Modern Chinese Theologies: Independent and Indigenous

The majority of Christians in China over the course of the last century have worshipped not in missionary-founded churches or in congregations affiliated with the contemporary Three-Self Patriotic Movement or Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, but in independent and unregistered churches, often labeled "house churches." From the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements within the mission-church landscape of the early twentieth century, to the Calvinist Reformed movement in the present-day Protestant church, the vibrant faith life and extraordinary church growth of this sector of Chinese Christianity offer a fascinating witness and lesson to the world church. Yet despite the size of their congregations and the spread of their teachings, the theologies of these independent and unregistered churches have drawn much less academic attention than mission-church or "state church" theologians.

This volume presents a selection of new studies on "house church" theologians and theologies. These begin in the early twentieth century with studies of the Spiritual Gifts movement in Shandong and the nature of Pentecostalism in Hong Kong, and arrive in the present with essays on the changing role of women's leadership in the church, given the spread of Reformed thought and the theological implications of Westminsterian Neo-Calvinism in China. The second section of the volume is devoted to the theological writings and lives of the two most prominent independent church figures of the twentieth century: Wang Mingdao and Ni Tuosheng (Watchman Nee). These chapters include studies of spiritual theology, of Ni's doctrine of humanity, his views on salvation, and his prison letters; of Wang Mingdao's life and moral thought, his Confucian beliefs, and his understanding of the relationship of Christians to the state. The third section of the volume foregrounds church voices like the fundamentalist Samuel Lam and the mediating figure Yang Shaotang, and considers local developments in Roman Catholicism in light of Vatican reforms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781506487991

Book preview

Praise for Modern Chinese Theologies

A magnificent treasure-trove in three volumes on modern Chinese theologies. This volume offers original explorations into well-known theologians like Watchman Nee and Wang Mingdao, juxtaposed with analyses of less-studied figures like Samuel Lamb and David Yang Shaotang. It also investigates the contested relationship between Pentecostalism and Chinese folk religion, and evaluates the prospects and pitfalls of contextualizing Reformed theology in China. This wonderful volume reminds us that so much of the vitality of Chinese theologies comes from what may be termed indigenous and independent. This trilogy is a must-have for all who wish to better understand Chinese Christianity and its implications for the world church.

—Alexander Chow, senior lecturer in theology and World Christianity; co-director of the Centre for the Study of World Christianity, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh; and author of Chinese Public Theology: Generational Shifts and Confucian Imagination in Chinese Christianity

This is the kind of book I have been waiting to see. It is an excellent compilation of people and Christian movements in China that have operated outside foreign missions’ or the state’s control, yet have wielded enormous influence over Chinese Christianity from their unsanctioned positions. Plus, it acquaints readers with some of the innovative scholars who are demonstrating why Chinese theology is not an internal conversation, but a meaningful and important contribution to any serious theological reflection today.

—Daryl R. Ireland, research assistant professor of World Christianity, Boston University

The second volume of Chloë Starr’s edited trilogy on Modern Chinese Theologies will serve as an entry point for English-speaking scholars to engage the development of Chinese revivalist theologies diverging from the propriety of missionary frameworks. Far from driving a wedge between Chinese and Western theologies, the essays here highlight unexpected points of connection to the Confessing Church, Orthodox theology, Azusa Street Pentecostalism, and the Black theologies of the Civil Rights Movement, among others. Though readers may be challenged by some local practices in these essays, they will be invited to see the Chinese revivalism of Watchman Nee, Witness Lee, Wang Mingdao, Dora Yu, and others as influences connected with global theologies, and even with frameworks they might themselves find familiar.

