Theology Today - Vol 46, No. 4 - January 1990 - BOOK REVIEW - Seeking the Common Ground: Protestant Christianity, The Three-Self Movement, and China's United Front

446 - Seeking the Common Ground: Protestant Christianity, The Three-Self Movement, and China's United Front

Seeking the Common Ground: Protestant Christianity, The Three-Self Movement, and China's United Front
By Philip L. Wickeri
Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1988. 356 pp. $27.95.

"Leaders of the Chinese Three-Self Movement are all Communists! The Chinese Three-Self Church is an heretical Church." So say many overseas Chinese Christians and many of their Western supporters in an effort to discredit the Three-Self Movement and to build a case for the "house-church" as the only valid expression of Protestant Christianity on the Chinese mainland today.

Wickeri's painstaking analysis of Protestant Christianity in China over the past four decades should go far toward demystifying the situation and placing the Chinese Three-Self Movement in its proper light, socially, politically, and also spiritually. An American Presbyterian fraternal worker formerly based in Nanjing and now serving with China's Amity Foundation in Hongkong, Wickeri amply documents the fact that the Three-Self Movement under the leadership of Y. T. Wu and others had its genesis in the period of transition from the Guomindang to the Chinese Communist regime. Working within the framework of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party, the movement sought to overcome the foreignness, dependence, and alienation of Chinese Christianity by bringing the structures and goals of the churches into general harmony with the aims and policies of the People's Republic of China. Shocking as this kind of relationship may be to persons accustomed to the complete separation of church and state, or perhaps even to an adversary role over against the government, Wickeri demonstrates that religion in China from ancient times has operated within the constraints of a totalitarian feudal society and that imperial efforts to control or limit the freedom of religious believers are nothing new. Thus arises the peculiar "patriotic" (ai-guo) trait of the Three-Self Movement and of other Chinese religious movements (Buddhist, Daoist, Catholic), all seeking to demonstrate political loyalty and cultural continuity, rather than tension or discontinuity, with Chinese society.

Wickeri, unlike some critics of the Three-Self Movement seems to be generally affirmative toward the new directions taken by Chinese Protestantism, initially by Y. T. Wu and more recently by K. H. Ting, and to regard these changes as natural and perhaps even inevitable. The new pro-socialist though anti-atheistic orientation of the church was necessary for the Chinese church's survival after the termination of foreign support, while at the same time allowing the church a degree of freedom to carry out its worship and witness functions and to root itself into the post-liberation soil of the People's Republic of China. The

448 - Seeking the Common Ground: Protestant Christianity, The Three-Self Movement, and China's United Front

formula for this was "seeking the common ground, while reserving differences." Externally, this meant a rough accommodation between Christian believers and the new socialist society, while internally it meant that former liberals and evangelical conservatives could relate in terms of "mutual respect." Wickeri is quick to note that this accommodation of Christianity to socialism worked well under the period of the "united front"-a concept enjoying warm support from Zhou Enlaibut that it failed and collapsed completely during the "ultra- leftist" reign of terror initiated by the "Gang of Four," climaxing in the Cultural Revolution and the closing down of all religious institutions and public places of worship.

Seldom does Wickeri seem to express a critical view either of the Three-Self Movement or the China Christian Council, yet in his concluding section he gently raises several points of possible criticism for future dialogue. The church allowed itself to be transformed by the Chinese social revolution, he notes, but was the church itself engaged in transforming that revolution? Given the church's self-avowed patriotic stance, did its new selfhood allow it to play a prophetic role? It is tantalizing to wonder how the Chinese church, given its peculiar "Chineseness" but also its accountability to the universal Christian community, would react to the students' call for democratic reforms and the tragic events of Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Wickeri sees the church slowly being "transformed and perfected" from within, losing itself in Chinese society so that it might in time make the full witness of the gospel available to that society. At this writing it is too early to judge whether the Chinese church has been able to play a prophetic and/or conciliatory role in post-June 4th China.

Wickeri's book is indispensable for gaining an accurate and comprehensive picture of Protestant Christianity in China over the past four decades, especially on its public or official side. Based on twenty-two interviews with Chinese church leaders, and relying heavily on translated excerpts from Tian Feng, an official publication of the Three-Self Movement, Wickeri's book comes close to being a semi-official account of that movement, and it is not likely to be surpassed. The book deals in a competent way with theological and ecclesiological issues facing the Chinese church today, but for a more intimate view of the spiritual life of Chinese believers during and since the Cultural Revolution one must look elsewhere. No one seeking a deeper insight into the controversy surrounding the Three-Self Movement can afford to miss this book.

James A. Scherer
Lutheran School of Theology
Chicago, Illinois