In 1898, the year before his death, the German missionary Ernst Faber reflected on his forty-year career in China. The account of his early missions work was suffused with a tone of failure and disappointment. He wrote openly about his difficulties in adjusting to the climate and environment of southern China, the diminutive numbers of converts to Christianity, his frustrations with learning Mandarin and the local dialects used in Guangdong, and the overwhelming feeling of loneliness that he encountered working in rural parishes.Footnote 1
Yet upon his death, Faber was regarded by his missionary colleagues as one of the most important Western missionaries working in China. Faber's obituary in the Chinese Recorder, the most widely read missionary organ in China, hailed Faber as “one of the very highest authorities in regard to the history, literature and religions of China.”Footnote 2 Gustav Warneck, the founder of Protestant missiology (Missionswissenschaft) in Germany, called Faber “the most important missionary of Chinese affairs, who grasped the central problems of mission work with a steady and brilliant hand.”Footnote 3
The nineteenth-century world that Faber navigated was filled with seeming contradictions. Considered by his peers as one of the most influential missionaries in China, Faber described his own work in terms of failure. He lived a life that was simultaneously provincial and cosmopolitan, national and international, particular and universal. His original life aspirations were to become a provincial blacksmith, but he ended up working the most productive years of his life in cosmopolitan Shanghai. Educated in a conservative Protestant milieu, Faber later broke with the Pietist establishment, earning most of his recognition from the literary work that he produced for the liberal Christian General Evangelical Protestant Missionary Society (Allgemeine evangelische-protestantische Missionsverein). When he left for China in 1864, Germany was not yet a unified nation, and he was embedded in an international missionary community filled with British and Americans. By the time he entered Jiaozhou in 1897, he went under the banner of the German Reich. He preached a message that he considered universal and eternal, but struggled with translating that message into languages—Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hakka—that did not have the precise vocabulary to express those truths.
Compared to other famous German missionaries, such as his successor Richard Wilhelm or his predecessor Karl Gützlaff, Ernst Faber has been neglected in the historiographical literature. This is due, in part, to the difficulty in placing Faber into familiar historical narratives. His career does not conform to the “missionary going native” model celebrated in narratives of Gützlaff and Wilhelm.Footnote 4 Unlike Wilhelm and Gützlaff, who both donned Chinese attire and professed a love for Chinese culture, Faber never embraced Chinese culture, and continued to yearn until his death for the eventual triumph of Christianity over Confucianism. His work has also remained largely inaccessible to a Western audience: while he wrote tracts and pamphlets in English and German, his magnum opus, Civilization, Chinese and West, was published in classical Chinese.
The purpose of this article is not only to recover a neglected figure, but to use Ernst Faber's experience as a lens to understand the myriad tensions and contradictions that characterized German missions work in the second half of the nineteenth century. Faber's missionary career highlights the various transformations in the German missionary community, as well as its work in China, in the second half of the nineteenth century. He stood at the center of the fundamental theological debate between liberal and Protestant missionary communities in Germany. Faber's career, sandwiched between two of the greatest religious uprisings in modern Chinese history, the Taiping Rebellion of 1864 and the Boxer Uprising in 1900, also occurred during one of the most fertile and formative periods of the expansion of Christian missions in China.
Faber's career also helps us to further examine the contours of “transnationalism.” As Patricia Clavin reminds us, transnationalism “is first and foremost about people: the social space that they inhabit, the networks they form and the ideas they exchange.”Footnote 5 Faber's peregrinations brings into sharper focus the transnational networks and communities that existed between the German lands and China in the nineteenth century. But Faber's career also challenges the triumphalist assumptions often underlying transnational narratives. Clavin has pointed out that works on transnational history tend to focus on the “consistently progressive and co-operative” character of exchange, leading to a “teleological history of globalization in which modern societies grow increasingly enmeshed.”Footnote 6 Stories of “repulsion, rather than attraction” have not been emphasized in the literature.Footnote 7
Faber's story illuminates the repulsion that some Western missionaries felt toward Chinese culture. But Faber's story is not just one of stubborn resistance to the lures of China; it is also one of change. In this article, I argue that Faber's early experiences with failure, rooted deeply in his distaste with Chinese culture, forced him to recalibrate and alter his approach to missions. Failure, or more precisely, perceptions of failure, brought about reform. Faber was not alone: many of his contemporary missionaries, such as James Legge, Young J. Allen, and John Nevius, also saw their early work of direct missionary conversion as a failed endeavor, and reoriented their work as a response.
