Tao, Brill, and Bohnenkamp as editor, publisher, and translator have performed a great service in producing this important volume in English. Beyond Indigenization draws together twenty essays originally published in Chinese in the Journal of the Study on Religion and History on different aspects of the inculturation (or Sinicization) of Christianity in China, offering a rich selection of substantial studies that will enable readers to follow Chinese-language debates and recent scholarship on the development of Christianity in China. Here there are few references to secondary literature in English, and all twenty-two authors are based in China or Hong Kong. Tao Feiya's introduction sets out the frame of the book as a continuation of the shift in the study of Chinese Christianity from a missiological to sinological and China-centered approach, acknowledging Chinese individuals and institutes as the main force in the transmission of Christianity in China. The emphasis in this book is primarily historical, and seeks to address indigenization from an interdisciplinary historical-religious perspective, but given the nature of the Chinese university system, the majority of the authors are historians rather than religion specialists.

Beyond Indigenization is organized in four sections: The Sinicization of Scripture and Thought; The Diversity of Conflict (from international disputes over Christian activity in China to intracultural debates on morality); Relations between Religions (including Buddhism and Islam); and Beyond Religion (comprising three essays on the impact of missionary scholarship or moral campaigning on secular society). The first section is the most weighty, with nine essays spanning the eighth century to the late nineteenth. Each explores a key moment of debate in contextualization or Sinicization through a single author or set of texts or artifacts, and ventures to explain how believers reached toward understanding – whether of God, doctrine, or truth – via integrating and reworking novel texts and modes of interpretation. Individual essays in this section explore indigenization in poetry, in novels, in primers and teaching texts, in art and in history, and show how deeply bound theology is with exegesis, philosophy, and the art of translation.

The strengths of the volume lie in the uniformly high quality of the essays and the careful selection to give a representative cross section of eras and tension points. Some essays offer case studies which give breadth to our understanding of indigenization, like Dai Guoqing's sample of seventeenth-century hymns or literati poems to Mary which introduce her into the Chinese canon as radiant, aromatic, ever-pure mother of (the Creator) God, and successor to Eve; others offer new theoretical insight, such as Zhu Donghua's reappraisal of Jingjiao faith not as (“Nestorian”) heresy but in terms of its origins in Syriac Christianity, exploring author Jingjing's apophatic influences and developing use of Buddhist terminology in his translations. Five of the essays in this first section consider the transmission and interpretation of faith in the Ming and Qing. Ji Jianxun's study of Ricci's “Doctrine of the Sovereign of Heaven” argues that Ricci's text, which affirms the rooting of Confucian thought in reason and natural law, offers a radical integration of Chinese classical learning and Christian theology that has not been captured by a focus in debates on in the “Term Question” of the name for God. Ricci was not the only one to offer a reinterpretation of the Chinese classics to align Confucian and Christian thought. As Wu Liwei explores, Antonio Caballero's 1664 Tian ru yin introduced his own spiritualized hermeneutics in a reading of the Daxue that was both bold reinterpretation of Neo-Confucian principles and a “ridiculous” (81) form of exegesis to those trained in the interpretation of Chinese classics. If Caballero's imposition of Christian hermeneutics on a Confucian classic did not convince many, the transmission of Catholicism to China did, over time, precipitate a “religionization” of Confucianism in the Qing, with much greater emphasis on venerating (a transcendent) Heaven and on techniques of meditation and self-examination, as Liu Yunhua's essay sets out. Images allowed for Christian ideas to percolate to a broader audience of non-elite church-goers, but also opened up a greater latitude of interpretation, as Xiao Qinghe, a leading historian of Roman Catholicism in China, examines in his study of distortions in Christology and the divine-human nature.

Although there are differences in perspective or subject matter within indigenization among Chinese and non-Chinese scholars, as Tao Feiya contends, these may be as much a matter of formulation for local political or cultural norms as genuine disputes. What is true is that more sustained reading of secondary studies across languages and intellectual cultures is highly desirable, and this excellent volume is a great step toward that end for English-speaking scholars. The translation of essays covering an array of periods and disciplines is highly readable and well done in general. Some infelicities remain, such as instances where Bohnenkamp has not used standard translations for Chinese terms, whether journal names such as the Wanguo gongbao (which ran with two different English names in the nineteenth century, neither of which is given) or Ming-Qing Chinese Christian texts where major English-language studies have set useful precedents for the translation of titles – making it more difficult for readers to follow up elsewhere. One further quibble is the English title of the volume: this not global other than in the sense that foreign missionaries and figures like Luther appear scattered throughout. The jacket blurb proclaims that the volume “places the practice of Christianity in China into the context of world history” which it does not: it places it either in the context of Chinese history, or precisely explores interpretive disjunctions between foreign intentions and Chinese reception, the hermeneutic screen between an artistic rendering of the Passion and a Chinese impression of a criminal being executed.