Christianity and Chinese Culture
The Limits of the Revolutionary Model. The crisis of the post-revolution Church in China can thus be understood as in part the result of the ‘foreign’ associations of Christianity.
However, the overall question of Christianity’s relationship to China is best approached from a wider framework which looks at the impact of Christianity on Chinese culture and values. There are deep continuities between Chinese tradition and official and unofficial attitudes today. While cultural values undergo constant modification this is a slow and complex process in which alien value systems such as Marxism and Christianity are themselves modified. What impact then did Christianity have on Chinese culture and its values? The revolutionary model is of little help here—a fact that is now coming to be recognised even in China.The Jesuit Mission. Chinese culture, of all the major cultural traditions, has been the most confined to one region of the world. Before the sixteenth century Christian culture had barely touched East Asia. The brief Persian ‘Nestorian’ mission of the seventh century made no longterm impact on things Chinese, even if its use of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist categories is of some interest. The Franciscan mission to the Mongol court in the twelfth century was even more peripheral. It is the Jesuit mission begun by Fr Matteo Ricci in 1582 that represents the first major encounter between the two cultural traditions—perhaps the only serious Christian approach to Chinese culture. Ricci and his distinguished successors were theologically conservative but they were also open to Chinese culture and tradition— unlike their Catholic and Protestant counterparts in the nineteenth century. Although the mission was part of the Age of Expansion, ‘imperial’ attitudes towards other cultures had not really developed. Nor did the Jesuits go to China under the protection of their governments.
The relationship of equality finds expression in the words of Valignano, Visitor to the Far Eastern Jesuit missions: ‘A confrontation with the intellectual aristocracy on its own level of language, social customs and superior talent.’ Their learning, adoption of the dress of the scholar-officials and their willingness to conform to Chinese customs earned them the (sometimes grudging) respect of the official class. The Jesuits acknowledged a degree of truth in Confucian doctrine and accorded respect to Chinese tradition so that ‘conversion’ did not imply alienation from Chinese culture. They were prepared to accept ancestor rites within the Church, an attitude inexplicable to Rome, whose rejection of the Jesuit position led to the 1724 ban on Christianity by the Yongzheng Emperor.The Missionaries Return. Robert Morrison was the first Protestant to establish a foothold on the Chinese mainland, in 1807.
There were few results until, to the consternation of the missionaries, their preaching inspired Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping uprising which devastated central China between 1850 and 1864. After the Opium Wars both Catholic and Protestant missionaries were able gradually to extend their work throughout China. But by 1900 Protestants, small in numbers, had had little success in recommending their faith to the Chinese, although this failure was masked by the extent of their medical and educational work. Catholics, building on the foundation that had survived from the eighteenth century and working amongst the poor, could at least boast ten to twenty times the number of Protestant converts.
Cultural Confrontation. A pietistic theology, that in its preoccupation with the need for individual conversion never questioned the cultural values of its own society, informed both Catholic and Protestant missions in the nineteenth century. Religious fervour went alongside cultural narrowness. To Dr William Milne, a colleague of Morrison, China was ‘a land full of idols; a land of darkness and spiritual death’.
Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, although advocating the adoption of Chinese dress and lifestyle, based his appeal for support on the assertion of ‘four hundred millions of souls, having no hope and without God in the world’. The Jesuit acceptance of the partial validity of Chinese tradition had been replaced by a theological dichotomy between revelation and culture of doubtful orthodoxy. As time went on some missionaries became convinced of the need for social reform in China and, while retaining a pietist theology, they sought to introduce Western notions of education and economic improvement. Foremost amongst such people was the British Baptist, Timothy Richard. In the twentieth century the Protestant Church in China of new ‘returned renouncer’ movements, from that of Rammohan Roy (founder of the early nineteenth-century Brahmo Samdj) to Swami Vive- kananda, with his Ramakrishna Mission, and other founders of religious Movement.The return of the missionaries coincided with the decline of the Qing dynasty and the decadence of official culture. It hardly seemed worth taking seriously and the ‘modernising’ values taught by the missionaries speeded the dissolution of the bonds that held the imperial system together. Chinese intellectuals began to adopt the modernising ideas but showed scant regard for the faith of the teachers. They became aware of the ‘scientific’ attack on religion in Europe and saw the First World War as demonstrating the bankruptcy of Christian culture. So they turned to Marxism and found an alternative faith that in the Red Bases after 1927 also offered a new form of society that appeared to work. The churches’ attempts at social reform seemed irrelevant.
The ‘revolutionary’ model points to Christianity’s links with imperialism. Lookingfromthealternativeperspectiveof‘modernisation’ it appears to have performed the role of a midwife, assisting at the birth of Chinese Communism. Both nineteenth-century pietism and twentieth-century liberalism appear to have failed to establish the Christian faith as a living reality within the Chinese world. In 1949 it remained an alien presence. It was the trauma of the subsequent years that was to lead to a new dawn for the Church.