Introduction
Y. Y. Chong speculated that missionaries in China were enthusiastic in promoting the Union Version Bible translation project because they were influenced by the Holiness Revival Movement.Footnote 1 However, the Holiness Revival Movement was a movement for pious and moral Christian life, rather than a translation movement.Footnote 2 For this reason, it is unlikely to have been the major source of influence on the translation project. Jost Zetzsche has pointed out that there are complex dynamics and controversies among missionaries and Bible societies in relation to the project's aims. He suggested that the Union Version project may have been launched because of the “missionaries’ sense of the urgent need to create one Bible for China”.Footnote 3 On this “urgent need”, I concur with George K. W. Mak's observation that the Bible translation projects of the Protestant missionaries in China followed the Reformation principle of establishing the absolute authority of the Bible and promoting individual reading of it.Footnote 4 In the Epitome of the Formula of Concord (1577), reformers described the authority of the Holy Scripture as the formal principle of the Reformation:
In this way the distinction between the Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments and all other writings is preserved, and Holy Scripture alone remains the only judge, rule and guiding principle (sola sacra scriptura Iudex, norma et regula), according to which, as the only touchstone, all teachings should and must be recognised and judged, whether they are good and evil, correct or incorrect.Footnote 5
This is the essential principle of sola scriptura, the theological doctrine held by some Christian denominations that the Christian scriptures are the sole infallible rule of faith and practice, that the Bible is the supreme standard of doctrine, and that nothing about Christian faith can be asserted if it is not in agreement with, or goes beyond, the scriptures. The principle was common to all Protestants.Footnote 6 Thanks to sola scriptura, missionaries were required to provide good-quality Bible versions in local languages, enabling those in the field to access God's teaching directly. Accordingly, Christian missionaries in China enthusiastically supported the Union Version translation project.
However, it is possible to query the extent to which missionaries’ understanding of the Reformation principle directly influenced the conservative independent/non-denominational Chinese churches, which by the twentieth century constituted the majority of the Chinese Church. In previous studies of the Union Version, researchers have usually focused on the discussions taking place within missionary circles. Though Y. Y. Chong published her research on the Chinese reception of the Union Version in 2000, her findings contain some errors. She argued that Chinese Christians conducted little theological discussion on Biblical translation in the Republican period due to unstable social circumstances, and that this resulted in much of the relevant historical evidence being lost or becoming inaccessible. In support of this assertion, she cited two short articles by Wang Mingdao, claiming that these were the only source materials that she could retrieve.Footnote 7 However, Chong was apparently unaware at the time that most of the works of Wang and Nee remained in circulation and hence, ample material existed regarding their views of the Union Version.
Moreover, previous discussion on Chinese Christians’ role in Biblical translation usually concentrated on their contribution to the translation process.Footnote 8 Lauren Pfister, for instance, noted that Ho Tsun-Sheen—the renowned Chinese translator assisting James Legge—attempted to integrate “a Christian worldview with a Ruist cultural framework, which Legge also shared with him”.Footnote 9 The relationship and interaction between missionaries and Chinese Christians with respect to Biblical translation has become a valuable topic of discussion among scholars. But the critical reception and responses of Chinese Christian readers are given less attention by researchers. In this article, I will investigate how far conservative independent/non-denominational Chinese Christian leaders were paradoxically influenced by the missionaries’ Union Version Bible translation project through a different understanding of sola scriptura.
