Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
Christianity Today Book Award Finalist—Missions/Global Church Reader's Choice Award Winner Throughout China's rapidly growing cities, a new wave of unregistered house churches is growing. They are developing rich theological perspectives that are both uniquely Chinese and rooted in the historical doctrines of the faith. To understand how they have endured despite government pressure and cultural marginalization, we must understand both their history and their theology. In this volume, key writings from the house church have been compiled, translated, and made accessible to English speakers. Featured here is a manifesto by well-known pastor Wang Yi and his church, Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, to clarify their theological stance on the house church and its relationship to the Chinese government. There are also works by prominent voices such as Jin Tianming, Jin Mingri, and Sun Yi. The editors have provided introductions, notes, and a glossary to give context to each selection. These writings are an important body of theology historically and spiritually. Though defined by a specific set of circumstances, they have universal applications in a world where the relationship between church and state is more complicated than ever. This unique resource will be valuable to practical and political theologians as well as readers interested in international relations, political philosophy, history, and intercultural studies.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 540
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
TO JIANG RONG AND SHU YA.
I thank my God in all my remembrance of you,
always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy,
because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.
And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you
will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
PHILIPPIANS 1:3-6
Weeping may tarry for the night,
But joy comes with the morning.
PSALM 30:5
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
IAN JOHNSON
When I first met Wang Yi, he ushered me into a conference room overlooking a landscape of old and slightly run-down office buildings in central Chengdu, western China’s most important metropolis.1 It was 2011 and his church was then called Early Rain Reformed Church, later taking the name Early Rain Covenant Church. Like many churches that weren’t registered with the government, it was housed in an office building. This one was fairly old, with one functioning elevator that groaned its way up to the seventeenth floor. I had taken one look and walked up the stairs.
I explained that I was working on a book about the revival of religion in China. I had been to many rural churches in traditional Christian heartlands of China, such as the province of Henan, but felt that big, urban churches like his were becoming more important. Would he let me sit in on his services and talk to congregants?
Pastor Wang immediately agreed on two conditions: first, no photography in the church, and second, if I wanted to quote anyone, I was welcome to do so but needed their permission. His reasoning was simple: Early Rain had nothing to hide. It was a public institution. All were welcome, and no one should be restricted in what they wrote. So if I wanted to visit his church, that was my right. And if I wanted to write something, that was also my right as a free person. His restrictions were simply means to respect the privacy of those who attended and to keep the service dignified.
At that point I had worked in China off and on since the mid-1980s. I knew that for me to visit his church regularly carried inherent risks. I asked him about the building security guards downstairs and whether they would report to the authorities that a foreigner was regularly entering the building and trudging up to the seventeenth floor.
“Yes,” he said. “But foreigners aren’t banned from attending church. We are an open organization. We have nothing to hide. Come and worship with us.”
We talked a bit further and I realized that compared to the many challenges that Early Rain faced, I was probably insignificant. And so I agreed to his conditions and began attending the church regularly, spending hundreds of hours in services, seminaries, prayer groups, and conversations with congregants, almost all of whom were happy to share their experiences.
That began what for me was an unusual religious experience. I was raised a Christian, in Canada, as an Anglican (Episcopal in the United States) and felt pretty comfortable going to church. But to me the beauty of the service largely resided in the music and the Shakespearean language of the King James Bible or the Book of Common Prayer. Most priests I had encountered didn’t really preach convincing sermons, and church seemed little more than a worthy Sunday-morning ceremony that contained important lessons about living a good life.
Sitting in on Wang Yi’s services was something else. His sermons were not homilies he squeezed into the service quickly so everyone could get to the parish hall for coffee and donuts. They were beautifully crafted, logically organized, educational experiences in Christianity. Mostly they were long. It was nothing for him to talk for half an hour and most sermons went on for forty-five minutes. And yet they didn’t seem long. He didn’t present Christianity as an obligation or chore but as an essential part of making sense of the society around us. At the time he was thirty-eight years old and had only converted six years earlier, in 2005, and so he was on a journey too—learning the Bible and teaching it to us.
This isn’t a paean to Wang Yi. Like many leaders of unregistered churches in China, he was an autodidact, who had memorized the Bible but saw things in, at times, dogmatic ways. His views on women (they could not serve as presbyters, let alone be pastors) were also not mine. And he had knock-down-drag-out battles with people with whom he disagreed, which didn’t seem like the most Christian approach to problem solving. I think other congregants had similar concerns—some would roll their eyes at his battles or joke about his fiery temperament.
But for them and me, attending Wang Yi’s church was a profound experience. Part of it was that people felt that they were participating in something completely clear and open—something they could participate in and help manage. This is a radical idea in China, where someone else, usually the Chinese Communist Party, is running one’s life.
Part of it also was his personal charisma, speaking skills, and sharp mind. His sermons were electrifying, not in the sense of rhetorical histrionics but because of the clear, insightful way he explained the Bible, so that it made sense to the daily life of someone living in China. He discussed real problems and related them back to this religion, which he didn’t see at all as “Western” or “foreign” but a universal faith that just happened to have been founded in the part of the world that we today call the Middle East.
My book included other faiths practiced by ethnic Chinese or “Han” people in China, and so I also spent time with Buddhists, Daoists, and folk religious practitioners. These were also idealistic people who were trying to bring a moral structure to their followers. This goal remains important to many Chinese, who feel buffeted by the essentially amoral world that the Chinese Communist Party has erected since taking power in 1949. Many of these other religious leaders also had committed followers who found meaning and value in their spiritual messages.
But Wang Yi—and other unregistered Protestant churches—connected the most directly with their followers. They offered the most help and advice and were best organized, often setting up schools, seminaries, and youth groups. This helps explain why Protestant Christianity was widely regarded as China’s fastest-growing religion until a crackdown began in the 2010s.