—Justin Tse, assistant professor of religion and culture, Singapore Management University

Volume 2 of Modern Chinese Theologies does that rare thing for a scholarly work: it both illuminates its subject, the theology of indigenous churches in China over the last century, and offers lessons for World Christianity. In terms of its variety of approaches and subjects—from theological explorations of well-known figures such as Watchman Nee and sociological analysis of key trends to the introduction of influential but nearly unknown figures such as Yang Shaotang—from start to finish it promises new vistas for both newcomers and experienced scholars of Chinese Protestant Christianity. It belongs in the library of every serious student of Chinese Christianity.

—Carsten Vala, professor and chair, Political Science Department, Loyola University Maryland

This volume provides a welcome addition to the literature on the churches in China, hitherto marginalized in mainstream academic discourse. This volume brings together a fascinating range of voices and new research on Chinese indigenous and independent theologies, and is both exacting in detail and comprehensive in scope.

—Caroline Fielder, lecturer in Chinese Studies, University of Leeds

Modern Chinese Theologies

Modern Chinese Theologies

Volume 2: Independent and Indigenous

Chloë Starr editor

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

MODERN CHINESE THEOLOGIES

Volume 2: Independent and Indigenous

Copyright © 2023 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932813 (print)

Cover design: Kristin Miller

Cover image: Rev. Wang Chunren 王纯仁 : traditional ink painting with Psalms 19:14

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-8798-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-8799-1

Contents

Acknowledgments

Series Preface

Part I: Theological Trajectories from the Twentieth to Twenty-First Centuries

1. The Spiritual Gifts Movement in Shandong Province, 1930–37

As Narrated by the Northern Presbyterian Missionaries

Kevin Xiyi Yao

2. The Theology of the Hong Kong Pentecostal Mission

A Mix of Western Christianity and Chinese Folk Religion?

David Kwun-Ho Tai

3. Theological Transformation and the Changing Role of Women in the Chinese House Church

Kang Jie

4. Give Us Dutch Neo-Calvinism

Retrieving and Reconsidering Dutch Neo-Calvinism in the Chinese Context

Xu Ximian

Part II: Doctrine and Life: Watchman Nee

5. Spiritual Life and Faithful Life

An Analysis of Watchman Nee’s Doctrine of Humanity

Xie Wenyu

6. Two Views of Sanctification

Watchman Nee’s and Calvin’s Accounts of the Christian Life Compared

Sun Yi

7. The Sinicization of Christian Pietism

Jia Yuming’s and Watchman Nee’s Approaches to the Problem of ‘Rationality versus Spirituality’

Brian Siu Kit Chiu

8. Joy and Submission

The Prison Theology of Watchman Nee

Liu Ping

9. The Doctrine of Theosis in the Chinese Indigenous Church

A Case Study of the Local Church

Yan Zheng

Part III: Inspiring the Church: Moral Fortitude and Spiritual Revival

10. A Disciple of Christ and A Pupil of Confucius

The Influence of Wang Mingdao’s Moral Thought on his Theology

Zhao Pan

11. Samuel Lamb and the Fundamentalism of the Chinese House Church

Liu Shibo

12. Ceaselessly Seeking a Path for the Chinese Church

Rev. Yang Shaotang

He Aixia

Index

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to all of the scholars and students from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, North America, Europe, and Australia who have attended the three Chinese Theology conferences online and in person between 2020 and 2022. The papers that have not made it into the volumes for a variety of reasons, including sensitivity of publication for authors, greatly enriched our discussions and understanding of the field. I am very grateful to the Council of East Asian Studies at Yale for funding the three conferences and for research funds that have enabled the translation of select chapters.

Carey Newman at Fortress Press has been an enthusiastic supporter of the project since the outset, and I am glad to record our appreciation for his editorial oversight. Lisa Eaton has been an exemplary project manager and we are very thankful for her work bringing the books to print. We had a great team of translators—Chen Long, Moira De Graef, Caroline Mason, Sharon Yao—who worked on various essays: thank you all.

