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  • Taiping Theology: The Localization of Christianity in China, 1843-64 by Carl S. Kilcourse
  • Ryan Dunch (bio)
Carl S. Kilcourse. Taiping Theology: The Localization of Christianity in China, 1843-64. Christianities of the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. xviii, 281 pp. Hardcover, $119.00, see https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137543141, ISBN 978-1-137-54314-1.

Taiping Theology sets out to trace the religious world of the Taiping movement in its own terms, as a corrective to past treatments of the movement as either a Christian heresy or a peasant rebellion with incidental religious elements. Rooting his argument in a model of religious vernacularization and localization drawn from recent scholarship on world Christianity (pp. 183-184), the author presents the Taiping religion as "an early form of localized Christianity in China" (p. 180). This important point will meet ready acceptance among scholars of modern China, but the book makes the case in more detail than previous work has done.

Revised from a 2013 PhD dissertation in History at the University of Manchester, Taiping Theology is organized into six chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter outlines the history of Christian missionary dissemination in China, focusing on translation and localization of Christian teachings into Chinese contexts. This is mostly familiar ground but necessary context for the study. The five body chapters all deal directly with Taiping texts and ideas. The author, Carl Kircourse, Lecturer in East Asian history at Manchester Metropolitan University, tells us the first two are devoted to theology, followed by one chapter on the Taiping's ethical teachings and two on "religious practice" (p. 24; meaning beliefs applied in limited contexts rather than anything like "lived religion").

There is a good deal that is interesting and original in Kilcourse's study. Chapter 4, "The Heavenly Father and His non-divine Sons," analyzes what the Taiping movement did and did not believe about the status of Jesus and Hong Xiuquan as "sons" of God. This is important, because the accusation that Hong attributed divine status to himself has been one of the chief complaints from [End Page 383] Taiping critics, beginning with the missionary critics of the movement in the 1850s. Through a careful exegesis of Taiping texts, Kilcourse shows that, on the contrary, the Taiping denied divine status to both Jesus and Hong—the sons of God were ontologically distinct from and subordinate to God the Father in Taiping theology.

The importance of fathers and sons was also reflected in Taiping ethical teaching, as chapter 5 shows. Despite the Taiping movement's well-known criticisms of Confucius and the dominant culture of their day, Kilcourse argues that the core Confucian concept of filial piety (xiao) remained very central to their ethical teaching, with subordination of children to parents and younger to older being emphasized. He also points to the importance of sexual abstinence in Taiping ethical teaching, as well as the prominence of opium as a major evil to be shunned in their texts. In short, "Confucian assumptions and discourses pervaded the Taipings' ethical teachings," he argues (p. 130).

The same interpretive theme of the persistence of Chinese norms within Taiping religious teachings runs through chapter 7, which sets out to correct the common notion that the Taipings were champions of gender equality. Yes, the Taipings insisted that all humans were equal before God, but the subordination of females to male authority was still pervasive in the Taiping world, Kilcourse argues. His primary evidence in this chapter is the "Poems of the Heavenly Father," a book of over five hundred poems that Hong Xiuquan published in 1857 for the instruction of the female servants, attendants, and consorts who staffed Hong's palace. As Kilcourse shows, that book affirms many of the established Chinese ideas about women's deportment and submission to men, including the "three obediences" (sancong) and the virtues of quietness, modesty, and chastity. If anything, these Chinese teachings were amplified by Hong's personal status as son of God and divinely ordained ruler. This book, Kilcourse argues, shows Hong's "continued attachment to Confucian morality and the gender orthodoxy of late imperial China" (p. 174). He does not, however...

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