Wang Yi was clear-eyed about these risks. He knew that he could be arrested at any time, but he refused to be drawn into the culture of secrecy that the Chinese Communist Party cultivated. This is why he rejected the term underground church. His was simply a church and had the same right to exist as the official churches. It was unregistered because it chose to be unregistered. I found this logic compelling, and in my writing prefer the term unregistered because it is more accurate than “underground” churches, which often are not underground, or “house” churches, which imply small groups of a dozen or so people. Rather, these are churches that lease office space and run kindergartens, seminaries, and even bookstores. They are what political scientists call civil society—groups that exist outside of government control.
Not all faiths around the world face these problems. Some are fortunate to exist in open societies that allow freedom of religion. Others are state-sanctioned religions that enjoy the blessings, but also the obligations, of state support. But to some degree all people of faith have to decide how to interact with authorities. Wang Yi and the other leaders of China’s unregistered churches thought deeply about this and tried to fashion answers through statements and manifestos, many of which are documented in this book.
These essays can be seen as specific to China but are also reflections of a remarkable explosion of faith that is taking place in many countries. In China, faith was long banned but is now on the upsurge, perplexing authorities. Some faiths have been co-opted, especially Buddhism and China’s indigenous religion, Taoism, which enjoy state support but also tight state control. Others face outright repression, such as Islam, against which the government has engaged in a brutal campaign of control, especially in the western region of Xinjiang. Still others, such as Catholicism, have been part of delicate negotiations over how bishops are ordained. As for Protestants, the government’s aim has been to force all churches into the state-controlled organization. Those that refuse, like Wang Yi’s, face destruction or at least a radical reduction in size.
Many of these battles inside China have global repercussions. China is now the world’s largest Buddhist nation and tries to use it as a form of soft power in other Buddhist countries. Its suppression of Islam has met with international condemnation and caused partial boycotts of prestigious events in China, such as the 2022 Winter Olympics. And its negotiations with the Vatican are closely followed by the roughly 1.2 billion Catholics around the world. Meanwhile, the crackdown on Protestantism has attracted widespread attention, in part due to social media.
Inside China, this campaign to control religion has been implemented through new laws. These do not protect religious freedom but curtail it. This reflects a broader point in China about the legal system. Ideally, laws should be above the whims of a ruler—rule of law. But in China and many other countries, the law is a tool of oppression—rule by law. It is this kind of state-controlled legal system that for the past decade has taken aim at China’s unregistered churches and resulted in Wang Yi’s arrest in 2018. Some saw the crackdown against Wang Yi and his church as something specific, arguing that he was too outspoken. But these criticisms miss the point that the state is nervous about all religions and that all would eventually be targeted, which is what has come to pass.
All of these risks were clear to Wang Yi when I met him a decade ago. He often wrote about the potential for arrest and how to behave in the face of an oppressive state. But his conclusion was to follow a course of radical openness. He had his sermons recorded and a library of them made available to anyone who visited, worshipers or police. People at Early Rain didn’t come furtively through the back door but dressed in their Sunday best and wore name tags. They were proud of attending his church and did so openly. This was their church, a small island of self-determination in a sea of state control, led by an energetic idealist.
“There is a risk of being so public,” he told me that morning. “But I feel that the bigger risk is being underground. We won’t have a free attitude if we don’t act free. A basic attitude of being a Christian is to be free. But you can’t act free if you think you’re a criminal. So we try to walk the path of being open.”
Wang Yi walked that path in good faith until it became impassable. Now that he is in jail, I think of something else that he once wrote in a letter to his wife, Jiang Rong, about what to do if he is arrested:
I am still a missionary, and you are still a minister’s wife. The gospel was our life yesterday and it will be our life tomorrow. This is because the One who called us is the God of yesterday and the God of tomorrow.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With thanks and appreciation to the many people who advised or assisted with making this book possible.
First, thank you to “Urban Farmer,” who planted the seed of an idea behind this book and oversaw an early translation of Our House Church Manifesto. He had the foresight to see its importance long before the events of 2018 and to communicate Wang Yi’s desire to share the manifesto outside of China.
Thank you to the fellows, advisors, and staff of the Center for House Church Theology for their frequent input and advice, with special thanks to Clara Kim, “Apollos Bell,” “Jin Chen,” and Brandon O’Brien.
Thank you to the many translators who worked faithfully on these texts over the years, particularly Ryan, whose linguistic gifts and leadership have made possible the idea of widely sharing Chinese house church theology.
Thank you to Trey Nation and Erik Lundeen for being on call to answer theological questions and for helping track down obscure references.
We are deeply grateful to Jon Boyd for taking a chance on this project and for his endless patience with us as we figured out countless details.
And last, but certainly not least, thank you to a very important group of Chinese individuals who assisted us in communicating with necessary parties within China. Their names remain anonymous, but the fruit of their faithfulness is evident.
INTRODUCTION
HANNAH NATION
On Sunday, it was Wang Yi’s turn to recite. He was wearing a light blue oxford shirt, short sleeved, with a striped tie. He bounced forward on the balls of his feet, grasping the pulpit like a pogo stick. He talked about today’s reading, which was the story of Jesus feeding five thousand people with just a little fish and bread—a miracle.
“China’s congregations are like this today. You hear so many people say, especially intellectuals like I used to be, ‘Christianity can promote economic development. Capitalism is brought by Christianity. It can help clothe and feed us. It can promote a more civilized form of commerce based on trust.’
“Christianity can bring democracy and human rights. It can make us a constitutional country based on rule of law. In other words, Christianity can allow us to feed ourselves like the manna from heaven or the loaves of bread. Christianity can bring a truly harmonious society.
“But the Gospels aren’t about this. What is the relationship between the Gospels and capitalism? There is no relationship. What is the relationship between God and democracy? There is no relationship. What is the relationship between Christianity and eating your fill? There is no relationship.
“This doesn’t mean we don’t push freedom and democracy and people eating their fill. But this isn’t what the Bible is about.”
