Opening China: Karl F. A. Gützlaff and Sino-Western Relations, 1827–1852 by Jessie Gregory Lutz (review)

Eerdmans’s series Studies in the History of Christian Missions continues to reaffirm the historical value and unique resources embedded in archives of missions worldwide. Inspired by her Harvard teachers John F. Fairbank and Suzanne W. Barnett—early advocates of integrating missions history into the mainstream of historical and later cultural or anthropological studies—the fine monograph by Jessie Gregory Lutz (professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University) on the eccentric pioneer German missionary to China Karl Gützlaff (1803–51) must surely finally allay suspicion of missions history as necessarily superficial, biased, or bland. Here is a subtle, thorough, balanced, and scholarly assessment of an unusually energetic, gifted, and controversial China missionary. Renowned (often through his own inflated narratives) for daring missionary forays along the China coast, Gützlaff (when fulfilling his dual role as interpreter and physician on opium vessels) managed “to take part in almost every major event on the China coast during the second quarter of the nineteenth century” (p. 66). In later life, he inspired generations of scholarly and missionary heirs from Hong Xuiquan and heterodox Taiping Christians to James Hudson Taylor and the rigorously faithful China Inland Mission. The early chapters of Lutz’s work trace Gützlaff’s spiritual, social, and intellectual evolution from a pietistic Prussian artisan to a highly trained, multilingual sinologist and skillful missionary entrepreneur. As Lutz points out, early royal patronage through the nascent Berlin Mission Institute battled with soaring personal ambition and a profound sense of spiritual unworthiness in “a fascinating conflicted man” (p. xv). Following in the footsteps of Robert Morrison (1782–1834), the pioneer Protestant missionary and Chinese Bible translator, Gützlaff—although motivated by evangelical missionary zeal—controversially took secular employment and a much-needed salary as interpreter for the leading exporter of opium to China, the Jardine-Matheson Company, and then for sixteen years (until his death) as China secretary for the British government in Hong Kong. In him, as Lutz rightly claims, we see “the epitome of evangelical contradictions” (p. 16); his strong, independent personality struggling to submit to the strictures of his humble, Moravian pietism; his biblical other-worldliness lived out on the frontline of the gruesome Opium War (1839–42) as well as the daily business of British bureaucracy and international intrigue. Lutz gives us a careful exposition of Gützlaff’s complex personality, missionary motivation, daily work, and tortured married life. She also gives us major chapters on the “multiple roles” of nineteenth-century missionaries (chapter 4), on Gützlaff’s extensive publications to enhance Sino-Western mutual understanding (chapters 5, 6), and on the intellectual and social “New Horizons” opened up by Gützlaff and his missionary peers on the world and on cultural distinctives (chapter 7). Most important, Lutz probes for the role played by women in the early missionary movement and Chinese church and tracks Gützlaff’s use of Chinese assistants, his encouragement of indigenous evangelism through the “Chinese Union” (chapter 8), and his role in creating the split in contemporary Chinese Protestantism between the rigid institutional confessionalism of early mission societies and the fragmentary centrifugalism—if not heterodoxy—of Gützlaff’s own charismatic individualism. The specialist and the generally interested will find much here to fascinate and provoke. British imperialist attitudes to China and the opium trade deserve critical re-examination and a new apology. The intellectual contribution of missionary scholars warrants wider acclaim. The odd character and unlikely vocation of a Gützlaff should cause wonder in believer and skeptic alike.