Much of the earlier literature—published in the 1960s and ’70s, in the immediate aftermath of the triumph of the Communists in 1949—on the Christian missionary effort in China has operated under the assumption that Christian missions failed in China, and therefore attempts to answer the question of why Christianity failed in China. Paul Cohen, for example, wrote, “By any ordinary standard of accounting, the religion of the West failed, in the late Qing, to relate itself effectively to Chinese needs.”Footnote 8 Scholars thus sought answers to why Christianity was unable to gain a strong foothold in China in the nineteenth century.Footnote 9 More recent scholarship has tried to revise this view of the Christian enterprise as a “failure,” instead arguing that the missionary project was crucial to China's modernization—while missionaries may have failed to convert the Chinese to Christianity, they succeeded in fundamentally altering Chinese society by helping to modernize it.Footnote 10
What has often been overlooked in the literature is that missionaries themselves felt that the missionary enterprise had failed. By focusing on how Faber adapted his missionary tactics in response to his own perception of overwhelming failure, this article joins a growing literature in the historiography of Christian missions that seeks to highlight the dialogic relationship between the missionaries and the local societies that they served.Footnote 11 Faber's career shows that the missionary was not merely a “cultural imperialist” or a “hand-maiden” of imperial interests. Instead, missionaries traversed and blurred many of the perceived categories and labels of their time.
Provincial Beginnings
Ernst Faber's early provincial upbringing contained few hints that would foreshadow his later cosmopolitan life. He was born on April 25, 1839, in Coburg, a city in the region of Upper Franconia, about 100 kilometers north of Nuremberg. Coburg was a predominantly Protestant city, with a population of about 10,000 in 1843. As early as 1530, when Martin Luther translated the Bible in the Coburg Fortress during the diet of Augsburg, Coburg boasted a tradition of being a bastion of Protestantism in a largely Catholic surrounding.
Faber was born into a pious Protestant family, and his mother instilled in him a “wonderful fear of God.”Footnote 12 He was the third of eight children. Faber's father was originally an affluent tinsmith who fell on hard times, and young Ernst's childhood was spent in a state of financial stress and near poverty.Footnote 13 Though a good student in his youth, Faber was forced to follow his father's footsteps due to his family's financial difficulties. From the ages of 11 to 13, he apprenticed to become a blacksmith. After finishing his apprenticeship at the age of 16, Faber wandered throughout the German lands, traveling through Saxony, Silesia, and Berlin. Faber later spoke of the loneliness and hardship during his travels, as he spent days on end alone in foreign villages, often unable to understand the local languages.Footnote 14
Faber ended up in Münster, which marked a turning point in his life. Münster was a predominantly Catholic city, and Faber's fellow journeymen would often tease him as a “heretic.”Footnote 15 Feeling ostracized, Faber joined a Protestant youth group. In the youth group Faber found, in his words, the “peace in his soul that he had so long been seeking.”Footnote 16 Faber became good friends with a fellow member of the youth group who had decided to become a missionary and later evangelized in Sumatra.Footnote 17 Faber decided to follow his friend, and in 1858 they traveled to Barmen together, hoping to join the missionary seminar of the Rhenish Missionary Society (Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft). After a year of preparatory courses and working as a teaching assistant for an elementary school class of one hundred students, Faber passed the entrance examinations and became a seminary student of the Rhenish Mission.
The Rhenish Mission was a child of the Pietist movement that swept through the German lands in the early 1800s.Footnote 18 Pietists in the early nineteenth century traced their roots to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Pietism of Philipp Jacob Spener and August Hermann Francke. They were further galvanized by the massive transformations that the French and Napoleonic revolutions brought to the European political landscape. Pietist revivals swept through England and the German lands, as “awakened” Protestants saw the revolutionary upheaval as a sign of the apocalypse.Footnote 19 Witnessing the crumbling of the old order throughout the German lands, German Pietists adopted an anti-Enlightenment stance that stressed personal devotion and spirituality, hoping that a return to personal piety would hasten the coming of God's divine order on earth.Footnote 20 Pietists upheld the Bible as the foundation of a religious and moral outlook on life, and viewed a literal and strict interpretation of biblical truth as a means of combatting the challenges of Enlightenment rationalism. The revival of Pietist ideals was an attempt to redeploy and restrengthen Protestant Christian values as Christianity came under attack from Enlightenment reformers and skeptics.