Instead, he said it was about God revealing himself through Jesus. It started with individuals taking responsibility for their own actions, he said, and it started with the Greek verb “to be.” And then he began to recite.
“Ego eimi,” he said in ancient Greek: “I am.”
I am the bread of life.
I am the light of the world.
I am the way, the truth, and the life.
I am.1
On December 9, 2018, Pastor Wang Yi (王怡) of Early Rain Covenant Church (秋雨圣约教会) in Chengdu, China, was arrested and detained. Over the following days and weeks, all of Early Rain’s leadership and hundreds of members were also detained, and the entirety of the church’s substantial physical property was destroyed or confiscated. One year later, in December 2019, Wang Yi was sentenced to nine years of incarceration.
These events made the news globally. They were reported on in the US by both the New York Times and Fox News. In the United Kingdom, several outlets reported on Wang Yi and Early Rain, including the BBC. Many North American and European diplomatic agencies have commented on his sentencing and condemned the actions of the Chinese government.
In part, this global attention was drawn to Chengdu due to a statement written by Wang Yi preceding his arrest and released by Early Rain after forty-eight hours of his detention. “My Declaration of Faithful Obedience” was translated into English, as well as several other languages, shortly after Wang Yi’s arrest and drew hundreds of thousands of readers as it circulated the internet. Though several other prominent house churches have also been closed and leaders arrested in the past decade, Wang Yi’s written statement is one of the first widely circulated declarations by a house church pastor in the twenty-first century.
In the media coverage of Wang Yi’s arrest and the closure of Early Rain, the exact nature of Wang Yi’s conflict with China’s governing authorities remained unclear. The easiest narrative for the media outside of China to pick up on was that of human rights violations and political persecution. Though not inaccurate, framing these events in this way had more to do with the West’s perception of China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) than it did with Wang Yi’s statements and beliefs themselves. Regardless of however the West or the CCP frames or understands Wang Yi’s conflict with the state, he himself has a very specific and particular understanding of what has taken place.
For Wang Yi, the conflict between his church and the state ought to be understood primarily, and perhaps only, as a spiritual conflict within a real, eschatological dimension. For Wang Yi, the conflict between Early Rain and the CCP is a conflict between the city of God and the city of man regarding who has authority over humanity and creation. By letting Wang Yi’s writings speak for themselves in English, this book seeks to introduce these theological positions to the narrative surrounding Wang Yi. No one can grasp the highly complex religious demography of China and the resulting political conflicts this landscape produces without attempting to understand the diverse theological cauldron of China’s pastors. In other words, to understand the political conflicts between church and state in China from the perspective of the churches involved, one must begin to study the theology they are writing and using to inform their decisions.
WHAT IS THE HOUSE CHURCH?
Unless the reader is a Chinese national or a Sinologist, a likely first question when reading a house church manifesto will be what, exactly, the house church is. Global Christianity’s understanding of the house church in China is generally murky. Our imaginations often lead us to darkened rooms where a dozen people gather and quietly whisper their prayers, unable to loudly sing, and eventually depart one by one in order to avoid attention. While this image held true for the realities of many Chinese Christians roughly thirty years ago, this is not an accurate picture of the house church today.
Let me paint another picture. I know of a house church in a prominent inland city that experienced powerful renewal roughly a decade ago through the historic Reformed gospel of grace. The pastor of this church was personally revived and spiritually freed in his understanding of the gospel, and the fruit of his personal revival was the revival of the rest of the church’s leadership. In turn, these leaders began noticing many things in the apartment building where the church rented property, as well as the surrounding apartment complex, that needed to be cleaned up and repaired. They organized the congregation to publicly participate in the property’s maintenance—fixing lights in hallways, collecting trash, and generally contributing to the well-being of the community. Not only did the church’s immediate neighbors notice these actions, but likewise so did the neighborhood security officers and policemen, and eventually the pastor was called to meet with these low-level magistrates. These local authorities chose not to interfere, and the church grew to more than five hundred congregants spread across multiple daughter churches. Until 2018, this large church was publicly engaged and maintained a friendly relationship with the local authorities. Since 2018, its relationship with authorities has changed. Yet, the church has remained active in the community and it has continued to grow. And through all of these changes—political, theological, and numerical—it has continuously called itself a “house church.” This is one of the realities of urban Chinese Christianity.
As you read Wang Yi’s manifesto, do not imagine the rural house churches of the 1960s and 1970s—scattered and sheltering in place. Instead, imagine China’s gleaming, rapidly growing cities, where people pursue their material and social dreams and engage the multitude of ideas and philosophies which define so many of the world’s urban centers. In this light, I offer five characteristics with which we can begin to understand and define the house church.
First, the house church is unregistered. The most fundamental identity of the Chinese house church is that it refuses to comply with the government’s demand to register with and submit to the official structures that exist within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for the regulation and oversight of all religious practice, including theology, preaching, and pastoral education, in short, spiritual governance. Though at times it has been severely suppressed, and even eradicated from the public eye during the 1960s and 1970s, Christianity is not illegal in China, strictly speaking. Before the Communist revolution, Chinese Protestant Christianity could arguably be understood primarily according to its relationship with the West, organized along an axis of affiliations with indigenous independent groups such as the True Jesus Church on one end and those participating in the Anglican communion on the other. However, with the removal of all Western missionaries and the severing of all denominational ties by the Communists in the 1950s this changed entirely. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the fundamental defining relationship for churches in China has not been to the West, but rather the relationship to the CCP. On one side of this new axis, a significant portion of Chinese Christianity exists within the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), a state-sanctioned organization that submits to the authority of the CCP. On the other side, churches that refuse to register with the TSPM stand within the historical stream of the “house church.” For many decades during the explosion of Christianity in China over the turn of the millennium, it seemed a middle ground might open allowing for gray semi-state-sanctioned churches. However, over the past ten years this increasingly seems to be disappearing as the government pursues compliance under the Regulations on Religious Affairs, which began to be enforceable in 2018.
