The Fate of Evangelicals in the TSPM: The Case of Chen Chonggui

Catholics 1949–1957: Resistance

From the Great Leap to the Cultural Revolution, 1958–1966

Some Thoughts

Chapter 8: The Chinese Church from the End of the Cultural Revolution to the Early Twenty-first Century

Prologue

Into the Maelstrom, 1966

Reform and Opening

The 1980s: Protestant Growth, Catholic Recalcitrance

A Rural Decade: Christianity as Folk Religion

Urban Christianity: “Cultural Christians,” and the Opium War Revisited

China in the Arena of World Christianity

Appendix: The Russian Orthodox Church and Ecclesiastical Mission in China

Late Seventeenth to Mid Nineteenth Century

Circa 1860–2000

Bibliography

Index

Blackwell Guides to Global Christianity

The Blackwell Guides to Global Christianity chart the history, development and current state of Christianity in key geographical areas around the world. In many cases, these are areas where Christianity has had a controversial past and where the future of Christianity may yet be decided. Each book in the series will look at both the history of Christianity in an important region and consider the issues and themes which are prevalent in the lives of contemporary Christians and the Church. Accessibly written by area experts, the books will appeal to students and scholars of World Christianity and others who are interested in the history, culture and religion of Christianity around the world.

Published

Christianities in Asia edited by Peter C. Phan

A New History of Christianity in China Daniel H. Bays

Forthcoming

Christianity in Africa Robert Kaggwa

This edition first published 2012

© 2012 Daniel H. Bays

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell's publishing program has been merged with Wiley's global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bays, Daniel H.

A new history of Christianity in China / Daniel H. Bays.

p. cm. – (Blackwell guides to global Christianity)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-5954-8 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4051-5955-5 (paperback)

1. China–Church history. I. Title.

BR1285.B39 2012

275.1'08–dc22

2011012209

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444342833; Wiley Online Library 9781444342864; ePub 9781444342840

To

Andrew Walls of Aberdeen

and

Thomas S. Y. Li of Tianjin

Both of whom I am humbly grateful to call

Teacher and Friend

Acknowledgments

In researching and writing this book, I have become a debtor to many. It all began in 1985, with the Henry Luce Foundation's support for my History of Christianity in China project, at the University of Kansas. Terry Lautz, the Asia Program Officer at the foundation, was consistent in his support of that project and in many other ways since; he has been a valued friend for 25 years.

Colleagues in the field of China missions and China Christianity studies have been faithful in assistance and encouragement: Gary Tiedemann, Chan Kim-kwong, Kathleen Lodwick, Murray Rubenstein, Bob Entenmann, Ryan Dunch, Lian Xi, Jessie Lutz, Carol Hamrin, Dick Madsen, David Mungello, Phil West, Silas Wu, among others.

Some senior China scholars not in the Christian studies field have nevertheless found time to be helpful in their support of my endeavors. Al Feuerweker and Ernie Young were wonderful mentors in my years in Ann Arbor in the 1960s, and always ready since then to write one more letter of recommendation. My thanks as well to the late John King Fairbank, the late K. C. Liu, to Paul Cohen, and to Jonathan Spence for assistance in many ways. I gained a much wider horizon of views on Christian history from my exposure to scholars of American religion: Grant Wacker, Mark Noll, Joel Carpenter, Nathan Hatch, Edith Blumhofer, among others. I am grateful to Jerry Anderson for including me in a group based during most of the 1990s at the Overseas Ministries Studies Center in New Haven. There I was exposed to stimulating new ideas and modes of analysis by Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Bob Frykenberg, and Dana Robert.

Very early in my odyssey, James Cha (Cha Shih-chieh), of National Taiwan University and China Evangelical Theological Seminary, played a key role by providing full access to his rich collection of Christian materials at the seminary during my stay in Taiwan in 1984–85. And the late Jonathan T'ien-en Chao did the same with his collection of rare historical materials at the Chinese Church Research Center, Hong Kong, all through the 1980s. Also in Hong Kong, Kim Chan has been a treasured colleague, collaborator, and friend for over twenty years; and I have enjoyed the friendship and hospitality on several occasions of Hong Kong colleagues Peter Ng, Philip Leung, Timothy Wong, and K. K. Lee.

In China my debts are legion. In the autumn of 1986 I travelled all over Shandong Province with Thomas S. Y. Li (Li Shiyu). We visited churches, also banged on hotel doors at 3 am, slept on concrete, rode farm wagons for taxis, and visited the original still-operating site of the Jesus Family, among other adventures. Thomas, at age 65, beat me to the top of Taishan, and drank most of the bai'ger. I owe him endless thanks, for friendship as well as for advancing my understanding of popular religion.

Other colleagues and friends in China are Tao Feiya and Liu Tianlu (both then of Shandong University; Tao is now at Shanghai University), Edward Xu of Fudan University, and Liu Jiafeng of Central China Normal University. Among senior scholars, Professor Lu Yao at Shandong University and President Zhang Kaiyuan of Central China Normal have always been hospitable and helpful. I also appreciate the assistance of Zhuo Xinping, Director of the Institute of World Religions of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), and of Zhao Fusan, formerly of CASS. All these, and others unnamed, made my research in China over the years thoroughly enjoyable in addition to being challenging intellectually.