Series Preface

Chloë Starr

This is the second volume in a series of three exploring modern Chinese theology. The first volume covered church theologians of mainland China associated with missionary-established denominations whose writing and thinking engaged a predominantly Western church heritage. This second volume, Independent and Indigenous, presents a collection of essays on Chinese church theologians. In the early twentieth century on the Protestant side these comprise house-church and charismatic voices who left mission denominations to establish their own churches or who were converted at the great revival meetings and joined, or created, new church bodies. In the People’s Republic, independent refers to churches or denominations operating outside of the state registration system, sometimes called house churches or underground churches and now often labeled unregistered churches. The third volume in the set, Academic and Diasporic theologies, expands the scope of China and of Chinese theology. It addresses two distinct groups: scholarship by mainland Chinese academics, and the writings of Chinese-speaking theologians beyond mainland China.

The architecture of the set of volumes is as much a pragmatic as a theological statement. The boundary, for example, between historic missionary denominations and independent or newer churches prior to 1949 is far from fixed, and many of the theologians discussed in Volumes I and II were raised or trained in one branch of the church before starting afresh in another. Theologians and writers across the divisions read each other’s work, and some of them worked together on common national committees or for church or apologetic publications. The same political and social questions often animated their theological grappling, albeit with different outcomes. The three volumes allow us to draw together key themes in theological debates among natural conversation partners, and to illustrate the commonalities and collective visions that stem from a shared social or spiritual habitus, while pointing to the fissures that traverse the ideological and geographical borderlines of Chinese theology.

Volume II

It is a truism that the church grows when missionaries leave. In the early twentieth century the church in China flourished in many forms: it grew within missionary and historic denominations, especially as Chinese priests, pastors, and leaders were ordained and began to lead congregations, and it saw an expansion—then exponential growth—in independent and Chinese-led Protestant churches and denominations. This homegrown Christianity, which Lian Xi characterizes as a potent mix of evangelistic fervor, biblical literalism, charismatic ecstasies, and a fiery eschatology not infrequently tinged with nationalistic exuberance,¹ testifies to the decades of concentrated mission work in the nineteenth century, while heralding the maturation of that process and a new stage in Chinese church history.

As a sector, these indigenous and independent Protestant churches were diverse, yet their theological commitments were predominantly conservative, focused on the conversion and regeneration of the individual, and often supporting millenarian beliefs that brought an urgency to their work.² There were three modes of church work operative: individual evangelists and the revival circuit, church congregations and denominations, and more amorphous phenomena such as the Spiritual Gifts Movement. The first includes itinerant evan­gelists like Yu Cidu (Dora Yu), who after a stint as a medical missionary to Korea became a self-supporting evangelist itinerating throughout southern China in the 1900s, or Ding Limei, who spent fifteen years from 1908 preaching in thousands of locations across eighteen provinces, as well as later figures better known in the West, such as Wang Mingdao or Song Shangjie (John Sung) and the Bethel Band. As for churches, the independent sector soon became the mainstream of Chinese Christianity, attracting more congregants than the historic denominations. Some of the largest and best known include the True Jesus Church begun around 1917 by Wei Enbo (Paul Wei), with its Sabbatarian worship and emphasis on spirit baptism; the Jesus Family established by Jing Dianying in 1927, with Pentecostal beliefs and communal living practices; as well as the Local Church, or Little Flock, of Ni Tuosheng (Watchman Nee), with its lay leadership, millenarian focus, and pursuit of mystical union with Christ.

The disruptions of national and civil war in the 1930s and ’40s affected the development of all churches, but following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, the drive to unify denominations into two overarching church bodies, Catholic and Protestant, had a disproportionate effect on indigenous Protestant churches. Despite being independent with no ties to imperialist foreign churches, and therefore politically more acceptable, the theological persuasions of many in the new Chinese churches meant that they could not in good faith join a national church body that co-operated (or colluded) with the atheist communist government. Some like Jing Dianying, leader of the Jesus Family, were involved in setting up the national Protestant body, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (Jing was later denounced and died in prison); many of Ni Tuosheng’s Local Church congregations were also initially affiliated with the TSPM. Others, like Wang Mingdao, were defiantly opposed to the Three-Self organization at the outset and resisted all pressure to join, to the point of imprisonment. The theology of a significant part of the post-war Chinese church has been shaped by the thinking and lived experience of its suffering martyrs, as they strove to hold to their beliefs and proclaim their faith.