Of course, this is a simple sketch of a system within which complexities abound. For example, where exactly do we place a large unregistered church in Wenzhou that worships publicly but has had its crosses demolished?2 Or a new unregistered church that meets in a hotel ballroom in the middle of Shanghai whose pastor was converted by an American missionary in the 2000s and received his theological education overseas? Can we rightly call such churches “house churches”?
As one personal friend with more than a decade of extensive on-the-ground engagement with unregistered churches has said,
I can’t think of any non-registered church that doesn’t self-identify as a “house church.” There is an undeniable historical legacy that non-registered churches associate themselves with. Even those that were the most public and open identified themselves as house churches, not because of where they met or even their theological background, but because of the historical legacy of non-registered churches in China.
I have been in prayer meetings with Wenzhou, charismatic, urban Reformed, and completely non-affiliated house church leaders. They are all very different, and in some ways many of them found it miraculous that we could all come together for prayer. But when someone led worship and started a Canaan hymn, they all started to sing together as if they’re from the same church. The reason is because Xiaomin’s Canaan hymns are an identifying marker in which house churches share.3 There is a common heritage among the non-registered that serves as a boundary.
Second, the house church is not secret. Simply because the house church is unregistered and therefore by some interpretations illegal does not mean it is a church in hiding. In general, house churches are cautious and seek to embody Christ’s directive to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. And as restrictions on unregistered religious practices have once again tightened since the beginning of 2018, most churches have taken serious precautions to cloak their activities from unwanted scrutiny and veil their members from social and government pressure. But in general, Chinese house churches are not altogether hidden. Some must be found through word of mouth, but most do not discourage local knowledge of their existence, and most Chinese living in urban centers have met at least one person who professes to be a Christian.
The house church is not secret in part because the house church is large. The new edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia estimates that today there are 112,030,000 Christians of all denominations in China (7.9 percent of the total population) and it projects this number will almost double by 2050.4 Many who minister within China cast serious doubt onto these numbers and are more comfortable with numbers around 70 million.5 However, a government report from 2018 cited 38 million adherents within the Protestant TSPM, meaning that if the TSPM’s numbers are accurate and if skeptics of the WCE’s high numbers are correct, unregistered Christianity is still prevalent enough in Chinese society to be impossible to keep hidden.6
Third, the house church is theologically engaged. As the house church grows and as its demographics shift toward China’s urban centers, its theologizing increases. Opportunities for theological and pastoral training both domestically and overseas have increased dramatically, and even with increased political pressure on the house churches, the amount of reflection, writing, and contextualizing taking place is impressive. Connected to this is increased global awareness and relationship. After the isolation of the latter half of the twentieth century, the house church is demonstrating increased desire to interact and converse with the global church. Much of the house church, particularly in China’s multitudinous urban centers, displays a curiosity regarding church history and systematic theology and is very much seeking to locate itself within the global conversations on both topics. Yet, unlike Chinese churches of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were reliant on the oversight of Western denominations and organizations for such global interaction, the contemporary house church is better positioned to converse as an independent peer, without returning to former structures of submission to outside ecclesiastical authority. Pragmatically, this is due to the restricted contact and affiliation with outside churches it experiences under the Chinese government.
Though it is helpful to recognize the increased theological engagement taking place within the house churches, it would be false to imply that this is a new reality. In fact, by his own account the theological dispute between the liberals and the fundamentalists of the twentieth century was the diving factor for Wang Mingdao, the figurative father of the house church. Throughout this book, the reader will come across mention of an essay titled “We—For the Sake of Faith,” which is widely considered a foundational document for the birth of the Chinese house church movement. Written by Wang Mingdao in 1955 as a rallying cry to Chinese Christians to not join the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, one is struck by its distinct lack of mention of the Chinese Communist Party or even of communism or governments generally. Wang Mingdao was an independent Chinese pastor, without any ecclesiological or financial connections to Western denominations or missionaries, and as such he fulfilled many of the ideals for religious independence espoused by the CCP. He also did not speak out against the new government after the CCP came to power. His entire argument against the TSPM was a theological one—he could not in good conscience unite with those who do not believe in the fundamentals of the faith such as the virgin birth, individual salvation from sin, and the resurrection of the dead at Jesus’ second coming. Wang Mingdao’s resistance to the religious organizations of the CCP based solely on theological arguments against liberal theology demonstrates that Chinese Christianity was theologically engaged before the CCP’s ascent to power and it was theology that shaped its response to the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. As Frank W. Price wrote upon the publication of “We—For the Sake of Faith” in English in 1956, “an acute theological controversy is shaking the Chinese Church. It will probably continue in various forms. New champions of the faith will arise, it may well be from among various schools of theological thought.”7 The Chinese church of the early twentieth century was not an unformed or shallow church; within it were many contemplative writers and preachers and it remains this way today.
Fourth, the house church is not uniform. To be very clear, apart from its particular refusal to submit to the authority of the CCP, there is no single house church theology or even identity. China’s house churches have traditionally fallen within basic pietistic fundamentalism, and this remains a primary distinguishing theological mark of the house church. But there are charismatic, broadly evangelical, and Reformed movements to be found within the house churches, and one must not forget the Catholic house church. Out of these many streams, grace-centric theology that draws upon the historic soteriology of the Protestant Reformation is on the ascent in China’s urban centers. But the house church and its theological persuasions are diverse, and this is likely to remain true as house churches engage the many various forms of Christianity to be discovered outside of China’s national boundaries.
Fifth, the house church is Chinese. This sounds like stating an obvious fact. But one of the most remarkable facets of the Chinese house church is its truly indigenous nature. Even after China reopened to the West at the end of the twentieth century and hundreds of missionaries found creative ways to enter, the church in China has never returned to what it was before the Communist revolution. With the abrupt ending of the entirety of the Western missionary endeavor in China, the Chinese church became the largest indigenously led movement in contemporary global church history.