Although the missionary movement in China was an heir of the Reformation spirit and the Union Version translation project explicitly claimed to follow the principle of sola scriptura, conservative independent leaders such as Wang Mingdao (1900–91) and Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng, 1903–72) rejected the authority of missionaries and western denominations as “flawed”, “inheritance of human” and “corrupt”.Footnote 10 However, one distinctive feature of Chinese conservative theology is Biblicism, and so Scripture occupied a central role in the conservative faith. The Reformation principle of sola scriptura legitimises this conservative stance and calls for a stern application of this principle. As the Bible is the most important authority for conservative Christians, Watchman Nee and Wang Mingdao—important leaders of the conservative circle in the early twentieth century—complained about the ‘inaccuracy’ and ‘inauthenticity’ of the Union Version translation. They pointed out errors of translation within it and offered their own translation. At the same time, however, they admitted that the Chinese Union Version was an outstanding and up-to-date translation of the Scripture. It is also important to note that the revisions of translation suggested by Wang and Nee were limited in scope, usually offering only an alternative translation of single word or term. Even the later Recovery Version (completed in 2005), which was a ‘new’ translation produced by the ‘Little Folk’ community founded by Nee, did not drastically depart from the Union Version.
Because the Bible occupies a central role in the religious practice of conservative Christians, the teaching and ministry of Nee and Wang unavoidably relied heavily on the Union Version. They taught that Christians should read and understand the Bible thoroughly. All the same, they regarded Biblical commentary as unnecessary or even harmful for spiritual cultivation: the Bible, for them, was ‘self-sufficient’. Thus, their criticisms of translated versions did not develop into the kind of historical criticism that has characterised Biblical translation history in the West. Indeed, Nee and Wang urged Christians to read the Bible, and eventually to read the Union Version. The Union Version, written in eloquent modern Chinese, thus became an integrated part of the Chinese Christian spiritual life rather than a mere convenient translation. At the same time, the teaching of spiritual practice—involving memorising and reciting Biblical texts as a way of mastering Bible content—that Nee and Wang encouraged, is particularly close to the medieval monastic principle of lectio divina. Consequently, their teaching promoted a very different understanding of sola scriptura with regard to the Union Version as compared to missionary interpretations. It could be argued, therefore, that Nee, Wang and the missionaries unintentionally integrated the Reformation principle, medieval spiritual practice and Chinese culture into an organic whole through the Union Version, and that this integration in turn, clearly demonstrates the significant impact of the Union Version on the Chinese Church.
The Chinese Union Version, its translation principle and sola scriptura
The creation of the Chinese Union Version represented a long-term project. As early as the General Conference of missionaries of 1877, missionaries in China discussed the need for such an undertaking. Sola scriptura operated as an important motivating factor and translation principle for them. S. L. Baldwin of the American Methodist Episcopal Mission, for instance, argued that they needed to produce a union version of the whole Bible, which “should be faithful to the originals, yet thoroughly idiomatic, simple and perspicuous in style, and as free as possible from unusual Chinese characters”. He predicted that this version would prevent confusion in teaching Christian truths and over time allow these truths “to become imbedded in the language, and find a home in the popular mind and conscience”.Footnote 11 In 1877 Chauncey Goodrich of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and a long-term supporter for Mandarin translation of the Union Version, similarly supported the case using the principle of sola scriptura. He advocated with great empathy that
In the Protestant Church of the nineteenth century, there can scarcely arise a controversy as to the fitness of giving the Bible to the people. The Protestant Church was born out of such controversies, and makes her boast that the word of God is free. There is none so poor or so low that she will not offer him the Gospel pearl. Need it be written how much the masses in China need the Bible in the Vernacular to unlock its sealed treasures […] God meant the light of the Bible, like the light of the sun, to shine down into the bottom of the valleys, as well as to illuminate the tops of the mountains. I think there is almost universal conviction among Protestant Missionaries, even in China, that the people must have the Bible in their vernacular. It need scarcely be added, in this paper, that in China we must also have a Bible in the universal language of China.Footnote 12
However, the discussion in 1877 conference failed to reach a consensus and ended up diverging into two translation projects.Footnote 13
In the General Conference of missionaries of 1890, the Union Version project again became an important topic of discussion. It is clear that the sola scriptura and a unified translation of the Bible pervaded missionaries’ discourses about the project. John Wherry of the American Presbyterian Mission (North) emphasised that the Protestant Church considered the Bible, rather than the papal office, “as its creed, and believes that an intelligent, personal acceptance of this creed is essential to the spiritual welfare of everyman”.Footnote 14 Wherry noted that the Peking version of Mandarin Bible (with the Old Testament translated by Schereschewsky) was a successful translation. He asserted that it was the result of, first, “its inherent excellence as a new and independent rendering of the Bible into Chinese”, second, that “it is in the familiar speech of the people to whom it was this version given”, and third that “it was […] to the unlearned of North China what the Bibles of Wycliffe and Luther were to the English and Germans”.Footnote 15 The reasons that he provided indicate that Wherry evaluated the success of the Peking version according to the criteria of sola scriptura.
