Always Something Missing

Giving without Intention among Sino-Taiwanese Protestants and Others

Bibliographic Data

ID4380129
AuthorsG P Breen (0000-0002-5468-145X, Associate Lecturer, University College London, UK [email protected], corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume40
Issue1
Pages51-67
Publication date2022-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0305-7674 • E-ISSN: 2047-7716
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3167/cja.2022.400105
OpenAlexW4293097473
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited24

What does it take to experience grace? I argue that for followers of the Chinese Christian reformers Watchman Nee and Witness Lee, in China, Taiwan, and the United States, grace is experienced as an intended gift with a missing motivating intention. For a group in which God's intentions are rigorously mapped out, experiencing God's grace is thus no simple feat. In particular, I show how the experience of grace occurs in moments of apparent wrongdoing when reward is least comprehensible. As this wrongdoing becomes institutionalised as an ideal mode of grace, however, it paradoxically becomes less graceful in practice. Therefore, grace here is an inherently transgressive, destabilising, contradictory phenomenon. Extrapolating beyond Nee and Lee's followers, I suggest that at a time of gratitudinous secularism, of givenness without a Giver, blessedness without a Blesser, grace is more abundant than ever. But that with this grace comes gratitude, an emotion often resistant to social change

China · Gratitude · Political science · Secularism · Sociology · Transgressive · Witness · Wrongdoing · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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