Back to Jerusalem: The Chinese-Christian Road to Globalization and Self-Fulfilment (original) (raw)
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Sage Open, 2021
For more than 100 years, China has seen waves of students and scholars heading overseas and studying in the West as well as the concomitant returning waves. This study draws on information obtained from secondhand documents and firsthand field studies to analyze and compare two returning waves involving the complex dynamics of globalization/indigenization of Christianity in China. The first returning wave began in the early 1900s and lasted until 1950, in which many went overseas because of their connections with Western missionaries. The second returning wave is currently occurring following the study-abroad fever after 1978, in which many were exposed to the proselytizing endeavor of overseas Chinese Christian communities and eventually converted to Christianity before returning to China. The article compares the following themes in relation to these two groups of Christian returnees: their negotiation with their religious identities upon the return, perceptions on the meaning of Christianity to themselves and to China, their transnational religious networks, and potential implications to the glocalization of Christianity in China. Consequently, it involves the following topics that are important throughout the modern Chinese history: modernity/religion paradox, East–West interaction in relation to Christianity, contributions of Western-educated professionals to China, glocalization of Christianity in China, and complex internationalist/nationalist interaction.
A Sinicized World Religion?: Chinese Christianity at the Contemporary Moment of Globalization
Religions, 2019
This essay explores the rise of Protestant Christianity at the contemporary stage of China’s globalization as a unique social and cultural phenomenon. Globalization can be seen as not only a homogenization process in political and economic terms, but also a process in which religious ideas and moral principles spread around the world. While in an earlier phase of globalization lack of Christianity was once constructed as a moral argument to ban Chinese migration to the Christian West, in the current context of China’s aggressive business outreach and mass emigration Christianity has become a vital social force and moral resource in binding Chinese merchants and traders in diaspora. By linking the rise of a sinicized version of Christianity in secular Europe with China’s present-day business globalization, I hope to suggest a new transnational framework for studying Chinese Christianity, which has often been examined in the nation-based political context of church-state relations, an...
This article provides a theological analysis of the Back to Jerusalem Movement (BTJM) in China. It explores the core motivating belief of the BTJM (a salvation-historical self-understanding of China as God's appointed means for ushering in the millennium) and identifies three underlying ideas—the westward expansion of Christianity, China's uniquely blessed status, and the importance of persecution and suffering in the last days—that are used to support this claim. It offers biblical and theological reflections on these three ideas and assesses the central BTJM belief that China has been uniquely chosen by God to fulfill the Great Commission.
Taking Jesus back to China: New Gospel Agents in Shanghai
Yangwen Zheng (ed.), Sinicising Christianity, Leiden: Brill, 2017
There has been a recent trend in the history of Christianity in China in which scholars emphasize the efforts of Chinese Christians.2 Departing from the earlier paradigm which focused on the activities of Western missionaries and the history of missions, scholars have started to look at the crucial roles of Chinese Christians, including both church leaders and ordinary Chinese Christians, especially Chinese Christian women, and their role in shaping modern Chinese societies and the growing independence of the Chinese church.3 A later development of this trend goes further and focuses on the rise of indigenous popular Christian elements in twentieth century Chinese history, showing how the cross-cultural religious encounter was grounded in Chinese culture and politics of the time. And the rise of Christianity in rural China in the post-Mao era has seen the continued development of some popular modes of Christianity.4 Scholarly attention has also been paid to the emergence of a group of intellectual Christians in urban China who follow a "New Calvinist theology" and have a strong theological interest in engaging in the public sphere around subjects 1
Christian Missionaries and Modernization in China: The Evolution of meanings and Functions
2021
This article analyses the role of Christian missionaries in the Modernization of China. The paper will examine the historical developments of Christianity's arrival in China, and the function of Jesuit and Protestant missionary groups. Furthermore, it will indicate that although the primary purpose of all missionaries was to evangelize the Chinese heathen, this developed gradually as historical and cultural conditions in China and the West changed. How did the conditions for this development come about? In sum, there were three categories of factors influencing this development including the demands of the "Treaty system", and the new relations of the weakened Qing government with the Western powers; the Protestant theological-social disputes in the West over the impossibility of Evangelization of other people in the world; China's particular climate and catastrophic natural events such as drought, floods and the like. In contrast to Jesuits, Protestant missionarie...
While China has become the world's fastest-growing economy in recent three decades of reform and opening-up, it has also witnessed the fastest-growing of Christianity in the country's modern history. Are there inner and necessary connections between the two phenomena? Why? How about the current situation of Christianity in this big Communist regime? This article treats the topic in three aspects: the size of Chinese Christian population, the relations between church and state in China, the challenges and opportunities of Christianity in China today.
The Formation of Global Chinese Christian Identities
Routledge International Handbook of Religion in Global Society, 2021
Christians have not been a major part of the mainstream debates in studies on Chinese diaspora and transnationalism. This chapter attempts to move Christianity into the centre of such conversations through the theme of identity. Specifically, it proposes that the diasporic Chinese Protestants were an integral part of the transnational Chinese communities that settled across the globe from the late nineteenth century to the present day by demonstrating how they synthesized their faith and various types of Chinese identities in order to form three dominant global Chinese Christian identities: evangelical identity, religious nationalism and religious ethnocentrism. In terms of evangelical identity, the chapter demonstrates how Protestants were motivated by their particular historical circumstances to appropriate evangelicalism as the primary means for shaping their respective diasporic cultures. For religious nationalism, I show how Protestant communities became transnational participants in China’s national salvation discourse. Such participation was seen by synthesizing their evangelical faith with nationalism and delimiting the projections of their identity within the bounds of the modern Chinese nation. Lastly, the study outlines the process of synthesis between faith and ethnic concern after World War II. It shows how different independent Chinese Protestant organizations constructed ethno-religious discourses as part of the process of forming the global Chinese Christian industry. These discourses include the unique ‘chosen’ status of Chinese Christians and their special concern for evangelizing the transnational Chinese communities. In all, the study suggests that the multiplicity of global Chinese Christianity affirms mainstream calls to examine the Chinese diaspora in all its diversity.
Uneasy Encounters Christian Churches in Greater China
2022
The book examines the dynamic processes of the various social, political, and cultural negotiations that representatives of Christian groups engage in within authoritarian societies in Greater China, where Christianity is deemed a foreign religious system brought to China by colonial rulers. The book explores the political and social cooperation and negotiations of two particular Christian groups in their respective and distinct settings: the open sector of the Catholic Church in the communist People’s Republic on mainland China from 1945 to the present day, and the Presbyterian church of Taiwan in the Republic of China in Taiwan during the period of martial law from 1949 to 1987. Rather than simply confirm the ‘domination-resistance’ model of church–state relations, the book focuses on the various approaches adopted by religious groups during the process of negotiation. In an authoritative Chinese environment, religious specialists face two related pressures: the demands of their authoritarian rulers and social pressure requiring them to assimilate to the local culture. The book uses two case studies to support a wider theory of economic approach to religion.