Chinese Theology by Chloë Starr

Chinese Theology by Chloë Starr

Author:Chloë Starr [Starr, Chloë]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-01-07T16:00:00+00:00


8

STATE REGULATION, CHURCH GROWTH, AND TEXTUAL PROFUSION

The period since Reform and Opening Up began in 1978 has proved to be one of the most exciting, diverse, and unpredictable in the history of Chinese Christianity. The great growth in the number of religious adherents and of churches and temples in China has forced the government to respond and adapt continuously. The scope of Christianity in China—with probably eighty million believers regularly attending worship services1—means that it is increasingly difficult to generalize about what constitutes “Chinese Christianity.” From the old populations of Shandong Catholic villages or Lisu minority towns where generations grew up in entirely Christian surrounds, to the new urban house churches challenging the status quo; from Wenzhou “boss Christians” running their city’s politics, to Korean-speaking congregations worshipping in lavish tiered sanctuaries in northeast China, the oft-repeated statistic about Chinese Christians being old, female, and poor has long needed modifying. The experiences of Christians are correspondingly disparate, and depending on the constituency—or the website visited—an observer might gain a sense of renewed persecution and defiant resistance or of thriving worship, civic integration, and a commitment to charity work among the new underclass.

This chapter analyzes some of the burgeoning categories of Christian writing and thinking that have emerged in various media across this period of growth. Although we can distinguish four broad types of church profession in contemporary China (official or open Chinese Catholic; unregistered or underground Roman Catholic; official Three-Self Protestant; and unregistered or house-church Protestant),2 Christian writings fall more neatly into three categories: the essays and expositions of official church theologians, the writings of other Christians and pastors, and the scholarship of academic Christianity.3 The three have prospered in separate phases and in different institutional settings, often with quite distinct readerships. The writings of state-sanctioned seminary professors have received more attention than either unofficial publications or the recent academic theology movements, and so this overview is followed by two chapters examining writings from the Sino-Christian theology movement and from recent Protestant house-church leaders.

To provide a context for the development of theological writings during the Reform era, the chapter begins with a review of recent church directions and religious life focused through the lens of religious policy and regulation. Much of life in the PRC has been highly regulated, but religion has been among the most constricted of all spheres, with regulation eased less rapidly. Christian writing has naturally grown in tandem with the church, with the rise of an educated middle class and technological advances, with government funding of university departments, and with trade growth and publishing agreements with foreign presses; but it has been affected throughout, both directly and indirectly, by government policy on religion. All sectors of the church have been subject to the same legislation, but the legislation has been tailored to differentiate among the various sectors and has mediated their development in different ways, providing the three broad categories of official church writings, unofficial church writings, and academic writings. The regulatory framework provides a window into



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