The Church in China in the 20th Century - Chen Zemin

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into the chaos of China today, to serve as comfort to those who are disappointed, to serve as a gathering of strength, to serve as a revelation of hope, and to serve as light in the darkness!

      Watching the bodies of our compatriots shattered, watching the achievements of centuries torched into ashes in the blink of an eye, watching our burdened motherland gradually disintegrate, how can our young hearts be still? How can we keep our lips tight together? Watching the budding of new hope, watching the twinkling light in the darkness, watching the work of God’s saving grace in this turmoil, watching the glory of the heavenly kingdom promised by Christ, how can we not call out the hope and passion in our hearts even more loudly!

      This is but a weak call from the heart of a Christian, but I believe that in the hearts of many compatriots across the country it will find an echo, and my hope is that these echoes will combine into a loud roar calling forth the sympathy of Christians across the nation, inspiring great power, and bringing the hoped for heavenly kingdom into reality in China, so that all glory be given to the all-holy, all-powerful, and all-loving Father in heaven!

      原本发表于《真理与生命》第12卷第5–6期, 1939年10月出版, (301–332页)。 (“燕京大学宗教学院”？)

      作者当时是上海沪江大学 (社会学系)本科三年级学生。本人对此文的写作, 早已忘记得一干二净。后来于2008年由北京世界宗教研究所的段琦教发现此文。我认为当时虽有一股热情, 但思想还远没有成熟, 极为肤浅；而且改朝换代, 时政背景已经大为不同, 现在不值得发表!承蒙刘若民老师恳请南京大学Don Snow教授译成英文, 至为感谢!陈泽民谨识。2010年3月15日。南京。

      Protestant Church in China Today

      (Tokyo, 1992)

      Chen Zemin

      One way to present a picture of the Christian church in China to our Japanese friends is to begin retrospectively and in comparison with Japan. There are many similarities between the Christian churches in the two countries.

      First, in both countries Christianity had been from the beginning a foreign religion, imported from the west at about the same time. Catholic Christianity was introduced by the Jesuits during the period of colonial expansion of the so-called Christian powers in the 16th century. Francis Xavier came to Japan in 1549, and Matteo Ricci to China in 1583. Both used the colonial enclaves of Goa and Macao as their springing boards. Both succeeded in some measure in their inaugural attempts, then met with difficulties and suffered temporary decline due to the failure on the part of some earlier missionaries to take enough notice of the foreignness of their religion. Catholicism was almost exterminated under the persecutions in the 16th to 17th centuries and prohibition policy in the 16th to 17th centuries in Japan. Xavier had been rightly accused of his lack of understanding of oriental religions and civilizations. Matteo Ricci made some headway because of his policy of accommodation, but the Franciscans and Dominicans were banned by Emperor Kang Xi after the Rites Controversy in 18th century, as a punishment of the reluctance on the part of the Pope and his emissaries to realize the significance of Chinese historical cultural and religious forces, in sharp contrast to the wiser and more understanding Ricci.

      Protestant Christianity came to Japan in the later half of the 19th century, and developed the Meiji period (1868–1912), through the efforts of denominational missionary organizations. In spite of the admirable anti-denominational “non-Church Movement” (Mykyokai) headed by KanzoUchimura (内村鉴三), Protestant Christianity as a whole had been looked at with askance and suspicion by the people because of its foreignness. In China, it was unfortunate that Protestant Christianity was forced upon China in the salvoes of gunboats and through the intrigues of merchants of Western imperialist powers, and missionary advances were flanked and protected by unequal treaties imposed upon the rotten Manchu Government in the 19th century. As a result Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, had been long regarded by most patriotic Chinese as a tool of political, economical and cultural invasions of colonialism and imperialism. Until the last three decades Christianity had been stigmatized by the Chinese people, who were not particularly anti-religious at all, as yang-jiao (洋教, foreign religion), with justifiable sentiments of hatred, contempt and resentment.

      Another similarity lies in the historical cultural and religious background of the two countries. In Japan, Confucianism, Buddhism and Shintoism have had deep and far-reaching influences over a thousand years. In China, Confucianism with its ethical, pragmatic and humanistic emphases, remained the main stream watering the national cultural soil, and together with Buddhism, which had been long indigenized, and Taoism, somehow fused with the other two, formed the triple roots of the national ethos. In both countries the traditional religious and cultural factors have been so strong and all-permeating that any imported religion that failed to assimilate or to accommodate with them, but claimed to be the sole and exclusive source of revelation, condemning dogmatically other affiliations to heathenism and damnation, would be sure to meet with suspicion and resistance. When it did make some success, as in pre-liberation China, it was at the cost of alienating its adherents from their compatriots. The terse acid saying that “one more Christian means one less Chinese” sums up the deplorable general situation.

      A third point of similarity, as a consequence to the two pointed above, is that believers both in Japan and in China constitute a very small minority among the peoples. If I am not mistaken, they amount to only about one percent in Japan, although the influence and prestige of Christians are far greater than the numerical strength. In China, taking Catholics and Protestants together, the percentage is still lower, about 0.6–7. So we are both facing the task and challenge of how to bear witness to our faith and commitment amongst an overwhelming majority of fellow-countrymen of strong non-Christian cultural background and orientation.

      Having made these comparisons, I presume it is easier for you Japanese Christians to understand the situation, endeavours, aspirations and problems of Chinese Christians than those from the so-called Christian countries in the West. We are near neighbours, and we have so much in common in our historical cultural heritage and experiences. We know that you have been grappling with similar problems. The well-known Japanese Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo (远藤周作) likens being a Christian to having a wife chosen by his parents. He wrote “Many times I tried to make her leave, but this foreign wife called Christianity shook her head and refused to go. So I had to make her Japanese.” This was what some conscientious Chinese Christians had tried to do before 1949 with little success. And this is what we have been laboring at since the liberation and the launching of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement in 1950. Three-Self means that the Chinese church must be self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating. It means the church must not, as it had been before, be dominated by missionaries, supported with foreign funds, and run in patterns according to various denominational traditions, copying the culturo-theological thought-forms of the many so-called “mother churches.” We must break the image of foreignness. In so doing, it is necessary to rediscover and realize our selfhood and achieve independence, so that we can have a full status in the mutual sharing and interdependence within the Church Universal. This is not anti-foreign. To adapt Endo’s simile and dictum, “We must make her Chinese.”

      Yesterday, on September 23, Protestant churches in China were commemorating the 34th anniversary of the inauguration of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. During the past thirty-four

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