The Roman Catholic Church also came under severe pressure throughout the 1950s, not least because of its ties to Rome, numerous foreign priests and religious in leadership positions, and history of connection with the Guomindang (Nationalist Party). Enforced unity under the government-sponsored Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA) caused a portion of the church to leave, and maintain their links to the Roman church and its rites and beliefs through trusted priests and bishops. In the second half of the twentieth century the label indigenous and independent might be used to refer either to the official Chinese Catholic church, which is, in global terms, an autarkic body, or to that portion of the church that chose not to affiliate with the CCPA and became an unofficial entity, or underground church; the nomenclature breaks down here. The work to bring about the unity of the Catholic Church in China is ongoing; in the twenty-first century various popes have labored to encourage the repair of divisions. Non-mainstream is taken to indicate works that are not Vatican-approved and come out of Chinese church experience and expression, whether from unregistered clergy or registered clergy writing in a personal capacity.³

In the half-century since the end of the Maoist era when churches and church bodies began to be reinstituted, the unregistered Protestant church landscape has seen great change. Some of the early twentieth-century churches still exist: the True Jesus Church, for example, holds to its charismatic and Pentecostal roots and is actively sending missionaries out across the globe.⁴ Meanwhile, the explosive growth of Christianity in rural China in the 1970s and 1980s led to new groupings and affiliations of evangelical believers; one of the largest church bodies, the Word of Life house church network, claims to have twenty million affiliated adherents.⁵ Such figures are difficult to substantiate and document: since new regulations governing religious practice were enacted in 1983 and 1991, all unregistered churches have in effect been extra-legal, and many of their actions illegal. Information-gathering on unofficial religious activity is evidently problematic, hence the wide range in estimates of the numbers of Christians in China.⁶

The last three decades have seen two new shifts in Protestant Christianity: the first is the move from a predominantly rural church to numeric strength and leadership in the urban church, including the development of the New Urban House Churches. The second is the resurgence of denominations among unregistered churches, and especially the growth of Reformed churches proclaiming a Calvinist theology. If the theology of Wang Mingdao and Ni Tuo­sheng’s generation, characterized by personal holiness and a distinction and separation from the world, is still valorized and models Christ for many in China, a new generation of urban house church leaders is as likely to engage with society, and even to challenge the government in law courts over its registration policies. Many of the Reformed church leaders have engaged in lengthy theological exploration and academic debate, popularizing historical theology with their writings. Various house church networks have also created underground seminaries, often resourced with Korean or American input.

Theology is a dynamic force. It interacts not just with changing social mores, from communist to consumerist, socialist to Sinicized, but also with ecclesial shifts and structural changes. Its mode of expression and means of publication may be constrained and force us to read and respond differently, as when thinkers like Ni Tuosheng spent decades in prison, or where unregistered church pastors now may publish online or in Taiwan if they cannot get official permission—in the form of an ISBN number—to distribute their thought in China. A diverse church landscape has become more complex by inconsistent, and regionally differentiated, implementation of religious regulation across China, and by frequently changing rules and ideological thinking on religion. The first decade of this century saw space for negotiation between unregistered churches and local government bodies, especially those churches who made sure they were known as positive social forces and did not cross mutually understood red lines (such as on size, links to other churches or foreign involvement).⁷ In the decade of the Xi Jinping era, the anticipated accommodation of unregistered churches within the system has not transpired, and there has instead been selective interdiction of house church activity.