These attributes are important to keep in mind while reading the work of Wang Yi. The first three are made plain by Wang Yi himself, but the fourth and fifth are helpful for locating Wang Yi’s arguments. The audience he is primarily interested in persuading is made up of China’s Christians found in the house churches, whether charismatic, fundamentalist, or Reformed. Though his writings are important outside of China, they are first and foremost for a church wrestling through cultural and political pressures, theological exploration, and numerical growth in search of its identity.
WHO IS WANG YI?
Wang Yi was born in 1973 in Santai, Sichuan, a small town eighty miles northeast of Chengdu. He graduated from the Law School of Sichuan University in 1996 and began teaching law at Chengdu University; he also became involved in human rights advocacy. Wang married his high school sweetheart Jiang Rong (蒋蓉), to whom he had written over eight hundred love letters while she attended college in another city.
Wang Yi began writing online and for various Chinese magazines at the end of the 1990s. In 2003, he became a columnist for China News Weekly and joined the Independence Chinese Pen Center. He also published ten books online. His writings were mostly cultural and political commentaries, and they brought Wang Yi national attention. In 2004, he was the youngest person to be selected for the Southern People Weekly’s list of “Fifty Most Influential Public Intellectuals of China.”
During the early 2000s, Wang Yi and Jiang Rong heard the gospel from Christian friends, and Wang Yi also became involved in dialogue with Chinese Christian intellectuals online. Jiang Rong believed first and was baptized in 2004. In April 2005, the couple began hosting a Bible study at their apartment in Chengdu, even though Wang Yi was not a believer. Shortly thereafter Wang Yi was converted and baptized and began to serve in a Bible study group called the Early Rain Fellowship (秋雨之福团契).
In 2006, Wang Yi was invited to meet with President George W. Bush at the White House as a representative of China’s Christian intellectuals in the house church. Wang Yi returned to Washington, DC, in 2008 to attend the Conference for Global Christians in Law and was awarded the Prize for the Contribution to Promoting Religious Freedom.
After resigning from Chengdu University, Wang Yi founded and began pastoring Early Rain Reformed Church (成都秋雨之福归正教会) in 2008, which was later renamed Early Rain Covenant Church after a contentious church split in 2018. In 2011, Wang Yi was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in one of China’s first indigenous house church presbyteries. Before its forced closure in 2018, Early Rain Covenant Church grew to more than six hundred members and around eight hundred attendees, planted multiple new churches, and launched a system of education from primary school through postgraduate seminary. Wang Yi’s preaching, writing, and news surrounding Early Rain were followed nationally by other house churches and were often divisive among Chinese Christians.
Within China, Wang Yi has often been controversial, as many pastors and laypeople within the house churches would prefer total avoidance of the church-state question. These critics disagree with Wang Yi’s outspokenness regarding the CCP and object to his publication of theological writings on political blogs and magazines. There are also those who do not agree with Early Rain’s embrace of Presbyterian polity and church discipline, as well as to the introduction of historic Reformed doctrine. Additionally, Early Rain experienced a painful church split in the years leading up to Wang Yi’s arrest, many details of which were publicly aired online. In many ways, Wang Yi’s writings contained in this book are directed as much to critics within the Chinese house churches as they are to the Chinese government. He desires to persuade other Christians of his views regarding the state, the church, and the end destination of both.
Like all persecuted Christians, Wang Yi can be mythologized and heroicized outside of China, particularly by those unfamiliar with his cultural context. But this is not helpful either to him or to readers of this book. Wang Yi is a man like all men, and like all Christians he confesses to be a fallen and marred image of the Creator, someone who places his trust in Jesus as the Savior of humankind and the only hope for redemption. One does not have to agree with all of Wang Yi’s arguments to recognize that he has a gifted mind and is an important voice from the house church that ought to be engaged. This book desires to let readers in the English-speaking world engage Wang Yi’s ideas for themselves, looking deeper than the commonplace “persecuted Christian” narratives that are so prevalent and that limit our ability to actually hear from churches outside the West. The best way to respect and encourage Wang Yi is to take what he has written seriously, whether that leads you to agree or disagree with him.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
As mentioned above, Wang Yi is a prolific writer and was a significant online presence, even before his conversion. He wrote regular public letters to his congregation; his sermons were recorded and posted publicly on his church’s website before it was shut down; and he maintained a personal blog, as well as published articles in various external blogs, magazines, and journals. The sources in this book come from this wide variety of textual and verbal output. As Chloë Starr, an important scholar of Chinese theology, has noted,
Literary form and theological content are indivisible, an integrated whole. . . . Chinese theology, like Chinese text reading, is essentially relational: this is not the virtuoso performance of a scholastic, where the reader, or student, follows along the steps to their logical conclusion, but a more open process, where the reader, conceived as a peer, is invited to make connections from within a shared intranet of allusion.8
Wang Yi is certainly no exception from this observation—the theology shared in this book is not an academic opus systematically answering the question of church and state. It is the theological outworking of a pastor concerned for his flock, who is writing or speaking to others as he answers questions for himself.
Shortly before his arrest and detention, Wang Yi directed Early Rain’s session to make all of his writings open source online. In keeping with this direction, Early Rain collaborated with an independent group to launch the Wang Yi Resource Library, which contains all of the original Chinese documents that are translated, annotated, and in some cases excerpted in this book.9
This book may be read in multiple ways. Each individual chapter is able to stand alone; as such, we believe this book will serve as a helpful tool for scholars of global theology, political theology, China studies, and more. It can also be read progressively as it traces the development of Wang Yi’s theology. Part one of this book, “Our House Church Manifesto,” was compiled in 2010 by Wang Yi himself and distributed by Early Rain as a self-published book. It was later revised in 2015 to include the “95 Theses.” This section is much denser than the rest of the book, as its content was all initially written for scholarly blogs, magazines, and journals, rather than adapted from spoken contexts or pastoral letters. Parts two and three, “The Eschatological Church and the City” and “Arrest and the Way of the Cross,” respectively, have been chosen and selected by ourselves from among Wang Yi’s many writings as representative of his theological development and of his spiritual preparation for his arrest and detention. Though there is not division in Wang Yi’s thought, we see enough progression to encourage the reader not to stop with the conclusion of part one, nor to give equal weight to chapters at the beginning and the end. Several of Wang Yi’s close acquaintances have noted to us that he continues to transition from thinking like a lawyer to thinking like a theologian; our desire was to demonstrate this movement in the flow of the content. It is important to note that these same acquaintances have all stated that chapter fourteen, “History Is Christ Written Large,” is the single most important essay Wang Yi has produced.