Special thanks to Mark Noll and Joel Carpenter, who went the extra mile to read and give me feedback on the first draft of all the chapters. Thanks also to my editors at Blackwell (now Wiley-Blackwell), Andrew Humphries and Isobel Bainton, for their patience when I did not meet deadlines or otherwise misbehaved. I am grateful to Calvin College for a sabbatical in 2007 and for generous travel assistance over several years, and to the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship for providing support at key times. My colleagues in the History Department and the Asian Studies Program at Calvin College welcomed me warmly upon my arrival here a decade ago, and they have provided a congenial environment for thinking and writing.

In some ways, ideas finding expression here began well over 30 years ago. Though I have learned much from others, the remaining defects and shortcomings of this book are mine alone.

I have dedicated this volume to Andrew Walls, always gracious and polite as he drops blockbusters which challenge our assumptions about Christian history outside the West, and to Thomas S. Y. Li, who, like Andrew, has taught me much about life as well as scholarship.

Finally, very special appreciation to my wife Janny, who for all these years has shared my love for China and has kept me on task. Without her there would be no book. Thank you, Sweetheart.

Daniel H. Bays

Grand Rapids, Michigan

October 2010

Introduction

This book has been close to my heart for many years, and in some ways it has been implicit in all my academic endeavors for the past three decades. In the early 1980s, when Christianity, along with other religions, was being resurrected in China after the Cultural Revolution and was showing immense vitality, I became part of a new generation of scholars, Chinese as well as American and European, who saw in the history of Christianity in China an important understudied area. Some topics in this area had in fact been studied; these studies centered mainly on the foreign missionaries and the story of what they did in China. But the other, and arguably more important, piece of the picture was the rise of Chinese Christians in the joint Sino-foreign endeavor to establish and nurture the faith in Chinese soil. This process was characterized by a persistent, overriding dynamic: the Chinese Christians were first participants, then subordinate partners of the foreign missionaries, then finally the inheritors or sole “owners” of the Chinese church. It was also a “cross-cultural process,” the result of which has been the creation of an immensely varied Chinese Christian world in our day.1 I have attempted to track some of the main features of this cross-cultural process over several centuries. I have also focused on China proper, making little reference to Christian stirrings among China's minority peoples and in overseas Chinese communities. Both of those topics are worthy of in-depth attention by other scholars.

I have been told by many that there is a need for a volume such as this. I myself have felt compelled to write it, if only for the sake of my own understanding. My aim has been, in the writing process, to incorporate the considerable amount of research of the last 25 years into a coherent narrative. Previous accounts which are somewhat comparable to this effort include Kenneth Scott Latourette's A History of Christian Missions in China (London, 1929), a large and remarkably detailed reference-type work which is unfortunately 80 years old. A 1988 book by the Rev. Bob Whyte, Unfinished Encounter: China and Christianity (London, 1988) was a very respectable general history by the project officer of the China Study Project, an ecumenical multi-year endeavor sponsored by several British Protestant and Catholic bodies, foremost among them the Conference for World Mission of the British Council of Churches. It has long been out of print, and at any rate cannot include the significant scholarship, much of it by Chinese scholars, of the past quarter century. Finally, Fr. Jean-Pierre Charbonnier has given us Christians in China A.D. 600 to 2000 (in English, San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2007; original French edition, Paris, 2002),). With this volume Father Charbonnier, China Director of the Paris Foreign Mission society, has given us a very substantial and useful account, mainly of the Catholic efforts in China. Perhaps Charbonnier's stress on Catholics balances out the greater weight given to Protestants by the other works, including this one.

In writing I tried to strike a balance between the early modern (pre-1800, with two chapters), modern (1800–1950, with four chapters), and recent (1950–present, with two chapters) periods. The heart of the book is the middle four chapters, Chapters 3 to 6. Here the basic tension between (foreign) mission and (Chinese) church is played out over a century and a half. Another large theme which recurs is the always-present instinct of the Chinese state, or political regime, to monitor and control religious movements; as a result Christianity was usually not seen only, indeed not even primarily, as a “religion” or belief system, but as a behavioral phenomenon which could cause endless trouble.

The appendix provides a brief history of the Russian Orthodox Ecclesiastical Mission to China from the late seventeenth century until the mid twentieth century, when it ended. This mission was unique in several ways, and its story should be included somewhere. Rather than try to include it in pieces scattered among a few chapters, I have given a concise version of it which has been relegated to an appendix.

