From Christ to Confucius

German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860-1950

Bibliographic Data

ID19974838
AuthorsAlbert Wu (0000-0001-6253-6984, corresponding author), Albert Monshan Wu
Year2016
Pages344
Publication date2016-11-22
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueFrom Christ to Confucius (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherYale University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.12987/yale/9780300217070.001.0001
OpenAlexW4243070065
Open LibraryOL28607397M
ISBN9780300217070
LanguageEN
Citations received10

This book examines how German Protestant and Catholic missionaries reconsidered their attitudes toward Confucianism and, more broadly, Chinese culture. In the 1860s, German missionaries attacked traditional Chinese values as antithetical to their goals of converting China to Christianity, and congregational leadership lay solely in German hands. By the 1930s, missionaries commented that Christianity’s global survival—both in China and the West—depended on a synthesis of Christ and Confucius. Even before they were forced by the Communists to leave in the early 1950s, the German missionaries had relinquished leadership to Chinese clergy. Why did these institutional and ideological shifts occur? How did German missionaries come to repudiate their former beliefs and tactics? This book argues that German missionaries, since their first entry into China, considered their missionary work in China as a failure. Propelled by failure, the German missionaries sought to reform their practices. These missionaries began to challenge Germany’s imperial project and even abandon central theological ideas such as the exclusivity of Christian salvation. Chinese Christians were crucial partners in the process, pushing the German missionaries to relinquish their previous claims of Christian superiority. In time, this thinking catalyzed a revolution among European Christians about the nature of Christianity itself. This book sheds light on the roots of Christianity’s global shift from being a predominantly European religion in the nineteenth century to a non-European one by the twenty-first century

Archaeology · China · Christianity · German · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Theology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Confucianism · German Missions · Interfaith relations · Missionaries · Relations

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