This volume offers incisive comment and new research from a panel of experts on the streams of theological thought that may dominate in the Chinese church but are not officially mainstream. Part I begins with two case studies from the early twentieth century on the Pentecostal and charismatic movements: the Spiritual Gifts Movement as seen from the perspective of Presbyterian pastors in the region in the 1930s; and the thorny question of the origins of charismatic practices in China, through the lens of the Hong Kong Pentecostal Mission. Kevin Xiyi Yao tackles the revival campaign of the Spiritual Gifts Movement in Shandong through reports from Northern Presbyterian mission stations, in the absence of direct sources, to give an account of this spontaneous, indigenous mass movement and the effects of its exuberant worship on local believers and church congregations. David Kwun-Ho Tai rejects the ascription of Chinese Pentecostal practices to a syncretistic mix of Chinese folk religion and new Protestant practices, and argues that the theology and practice of the Hong Kong Pentecostal Mission—such as the Latter Rain of the Holy Spirit, experienced in healing practices and Spirit baptism—can be traced directly to American Pentecostal influence and the legacy of Azusa street.

The next two chapters in this section on theological trajectories jump to the present day, examining the role of women in the house church and the particular strands of (Neo)Calvinism that are emerging in Reformed churches in China. Kang Jie’s important essay traces the effects of the promotion of Reformed theology and the establishment of Reformed seminaries and training in China on extant house church beliefs and leadership patterns. The case studies Kang gives show that as once-charismatic congregations transition toward the Westminster Confession, women, who form the majority in churches, face both the removal of leadership roles and strong encouragement to marry within the church. The final essay in Part I, Xu Ximian’s study of Dutch Neo-Calvinism, explores the reception of Neo-Calvinism in Reformed house churches in Wenzhou, Zhe­jiang. Xu argues that the version of Calvinism introduced to Wenzhou has been American-inflected Westminsterian Calvinism, and that a better understanding, and retrieval, of Dutch Neo-Calvinism would act as a helpful corrective to interpretations of issues from special grace to church-state relations, and enable a richer contextualization of Christianity in China.

The second part of the volume offers five essays on one of China’s most significant theologians of the twentieth century. Ni Tuosheng, or Watchman Nee, was a writer, church leader, and witness, who died in a reform-through-labor camp near Shanghai in 1972. He had been sent to prison in the mid-1950s on fraud and corruption charges relating to his business, but was told in 1967 that he would have to renounce his faith to be freed, which he refused to do. While Ni’s life and theological legacy have inspired much debate and reconsideration as new facts emerge, the Local Church that he founded after leaving his early Anglican schooling behind continues to exist and grow not only in China—in both unregistered congregations and within the TSPM—but also in Taiwan, the United States, and across the world.

Xie Wenyu’s opening essay foregrounds Ni’s systematic writing and especially his doctrine of humanity. Ni’s trichotomous view of the human being (as spirit, soul, and body) inspired his teaching on the nature and growth of spiritual life, and the need for the soul to submit to the spirit for ordered development. In exploring the biblical basis of Ni’s understanding of the human constitution, Xie’s essay contrasts Ni’s schema derived from Ephesians with the concept of life in the Gospel of John, to propose a distinction between spiritual life and faithful life. Sun Yi’s essay places Ni’s thinking on sanctification in The Normal Christian Life alongside that of John Calvin in The Institutes of the Christian Religion, and explores the differences in the nature and aim of the sanctified life between substitution and union theories of sanctification, not just to elucidate their respective merits, but to show how the Chinese house church has overlain Reformed beliefs onto its Pietist heritage, and the clarity to be gained by better understanding this development.

