Peace to you, brothers and sisters who have found your home and purpose in the church of Christ.
I am heading to the U.S. for two weeks of ministry. The last time I visited was two years ago. Praise the Lord for moving the hearts of the police to make a special visit to my home just before my departure. They came specifically to inform me that they had approved this trip and to wish me safe travels. Police officers blessing a pastor—how humorous, gracious, and mighty our God is!
I am scheduled to deliver two lectures on the Chinese church—one at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and another at the China Evangelical Seminary in Los Angeles. With a deep commitment to and love for Christ’s kingdom, I am sharing with you an excerpt from my lecture notes to express how much I have missed you during my travels.
According to a Reformed worldview, in order to understand the Chinese house church we must also understand what is happening in Chinese society. As C.S. Lewis put it, “We must practice double-listening, always attuning ourselves to the voice of God through the truth of Scripture on the one hand, while listening to the world around us on the other, so that we might know what is happening in it, where the current tides are flowing, where its problems lie, and where its idols stand.”[1]
We cannot understand the Chinese church of the twentieth century apart from the history of twentieth-century China. And without that historical awareness, we cannot faithfully proclaim a gospel that took on flesh and entered history. Nor can we use it to speak powerfully into the concrete realities of cultures, societies, and human hearts.
Simply put, China in 2012 is in the midst of what Li Hongzhang describes as an “unprecedented transformation not seen for two thousand years.” China is emerging from a history as tumultuous as the Three Gorges—150 years of so-called “national rejuvenation,” 60 years of political upheaval since 1949,[2] and 34 years of social transformation since 1978.[3] In recent decades, a new Chinese civilization has begun to take shape, influenced by changes on every level—institutional, social, cultural, moral, political, and, most crucially, spiritual, which is the very foundation of Chinese civilization. In the most fundamental sense, this spiritual transformation will be determined by the spiritual vision of today’s Chinese house churches. For “that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” (Jn. 3:6)
Looking at the past five centuries, the arc of world history is clear. The “unprecedented transformation” began with the Reformation of 1517, which laid the foundation for today’s global values in culture, society, human rights, and politics. Rome’s doctrines were no longer capable of addressing the upheaval of the world order. The Church had either rebelled against or obscured the truth of the gospel, rendering it incapable of blessing or challenging the world with biblical truth. God then brought forth the Reformation and Reformed theology. A rediscovered, newly articulated biblical worldview known as “Calvinism” and a supernatural way of faith and life known as the “Puritan Movement” have decisively shaped and defined the foundational value structure of world civilization over the past five centuries.
Two primary forces have shaped this foundational value structure of Western civilization: the Puritan tradition within the churches of England and America and the tradition of nationalism that arose after the French Revolution. One might say this a modern adaptation of that “tale of two cities”—Jerusalem and Athens, the church and the world. In other words, where Calvinism took root, a new “Jerusalem” emerged; where Calvinists were massacred (as with the Huguenots), a new “Athens” emerged. This led to a cultural standoff within modern Western civilization between continental Europe and the Anglo-American world, a rivalry which Samuel Huntington, in his book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, identifies as a fundamentally religious rivalry.
This classical model provides a remarkably fitting framework for understanding the tension between the Chinese church and Chinese society over the past century. The Chinese Communist Party, grounded in Marxism, represents a fusion of the Roman spirit and modern nationalism. In Leviathan, which is often considered the founding text of modern political science, Thomas Hobbes cites Luke 11:24–26—the parable of the unclean spirit who returns with seven spirits more wicked than itself—to describe the rise of the modern state as a revival of the Roman spirit. Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s China are the left-wing heirs of this revival, and the post-Christian European Union of today its right-wing heirs. At the same time, God has led the Chinese house church down a path much like that of the Puritans. It is a path of “dissent from the state church” that has lasted for over sixty years. In contemporary China, both Rome and Jerusalem have found their representatives. One might even say that in 20th-century China, the Puritan tradition encountered one of the most vicious enemies the gospel has ever faced, seven spirits more wicked than the first, unleashed by an amalgam of Marx and Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China.
