[Hayhoe, Ma Xiangbo, pp. 272–277—JC]
ZHAO ZICHEN
Nearly half a century younger than Ma Xiangbo, Zhao Zichen (1888–1979), known to the world as T. C. Chao, was by consensus China’s best-known Protestant thinker. Born to an affluent merchant family in Zhejiang, Zhao attended a Presbyterian school in Suzhou, Jiangsu, and then studied at the Methodist Suzhou (Dongwu) University. From 1914 to 1917 he studied theology at Vanderbilt University in the United States and then returned to teach theology at Suzhou University until he moved to Beijing in 1926. Zhao served as a professor and then became dean of the school of religion at Yanjing University in Beijing, and he was for almost three decades the leading spokesman of Christianity on campuses and among the educated.
At first a Methodist, he later became an Anglican, receiving ordination in 1941. In 1948 he was elected one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches, although he later faded away in Communist China on account of his initial opposition to the Three-Self Movement (movement for self-administration, self-support, and self-propagation), which represented Protestant Christianity’s effort—under Wu Yaozong (Y. T. Wu)—to cut its links with the West and work with the Communist government. In 1951–1952, Zhao came under severe attack by his colleagues and students for his allegedly halfhearted support of the movement, and his holy orders were revoked by his bishop. He suffered dreadfully also during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution—but this time from the enemies of Christianity and of all religion—and from rumors that were spread of his renunciation of his faith. With the reopening of China in the late 1970s, Zhao reemerged and reaffirmed his faith as a Christian thinker and theologian. By this time, however, the world’s attention had shifted to the leaders of the Three-Self Movement, especially Ding Guangxun and Chen Zeming, both leftist sympathizers from early on.
The two articles below were written in the mid-twenties when Christianity was under severe attack by the forces of nationalism and communism.
PRESENT-DAY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND LIFE IN CHINA
To the casual observer the preponderance of irreligious literature and talk by intellectual and anti-religious people seems to show that China is at the present time a country that has dispensed with religion or at least thinks that religion is merely good for superstitious folks in limiting their conduct to proper social spheres. . . .
Deeper study, however, shows a different picture. It reveals that, in spite of the loud anti-Christian movement, which is a sign of the need for a deeper manifestation of religion, the Chinese people, the steady and respectable class of people, are searching for a satisfactory spiritual life. . . .
There have been attempts to make Confucianism into a religion. At least three things might be adduced to make such attempts for some people worth making. They are the worship of Heaven, the worship of ancestors, and the worship of Confucius himself as a kind of prophet of the religion, in which he is raised to a position of divinity essentially the same as the divine nature of Heaven. . . .
This attempt was defeated, not because Christians strenuously opposed it but mainly because the leaders of the new popular government took no interest and sometimes thought this sort of religious legislation was contrary to the spirit of the revolution that had just come to pass. . . .
The anti-Christian movement makes us think of two things—namely, are we, in following Jesus, politically unfit to be China’s best citizens? Are we superstitious in our beliefs and practices? If the answer is in the affirmative and we are sure of it, then let us quit altogether and become anti-Christians as devoutly as we can. But if the answer is no, then it is our immediate duty to find the reality in our own experience and in our own life, in our clear-cut thinking and in our activities, to bear witness to the gospel of individual and social salvation.
The demands on Christianity are these. First, it must present to the thoughtful of today a religious life of power, thoroughly ethical, profoundly critical and discriminating and completely loyal to God. Second, it must become adjusted to its social and intellectual environment, so that from this time the religion of Christians should be an inner growth rather than an external imposition even in appearance. No religion brought into the country from outside can become indigenous unless it becomes a growth from within and makes its own natural and living adaptations and improvements. Third, there should be a reasonable interpretation of the deep religious experience of the believers, a Christian rationalism that is free, yet based upon the facts of the spiritual life. Fourth, those who believe must now work to Christianize and create a new community in China. Christianity stands for a redeemed and new humanity, in the form, at first, of a brotherhood, then of a society, and then of a nation that is a part of the whole of humanity. The Communists want society to become communistic; the workingmen want society to be the workingmen’s society; anti-Christians and half-baked scientists want society to be one of atheism and rationalism without a foundation for it; but all will fail unless those who can do it make society a society of loving souls. The Christian, believing in God, must desire to have, and work hard for the realization of, a society that may be called the Kingdom of God. Then, finally, the times call aloud for the forthcoming of prophets, men and women who know God and who can transcend the sins of the times and have visions of the truth and of the future. Great opportunities are linked up with grave dangers. And the sin of Chinese Christians today lies in the fact that they are being led astray and they are not leading the times as they should. The clearest demand today is for a new leadership among Chinese Christians, which can transcend the times in thought and life and can lead.
