One of the primary lines of inquiry in the academic field of world Christianity traces the degree and nature of mutual interaction between the global and the local in the shaping and development of the Christian Church. In From Christ to Confucius, Albert Wu has pursued this thread as it relates to the German missionary project in late imperial and republican China. Specifically, he is interested in how missionary attitudes towards Chinese culture changed over time, as well as in the implications of this change for both the missionaries and the local Chinese Christians. To build his case, Wu employs a combination of solid archival reconstructions of the historical development of his primary subjects, the German missionaries and Chinese converts of the Protestant Berlin Missionary Society (BMS) and the Catholic Society of the Divine Word (SVD), and rich descriptions of their social and political contexts in both Germany and China. As expected, Wu's interest in shifting cultural attitudes during the period from 1860 to 1950 means that questions of nationalism – both in China and in Germany – surface repeatedly throughout the study.
Chapter i provides a general introduction to the roots and key motivations of the China mission, a task made difficult by Wu's decision to cover both Protestant and Catholic developments. Chapter ii looks more closely at what the author views as a sense of disappointment and frustration experienced by China missionaries in the second half of the nineteenth century. Particular attention is given to their failure to establish indigenous or three-self churches and the influence of national rivalries within the missionary communities. Chapter iii outlines the period of mission optimism that followed the resolution of the 1900 Boxer Uprising. Here Wu focuses on the growing disconnect between the German missionaries and their Chinese converts, as social and political developments in both China and Germany repeatedly threatened that optimism. Chapters iv and v address the 1911 Chinese Revolution and World War I, respectively, two events that served to heighten the distance between the foreign missionaries and their local Chinese brothers and sisters. Chapter vi, ‘Falling in love with Confucius’, explores the pressures from both Germany and China that drove many German missionaries to abandon their previous attitude of suspicion towards Chinese culture and to embrace Confucius as an ally in their efforts to preserve the cultural relevance (in China but also in Germany) of their mission project.
While chapter vi is intended to function as the climax of Wu's study, chapter vii demonstrates the real value of his approach. Entitled ‘Unfulfilled promises’, it describes the Protestant and Catholic mission communities in the midst of rising anti-foreignism in China and rising nationalism in Germany. The littoral status of the cross-cultural missionary is shown in striking detail, as notions of race and nationality squeeze the missionaries from two different directions, leaving them increasingly distanced from both their German supporters and their Chinese Christian brothers and sisters. Profound similarities in the social and political trends of 2018 in China and the West heighten the reader's interest in how Wu's subjects from a previous century balanced the twin instincts of Walls's well-known Indigenising and Pilgrim Principles (Andrew Walls, The missionary movement in Christian history, Maryknoll, NY 1996). In this chapter Wu has written history that feels torn from today's headlines.
Chapter viii moves to post-liberation China, using the stories of two Chinese Christians, pastor Ling Deyuan and scholar Chen Yuan, to helpfully illuminate the different ways in which Christian communities renegotiated their identity after the departure of the missionaries. Wu emphasises the choices (or lack thereof) that confronted Chinese Christians of different backgrounds as they struggled to find their place in Communist China. The concluding chapter brings the argument into the present, placing the entire study within the context of religious change in Europe and the Global South. Herein lies one of Wu's most interesting contentions, that both the so-called secularisation of Europe and the rise of non-Western Christianity were already present within the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mission project, revealed in the ways in which these German missionaries and Chinese Christians responded to political change and religious pluralism.
The rise of world Christianity as a field of academic inquiry during the last decade has increased interest in studies that integrate Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox strands of Christianity into single complex narratives (see, for example, Brian Stanley's Christianity in the twentieth century, Princeton, NJ 2018). Wu's study is notable for its attempt to intermingle Protestant and Catholic people and events throughout the text, though at times From Christ to Confucius reads more like two different stories told in tandem rather than a unified whole – a tendency particularly noticeable in the first and last chapters. And while Wu's choice of the BMS and SVD naturally relegates Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism to the margins of his study, his final chapter would have benefited from a more robust consideration of these two important communities within the global Christian Church. These challenges, however, say more about the difficulty of combining all these disparate narratives than they do about any shortcomings in Wu's excellent research.
This is a well-written work of history suitable for use in upper level courses. It is to be hoped that more scholars will pursue this kind of integrated study in the future.
