Here are two books on the same subject: how Christianity has gained its footing in China. But they approach it from different perspectives. Robert Morrison and the birth of Chinese Protestantism, as its title reveals, is a biography of the experiential and spiritual adventure of Robert Morrison, one of the most well-known Christian missionaries to China in the early nineteenth century. The mission Morrison undertook was to deliver the Christian message to the Chinese, to achieve which he spent most of his time in China, learning Chinese and translating the Bible. Reading Christian Scriptures in China aims to be a discourse on the Christian Scriptures in a Chinese cultural, linguistic and historical context, and an assessment of the possibility and plausibility of ‘theology in the Chinese language’. Central methodologically to both books is a concern with inter-religious and inter-cultural translation, seeking the common ground of two different languages, religious systems and textual traditions and at the same time reflecting on the difference and conflict arising from the crossing of cultural barriers. This concern is therefore two-fold: how to transplant Christian faith into a different cultural soil, and how to make Christian Scriptures linguistically, literally and philosophically meaningful to the Chinese.

Robert Morrison was one of the earliest European Protestant Christian missionaries to south China. Under the auspices of the London Missionary Society, he went to China in 1807 and set up his base in Macao and Canton (Guangzhou). During the twenty-four years that he spent in China (apart from about three years back in England between 1823 and 1826), Morrison continued to study the Chinese language, preached Christian teachings to his associates and others, and undertook the task of translating the whole Bible into Chinese, with invaluable help and assistance from his aides. The difficulties he met were far beyond the imagination of today's international travellers: there were effectively no language tools he could use, and most of the people with whom he came into contact were either hostile to his adventure or indifferent to the Christian faith. Overcoming all these problems with a strong will and endurance, Morrison eventually emerged as the ‘leading interpreter of China in the West’, and the ‘inspiration for Christian mission in England and America’.

On such a pioneering and historic figure as Morrison, rich scholarship already exists, but Hancock has seen a need to re-evaluate ‘Morrison at a time when China is re-evaluating Christianity and the legacy of China mission’. For Hancock, early studies of Morrison ‘share the exogenous, Eurocentric perspective’, while more recent studies have not yet sufficiently explored the rich mine of cultural, historical, linguistic and literary data about this man and his life. Hancock seems not to intend to excavate new materials or information from archives; rather he labours to sift a good number of existing biographies, Morrison's own records and publications, and the records and comments of his contemporaries. He sees it as his goal to ‘re-create and then re-evaluate Morrison primarily through a close rereading’ of the Memoirs of the life and labour of Robert Morrison, D. D. (1839). In many respects, this rereading reflects Hancock's own personal convictions about the role and value of Christian mission as a cross-cultural enterprise, as well as an increasingly accepted view among contemporary scholars of Christianity in the context of non-Christian cultures. Out of this he has successfully generated a new and hermeneutical narrative of Morrison's life and experiences including his ambition, frustration, painstaking effort and achievement.

Reading Christian Scriptures in China takes up a similar challenge but its approach is more focused. A collection of twelve papers, with a well-constructed editorial introduction, it is divided into two parts. The central theme of part i is the Bible in China from historical and contemporary perspectives, while part ii is devoted to the hermeneutics of reading the Bible by a number of leading Chinese scholars, theologians and church leaders. How to read the Bible in China is in effect a question of how to indigenise Christian teachings to Chinese culture, the Chinese way of life and way of thinking; in other words how Christian messages could and indeed should be understood, translated, interpreted, transformed and responded to. In answering this question, a great effort has been made to reduce the tension between Chinese attitudes towards sacred texts and what the west believes to be correct interpretations for the Chinese, between Chinese traditionalists and modernisers/westernisers, and between the ‘puritan’ interpretations of Christian tenets and the ‘pragmatic’ applications of Christian religion to social reality. For the majority of Chinese Christian scholars this tension must be resolved before the Chinese Bible can be, in any real sense, ‘created’. Explicitly or implicitly these efforts have led to various types of readings and interpretations in Chinese in different historical periods, as revealed in Fredrik Fällman's account of contemporary church leaders and Christian/Non-Christian intellectuals and their views of biblical messages, John Yieh's paper on the three leading Christian interpreters and in Sze-kar Wan's article on the five Chinese theologians of the May Fourth period. As a cross-cultural enterprise, reading the Bible in Chinese and by the Chinese is never value-free, and different readers tend to attach their own perspectives or interpretations to the select texts and messages to form their own understanding. This is a matter of interest not only for academics and church leaders, but also, to a lesser degree, for ordinary people, in the sense that the Bible has become a cultural symbol of the merging of the west and China.

Both books attempt, through case studies and historical narratives, to reflect on or answer more fundamental questions, for example, how, in imposing a particular faith upon, or delivering its message to, another cultural system, can the value of both systems be preserved rather than destroyed or reduced? What should have been done to avoid the trap of Edward Said's ‘orientalism’ when Christian teaching was rendered into a different language and presented to the people of a different cultural tradition? These attempts have produced fruit; both books are not only invaluable resources for students and general readers on the subject of Chinese Christianity but also refreshing and timely contributions to inter-religious and inter-cultural studies.