The German lands saw a wave of Protestant missionary societies founded on these Pietist principles in the 1820s.Footnote 21 Founded amidst this enthusiasm for foreign mission was the Rhenish Mission, which began in 1828 with the combination of three smaller mission societies from the Prussian Lower Rhine provinces of Elberfeld, Barmen, and Cologne.Footnote 22 The society was evangelical, interdenominational, and international. The first Rhenish missionaries, for example, were stationed in South Africa in 1829, and obtained financial and institutional support from the London Missionary Society.
The missionary societies exemplified the turn toward voluntary associational activity that changed the religious landscape of Europe in the early nineteenth century. They enjoyed immense popularity. In 1821, the Basel Missionary Society started an annual missions festival, where missionaries would report on their experiences, interspersed with a community festival and revivalist explications of the Bible. The popularity of mission festivals soon spread throughout the German lands.Footnote 23 Missionary societies publicize their activities and achievements in their own journals and publications, informing the public of their work abroad.
Why did Pietists so enthusiastically embrace foreign missions? Theologically, Pietists rallied around foreign missions in their hopes of hastening Christ's return, as they saw the spreading of the Gospel to all people as a prerequisite for the Second Coming.Footnote 24 Many mission theologians saw the expansion of Christianity into Asia and Africa the logical next step in the evolution of global Christianity—Gustav Warneck called the nineteenth century the “fourth stage” of world missions, when Christianity would triumphantly reach every single corner of the earth.Footnote 25 The prospect of foreign missions also posed little political threat to internal German state affairs, and state officials often encouraged and embraced the prospects of the expansion of overseas influence through missionary activity.Footnote 26
Friedrich Fabri, who was appointed the missions director of the Rhenish Missions in 1857, was a product of this Pietist milieu. Under Fabri's direction, the Rhenish Missions gained prominence within the landscape of missionary societies. Educated at Erlangen and Berlin from 1841 to 1845, Fabri became a curate in Würzburg in 1848 and a pastor in 1851, before accepting the position at the Rhenisiche Missionsgesellschaft.Footnote 27 The Revolutions of 1848 defined Fabri's theological, social, and political outlook. Fabri viewed 1848 as the greatest crisis in Christendom since the Reformation, and saw the rising “social question” as one of the most important problems that theologians had to face.Footnote 28 Fabri argued that the upheaval and unrest of 1848 was at its core a moral and religious abnegation of Europe's Christian past, and this social fragmentation could only be cured by promoting the “power of the Gospel.”Footnote 29
Fabri believed that foreign missions possessed similar restorative powers. In his 1859 pamphlet, “The Origins of Heathenism and the Duties of Foreign Missions” (Die Entstehung des Heidenthums und die Aufgabe der Heidenmission), Fabri wrote that through the “catastrophe of Babel,” and humankind's hubris, humanity was divided into multiple races, nationalities, and languages.Footnote 30 For Fabri, the goal of foreign missions was to “end heathenism,” which would bring about world peace, as people would be reunited with the “wonderful humility” of God.Footnote 31 Like Warneck, Fabri saw the nineteenth century as a new phase of missionary work that would witness the spread of Christianity throughout the whole world. Fabri believed that spreading the Gospel throughout the world would hasten the Second Coming.Footnote 32 Fabri also explained that expanding foreign missions would counter and attenuate the spread of revolutionary ideas. Napoleonic tyranny, socialism, and individual egotism would be conquered by the work of God through foreign missions.Footnote 33
In 1857, Fabri solidified the missionary curriculum, and raised funds for the establishment of new buildings and classrooms.Footnote 34 He strengthened the Rhenish Mission's relationships with local and international youth groups, and his energy and charisma attracted young men from Russia, England, North America, Greece, and the German lands to the seminary.Footnote 35 Ernst Faber entered the Rhenish Missionary society in 1858, amidst Fabri's ambitious expansion of the Rhenish mission's work. Faber quickly became Fabri's “favorite student” (Lieblingsschüler), and Faber considered Fabri a surrogate father.Footnote 36
Faber finished his courses in four years, and furthered his theological studies in Basel. Afterwards he spent two semesters studying more theology at the University of Tubingen.Footnote 37 In March of 1864, he learned that the Rhenish Missions had decided to send him to China. Before he was sent to China, Faber spent a summer studying natural sciences at the Zoological Museum in Berlin and geology at the Geographical Institute in Gotha.Footnote 38 On August 14, 1864, Faber was officially ordained as a missionary, and within a month was on a British ship, the “Arab Steed,” headed for China.