In producing this book, we hope to make Wang Yi’s writings accessible to the uninitiated reader. Though his writing style is accessible, he makes frequent reference to the Chinese context; therefore, we have aimed to introduce each chapter with needed contextual explanation, as well as by situating it within a loose narrative. We have also provided a glossary and ample footnoting to explain specific cultural references. Footnotes have generally been used for single-reference items. Repeated important names and events are likely to be found in the glossary with lengthier explanations. Additionally, chapters five and six contain bibliographies provided by Sun Yi (孙毅) and Wang Yi themselves, and we have chosen not to add to their references.
We find it important to note that most of the writing in this book was initially developed for either spoken contexts or as online essays, and therefore, Wang Yi did not give academic attention to the citation of his sources, many of which come from the corpus of unpublished, uncatalogued, and sometimes apocryphal stories and documents of the early Chinese house church. This, of course, made our work quite challenging at times and we ask for patience where full citations have been beyond our abilities to hunt down.
The English translations provided here have been a collaborative effort by a remarkable team of people who choose to remain anonymous. We stand on their shoulders and are deeply indebted to their commitment to make the writings of Chinese pastors available to English speakers. Their linguistic gifts open the gates between heaven’s global communities.
WHY SHOULD A CHRISTIAN IN THE WEST READ ABOUT CHINESE CHURCH-STATE THEOLOGY?
It is likely that many people will pass over a theological work from a Chinese writer on the basis of geography alone. People might be prone to think that differences in cultural context between twenty-first century democratic America and twenty-first century communist China are too great for dialogue. And yet, modern majority culture North American and European Christians readily turn to five-hundred-year-old theology from Reformation Europe, a time and place we can hardly say we have much in common with. Though we are perhaps closer to Europe geographically, are we truly any closer culturally to premodern, preindustrial, predigital, predemocratic, presecular, precapitalistic European Christendom? I do not mean to discourage readers from engaging the West’s theological heritage but rather to provoke them to consider whether they might have more in common with urban China than they realize. The urban Chinese Christian certainly comes from a significantly different historical, cultural, and political context. But like the reader, the urban Chinese Christian works and lives in an age dominated by material gain, technology, and secularism. We are not so distant.
Christianity is currently making sizable inroads into perhaps the greatest single cultural identity in the history of modern civilization and it is in conflict with the ruling powers of this great civilization. One does not need to agree with Wang Yi in order to see that he and any other comparably prolific theological writer are important to hear and understand, if for no other reason than to follow the important developments within Christianity in the twenty-first century. If the twenty-first century really does prove to be the Chinese century, then now is the time to begin understanding the theological developments taking place within China, for their debates will echo throughout global Christianity. As Wang Yi himself so often implies in his writings, the Chinese house churches are the living inheritors of the Western churches’ older theological debates, and they are poised to be the next frontier of church-state theology. Wang Yi himself embodies this. When was the last time a notable, publicly lauded, secular legal scholar became a Christian in Europe and then turned his full attention to the thorny issue of church-state theology? As North America and Europe race further toward the secularism modern China represents, we need the perspective of those who have considered the faith from the outside and chosen to enter in. Right now, the ideas of a former human rights lawyer who lives as a pastor theologian under an authoritarian regime are indeed relevant to churches in the throes of untangling Christianity’s political allegiances.
Scholars and academics are beginning to study Wang Yi according to his particular cultural context, an important endeavor which ought to continue. However, we need to not only consider Wang Yi’s writings as Chinese texts for the Chinese context, but also to place them within the conversation of global Christianity. All Christian texts are both local and global simultaneously, for the Christian faith has always been both local and global in nature.
This book highlights three important aspects of Wang Yi’s writings on the house church that have the ability to reach beyond the Chinese context. First, a church’s history invariably shapes its identity. Second, the eschatological destination of the church determines not only its heavenly, but also its earthly, reality. And third, the way of the cross is the road the church must walk if it is truly united with Christ, as will be seen throughout the writings this book makes available. Though Wang Yi writes specifically to the Chinese context, these are three points all churches in all times would benefit from grappling with, whatever conclusions they finally arrive at.
ABBREVIATIONS
CCC—China Christian Council
CCP—Chinese Communist Party
CCPA—Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association
ERCC—Early Rain Covenant Church
MFA—Ministry of Foreign Affairs
PRC—People’s Republic of China
SARA—State Administration for Religious Affairs
TSPM—Three-Self Patriotic Movement
TIMELINE OF IMPORTANT DATES
1517—Portuguese ships arrive in Canton and seek to establish trade.
1552—First attempt by the Jesuits, under Francis Xavier, to establish a mission in China fails.
1582—Matteo Ricci, along with other Jesuit priests, is welcomed by the imperial court and establishes Catholic missions in China. Nine hundred and twenty Jesuits serve in China before the first Protestant missionaries arrive two centuries later.
1807—Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, arrives in Canton (modern-day Guangzhou). In the following decades, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Episcopalian missionaries establish missions in China’s coastal ports opened under treaties with Western colonial powers.
1839–1842—The First Opium War ends with five treaty ports opening to foreign activity under the Treaty of Nanking, and the British gain control of Hong Kong.