William Muirhead of the London Missionary Society likewise pointed out that the Protestant missions had a common practice “to translate as soon as possible at least a portion of Holy Writ into the current tongue”; in his view, “the faithful transfer of the Sacred Writings into the language of this people” would allow the Chinese to “become acquainted with their [the Bible's] precious truths, and raised to the enjoyment of their [the Bible's] inestimable blessings for time and eternity, for earth and heaven”;Footnote 16 a unified Bible translation would show the “standard of truth” of Christian revelation.Footnote 17 After the conference, Calvin Mateer argued that the Mandarin Bible was likely to speak more effectively to the Chinese than the Wen-li Bible. A Mandarin Bible could be “intelligible to the common people” when it was “read to them” in public worship. According to Mateer, “The fundamental distinction between Wen-li and Mandarin is that the former is addressed to the eye, the latter to the ear”.Footnote 18 The structure of the sentences of the Mandarin Bible accordingly needed to “conform to the model of the spoken language”.Footnote 19 In discussions on adding notes, headings and an introduction and preface to the Bible, the missionaries’ recurrent concern was whether this additional information would jeopardise the principle of sola scriptura. Finally, they decided to allow only minimal marginal notes in the Union Version. Footnote 20
The principle of sola scriptura reflected the extent to which the Union Version project was a typical nineteenth-century biblical production undertaking. Faithfulness was the guiding principle for upholding sola scriptura in the translation projects of that time.Footnote 21 For example, the Revised Version project carried out in the nineteenth century listed ‘faithfulness’ of the translation and revision as the essential first principle.Footnote 22 Also, Protestant efforts to produce a translated Bible then assumed that “merely reading the text would change people's lives and in turn bring about salvation on a national and international level”.Footnote 23 In this respect, the principle of sola scriptura supported using vernaculars for Bible translation projects.Footnote 24
Wang and Nee on Reformation, Missionary Enterprise and the Union Version Bible
Wang Mingdao and Watchman Nee appreciated the spiritual achievement of the Reformation, and their positive evaluations were chiefly related to the doctrine of sola scriptura. Nee, for instance, commented that Martin Luther had brought about the Lord's recovery to the church.Footnote 25 This recovery, for him, consisted of two parts: justification by faith, and a Bible open to all.Footnote 26 However, he was critical of the fact that, as he saw it, Luther had only explained the truth of faith and had not given a clear teaching on justification.Footnote 27 In other words, Luther's main contribution to the Lord's recovery rested on the doctrine of the Holy Scripture. For Nee, the proper view regarding Biblical authority was to believe that it represented God's living words. Hence, he commented that,
The Bible is an astonishing book. This book has its characteristics, that is, it is spoken by the words of human beings, but it is really God's words. It is written by human hands, but it is really written by God's hand… The Bible is a book written by human humans and spoken by human mouths. However, God has blown his breath into it. Therefore, it is a living book. It is living word spoken by the living God. This is the meaning of inspiration in the Bible.Footnote 28
In Nee's view, because the Bible was directly inspired by God, and the Spirit was inerrant, then the words within the Bible too had to be viewed as infallible:
The Holy Spirit inspires the Bible. The Spirit does not only give words to human beings, but also prepares the person who is writing the Bible to be a vessel. Because the vessel has the spirit of this kind, so it is called to write that type of words. Therefore, the Spirit behind the words of the Scripture is complete and strong. The Spirit cannot be wrong. The Spirit is inerrant.Footnote 29
As far as Wang was concerned, the Reformation was a movement of Bible reading and translation, and he rejoiced that the Reformation had made the Bible available to the public.Footnote 30 He appreciated Martin Luther for his courage in standing for Biblical truth against the oppression of Roman Catholic Church.Footnote 31 Wang's view on the Bible was, therefore, similar to that of Nee. He emphasised that every single word in the Bible was inspired by God, and, thus, the Bible for him was without error.Footnote 32 For him too, Theological Liberalism denied the authority of the Bible, and Liberals were indeed “unbelievers”.Footnote 33 For him, the only authority for his ministry was the Bible:
Whatever the Bible says, I will accept. Whatever the Bible does not say, I will not take them even a little bit. My faith and my message are fully back to the Bible. No matter how many people subtract some truths from the Bible, and no matter how many people add some traditions other than the Bible, I always believe in everything in the Bible, no less and no more.Footnote 34
For Nee and Wang alike, the Reformation exalted biblical authority and they explicitly taught that only the Bible could be the authority for Christian life. If the main influence of sola scriptura for the missionaries’ Union Version project manifested in vernacular—Mandarin—translation, for Wang and Nee this was properly strict obedience to the Bible. However, when they applied this principle regarding the Union Version, it produced a paradox. Although missionaries considered themselves as faithful students of the sola scriptura, Wang and Nee criticised the missionary enterprise together with denominational churches for betraying the Reformation. Nee believed that his ministry was a ministry of the Lord's recovery. He admitted that the Chinese had been taught a great deal of religious knowledge by missionaries, but, in his view, missionaries did not proclaim the message of salvation, justification and regeneration, something that he blamed on denominationalism.Footnote 35 Moreover, he described the denominations that the western missionaries brought with them into China as ‘unbiblical’: in his view, denominationalism could not be a result of biblical teaching.Footnote 36
Wang likewise voiced severe criticism of the missionary enterprise and associated denominational churches. He claimed that more than half of Christians in China were not true Christians, but only Jiao You (religious friends)—they did not repent from sin and live out a faithful life. He lamented that the Chinese Church was disloyal to Biblical teaching, and he also objected to western missionaries dominating control of missionary work and selecting—what he viewed—as incompetent and unfaithful Chinese to be their co-workers.Footnote 37 He, therefore, saw it as the task of his ministry to point out such sins and proclaim the Biblical truth.Footnote 38
While Nee and Wang were both heavily critical of missionary endeavours in China and had complaints about the translation of certain verses, nonetheless their reverence for Biblical authority meant that they gave a positive reception to the Union Version, believing that the missionaries had done a good job with it.Footnote 39 Nee described the Mandarin Union Version as “the best Bible translation in China, and one of the best in the world”, because it had been translated from the best available Greek manuscripts of that time.Footnote 40 Wang also acknowledged that the Mandarin Union Version was “really a very good” translation.Footnote 41 The Union Version, thus, sheds light on how missionaries and two Chinese Christian leaders approached the sola scriptura differently while arriving at the same destination.