Faber's familial background typified the mid-nineteenth-century Pietist missionary. The missionary seminar allowed lower-class youths a chance at upward mobility, an opportunity to leave their provincial homes and encounter the wider world. But it also put them in harm's way. Faber wrote evocatively of the perilous trip across the ocean, beset with accidents, sickness, and fear of impending doom.Footnote 39
Faber's early training shows the patchwork nature of a missionary's training in the nineteenth century. The missionary was not a specialist: he was expected to engage in a multitude of disciplines. Faber would learn English and receive a rudimentary training in the medicine on the steamship trip.Footnote 40 What was missing from this variegated training, however, was even a basic introduction in the language and customs of the Chinese themselves. Faber was thus hardly equipped with the requisite preparation to engage with Chinese society before his trip. What motivated him were the grand promises of Pietism: internal, social, and political transformation of the Chinese through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Becoming a China Missionary
Faber traveled to China during a time of momentous expansion for the Protestant missionary enterprise. The first Protestant missionary, Robert Morrison, had entered China only half a century earlier, in 1807. The initial decades of Protestant missionary work grew slowly, as the Qing Empire restricted the missionaries from expanding beyond Canton and Portuguese Macao.Footnote 41 The area of missionary work expanded after the first Opium War to the five treaty ports of Canton, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Amoy, and Ningbo. Further edicts in 1844 and 1846 provided more toleration to Chinese Christians.Footnote 42
The true revolutionary expansion missionary work came with the Sino-French agreements of 1858 and 1860 in the wake of the second Opium War. These treaties allowed Catholic and Protestant missionaries to preach freely throughout the Chinese Empire. Chinese Christians were also guaranteed the right to practice Christianity without being punished.Footnote 43 This lay the foundation for the unprecedented growth within the missionary movement after the 1860s. As Paul Cohen has noted, between 1864 and 1874, the number of Protestant missionaries almost quadrupled in size, from 189 to 436. By 1905, that number would leap to 3,445, an almost nine-fold increase.Footnote 44 Faber traveled to China amidst the first wave of this excitement for the opening of China and the dreams of converting China to Christianity.
The mid-nineteenth-century German Protestant enthusiasm for missions in China can be traced to the work of Karl Gützlaff. Gützlaff was educated at Johann Jänicke's missionary seminary in Berlin (the precursor to the Berlin Missionary Society), and entered China as an independent interpreter in the 1830s. Gützlaff became famous for founding the Chinese Union, and advanced the radical proposal that in order for China to ever become Christian, it needed to be converted by the Chinese. Gützlaff argued that the Christianity in China needed to rely on native, rather than foreign, missionary work.
But in order to expand, the missionary enterprise still needed more foreign missionaries to train the native clergy, and Gützlaff traveled throughout the German lands, trying to drum up financial support and attract new personnel. Gützlaff's tours sparked a “China fever” among German missionary societies in the early 1850s. The Rhenish Missionary Society's decision to send missionaries to China can be traced directly and solely to Gützlaff.Footnote 45 In 1847, the Rhenish Missionary leadership sent two missionaries, Ferdinand Genähr and Heinrich Köster, to China. The two missionaries landed in Hong Kong, and would spend their careers in Canton.Footnote 46 The Rhenish Mission Society's early efforts in China were modeled after Gützlaff's Chinese Union. Gützlaff's Chinese Union would prove a failure, however, as many of Gutzlaff's trusted Chinese assistants turned out to be “unscrupulous characters” who “spent their expense money on opium.”Footnote 47
This period of rapid expansion of the missionary enterprise in China resulted in a rise of anti-Christian sentiment from Chinese elites. The 1860s saw an increase and “growing torrent of violently anti-Christian pamphlets and tracts.”Footnote 48 Anti-Christian violence spread throughout China after the 1860s. Local Chinese gentry and low-level officials rejected Christianity, and often led the charge in promulgating anti-Christian violence.Footnote 49 Christianity posed myriad political, social, and ideological challenges to the power structures of the local Confucian elite, and Confucian intellectuals fought back.