I believe that the spiritual tradition of the Chinese house church has already endured two major seasons of decline. The first began in 1900 with the crisis between the church and the state, which embedded the cancer of nationalism deep into the life of the Chinese church. The second was the wave of political persecution beginning in the 1950s. To be sure, God revived and preserved the house church as it walked through that wilderness, reclaimed its Christian heritage, and was grafted into the vine. Yet the pietist tradition that dominated the Chinese church largely withered because it lacked a comprehensive gospel worldview with which to respond to the Red era and because of its own narrowness and fear. A third crisis has come in the past 34 years, in the wake of China’s economic rise. Although the house church has, by God’s grace, experienced ongoing revival, the complexities of this era have also brought about a new period of spiritual fragmentation—a kind of spiritual Warring States period.[4] Apart from the shared conviction that “Christ is the sole head of the church,” the house church lacks a firm theological foundation for its confession of the gospel that is grounded in biblical truth.
Trusting in God’s good providence and grace, I believe that in the coming decades, as secular values become entrenched in Chinese society, the Chinese house church will face a defining moment in its spiritual tradition, a long and imminent spiritual battle. This last battle—not in a chronological sense but in an eschatological one—may well be determined by how deeply the church-planting and theological education movements rooted in the Reformed tradition can shape the future of the Chinese church. Will the future Chinese church be able to unite the Reformed Puritan tradition and the pietist “Little Flock” tradition,[5] thus providing an opportunity to recover a more biblical Christianity ever since pietism broke away from the Reformed tradition in the 17th-century? Will the gospel of Christ, in this rising empire of China, engage in a decisive contest with a wide array of worldviews claiming to unite East and West? As in The Lord of the Rings, the Dark Lord is gathering his hosts in Middle-earth for the greatest spiritual battle in five centuries. Will Scripture stand above culture or culture above Scripture? Will we see the Christianization of culture or the culturalization of Christ? The West is largely incapable of resolving this crisis of values, but might China, through its own “unprecedented transformation,” bear witness once more to that foolish and ancient answer that is found in faith alone?
If the answer is no, I deeply fear that when China completes its transition toward a liberal-democratic, global-civilizational model, the “Chinese house church” as a spiritual tradition will have completely stagnated, relegating itself to the annals of church history.
But if the answer is yes, then I must offer a word of warning to certain overseas Chinese churches that have almost entirely capitulated to the Communist Party system and the Three-Self framework. They must examine their duplicitous pragmatism, wrapped in spiritually charged terms like “missions” and “ministry.” Over the past decade or so, various forms of “overseas missions,” “cultural ministries,” and so-called “official exchanges” that run counter to God’s calling for the house church in China have caused tremendous harm and confusion. I speak with the urgency of a prophet and the compassion of a shepherd to the brothers and sisters in overseas Chinese churches—and to some within the Chinese house church itself—who have grown increasingly fearful or cynical in the face of this new Chinese empire: The historical foundation of the Christian faith rests on the fact that “the ruler of this world” has already been cast out of the body of Christ through the cross. Rejecting this truth is almost tantamount to denying Jesus himself.
If this is so, then I also appeal to seminarians and new immigrants in North America: America is not your city of refuge. May you hear the Macedonian call from across the ocean. May you return to the true Narnia, to the old battlefield into which you were born. I pray that even now, as China’s social elites are fleeing en masse, bleeding out of the country like an open wound, the Lord himself would call more new immigrants in North America to swim against the tide, to leave a foreign people, a foreign country, a foreign home to a land that the Lord will show you. May you stand with the persecuted church in the power of faith and walk with your brothers in chains through this final stretch, lest any among you dwelling in paneled houses should one day find himself and his children having no right, no share, and no remembrance in Jerusalem.
Your servant in the Lord, Wang Yi
September 6, 2012—over the skies of California.
[1] Wang Yi mistakenly attributes this quote to C.S. Lewis. It is, in fact, a paraphrase of John Stott from The Contemporary Christian (Intervarsity Press, 1992).
[2] Editor’s note: 1949 marks the founding of the Communist Party
[3] Editor’s note: 1978 marks the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening-Up” (改革开放) policy, which transformed China’s economy from a command economy to a market-oriented one, leading to unprecedent economic growth.
[4] Editor’s note: The Warring States Period (475–221 BC) was a time of intense conflict (and, paradoxically, cultural flourishing) in ancient China, as rival kingdoms vied for supremacy until the Qin finally unified the nation in 221 BC.
[5] Editor’s note: Founded by Watchman Nee, the “Little Flock” is a significant pietist movement within Chinese Christianity that gained prominence in the 1920s.