The Union Version and Chinese Spiritual Cultivation: From Sola Scriptura to Lectio Divina
As conservative leaders, Nee and Wang regarded Bible reading as an obligation for all Christians.Footnote 42 Both followed reformers’ exegetical principles derived from sola scriptura in their teaching of Bible reading: first, the Bible was the sole authority for Christian life; second, the Bible's 66 books were a unified whole; and, third, Scripture as interpreter itself (Scriptura sui ipsius interpres) was the best exegetical method.Footnote 43 However, Chinese conservative leaders did not develop these principles into the historical-critical practices that reformers and their successors introduced.Footnote 44 The reason for this was that, for them, Biblical reading was mainly a spiritual practice and should not be regarded as an intellectual undertaking. Hence, Nee and Wang did not think that reading the Bible, even according to the above principles, would automatically transform a Christian's spiritual life. They argued instead that Christians could not benefit from the Bible unless they prepared themselves to be a person ready for receiving God's teaching. Wang, hence, suggested that Christians should empty themselves:
… we should be cautious at this point. We should not mix those unbiblical teachings, which we hear from everyday life, with the biblical teachings. Because they are not biblical stuff, they can effectively block us to receive the biblical truth. It will be the best if I re-evaluate everything that I know with the biblical standard. We can keep it if it has biblical basis. We can forgo it if it has not. The things that I know a little bit, no matter it has been learnt in the past few years or several ten years, no matter it has been heard from a pastor or a doctor, they cannot be the standard. The person that is going to read the Bible should use the Bible as the sole standard, and then he or she can talk about bible reading.Footnote 45
For Nee, too, Christians should not only have the right method to read the Bible, they should also become the right persons for its reading:Footnote 46
A person that is closed from God, even he researches a lot, pray a lot, he is still a person that cannot read the Bible […] God's light is the same. But, humans are not the same. Someone is open to God. Thus, he can read the Bible. Someone is closed from God. Thus, he cannot read the Bible.Footnote 47
Reading the Bible, for him, was not an art of hermeneutics, but an act of spiritual cultivation. As he instructed his followers, for a Bible-reading experience to be fruitful, it was necessary to enter three modes required by the Holy Spirit: the thought of the Holy Spirit, the reality in the Bible of the Holy Spirit, and the spirit of the Holy Spirit.Footnote 48 In his view, Bible reading represented an engagement with the Holy Spirit, and people could only grasp the mystery of the Bible if they were connected with the Holy Spirit.Footnote 49 More importantly, for Nee, those people connected with the Holy Spirit and open to God needed to memorise the Bible. In other words, people did not connect with the Holy Spirit through exegesis but by the act of memorising:
Paul told Ephesians, “to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’” (Acts 20:35). To remember Lord's words, you need to memorise them. You cannot remember if you do not memorise them […] If our hearts before God are open, and if our attitude is gentle, it is very easy to memorise the Bible. If we always remember the Lord's words, it is very easy to memorise the Bible. If we memorise the Bible whenever we have time, we can plentifully stock Christ's words in our hearts. If our inner person does not have the words of the Bible, it will be very difficult for the Holy Spirit to speak to us. Every time God gives us revelation, usually it uses the words of the Bible. If we do not memorise solidly the words of the Bible, revelation will not come out easily.Footnote 50
After having learned the words of the Bible by heart, the next step was to meditate on Biblical teachings. Interestingly, one way to produce effective meditation was to draw on these,Footnote 51 thus reinforcing Nee's emphasis on committing the Bible to memory.
Wang Mingdao did not have the same mystical sensibility as Nee with regards to the teaching of Bible reading. Rather, he believed that the vast number of Bibles in circulation was sufficient proof that it was inspired and preserved by God.Footnote 52 Pragmatically, he asserted that the best reading method for the Bible was simply to read it.Footnote 53 This needed to be approached in a disciplined or habitual manner: Christians ought to conduct a daily Bible reading in the morning; pray for the Holy Spirit to come and guide them; closely read one whole chapter of the Bible several times; and then divide that chapter into paragraphs in order to identify the themes and memorise them. After becoming familiar with the flow of each chapter, readers needed to identify its core teachings or truths. Finally, Wang advised readers to choose several key verses of the chapter to memorise firmly and thoroughly.Footnote 54 Wang was a stern moralist teacher who believed that the Bible was “the sword of the Holy Spirit”, which Christians could use to fight off the temptation of the Devil. He lamented that Christians often failed in their moral life because they did not commit God's words to memory, and so were unable to identify the appropriate Biblical teachings with which to resist the Devil's attacks when they were in the midst of spiritual struggle.Footnote 55 For this reason, he picked out verses from the Union Version Bible and listed them according to categories so as to make it easier for readers to find the passages that they could memorise to fight off spiritual temptations.Footnote 56
Thus, while these Chinese Christian leaders considered the Bible as the sole authority in their lives, their writings suggest that they did not turn the principle of sola scriptura into a humanistic hermeneutical idea. In Western Christianity, the sola scriptura led to the rise of the historical-critical method, which scholars used to fight against established religious authority. In Chinese Christianity, conservative leaders were also very critical of the established religious authority, which, in this case, was the western missionary enterprise. However, the adherence of Wang and Nee to sola scriptura meant that they developed spiritual practice instead. For them, reading the Bible was not a self-contained activity; instead, it was a necessary component of a broader spiritual cultivation project. Both stressed the importance of memorising, meditating, and praying in the course of Bible reading. This practice allowed the Chinese Union Version to become a necessary part of life. Though both accused missionaries of betraying the principles of the Reformation, through their use of the Union Version they themselves remained under the influence of missionaries.