LEADERSHIP AND CITIZENSHIP TRAINING
The Christian college is facing a new intellectual situation, which requires a scholarly contact between Christian and non-Christian educators and which demands the participation of Christian educators in many of the national movements. The [Chinese] Renaissance has discovered for the nation the new individual, who has new aspirations for self-realization, through a systematization of the learning of the past, the organization of the conditions of human existence in the present, and the scientific actualization of the hopes for the future. The new individual must have a new nation, and hence the Renaissance and the patriotic movements have merged into each other, on the one hand to resist foreign, imperialistic encroachments on Chinese territory and resources, sovereign rights, and culture, and on the other hand to build up the new China from within rather than from without, in spite of foreign imperialistic propaganda working insidiously among the Chinese youths. The true leaders of such movements deeply realize that success depends upon intellectual guidance. So while “in the writings of the younger generation, there is a great deal of cheap iconoclasm and blind faddism . . . the saner and more far-sighted leaders are trying to inculcate into the people what they regard as the only safeguard against these dangers—namely, the historical and evolutionary point of view and a truly scientific attitude of life."3 This, as we Christian educators see, is not enough, because without a transcendent faith in God, we believe, the historical and scientific spirit will not lead us very far in our national movements. We need intellectual leadership that is coupled with religious aspirations, and precisely here the Christian college must make its contribution.
This leads us to the third consideration—namely, the demand of the Christian movement as a whole for thorough Christian intellectual leadership. The Christian church and the Christian college are the two great forces of the Christian religion that reveal its true nature and express its true life. Whereas the church must, by its institutionalized forms and constituted authorities, conserve the religious values of life, the college, by virtue of its tasks of scientific experimentation and its academic freedom in the field of the humanities, counterbalances the conservative and crystallizing influence of the church and thus, by freely discovering new values and quietly and gradually replacing old values, creates at the same time a living, growing equilibrium for the Christian religion. The churc
h gives support to educational institutions, so that in matters of theory the scholars may be preeminently qualified to judge without being restrained, while on the other hand the educational institutions help the church to adapt itself to new and unfamiliar environments. This, however, does not exhaust the relationship between the two organizations. In the history of the Christian movement, prophets have often been men of high intellectual attainment. As the growing complexities of life in modern times demand intellectual leadership in all spheres of activity, the prophets of the Christian movement will have to be men of great intellectual acumen and thorough education. . . .
Having briefly stated the demands for intellectual leadership made upon the Christian college by the growth of the educational work itself, by the rising of the new China, and by the necessities of the Christian movement, let us mention in passing the terrible need today for men to show the way to transcend the difficulties and wrong thinking of the times. Leadership means nothing else than that some prophets arise who can point the way out of the present unsatisfactory conditions of thought and life to a more satisfactory future. Leadership always implies a future for ourselves, who must transcend our own conditions, and for our race and nation, which, too, must outgrow the old limitations. When we say that we need leaders of new ideas, we express a desire for the coming of prophets who know the past so thoroughly that they will not be bound by it and who hold a faith in the future so strongly that they will reveal sufficient idealism to lead us toward the realization of cherished ideals.
[Adapted from Zhao, China Today, pp. 33, 38–39, 41, 47–49, 124–127—JC]
WU YAOZONG
Almost ten years younger than Zhao, Wu Yaozong (Y. T. Wu, 1893–1979) represented the leftist sympathizers among Chinese Protestants. Born into a struggling non-Christian family from Guangdong in southern China, he prepared himself to enter the customs service, enrolling in the Customs College of Beijing. After graduation in 1913, he returned south to take a position as customs officer, was transferred to Beijing in 1917, where he stayed at a YMCA hostel, and received baptism in 1918. He gave up his secular career two years later to join the YMCA staff, working chiefly with students. Like Zao Zichen, he perceived Christianity initially as a basis for a spiritual reconstruction of China, but eventually, in an age that saw the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression, Wu moved from social reform to social revolution.
In 1924 Wu studied theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He received a master’s in philosophy in 1927 from Columbia University with a thesis on William James. He returned ten years later to do a thesis at Union Seminary that had special reference to John Dewey’s pragmatism. As a prominent churchman in China, he traveled to several conferences abroad, before and after World War II. During the war he spent four years in Chengdu. In 1945, he began the journal Tian Feng (Heaven’s Wing), which was to become in 1951 the official organ of the Three-Self Movement.
Wu was at first opposed to communism for what he termed its terror and brutality, and its alienness to the temperament of the Chinese people. Following the Mukden Incident of 1931, however, he found himself increasingly in agreement with the Communists on the need to resist foreign aggression and change the social order. When the Communists came to power in 1949, he sought to play a mediating role with the new government, in order to permit Christians to integrate in the new society.
