A New History of Christianity in China

The overall aim is to explain the transformation of Christianity from being part of a Western religion to being a thoroughly Chinese religion today, indeed one which is fast-growing and has potential for heavily influencing China’s future. In other words, this will be a story initially focused on the European and American foreign missionaries who went to China, but whose focus will shift increasingly to Chinese Christians and their lives. Yet another way to describe the purpose is to see the whole process as a large example or case study of the successful cross-cultural transmission of Christianity, a phenomenon of which there are other examples as well (e.g. much of Africa, Korea, Indonesia, the Pacific Islands, etc.). The scope will in one sense be very broad, from the first Nestorian missionaries and converts of the seventh century CE to the array of Christian (and ‘semi-Christian’) groups, Catholic and Protestant, who are on the scene today. The religious scene in China in the 1990s and since has been very complex. And although Christians have a very important role in that picture today, I believe that this cannot be well understood without some conceptual grasp of Christianity in China before the Communist era began in 1949. For example, one of those concepts is that Protestant and Roman Catholic Christianity are not viewed as being the same religion, but two different ones. This view, shared by Chinese governments and people alike, has been the case for several hundred years, and, like other such historical patterns, must be kept in mind by observers today.