The integration of Biblical translations and Biblical reading as strategy of spiritual cultivation was not limited to China, but appears as a consequence of missionaries engaging with indigenous cultures in other parts of the world. Lamin Sanneh has observed that Biblical translations in African local languages were used as written oracle for spiritual combat. African Christians also referred to the translated Bible, criticising what they viewed as missionaries’ unfaithful practice in terms of how the latter related to the Scriptures.Footnote 57 In China, what we find is that conservative Christian leaders transformed the Union Version into the core of their spiritual and moral teaching, while also using it to repudiate the missionary establishment.
Finally, it should be noted that the teachings of Nee and Wang were very similar to the three-step practice present within the medieval monastic lectio divina, namely that monks need to include reading (lectio), meditation (meditatio) and prayer (oratio) in their spiritual practice. The lectio is an active reading and the words of the Bible are pronounced verbally. The meditatio is a memorising practice, with the aim of immersing one's body and soul within the sacred text. Finally, the oratio is the response to the light of the Scripture.Footnote 58 In a deeper sense, it represents to its practitioners a practice of “letting our Divine Friend speak to us through his inspired and inspiring Word”.Footnote 59 The objective and steps of the practice are very similar to the teaching of Wang and Nee.
But Nee and Wang certainly did not draw their teaching from the monastic or Roman Catholic tradition. Instead, I would suggest that their high respect for Biblical authority as ‘life transforming power’ led them teach a humble, self-empty and meditating way of reading the Bible. Evan Howard found that the teaching of Bible reading as part of the Protestant spiritual revival movements in the West from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries was a modern non-clerical recovery of the monastic culture of lectio divina. Footnote 60 On the other hand, the spirit of sola scriptura in the translation projects of the nineteenth century turned Biblical scholarship into historical-critical and textual critical enquires. Though the conservative readers of these translations acknowledged that they benefitted from the fruit of this scholarship, they remained critical about the achievement, and practised sola scriptura in a different way. It may be possible that Wang and Nee unintentionally returned to monastic practices just as the western revival movements had done so. Either way, the adoption of the Union Version Bible reveals an interesting integration of Chinese conservative Christian faith, missionary enterprise, sola scriptura and the monastic style of spiritual practice in the Chinese Church.
Conclusion
In short, the Reformation's principle of sola scriptura deeply influenced Chinese Christian leaders of the early twentieth century. They also viewed this principle as a basis for their opposition to missionaries and western denominations. However, in their teaching of Biblical reading, sola scriptura did not lead to Biblical criticism. The main emphasis was instead on reading the Bible as a spiritual practice, thanks to which the Union Version, though it is a work produced by missionaries, enjoyed an unparalleled reverence. In other words, while memorising and prayer constituted vital parts of Bible reading in the teaching of Wang and Nee, their practice of sola scriptura through the Mandarin Union Version Bible converged with medieval monastic traditions.