In 1950, after three conversations with Zhou Enlai in Beijing, he concluded that Chinese Christianity must distance itself from foreign powers and influence. Thereupon he launched the Three-Self Movement, the declared purpose of which was to free Chinese Christianity from financial dependence on the capitalist West. He drafted a document called “The Christian Manifesto,” which was published in 1950 over the signatures of forty prominent Protestant leaders. However, other leaders declined to become involved in collaboration with the government. Wang Mingdao was the best known of this group. Bitter struggles ensued among the Protestants, especially between Wang and the leaders of the Three-Self Movement. Then, during the Cultural Revolution, even the Three-Self Movement was attacked as a “conspiracy between Liu Shaoqi [denounced as a revisionist] and Wu Yaozong.” All religious activities ceased, and many leaders were forced publicly to renounce their faith.
THE PRESENT-DAY TRAGEDY OF CHRISTIANITY
This article by Wu Yaozong, which appeared in Tian Feng for April 10, 1948, more than a year before the Communist armies reached Shanghai, is in a sense the opening salvo of the Three-Self Movement.
A world revolution is developing before our eyes. No matter how we may fear and hate it, this revolution is already an undeniable fact. The opposition of the toilers, the struggles of ethnic minorities, and on the international scene the sharp opposition between democratic and anti-democratic forces, all these are inevitable phenomena of that world revolution. At the present stage the most important task of that revolution, negatively speaking, is to oppress peoples and enslave the world; and positively speaking, [it is] to unite all democratic forces in establishing a new society of freedom and equality, a society of no classes, where everyone works and everyone receives the results of his labors. . . .
At present the cause of the tragic situation in Protestantism is America, and this is because of the historical development. America is a newly developed capitalist power, which only since the Second World War has suddenly become the leading capitalist nation. Its establishment and later separation from the mother country were due partly to economic and political conflict and partly to difference of religious belief, but these two were interrelated. And so the spirit of American capitalism can be said to be the spirit of current Protestantism, and the individualism and freedom that capitalism preaches are the individualism and freedom that certain Protestant leaders preach. . . .
At this critical juncture the position of Chinese [Protestant] Christians is tragic. Chinese Christian tradition is primarily British and American. At present its relations with America are especially close. Most of its missionaries are American, and most of its leaders have been trained in America. Its institutions depend upon American support. Because of these relationships in faith and thinking, the Chinese Christian Church is practically a copy of American Christianity. . . .
The history of Christianity in China has not been all a favorable one. Of course there has been bandit and mob violence due to the superstition of the people—of that we are not now speaking. But since the May 4 movement, from 1922 to 1925, the anti-Christian movement in China has been led by intellectual elements. They said that Christianity is the opiate of the people, it is the running dog of imperialism, the forerunner of cultural aggression. . . .
The historic tragedy of Christianity is that in its history of the past hundred years it has unconsciously changed to become a conservative force. And now at the present stage it has become a reactionary force. . . . In the course of this tragedy of history, Christianity has not only not shown the insight of a prophet in opposing the forces of reaction but has almost made itself one with those forces. . . .
To avoid misunderstanding I will add one further word: When I speak of the tragedy of Christianity today, I do not wish to deny or obscure the fact that within the Christian Church there are many honorable persons and many noteworthy accomplishments. In China, and in the whole world, there are many devout Christians who devote themselves to constructive efforts. They do not seek renown but, accepting obscurity in their own little place in life, make an effective witness for their faith. . . . March 31, 1948.
[Adapted from Merwin, Three-Self Movement, pp. 1–5, 12–19—JC]
THE REFORMATION OF CHRISTIANITY
The influential Shanghai daily Da Gong Bao carried on July 16, 17, and 18, 1948, a serial by Wu Yaozong under the title “The Reformation of Christianity: On the Awakening of Christians.”
I have not given up hope for Christianity. I have been a Christian for thirty-one years and am still a true Christian. During the past decade my Christian belief has been tried
and cleansed, but I still keep and follow its essence. . . .
Can there be a reformation and rebirth of Christianity? I think there can. Christian faith itself has an inner life, the voice of God that Christ preached is endowed with a deep cosmology and outlook on life in ideals and motive power for living. It is the truth of life, and all truth is of revolutionary nature. . . .
First of all, I think Christianity will have to disassociate itself from the capitalist and imperialist order. This is not an easy undertaking, but it must be done. . . . Second, Chinese churches must carry out their former avowed principle of becoming self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating, and thus become really Chinese churches. . . . Christianity must learn that the present period is one of liberation for the people, the collapse of the old system, a time when the old dead Christianity must doff its shroud and come forth arrayed in new garments.
[Adapted from Merwin, Three-Self Movement, pp. 12–14—JC]
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2 Page 80