Description: While the Peoples Republic of China is officially an atheist country, Christianity continues to experience rapid growth on the Chinese mainland. Many observers see the country as on the way to becoming "the world's most Christian nation." Yet there is widespread ignorance in the English speaking world about how the Chinese Christian community fared during the decades prior to China's "opening up to the West" in the aftermath of the historic visit of Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972. This collection of essays, the first of them published in 1939, provides an invaluable record of developments in mainland Chinese Christianity during that period and for the remaining decades of the twentieth century. The fact that the essays were all authored by a key participant in the Protestant churches in China provides significant added value. Professor Chen discusses a wide range of important topics: various stages of rural and urban development, the "Three Self" principles for structuring officially sanctioned worshiping communities, Bishop K.H. Ting's advocacy of a genuinely indigenous Chinese theology, patterns of international cooperation, worship, seminary education, and much more. These essays make a unique and significant contribution to the Western understanding of Asian religious life in the twentieth century.
Brief description:
Ruomin Liu was born in China in 1978. He studied theology in Nanjing, and then in Heidelberg, Germany. His doctoral dissertation on the ecclesiology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer was published in 2014. He has served as professor of systematic theology of Nanjing Union Theological Seminary, and has been one of the heads of the Academy of Mission at Hamburg University since 2016. Liu has published widely on theological topics in Chinese and in German.