The third essay in this section returns to the Pietist roots of much of Ni’s theology, and examines commonalities in the relationship between the rational and the spiritual in the writings of Ni and his contemporary, the Presbyterian pastor and professor Jia Yuming. As Brian Siu Kit Chiu shows, Ni and Jia, who both wrote for Jia’s Spiritual Light magazine, came to focus their theological attention on spirituality, whether experienced in becoming a Christ-human or attaining wholeness in mystical union with God. Like Chiu’s essay, most writing on Ni’s theology has examined Ni’s publications from the period of his church career. Liu Ping’s study, however, turns to Ni’s prison writings. Liu begins with a description of the Chinese prison system, and clarifies his understanding of prison theology as the theological expression of those imprisoned for the sake of their faith alone, contrasting this with the incarceration of a figure like Bonhoeffer. Liu draws on a small number of Ni’s letters from prison to his family to reconstruct his last years and state of mind, and reads these in the light of Ni’s earlier theological writings to limn a resistance characterized by joy and submission. The final essay in this section, which could equally well appear in Volume III of this series, looks beyond Ni Tuosheng himself to the legacy of his teachings in the Local Church. Yan Zheng examines the doctrine of theosis in the Local Church as it develops out of Ni’s teachings on sanctification to become an explicit and systematic vision of deification under Li Changshou (Witness Lee), and describes its spread and development under the subsequent generation of overseas leaders. Yan is ambivalent about attempts to trace the Local Church’s teaching on deification to Orthodox roots but affirms the potential of its spiritual practices for the Chinese church.

Part III of the volume presents three studies of diverse church voices whose faith and thinking has inspired generations of churchgoers in China. Zhao Pan tackles one of the most prominent Protestant house church thinkers: Wang Mingdao. Zhao’s research complements existing studies of Wang’s theology by analyzing the role of Wang’s moral commitment in his faith and life choices, grounding Wang’s morality in both scripture and his Confucian identification. The second essay in this section centers on a figure who acknowledges his debt to Wang Mingdao’s theology. As Liu Shibo’s study of the influential preacher and leader Lin Xian’gao (Samuel Lamb) shows, this is manifest in an unwillingness to stray beyond scriptural language into theology, including a reluctance to use a term like Trinity of God, since its source lies outside scripture. Liu’s sensitive study, which excavates the different elements of Lin’s theology, does justice to Lin’s reclamation of the positive value of the term fundamentalist. A third church voice, Rev. Yang Shaotang of Shanxi (d. 1969), is little known in the West, despite being labeled one of the three giants of the Chinese church in his day, as He Aixia’s essay acknowledges. Rev. He’s brief study of Yang shows the tensions and trials of someone caught between Three-Self belonging and a fundamentalist theology, whose painful witness testified to a much broader ecclesial vision than most of his contemporaries. Yang Shaotang is important for this reason, and the essay concludes the volume on an optimistic note.

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1 Lian Xi, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 2.

2 C.f. Daniel Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 128–40.

3 A good example might be the 2006 book Crying out in the Wilderness: The Crystallization of Seven Years of Observation and Reflection, A Compilation of Four Years of Study Tours and Preaching, written by the chief editor of the Jilin Catholic diocese journal Shengxin beilei 聖心蓓蕾, Yu Haitao 于海濤. This work discusses charismatic revival in the Catholic Church and the need for Catholics to return to the Bible, the Holy Spirit, and the foundations of love and mission. See Yu Haitao 于海濤, Kuangye husheng: Qi nian guangcha sikao de jiejing, si zai youxue xuanjiang zhi jicheng 曠野呼聲: 七年觀察思考的結晶, 四載遊學宣講之集 (n.p., 2006), and discussion in Austen Soong 宋怀思, 旷野呼声2006年吉林一个天主教徒在湖北的救恩复兴宣讲集成 [Crying out in the Wilderness: Notes from a Jilin Catholic on the 2006 Salvation Revival in Hubei Province], paper presented at Yale Conference on Modern Chinese Theologies, June 2021.

4 Yen-zen Tsai, Glossolalia and Church Identity: The Role of Sound in the Making of a Chinese Pentecostal-Charismatic Church, in eds. Fenggang Yang, Joy K. C. Tong and Allan H. Anderson, Global Chinese Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 141.