1850–1864—The Taiping Rebellion is fought between the Qing Dynasty and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a theocratic, syncretistic cult led by Hong Xiuquan, the self-proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ. The rebellion ultimately consumed China in complete civil war and was one of the bloodiest wars in recorded history with upward of thirty million deaths.
1854—Hudson Taylor arrives in Shanghai and begins first inland missionary activity; in the following decades, China Inland Mission (CIM) is established and methods of indigenization are practiced.
1858–1860—Foreigners, including missionaries, are given the right to travel inland under the Tientsin and Peking treaties at the end of the Second Opium War. Britain forces China to legalize the opium trade.
1894–1895—At the end of the First Sino-Japanese War, Korea gains independence from Chinese imperial rule, and Japan gains control of Taiwan.
1897–1898—Britain, France, Germany, and Russia all gain colonial power over various Chinese provinces.
1899–1900—The Boxer Rebellion breaks out against foreign colonial power in China, including the presence of missionary activity. The Boxers kill thousands of Chinese Christians and more than one hundred missionaries and their children. After the Empress Dowager Cixi threatens to kill all foreigners in Beijing, allied colonial forces overtake the capitol and demand reparations.
1911–1912—The Chinese Revolution brings an end to the Qing Dynasty and imperial rule in China. The Nationalist Party is birthed and the Republic of China (ROC) is established.
1919—Students protest colonial influence, the feudal powers, and traditional Chinese culture in the May Fourth Movement.
1921—The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is founded.
1922–1927—The Anti-Christian Movement sparks violent protests against missionary activity across China and causes missionaries to flee the country.
1928—The Nationalist Party rises to political power under Chiang Kai-shek, who begins a military campaign to reunify China.
1934—Mao Zedong leads the CCP on the Long March after Chiang Kai-shek purges all Communists from his ranks.
1920s and 1930s—Evangelical revivals take place across China and thousands are converted and baptized.
1937—The Nationalist Party and the CCP join forces to remove Japanese imperial forces from northern China.
1941–1946—Protestant and Catholic missionaries are interned or flee during WWII; most return to China after combat with Japan ceases.
1945—The Nationalists and CCP defeat Japan.
1946—The Chinese Civil War emerges between the Nationalist Party and the CCP.
1949—The CCP defeats the Nationalists and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is established.
1950—Wu Yaozong publishes “The Christian Manifesto,” declaring submission and loyalty to the CCP. Eventually, half of all Chinese Christians sign the document.
1951—The Religious Affairs Department is established under the supervision of the CCP.
1951—The PRC severs diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
1951–1952—All Catholic and Protestant missionaries are expelled from China.
1954—The Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) is founded under the leadership of Wu Yaozong and the authority of the Religious Affairs Department. All churches are required to register and submit to its authority, and all theological education comes under its supervision.
1955—Wang Mingdao publishes “We—For the Sake of Faith” in response to “The Christian Manifesto” and the establishment of the TSPM. Wang Mingdao’s essay and his refusal to join the TSPM is regarded as the beginning of the house church movement.
1957—The Anti-Rightist Campaign attacks and eliminates thousands of Chinese intellectuals from leadership.
1957—The Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA) is established to oversee Catholic churches within China.
1966–1976—The Cultural Revolution engulfs China and destroys public life. All churches and seminaries are closed and the TSPM and CCPA are ended.
1979–1980—The TSPM is officially restored after Mao Zedong’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution. The China Christian Council (CCC) is established as a sister organization to the TSPM.
1982—Document 19 is made official policy as part of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. The document allows for increased official, regulated religious activity.
1989—The June Fourth Protests at Tiananmen Square and the government’s violent response impact the political ideals of a generation of students across China.
2008—The Sichuan Earthquake kills nearly ninety thousand people and leaves millions homeless in southwest China. It reveals mass corruption among government leaders and construction businesses.
2011—Shouwang Church in Beijing is prevented from occupying its purchased space for worship and begins to resort to worshiping outside in public parks.
2012—Xi Jinping rises to become president of the PRC and general secretary of the CCP.
2013—The last of the first generation of prominent house church pastors, Lin Xiangao, dies in Guangzhou.
2014–2015—A campaign to demolish more than one thousand visible church crosses takes place in Wenzhou, known as “China’s Jerusalem,” and across Zhejiang Province.
2016—Xi Jinping inaugurates a new campaign for the “Sinicization of Christianity.”
2018—The New Religious Affairs Regulations take effect, updating Document 19 and the CCP’s religious policies.
2018—Zion Church in Beijing and Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu are raided and closed.
2019—Wang Yi is sentenced to nine years imprisonment on charges of “inciting to subvert state power” and “illegal business operations.”
PART I
OUR HOUSE CHURCH MANIFESTO
In late 2010, Pastor Wang Yi of Early Rain Covenant Church compiled a book called 我们的家庭教会立场 (women de jiating jiaohui lichang). Translated literally, this title reads Our House Church Standpoint, or more literarily, Our House Church Manifesto. The book contains writings from three of China’s most prominent house churches—Early Rain Covenant Church, Shouwang Church, and Zion Church (the latter two both in Beijing), demonstrating that though these churches represent different ecclesiological commitments, they are united in their stance rejecting submission to China’s state-sanctioned church agency, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. The early 2000s were important years for house churches in China, and several events convinced the churches represented by Wang Yi’s book that a particular house church identity needed to be studied, honored, and preserved.
Two years prior, the Sichuan Earthquake of 2008 catalyzed house churches across the country into rapidly organizing a response to the humanitarian needs of western Sichuan. Throughout these relief efforts, house churches acted publicly in uncharted ways and were visible both locally in person and nationally online providing aid.1 This level of organization and public presence did not quietly dissipate in the following years; rather, the momentum among churches in urban China continued, producing various social, educational, denominational, ecumenical, and theological movements.
