One important thing I've learned in my first weeks at college is the distinct advantage of having a professor who will forward you articles of interest that provide the ever-welcome opportunity for productive procrastination. So when an article called "Developing a Discipline: The Recent Study of Western Church History in the People's Republic of China" pops up in my inbox, you'd better believe that a textbook reading about Archaic Era ceramics techniques is going to be demoted in priority.
The article, from the July edition of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, explores the development of academic preoccupation with church history in post-Marxist China. Following the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), during which the privilege of practicing and studying traditional forms of culture (such as religion) was taken away, Deng Xiaoping stepped in with his policy of "reform and opening" in 1978. Several factors contributed to the revival of Christianity as a topic for scholarly study and the gradual departure from the Marxist theory of religion as the "opium of the masses." The prohibition on unregulated spiritual activities was lifted; Buddhism and Protestantism, interesting bedfellows, led in the subsequent revival of religious practice; intellectuals took notice, and the Chinese interest in western church history was born.
On one hand, some of the liberal interpretations of the first resources available to China in the 1980s might elicit guffaws from those of us who have shamefully taken for granted our basic education of the Church's history. Reading the objective of one scholar's work especially made this Calvinist queasy:
Yu Ke investigated Calvin’s theology, analysing in detail the nature of predestination : election remains a mystery to all people, but it shows those elected the signs of being chosen through a calling. The ties between faith, success and morality made the Calvinist struggle a lifetime battle to achieve and hence made the religion a force which pushed society forward. Calvinism thus became a force for creating capitalism, with Calvinists accommodating to the development of a commodity economy with their new ideals and new values.
I'd like to see a secular American capitalist react to that! To be fair, though, we can't ignore the tragic roots of the awkward firstfruits of this research: those Chinese scholars naming the Reformation the first capitalist revolution and ascribing bizarre political agendas to Luther were perhaps unavoidably still steeped in the Marxist worldview; for a nation to be opening and expanding its capacity for the study of church history so soon after the rule of Communism is truly remarkable.
It is heartening to continue to trace the pursuit of the discipline in the 1990s, when Chinese students and seminarians who had been studying in the west returned with a new perspective relevant to their national concerns: the modernization of the western world by means of the church's influence on society. The subsequent "religious cultural fever" brought about myriad journal articles, books and studies on the relation of culture to religion, most with the goal to reconcile Chinese culture with Christianity. This is where we start to see the topics familiar to American religious studies: the influence of Greek thought on early Christian theology, the derivatives of Aristotelian philosophy in Aquinas' works, and finally (notably lacking in the 80s) studies on Orthodox church history.
At the article's end, the author stresses the necessity for continued relations between religious scholars in the west and those in China. It is unlikely that the Chinese scholars have approached the desired amount of translated primary sources to work with; what if an American university or seminary could institute a program specifically to aid them in this? To supply Chinese academia with the resources for further study of historical Christianity could certainly be a step toward liberating the rest of Chinese society from anti-religious oppression, as well as toward delivering the persecuted Church from the terrors she faces there even today.