5 Yalin Xin, Inside China’s House Church Network (Lexington, KY: Emeth, 2009), 21.

6 Pew Research data from 2010 gives 67 million, of which 58 million are Protestants and 9 million Roman Catholic. Of the 58 million Protestants, an estimated 35 million are house church members. https://tinyurl.com/3duf88yw. Other sources range from 50 to over 100 million Christians.

7 See Carsten T. Vala, The Politics of Protestant Churches and the Party-State in China: God above Party? (London: Routledge, 2018), 14. Vala uses the concept of a public transcript to explain how illegal groups might violate official policies yet still be tolerated (provided they observe certain norms), and shows how a domination-resistance model often used of illegal religious bodies in China is complemented by a model of negotiation.

Part I

Theological Trajectories from the Twentieth to Twenty-First Centuries

Chapter 1

The Spiritual Gifts Movement in Shandong Province, 1930–37

As Narrated by the Northern Presbyterian Missionaries

Kevin Xiyi Yao

The conservative sector of Protestant Christianity in early twentieth-century China was highly diverse. Churches and mission agencies from a wide spectrum of church traditions, ranging from Anglicanism to independent faith missions, rallied under the banner of unwavering loyalty toward biblical authority, historical orthodoxy, and evangelicalism. Pentecostalism was an important force among these, and of all the Pentecostal groups active in the Republican era, the Spiritual Gifts Movement (靈恩會, SGM) in Shandong province stands out. The significance of this Shandong movement has been recognized in several historical studies.¹ However, our knowledge of it is still minimal, and the scarcity of the primary sources renders further study of it almost impossible.² In the absence of insider sources, this essay approaches the Spiritual Gifts Movement through the (often negative) assessments of the Northern Presbyterian Shandong Mission (NPSM), to try to build up a richer picture—even as mirrored in the condemnations of opponents—of this important revival campaign.

As the largest Protestant mission in Shandong province in the early twentieth century, the NPSM encountered the Spiritual Gifts Movement more than any other mission agency. As a result, a considerable number of records of those encounters are preserved in the archives of the Northern Presbyterian Foreign Mission Board. Based on these archival data, this study begins by tracking the historical trajectories of the NPSM and the SGM, and then focuses on highlighting major features of the movement’s beliefs and practices. My hope is that this case study can help to shed more light on the Spiritual Gifts Movement within the Shandong Revival and on the Pentecostalist wing of conservative Protestantism in China in the twentieth century.

Background

It is a commonplace that Shandong province has a special position in Chinese history, as well as in Christian history in China, as home to the Spiritual Gifts Movement and famous Shandong Revival. In Chinese Christian narratives of the 1930s, the SGM and the Shandong Revival are inseparable. The term Shandong Revival seems to point to several mostly unrelated local revivals taking place primarily between the late 1920s and the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. According to contemporary scholars, three major streams can be identified: Marie Monsen and her revival, primarily among Southern Baptists; the revivals associated with Song Shangjie and Wang Mingdao; and the Spiritual Gifts Movement.³ From the perspective of scholarly studies, the first two are relatively easy to handle. After all, theologically and organizationally, these belonged to the mainstream of the nationwide evangelical revival movement in modern China. But the SGM is more difficult to grasp.⁴ The Shandong Mission of the Northern Presbyterian Church had extensive encounters with the Monsen and Song/Wang revivals during the first six years of the 1930s, and their narratives also reveal many interesting aspects of the history, beliefs, and practices of the Spiritual Gifts Movement.

