Roots of the Chinese Church

"The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou," by David E. Mungello (Univ. of Hawaii, 248 pp.; $36, hardcover). Reviewed by Daniel H. Bays, professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Kansas, Lawrence; he is the author of "Christian Revival in China, 1900-1937," in Modern Christian Revivals, edited by Edith L. Blumhofer and Randall Balmer (Univ. of Ill.).

Many readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAYare aware that the last 15 years have seen a great revival of Christianity in China (CT, May 16, 1994, p. 17; pp. 33-34). As a result of the rapid expansion of the faith in recent decades, which has been duplicated in Africa and the rest of Asia, a majority of Christians in the world today are outside Europe and North America. China is an example of a society where Christianity is being integrated into existing cultural structures without the guidance of foreign missionaries—in part, because all such missionaries were forced to leave China more than 40 years ago, but also because the indigenous church has continued to mature.

There are many good resources for understanding the church in China today. Two recent books well worth reading are Alan Hunter and Chan Kim-Kwong, "Protestantism in Contemporary China" (Cambridge, 1993), and Edmond Tang and Jean-Paul Wiest, editors, "The Catholic Church in Modern China" (Orbis, 1993). There are also some excellent Protestant and Catholic "China-watching" organizations in Hong Kong, with informative publications. Yet too strong an emphasis on the Chinese church today obscures the fact that Christianity has been present continuously in China for more than four hundred years.

In "The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou," David Mungello, formerly of Coe College and now of Baylor University, gives us rare insight into how Christianity as a religious faith was blended with Chinese society and its intellectual underpinning, Confucianism, long before the onset of the modern missions movement. Academic China specialists will appreciate the work because it is a carefully drawn and meticulously documented multilingual study, based partly on formerly inaccessible materials Mungello found in the 1980s in the newly reopened Jesuit library in Shanghai, and partly on long-overlooked items in the Vatican library in Rome.

But the book has a broader appeal as well. Thoughtful Christians curious about China will profit, because the world the book portrays, China from about 1610 to about 1730, is not so far from the China of today; indeed, the similarities are striking. Then, as today, foreign missionaries had no special legal privileges or "rights" to reside in China and carry on religious work (as they did from the 1840s until the 1940s). Then, as now, they were often at the mercy of an arbitrary and generally unwelcoming government; they had to be very circumspect in their actions. Then, as now, most Chinese proponents of the official ideology (then Confucianism, today communism) were indifferent, suspicious, or overtly hostile to Christianity. Yet, in the 1600s, during an era of political instability and social uncertainty much like today's China, some members of the elite, as well as commoners, were attracted to the truths of Christianity. And then, as today, Chinese Christians had to work out their identity as both Chinese and Christian very much on their own.

Because the first Protestant missionary did not reach China until 1807, many Protestants today are ignorant of the earlier European Catholic missionaries and Chinese Catholic communities, dating from 1583. Mungello gives us incisive portraits of the Jesuits Martino Martini (1614-61) and Prospero Intorcetta (1625-96). The stories reveal the high cost of commitment in the early missionary movement. On Intorcetta's first voyage from Europe to China, 12 of the 18 missionary priests died before arrival; only 2 of 13 survived the second voyage.

Still, the main focus of the book is not the missionaries. It is the Chinese Christian community of Hangzhou, in Zhejiang province (about 150 miles from Shanghai). Included are photographs of the Hangzhou cathedral, first built in the 1660s and still in use today. In particular, Mungello brings us the life and the ideas of Master Zhang Xingyao (1633-c. 1715), a local leader of the Christian community.

As the author stresses (and this is one of the book's major points), Zhang was a pious and faithful Christian, but he was also an orthodox Confucian. He did not see Christianity as replacing his Confucian beliefs but rather as complementing or fulfilling the truth that the Chinese originally had in antiquity but had lost track of over the centuries. He respected and got along well with his European missionary brothers in Hangzhou, but he did not hold them in awe, and he reserved for himself the right to create his own explanation of what Christianity meant in the context of Chinese culture.

A good part of the book is taken up with Zhang's analysis of this "identity" issue. Mungello argues that Zhang was not a syncretist; rather, he was at once a real Christian and a Confucian intellectual loyal to Chinese culture and the values embodied in its traditions. Zhang would affirm, it seems, all the basic elements of what most of us would agree are the essentials of the Christian faith, but he stressed them in ways that we in North America probably would not. For example, he generally referred to Jesus with the same term used for God the Father; and he was more attuned to family ethics, and what might be called "public morality," than many Christians are today in the West.

This story of a thoughtful Chinese Christian in the late 1600s has profound relevance to global Christianity at the end of the twentieth century. Mungello's book can give us a deeper understanding of the struggle of Asian and African Christian thinkers who experience the transformative power of the gospel in the context of their own cultures.