China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture by Yang Huilin (review)

theory that will drive the field forward as scholars evaluate his hypotheses against other materials. RICHARD D. MCBRIDE II Brigham Young University–Hawai‘i YANG HUILIN, China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014. x, 264 pp. US$59.95 (hb). ISBN 978-1-4813-0017-9 Since the 1990s there has been an intellectual movement, called “Sino-Christian theology” (hanyu shenxue 漢語神學), to promote the academic study of Christianity in Chinese universities. Its advocates, widely known as “cultural Christians” (wenhua jidutu 文化基督徒) in the public domain, express a keener interest in theological inquiry than in personal conversion. This movement is part of a broader intellectual process of adjusting Western Christian theology to contemporary scholars ’ concern about China’s transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society. Broadly speaking, the cultural Christians are composed of three groups of scholars: first, philosophers and literary researchers studying the development of Christian thought without religious commitment; second, historians interested in the history of Sino-Christian interactions; and third, Christian intellectuals not affiliated with patriotic churches seeking to use their theological knowledge in service to the church and community. Diversity characterizes the conceptual orientations of these cultural Christians.15 Yang Huilin 楊慧林 belongs to the first group and has actively integrated the study of Christian thought into his literary research at Beijing’s Renmin University. This represents his conscientious effort to search for a new moral framework in post-Tiananmen China (pp. 41–42). This essay collection presents the fruits of his decade-long scholarship. Yang organizes the fourteen chapters thematically into three categories. The five chapters in part 1 reject the Marxist historiography of Christianity in China, and problematize the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and Chinese culture. Yang highlights a paradigmatic shift in China’s religious research, from atheistic propaganda in the Maoist era to an academic discipline independent of the state’s control during the Reform period. He characterizes the history of Sino-Christian encounters as a complicated process of adaptations, accommodations, and appropriations among foreign missionaries and native church leaders, not the linear path of exploitation portrayed by the official historiography of Western imperialism. Yang regards the Christian missionary movement as the advent of modernity, highlighting the contributions of missionaries in the founding of modern universities and the transmission of Western knowledge. He praises Republican Chinese theologians such as Wu Leichuan 吳雷川, Zhao Zichen 趙紫 15 Pan-Chiu Lai and Jason T. S. Lam, eds., Sino-Christian Theology: A Theological Qua Cultural Movement in Contemporary China (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010); Chloë Starr, “SinoChristian Theology: Treading a Fine Line between Self-Determination and Globalization,” in Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China: Transnational Religions, Local Agents, and the Study of Religion, 1800–Present, ed. Thomas Jansen, Thoralf Klein, and Christian Meyer (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2014), 379–410. 102 BOOK REVIEWS 宸, and Liu Tingfang 劉廷芳, who indigenized Christianity through dialogues with non-Christian scholars. Acknowledging that both Confucianism and Christianity faced intense criticism in the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and early 1920s, Wu Leichuan advocated a Confucian-Christian convergence as a blueprint for helping young Christians to reconcile the Confucian focus on family values and interests with the pursuit of individual spirituality. Both Zhao Zichen and Liu Tingfang addressed the challenge of Chinese nationalism by urging Christian college and mission school students to nurture their own faith in preparation for serving the people inside and outside the Church. Localization of theological research is addressed in the five chapters in part 2. Yang draws on the insights of continental European theologians and cultural theorists to promote the embrace of Christianity as a means of inculcating Western values and norms. As many Chinese theologians strive to accommodate global Christianity with their native heritage, they no longer adopt an antagonistic stand toward Western thought. In his reflection on the horrors of China’s Cultural Revolution , Yang urges fellow scholars to invoke Judeo-Christian transcendental ideas to confront the ideological remnants of the Maoist culture of violence (chapter 5). Only by doing so can the Chinese delve into their traumatic past to seek new meanings about self and nation, and about the role of a citizen in a socialist state. Because China did...