Since Presbyterian Church (US) missionaries set foot in Shandong in May 1861, the Shandong Mission had gradually become the largest Protestant mission in the province, and the strongest among all Northern Presbyterian missions in China.⁵ Establishing its first station in Dengzhou (Tengchow, 登州), a port city in the northeastern part of the province, the Shandong Mission steadily expanded its reach from the coastal area in the east toward the interior. In 1871, a station in Jinan (Tsinan), the provincial capital, was opened. In 1883, Weixian (Weihsien, 濰縣), a city in between Yantai and Jinan was added. In the 1890s, the Mission turned its gaze to the southern part of the province, which included some of the most mountainous and poorest regions in the province. In 1890, Linyi (Ichow, 臨沂) station was opened, and two years later, Jining (Tsining, Chiningchow, 濟寧) station was established. The expanding German colonial presence helped the Shandong Mission open a new station in Qingdao in 1898.⁶

Given that Shandong province was the birthplace of the Boxer Movement, the Shandong Mission suffered much destruction and evacuation following 1900, but the Mission bounced back quickly and began to expand again, especially in the southern part of the province along the railway connecting Tianjin and Shanghai, with new stations in Yixian (Yihsien 嶧縣), Tengxian (Tenghsien 滕縣), and in 1918, a substation was opened at Qilu (Cheeloo 齊魯) University, completing the Shandong Mission’s network of nine stations.

The early years of the twentieth century witnessed the organizational consolidation of the Presbyterian missions at provincial and national level. In 1910, the China Council was established and headquartered in Shanghai as a coordinating body of all PCUSA missions in the country. As the largest China mission of the PCUSA, the Shandong Mission had its own council and administrative committees. Organizationally the center of gravity appeared to be shifting. While the old stations such as Dengzhou and Yantai became stagnant, such new stations as Tengxian showed a lot more vitality. In just a couple of decades, Tengxian Station would grow into a major fundamentalist missionary and theological education stronghold with national influence. Yet by the early 1930s, the Mission entered an internally critical and turbulent period. While the modernist-fundamentalist confrontation caused significant concerns among this group of overwhelmingly conservative missionaries, the drive toward a self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating Chinese church accelerated considerably. As all of this was happening, Northern Presbyterians found themselves suddenly facing a new challenge: SGM and other revivalistic stirrings in their field.

The Rise and Fall of the Spiritual Gifts Movement

Linyi is the area where the SGM originated and became its first hotbed in the province. Located in the southern part of Shandong, Linyi was one of the largest Northern Presbyterian mission fields in China,⁷ but the station was isolated geographically and understaffed most of the time. Thus when the indigenous Pentecostal movement suddenly arose, the mission and churches were ill prepared to cope with the change and theological difference it brought. The SGM first started within a Presbyterian church in Feixian (費縣). Toward the end of the 1920s, some key native church leaders became increasingly discontent with foreign missionaries’ dominance, especially in financial matters. In 1930, Ma Zhaorui 馬兆瑞, a Pentecostalist church leader influenced by the Assembly of God came to the region from Nanjing and held revival meetings.⁸ Encouraged by Ma, a group of Presbyterian leaders withdrew from the Lingyi Presbytery, and established an Independent Church of Spiritual Gifts (靈恩自立). By 1932–33, the new movement began to impact the entire field of the Linyi Station, and caught the attention of Northern Presbyterian missionaries. The Linyi station reported that this new group had started numerous revival meetings in the Presbyterian church network and spread in the field like wildfire.⁹ As it expanded, the movement began to set up its own leadership and headquarters, and even printed a monthly magazine. Early in 1933, the SGM reached the city of Lingyi itself and quickly sent the mission infrastructure, especially its schools, into chaos.¹⁰ Consequently the Presbyterian mission and church in Lingyi was decimated, and a large number of its active pastors and church members left and cut their ties with the mission.

After SGM shook the Linyi field in early 1930s, the Northern Presbyterian mission stations in the southern part of the province were also impacted. There is no evidence for any systematic and consistent scheme of dispatching and coordinating of leaders from Linyi. But the same pattern was repeated in Tengxian, Yixian, Jining, and Jinan: freelance preachers without authorization or permission from the mission and local churches roamed over the field, and started Pentecostal-type revivals within local church communities. However, the Northern Presbyterian stations and church communities in these areas were stronger, and SGM did not penetrate local churches there as much as in