China and the Church
China and the Church

Author: Christopher M. S. Johns

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-02-16

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0520284658

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This groundbreaking study examines decorative Chinese works of art and visual culture, known as chinoiserie, in the context of church and state politics, with a particular focus on the Catholic missionsÕ impact on Western attitudes toward China and the Chinese. Art-historical examinations of chinoiserie have largely ignored the role of the Church and its conversion efforts in Asia. Johns, however, demonstrates that the emperorÕs 1722 prohibition against Catholic evangelization, which occurred after almost a century and a half of tolerance, prompted a remarkable change in European visualizations of China in Roman Catholic countries. ChinaandtheChurch considers the progress of Christianity in China during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, examines authentic works of Chinese art available to the European artists who produced chinoiserie, and explains how the East Asian male body in Western art changed from ÒnormativeÓ depictions to whimsical, feminized grotesques after the collapse of the missionary efforts during the 1720s.

House Church Christianity in China
House Church Christianity in China

Author: Jie Kang

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-11-04

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 3319304909

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This book provides a significant new interpretation of China's rapid urbanization by analyzing its impact on the spread of Protestant Christianity in the People's Republic. Demonstrating how the transition from rural to urban churches has led to the creation of nationwide Christian networks, the author focuses on Linyi in Shandong Province. Using her unparalleled access as both an anthropologist and member of the congregation, she presents a much-needed insider's view of the development, organization, operation and transformation of the region's unregistered house churches. Whilst most studies are concerned with the opposition of church and state, this work, by contrast, shows that in Linyi there is no clear-cut distinction between the official TSPM church and house churches. Rather, it is the urbanization of religion that is worthy of note and detailed analysis, an approach which the author also employs in investigating the role played by Christianity in Beijing. What she uncovers is the impact of newly-acquired urban aspirations for material goods, success and status on the reshaping of local Christian beliefs, practices and rites of passage. In doing so, she creates a thought-provoking account of religious life in China that will appeal to social anthropologists, sociologists, theologians and scholars of China and its society.

China and the True Jesus
China and the True Jesus

Author: Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0190923466

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"The history of the True Jesus Church, a Pentecostal church founded in Beijing in 1917, reveals dynamic interaction between charismatic experience and organizational processes. Believers' lived experiences provide grassroots perspective on developments in China's modern history, including transnational exchange, gender roles, models for legitimate governance, clandestine culture, and church-state relations"--

The Registered Church in China
The Registered Church in China

Author: Wayne Ten Harmsel

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2021-03-09

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 1725286246

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In The Registered Church in China, Wayne Ten Harmsel pulls back for Western readers the shroud of mystery surrounding Chinese registered churches. Through interviews with Chinese pastors, evangelists, and lay Christians, he provides a rare view of what it means to live in the shadow of both the government and the well-known house churches. Registered churches have received criticism from both of these sources, as well as from many churches in other countries, particularly the United States. Ten Harmsel examines the charges leveled against registered churches and presents a balanced picture of the complexity of the church situation in China. (Such complexity arises, for instance, in the registered churches' struggle to respond to new religious regulations and the controversy over Sinicization.) China has become a major center of twenty-first-century Christianity, and, despite how little is known about registered churches in the West, these congregations play a significant role in shaping Chinese Christianity today.

Christianity in China
Christianity in China

Author: Daniel H. Bays

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 526

ISBN-13: 9780804736510

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This pathbreaking volume will force a reassessment of many common assumptions about the relationship between Christianity and modern China. The overall thrust of the twenty essays is that despite the conflicts and tension that often have characterized relations between Christianity and China, in fact Christianity has been, for the past two centuries or more, putting down roots within Chinese society, and it is still in the process of doing so. Thus Christianity is here interpreted not just as a Western religion that imposed itself on China, but one that was becoming a Chinese religion, as Buddhism did centuries ago. Eschewing the usual focus on foreign missionaries, as is customary, this research effort is China-centered, drawing on Chinese sources, including government and organizational documents, private papers, and interviews. The essays are organized into four major sections: Christianity’s role in Qing society, including local conflicts (6 essays); ethnicity (3 essays); women (5 essays); and indigenization of the Christian effort (6 essays). The editor has provided sectional introductions to highlight the major themes in each section, as well as a general Introduction.

The Church of the East in Central Asia and China
The Church of the East in Central Asia and China

Author: Brepols Publishers

Publisher:

Published: 2020-11-04

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9782503586649

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A collection of papers on the history of Christianity along the Silk Road and in pre-modern China, pushing back the frontier of knowledge in a fast developing new area of research.00The diffusion of Christianity along the Silk Road from Iraq and Iran to China in the pre-modern era has attracted scholarly attention in the West since the discovery of the famous Xi?an (Nestorian) Monument c. 1623. This initial discovery was dismissed as a?Jesuit forgery? by Voltaire, Edward Gibbon and many other scholars of the Enlightenment. However, its authenticity has been more than vindicated by the discovery of genuine (Nestorian / Jingjiao) Christian texts in Chinese from Dunhuang and in Syriac, Sogdian and Old Turkish from Turfan (Bulayïq) at the beginning of the last century. The discovery of a second major inscription which included part of a Chinese Christian (Jingjiao) text already known to scholars from Dunhuang, and the recent re-discovery of several Dunhuang Christian texts in a Japanese library, has removed any lingering doubts about the authenticity of the texts recovered from Dunhuang. The surviving material spans almost a millennium from the introduction of Christianity along the Silk Road in the sixth and seventh centuries through the Mongol period and beyond.

Builders of the Chinese Church
Builders of the Chinese Church

Author: G. Wright Doyle

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2015-01-29

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1630878812

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From 1807, when the first Protestant missionary arrived in China, to the 1920s, when a new phase of growth began, thousands of missionaries and Chinese Christians labored, often under very adverse conditions, to lay the groundwork for a solid, healthy, and self-sustaining Chinese church. Following an Introduction that sets the scene and surveys the entire period, Builders of the Chinese Church contains the stories of nine leading pioneers--seven missionaries and two Chinese. Here we meet Robert Morrison, the heroic translator; Liang Fa, the first Chinese evangelist; missionary-scholar James Legge; J. Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission; converted opium addict Pastor Hsi ("Overcomer of Demons"); Griffith John and Jonathan Goforth, both indefatigable preachers; and the idealistic advocates of education and reform, W. A. P. Martin and Timothy Richard. Readers will be inspired by their courage, devotion, and sheer perseverance in arduous work, and will gain an understanding of the roots of the two "branches" of today's Chinese Protestantism.

The Coming Chinese Church
The Coming Chinese Church

Author: Paul Golf

Publisher: Monarch Books

Published: 2013-10-31

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0857214756

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While China is shaking the world in ever increasing ways, behind the scenes it is the Church that is moving China. And the Holy Spirit will not stop at China's borders. From the fires of persecution to the toughest frontiers of mission, the Chinese Church is rising up. Many Chinese Christians are convinced that they are set to become a powerful missionary force that will reach to the ends of the earth. Chinese believers know how to believe; they know how to pray; and they know how to remember and honor their spiritual heritage. These qualities are leading believers to engage directly with the rest of the world. The Coming Chinese Church tells stories of the Chinese revival previously unpublished in the West and offers prophetic insight into China's role in mission as it seeks to impact the world. Drawing heavily on testimonies and stories from within the Chinese Church, this luminous book deals with a number of major themes: confronting the challenges of secularism; anti-Christian sentiment; engaging with Islam; personal and corporate revival.