Yesterday I participated in an interview of a candidate for a teaching position in World Religion. The erudite new Ph.D. (from a premier North American university) was in command of three languages and four Asian religious traditions. While he had grown up the child of illiterate peasants in a village north of Shanghai, his Christian faith was now central to a remarkably deep intellectual life. Concisely, he epitomizes a transformation now taking place that could well turn China into the world’s most powerful Christian nation-state.
One point of connection between us was that we had both read David Aikman’s new book, Jesus in Beijing (Regnery). Aikman, the former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine, charts admirably the fascinating, mercurial, and sometimes sadly instructive history of the Christian evangelization of China. It is a story of remarkable men and women: heroes, martyrs, eccentrics, and, yes—as elsewhere—dismal, even disgraceful heretics and apostates.
The Nestorian Christians—whose descendents are the Assyrian churches of Iraq— arrived in A.D. 635. Aikman traverses the subsequent history, ending with an analysis of the startling missionary vision of millions of Chinese Christians of the 21st century: to wend their way along the old Silk Road, gathering in the churches, converting the Muslims as they go, and then at last “to preach the gospel in Jerusalem.” He includes superb mini-biographies of some of the most important historical figures and house-church leaders of the past half-century, as well as of dynamic current leadership.
Aikman’s Chinese interlocutors say (and from my own experience in China I am inclined to concur) that the character as well as the spread of the Gospel in China “is just like that in the Apostles’ time.” First, it has been initially regional, spreading out from widely distributed centers of intense activity such as Wenzhou (“China’s Antioch,” as its inhabitants now say) into far-flung areas to which its tent-maker merchants disperse. Also, while growth at first came largely in peasant populations, it has now crossed over to engage dramatically the intellectual and artistic classes.
In major universities in Shanghai and Beijing, “Christianity fever” has for more than a decade now been endemic; one graduate student told Aikman that graduate students from major universities, especially women, are more likely than not to be Christians. Leading novelists, among whom now are several Christians, agree that in the artistic community also, while not yet predominantly Christian, “the trend is definitely toward Christianity.” Prominent centers for “Christian Cultural Studies” have sprung up at Renmin (People’s) University and at Sichuan University (others are planned). Major university presses (e.g., Renmin, Beijing) are beginning to publish both indigenous and leading Western works of faith-learning scholarship in Chinese translation. Many conversions result, as Aikman has discovered, from a chain of enquiry begun by reading books.
North American and British scholars whose names are familiar to readers of Books & Culture are among those whose works are becoming as widely known in China as in the West. These Western Christian scholars remain a point of distant contact with the missionaries expelled after 1949, whose legacy to China included the establishment of schools, and, as many have said, a powerful instruction in “how to pray.” Exiled, the missionaries have encouraged others to pray for China, so that China has been called “the most prayed for nation in history.” If the growth of Christianity in China is now overwhelmingly an indigenous phenomenon, prayer is certainly a major factor.
Aikman reflects accurately that most of the growth stems not from the “open” or registered Three-Self churches, of whose complex history he gives a particularly useful account. Bathtub baptisms predominate among the unregistered study group assemblies, as do conversions by dream vision and miraculous healings, and it is there—especially in the context of the official ban upon them—that the growth has continued to be most dramatic. (Tertullian was right.)
Doctrinal variations are relatively few, though in one respect significant. The “registered” churches are forbidden to preach on the Second Coming. The expectation of the imminent return of the Lord, however, is clearly a powerful source of hope and endurance—and an incentive for evangelism—in the underground church.
In 1949, there were officially 3.3 million Catholics in China and 900,000 Protestants—a little over four million Christians altogether. An estimate given to me by a ranking Chinese official (not a Christian) is that there are currently 70 to 100 million. For Aikman, “it is worth considering that not just the numerical, but the intellectual center of gravity for Christianity may move decisively out of Europe and North America as the Christianization of China continues and as China becomes a global superpower.” I am inclined to agree, though I am less certain than Aikman that a consequence is necessarily that China would then become “America’s Great Ally.” The Christianity now emerging in China has a radically orthodox character that may unsettle Western Christians steeped in cultural compromise. And no one, I suspect, can predict what may happen if and when China gets its own Constantine.
For readers whose Christian imagination permits of a future in which America is not God’s vicar, Aikman’s book is provocative reading. His appendices, which include the formal creed of the House Church movement, are worth the price of the book.
—David Lyle Jeffrey is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities, as well as provost, at Baylor University. He is also, since 1996, Guest Professor at Peking (Bei-da) University. His People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (1996) has just been published in Chinese translation by Renmin University Press (2004).
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