I have decided not to include a separate “conclusion” at the end of the book. Christianity in China is in a state of flux (as are many things in China), and I do not wish to extrapolate the present into the future any more than I have in the last few pages of Chapter 8 – especially when observers are so little agreed on the shape of the “present.” But there are some larger themes which I hope the reader will derive from this effort. One is the notion that Christianity, when it is separated from its bonding with Western culture in a package we may call “Christendom,” is perfectly capable of adapting to function in different cultural settings, often after a period of cross-cultural interaction which may be disruptive. The lesson: one can have Christ without Christendom. The other notion that I hope is manifest in this account is the remarkable flexibility and creativity in the Chinese relationship with Christianity (or perhaps with “Christianities”). Examples abound: the Daoist and Buddhist terms used by the Nestorians; the powerful Biblical visions of the Taiping leaders in the nineteenth century; devices of Chinese Catholics in renaming the ancestral ceremonies in order to finesse the Pope's proscription; and today's frequent occurrence of White Lotus-like Protestant millenarian sects in the Chinese countryside. One is tempted to observe, “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”.

Note

1. Andrew Walls, “From Christendom to World Christianity,” in The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History, ed. Andrew Walls (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), pp. 149–171.

Chapter 1

The Nestorian Age and the Mongol Mission, 635–1368

Prologue

The new Beijing City Museum is a stunning showcase of daring recent Chinese architecture, built about 2004 or 2005, and is one of several monumental buildings that make central Beijing visually much more interesting than when the official style was “Stalinesque Victorian.” The city museum had formerly been in a one-story wing of the “Confucius Temple,” a peaceful but run-down structure on the northeast side of the city, with far too little viewing space to display its holdings. When the museum moved to its spacious new quarters on the main East–West artery, visitors could see an entire floor of artifacts, photos, exhibits, and other items all on the history of the city of Beijing, including history from the time before it was called Beijing. For of course it used to be called Kambaliq, or Dadu (Great capital) when the Mongols ruled China. Walking through the exhibits of that period of Beijing's history, it is hard to miss a cross carved on a large stone slab. This is a Nestorian cross, with the four spikes of equal length, a symbol of the Christian Church of the East, often just called Nestorian. Moreover, there is a photo of a pile of rubble and perhaps part of a stone wall, identified as (possibly) the remains of a Nestorian Christian monastery in the suburbs of Beijing. These items do not date back to the very beginnings of Christianity in China – another stone we will discuss presently will do that. But it adds concrete visual evidence of the recurring Christian presence in pre-modern China, which began almost 15 centuries ago, if not earlier.

Just exactly when Christianity first entered China is a matter of some debate and even dispute among scholars, church representatives, and other interested parties. Much of this uncertainty has arisen only in recent years. It is due to the discovery, almost 30 years ago in the early 1980s, of some very interesting bas-relief sculptures on a rock face at Kongwangshan, near the city of Lianyungang, in what is now Jiangsu Province. Lianyungang was an important port city in earlier times, first port of entry into China for many who came by sea. These bas-reliefs depict three persons. The undeniable existence of these sculptures, and probable dating of them to the reign of the Mingdi emperor (r. 57–75 CE) of the Later Han Dyasty (25–220 CE), have led to the conclusion that these are from the period of the very early entrance of Buddhism into China, and depicted Buddhist figures. This conclusion would not have been seriously questioned, until recently. Within the past five to ten years, however, some have begun to think that these carved figures might not be Buddhist, rather that the evidence pointed to their being Christian; the human figures on the rock face were the Apostle Thomas and Mary the mother of Jesus, with a variety of candidates for the third figure.

This idea of Thomas in China is not new. His alleged visit to China has never been questioned by the Mar Thoma church in India, which has always claimed direct descent from the claimed church-planting of the Apostle there in the early 60s CE. Their books and church traditions clearly have Thomas in the 60s CE coming to India, then to China, and back to India, where he died. Two breviaries (concise liturgy books) of the Church in later centuries, one from Malabar, south India, and one in Syriac from the Church of the East, also seem possibly to refer to Thomas and China. Nevertheless, few people believed the Thomas-in-China theory; there simply was not enough concrete evidence to take it very seriously. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the early Portuguese explorers, chroniclers, and historians who came to India related the stories of the Indian church on the southeast coast concerning St. Thomas and China. Some favored accepting the claim, others were highly skeptical. Matteo Ricci, the first great Jesuit China missionary (in China 1583–1610), encountered there some ambiguous references to (possibly) Thomas. But no one had any concrete evidence. Then in 2008, two Frenchmen wrote a book strongly advocating the Thomas-in-China thesis. They based their argument on the Kongwangshan bas-reliefs and other evidence that they adduced, and concluded that Thomas went from India to China by sea, because of an outbreak of unrest on the Old Silk Road through central Asia. They also claim that rather than Buddhism setting the bar for other religions, Christianity may have influenced Buddhism, which was just in its formative stages in China at this time. Now there is some controversy over these issues, because of their linkage to those of national self-image and questions such as which of the world religions got to a given place first. For example, Professor Perrier found a group of scholars of religion at Nanjing University, the school with some expertise in this period, quite resistant to his suggestions about the content of the bas-reliefs. I, for one, cannot see where this argument will end, or if it will end. The key evidence seems not at all clear-cut, so a more cautious stance would seem in order until more mainstream scholars become involved.