The Canton that Faber first encountered had just witnessed the Taiping Rebellion, which Frederic Wakeman has called “the world's most disastrous civil war” that “cost China somewhere between ten and twenty million souls.”Footnote 50 Canton was also a place that comprised of Cantonese-speaking Chinese in the majority, but a diverse landscape of people who spoke different dialects—Hakka, Hokkien, Chaozhou, and Mandarin.Footnote 51 In the wake of the Taiping Rebellion, conflict between the migrant Hakka and local Cantonese erupted: this “forgotten war” left more than a million dead.Footnote 52 Faber thus encountered a society that was not only ratcheting up its anti-foreign, anti-Christian sentiment, but was still dealing with the after-effects of a civil war. Faber experienced this anti-foreign sentiment almost immediately upon his arrival in China. While he was in Hong Kong, inspecting some of the local schools, Faber walked by a field, where some twenty to thirty Chinese men were working. Once the workers saw him, they started yelling, “Kill the foreigner, kill the foreign devil.”Footnote 53
By the end of the summer, Faber had transferred further inland, to Humen (虎門), where he would be the only European in town for the next eight years. Faber's early reports to the Rhenish Missions described his frustration with an unfettered negativity. His monthly missionary reports were so negative that the editors had to provide a disclaimer to their readers, stating that that even though Faber's reports were of a “critical nature,” they stemmed from a desire to see the missionary movement grow in China, and one could learn from the “mistakes” and find a better way to move forward.Footnote 54
To put it simply, these reports indicate that Faber hated China. He complained about the unbearable summer heat and the “downright uncomfortable living conditions.”Footnote 55 He described the air, water, and streets of China as “dirty” and “terrible.”Footnote 56 The realities of the missionary experience fell far short of his grand illusions. When he first arrived in Humen, he found a missionary station in “bad shape”—almost nobody attended services.Footnote 57 At most there would be two to three people in the pews. There were only eight students in the missionary school that the Rhenish Mission founded, no baptized Christians, nor any catechumens.Footnote 58 Faber felt especially dejected in his first week in Humen, as he sat in an empty chapel listening to his Chinese assistants preach.Footnote 59 This depression and loneliness continued to pervade his annual reports.
Unable to speak Mandarin, Hakka, or Cantonese for the first several years in China, Faber turned to medical missionary work. The missionary station handled between four and six hundred cases a year, with sicknesses ranging from skin diseases to diarrhea, and he performed surgeries on eyes and teeth. Faber and his Chinese assistants would receive each patient and use this as an opportunity to evangelize.Footnote 60 He also made house visits, which he also used to spread the Gospel. Due to the trust that he had gained with the medical missions, both church attendance and school registrations saw an increase in numbers; his reports began to reflect some optimism.Footnote 61
Faber's early years show the improvisatory and haphazard nature of the mid-nineteenth century missionary enterprise in China. Faber had never officially learned medicine; he was primarily trained as a geologist and botanist.Footnote 62 He readily admitted that he had made mistakes as a medical missionary.Footnote 63 The work was also constantly understaffed. After eight years, the Rhenish Missions sent another missionary and his wife to help Faber. But the help turned into more of a burden, as the couple fell ill from the travels in China, and Faber spent significant time caring for them instead. Despite all the effort that Faber invested in medical missionary work, Faber felt that it was ultimately still a failure. He complained that “maybe only one person in a thousand” would convert to Christianity.Footnote 64
For the first several years, Faber refused to preach in Chinese, as he felt unconfident in the language. “The Chinese are scoffers by nature,” Faber explained in one of his annual reports, and “even though some would find my preaching interesting, they would find amusement in my blunders of speech.”Footnote 65 He wrote that it would be difficult for any foreigner to spread the Gospel through preaching. He thus left the preaching to most of his subsidiaries and fellow Chinese Christians.
