The Kingdom of God in China

Interesting Developments

We have heard many accounts of the vigour of the Chinese church and the rapidity with which it is growing. Yet we at Contra Celsum have long waited for something more. No, we are not referring to some unbiblical idea of a "second blessing"--be assured. Rather, the issue has turned around the historical rootlessness of the church in China.

Like many nations in the east and elsewhere the great missionary movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took the Gospel to China. But more often than not it was a Gospel intermingled with platonic idolatry. The Gospel was about "getting saved" and escaping from the world, not about God's people inheriting all the covenant blessings of God in Christ as our new federal head. Covenant continuity through generations and in history was not a strong suit of the great missionary movement.

So, we believed that a time would come when the Chinese church would discover for itself the historic Christian faith. They would begin to pay attention to what the Holy Spirit had been teaching the Church for the previous two thousand years. If a recent article in The Guardian is accurate this may now be happening.

Andrew Brown writes about how Christians in China are discovering the historical Church. Chinese Christians are apparently becoming very interested in Augustine and Calvin.

Although Calvinism is shrinking in western Europe and North America, it is experiencing an extraordinary success in China. I spent some time on Monday talking to the Rev May Tan, from Singapore, where the overseas Chinese community has close links with mainland China. The story she told of the spread of Calvinist religion as an elite religion in China was quite extraordinary. There may be some parallels with the growth of Calvinism in South Korea, where the biggest presbyterian churches in the world are to be found, but it's absolutely unlike the pattern in Africa and Latin America. There, the fastest growing forms of Christianity are pentecostal, and they are spreading among the poor.

But in China neither of those things are to be true.

Calvinists despise pentecostalists. They shudder at unbridled emotion. If they are slain in the spirit, it is with a single, decorous thump: there's to be no rolling afterwards. And in China, the place where Calvinism is spreading fastest is the elite universities, fuelled by prodigies of learning and translation. Wang Xiaochao, a philosopher at one of the Beijing universities, has translated the two major works of St Augustine, the Confessions and the City of God, into Chinese directly from Latin. Gradually all the major works of the first centuries of the Christian tradition are being translated directly from the original languages into Chinese.

Apparently this development has happened outside the boundaries of the official Chinese churches, but is now starting to have a significant impact within the walls.

All of this is happening outside the control of the official body which is supposed to monitor and supervise the churches in China. Instead, it is the philosophy departments at the universities, or the language departments and the departments of literature and western civilisation that are the channel.

"The [officially recognised] churches are not happy with universities, because it is not within their control. And their seminaries are not at the intellectual level of the universities," says Dr Tan. "Chinese Christianity using Chinese to do Christian thinking has become a very interesting movement."

Many of the missionaries who tried to bring Christianity to China before the communists took over where presbyterians, and other sorts of Calvinist. But that does not explain why Calvinism should be the preferred theology of the house churches and the intellectuals now. Dr Tan suggests that this is because it is Protestant: that is to say it can be made much more convincingly native than Roman Catholicism, since presbyterian congregations choose their own pastors. This is, I suspect, enormously important at a time when China is recovering from a century and a half of being the victim of western powers; the pope's insistence on appointing Catholic bishops is unacceptable to the government and perhaps to the people too.

Brown points out that Calvinism, which stresses the kingship of Christ over all of life, has great relevance for a Church in opposition, as indeed is the Church in China.

Calvinism isn't a religion of subservience to any government. The great national myths of Calvinist cultures are all of wars against imperialist oppressors: the Dutch against the Spanish, the Scots against the English; the Americans against the British. So when the Chinese house churches first emerged from the rubble of the Cultural Revolution in the80s and 90 s "They began to search what theology will support and inform [them]. They read Luther and said, 'not him'. So they read Calvin, and they said 'him, because he has a theology of resistance.' Luther can't teach them or inform them how to deal with a government that is opposition."

And, though the communists stigmatised Christianity as a foreign religion, they also and still more thoroughly smashed up the traditional religions of China: "The communist, socialist critique of traditional religion, and of Confucianism has been effective", she says: "The youngsters think it is very cool to be Christian. Communism has removed all the obstacles for them to come to Christianity."

We believe something else will be really cool. It will be the day that world acknowledged Christian theologians from China help the world-wide Church rediscover its own heritage once again, and teach according to the prophets and the apostles, and, therefore, also make use of the biblical insights of Augustine, Chrysostom, Cyprian, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Owen, and so forth.

Brown concludes:

It would be astonishing if China were to become a great power in the Christian world, as well as in the economic one. But things just as strange have happened in the past. Who could have foreseen, when Augustine was writing those huge books now translated into Chinese, that barbarous Europe would become the centre of Christian civilisation, and his homeland in North Africa would become entirely Muslim?

And would it not be equally astonishing if, even as China were to become a great power in the Christian world, the homeland of Calvin and Luther were also to become entirely Muslim? There are many factors which suggest this may well be the case within a hundred years. For the Scriptures make it abundantly clear when a nation or civilisation turns away from God to idols, He gives them up to the tyranny of the idols they worship.