A New Lens and a New Picture of Christianity in China

Daniel H. Bays’s A New History of Christianity in China is the first comprehensive scholarly work on the subject since Kenneth Scott Latourette’s History of Christian Missions in China published in 1929. It condenses a lifetime of profound engagement with Chinese Christianity—along with insights from the most significant scholarship in the field during the past several decades—into a single definitive volume. What he provides is not only the most complete coverage of Chinese Christianity to date, but also a new and convincing framework for understanding Christianity as a religion of the Chinese people. Its lucid, concise, and direct prose also makes it a pleasure to read.

Fifteen years ago, Nicolas Standaert reminded us of some of the main challenges for the study of Chinese Christianity in “New Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in China” (Catholic Historical Review 83, no. 4 [1997]). He wrote, “one could state that the real problem is not a descriptive and event-bound history of Christianity in China, but rather an outline of a general model encompassing the Christian expansion, but also the (Chinese) reaction to this type of expansion. … More importantly, are there also some structures, which like a relational architecture with a durable stability can explain how this expansion was realized in China?” (Standaert, p. 590). Professor Bays, in his numerous publications, has long been proposing a new structure of this kind—a new model of understanding Chinese Christianity on its own terms, not as a branch of Western missionary work but as a Chinese historical development. Now, finally, a new, balanced, and authoritative history has been constructed on that model. In doing so, Bays reorients students of Chinese Christianity toward what Standaert has called the “internal dynamism” of Chinese religion and society.

Writing in the 1920s, Latourette had been conscious of the limits of his otherwise magisterial work. As he explained in the preface, “The book has been purposely named ‘A History of Christian Missions in China,’ so stressing the part of the foreigner, rather than ‘A History of the Christian Church in China.’ It is to be hoped that a Chinese will sometime prepare a narrative from this larger angle” (Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China [New York: Macmillan Co., 1929], pp. vii–viii). Bays’s New History has provided precisely the “larger angle” that Latourette called for; it accomplishes what Latourette challenged succeeding generations of historians to do—not only in updating the historical account, but, more important, in cultivating new historical sensitivity and imagination. Bays’s accomplishment also suggests that the nationality of the historian is of dubious importance in our common quest for historical understanding of Chinese Christianity, or, for that matter, Chinese history itself.

Bays presents the entire history of Christianity in China in eight succinct chapters, which capture all the major developments as well as the most significant scholarship to date. There is a deliberate balance between “the early modern (pre-1800, with two chapters), modern (1800–1950), and recent (1950–present, with two chapters) periods” (p. 2). The heart of the book, however, is in the middle four chapters, which trace a century and a half of the modern (mostly Protestant) missionary movement in China from its beginnings to its denouement after the Communist takeover. It is a gripping—and at the same time evenhanded and sober—account, masterfully interwoven with the main strands of modern Chinese history. In contrast to Latourette’s grand narrative with its spotlight on pioneering missionaries and the institutions they built, Bays surveys the missionary work but also looks beyond it for stirrings of Chinese Christian life—with its energy, innovation, and promises, as well as its frustrations and missed opportunities under the tutelage of Western missions.

Throughout the book but particularly in the chapters that cover the modern period, Bays brings to light “the basic tension between (foreign) mission and (Chinese) church” (p. 2). He credits the...