Meanwhile, the global Christian community prepared for the third congress of the Lausanne Movement. The Lausanne Movement connects global church leaders in order to further the cause of evangelism and missions. The first congress took place in 1974 in Lausanne, Switzerland, and is considered a pivotal moment in modern church history for uniting the church for the work of the Great Commission. A second congress occurred in 1989 in Manila, the Philippines.
The Cape Town Congress in 2010 was carefully planned so that a fuller picture of the global reality of the church would be represented, with particular focus given to the voices of the Majority World. More than two hundred Chinese delegates from house churches were invited to participate in what would have been the largest delegation in attendance; however, when the delegates attempted to travel to Cape Town, Chinese authorities stopped them at various airports across the country and seized their passports. As a delegate, Wang Yi was detained for four hours and not permitted to travel. As occurred in Manila in 1989, the Chinese delegation’s two hundred seats were left empty during congress proceedings and the Lausanne Movement conducted a special time of prayer for the church in China. The Chinese delegation sent a note to the congress communicating that they accepted their government’s decision peacefully and with hope in Christ. The message quoted several passages from Scripture, including Philippians 1:29, “For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake.”
China’s Ministry of International Affairs released a statement clarifying the reason for its decision to detain the delegation—congress organizers had overlooked inviting participants from the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. A statement from the government read, “This action publicly challenges the principle of independent, autonomous, domestically organized religious associations, and therefore represents a rude interference in Chinese religious affairs.” Failing to invite delegates from the TSPM while including the house churches, which have no legal identity in China, was viewed as a politically subversive act.
2010 also proved to be a significant year for Beijing Shouwang Church (北京守望教会, Beijing Shouwang jiaohui), a large unregistered congregation founded in 1993 and pastored by Jin Tianming (金天明).2 In the early 2000s, Shouwang was raided by police and told to register with the government. Jin Tianming interpreted government regulations to mean he could seek registration with the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) without joining the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which he attempted to do in 2006. Due to its size, the congregation began to have a difficult time finding large enough spaces in which to meet. In 2008, Shouwang’s registration application was officially denied, and in 2009 police began raiding the congregation and harassing members’ employers. The congregation was prevented from meeting in their rental property and began meeting outdoors in parks as their struggle to find a venue intensified. In 2010, Shouwang raised 27 million RMB (4.12 million USD) from among its thousand members to purchase its own property. However, according to Shouwang, after members of the church were stopped from joining the Lausanne Congress, relations with the government deteriorated further. In 2011, the government stopped Shouwang from occupying its property, which the church claims was purchased legally. In response, Shouwang declared it would begin conducting public worship services outdoors in a prominent city square. Jin Tianming and several church leaders were promptly placed under house arrest and other church members were repeatedly detained.
In addition to including chapters from Shouwang’s leaders in his manifesto, Wang Yi included a chapter from Jin Mingri (金明日), the senior pastor of Zion Church (锡安教会, xi an jiaohui), one of the largest house churches in Beijing, and founder of China Christian Theological Seminary. Before leaving to join the house church, Jin Mingri was a pastor within the TSPM. He was one of the first government-approved seminary graduates after the TSPM was reinstated following the Cultural Revolution. At the time Wang Yi compiled the manifesto, Zion was a “public” urban house church, unregistered with the TSPM. It had over 1,500 attendees and six meeting places in office buildings across Beijing.
The chapters in part one are translations of Wang Yi’s Our House Church Manifesto. Whereas the chapters in parts two and three of this book were mostly adapted from spoken contexts, the chapters in part one were all originally written for various journals or books, making this section the densest and most complex. After first compiling his manifesto in 2010, Wang Yi revised it in 2015 to include Early Rain’s “95 Theses.” With the exception of chapter six, which has been excerpted by the editors in order to bring it closer in length to the other chapters of this book, the manifesto has been reproduced in full.
The manifesto demonstrates Jin Tianming and Jin Mingri’s influence on Wang Yi’s understanding of the history of the house church, as well as the importance of this history for shaping and forming the identity of many contemporary urban house churches in China. There are several main themes to be found in Our House Church Manifesto. First, it seeks to clarify what the tradition of the house church is and how it is different from the TSPM. Second, it seeks to explain why the churches represented by the manifesto are determined to continue promoting this tradition and refuse to submit to the TSPM. Third, the manifesto calls other house churches to join the authors, submitting to the kingship of Jesus Christ alone as the head of the church in rejection of nationalistic idolatry.
WHY WE ARE A HOUSE CHURCH
WANG YI
The following document is a pastoral letter written by Wang Yi to his congregation following the detention of the Chinese delegation traveling to Cape Town, South Africa for the third Lausanne Congress. Wang Yi’s pastoral letters were usually first emailed directly to his congregation, then posted online for the general public. An excerpt of this article was also published on The Kosmos, a Chinese online journal of theology and culture.
This chapter outlines Wang Yi’s understanding of what the church is, his theological arguments for the separation of church and state, and the history of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. At the heart of Wang Yi’s theology is a question: Who has ultimate authority over the church? He believes that the various answers to this question fundamentally define the differences between China’s state-run and house churches.
To my fellow communicants of Early Rain Covenant Church,
Peace. I’m thankful that on the fifteenth of this month, some brothers and sisters came very early to my home to pray, sing praises, and experience being stopped at the airport together with us. Many more brothers and sisters truly cared for us, praying for us and the other attendees. My wife, Jiang Rong, said you were like angels, embodying the Lord’s comfort for our family.
This time, because the government feared the participation of Chinese house church pastors at the Third Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization, they stopped its citizens from departing on a large scale. In substance, this is a conflict between God’s call to the church for “world evangelization” and the official doctrine of so-called self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation.1 The spokesman from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ma Chaoxu, said that the Lausanne meeting’s “secret communications and invitations to those outside of the legitimate Chinese church” (meaning the Three-Self church) violated the state’s principle of a “self-governed church.” It is a crude interference in “China’s religious affairs.”2