For the first several of years, then, Faber depended on his Chinese “assistants” (Gehilfen) for survival. He relied on the Wang family, who had been converted by Gützlaff. The patriarch of the family had been an evangelist for over thirty years by the time he met Faber. His son, Wang Qianru (王謙如), became Faber's close collaborator, eventually becoming the first Chinese pastor ordained by the Rhenish Mission.Footnote 66 Despite the close relations, Faber had reservations about the family. “Old Wang,” Faber wrote, was not a “polished” speaker, but he “knew enough and had experienced enough of Christianity to be able to present its truths.”Footnote 67 Faber noted that even though Wang Qianru was more charismatic than his father, the younger Wang was still “weak in Christian experience.”Footnote 68 Faber worked closely with the Wangs to help craft their sermons throughout the week.
Faber's first major publication in Chinese, Sermons on the Book of Mark (馬可講義), provides insight into the collaborative process between the missionary and the local Chinese Christians. Starting in 1867, one of his Chinese assistants would transcribe the various sermons that Faber gave on the book of Mark. After collecting more than about seven years worth of material, Wang Qianru helped to translate the sermons from the local Hakka dialect into classical Chinese. Faber described the final product as a collaborative effort between him and his fellow Chinese Christians, including Wang, Chen Dexun (陳德勳) and Chen Xiaoxin (陳效新).Footnote 69
The book reflects Faber's Pietist approach to missions. Faber emphasized a close reading of the Bible, familiarity with the Bible's central themes, and the centrality of preaching to the success of missions.Footnote 70 The sermons worked as not only an exegesis of Mark, but also as a manual for Chinese Christian preachers. Faber's sermons instructed Chinese preachers on how they should preach and engage with their audiences, doling out advice such as “when preaching, one should not use foul language, in fear of losing the dignity of the message.”Footnote 71 The book also provided tips for how to debate with learned Confucian scholars: “debate is like two armies preparing for battle, one must know the enemy's canon as well as one's own, and thus when debating Confucian scholars, even though you need to defend the principles of the Bible, you can use the Confucian canon to also convince them of their follies.”Footnote 72
Despite Faber's heavy reliance on his Chinese assistants, he nonetheless wrote openly about his distrust of Chinese national character. He felt that the young Chinese who entered the mission schools still “always placed Confucius above the Bible.”Footnote 73 They were still far from “losing their love of the national sage.” In order to win the Chinese over, Faber argued, the missionaries needed to engage the Chinese in their own language in order to convince them of the falseness of Chinese thought and superiority of Christianity.Footnote 74 To prevent the young Chinese from being tempted by the knowledge within the Confucian classics, Faber argued that they should only teach the Bible and Western knowledge in the mission schools. The missionaries needed to insulate the Chinese from any non-Christian influences. Faber argued, “[C]osmopolitanism is not the beginning, rather it is the end of one's development.”Footnote 75
Contact with local Confucian elites proved a source of mistrust and frustration as well, which laid the foundation for the anti-Confucianism that Faber would develop in his later writings. In one of his early reports to Barmen, Faber wrote of a dinner that he had with one of the local gentry. Even though the gentry had treated him to a lavish meal, Faber wrote that they were “through and through sly political foxes” (Die Chinesen sind durch und durch politische Schlauköpfe) who “could not be trusted.”Footnote 76 It turned out that Faber, in his daily strolls, had walked through the gentry's garden. The gentry official had in fact invited Faber to dinner in order to ask Faber to pay for the daily walks through the garden. Faber refused to pay.Footnote 77
Faced with a paltry number of Christians in the church pews, Faber realized that he needed to reconceptualize his missionary tactics. He decided that he needed to devote his time to engaging with the Chinese literati. Faber focused on learning the Chinese classics, so that he could debate with educated Chinese. He learned classical Chinese by relying on the translations of James Legge and comparing them with the original text themselves.Footnote 78
Faber started calling for the reform of the missionary training. In one of his reports to the Rhenish Missions in 1869, Faber noted that he had been poorly trained to engage with Chinese society before arriving in China. He argued that it was necessary for missionaries to learn to read Chinese in order to “attack the old system” of Confucian learning.Footnote 79 Faber admitted that, prior to entering China, he had never planned to dedicate his time to writing and reading the Chinese classics. He had come to China under the assumption that he would spend most of his time preaching, and thus had spent most the first several years in China learning the local dialect. Yet the influence of educated Chinese on local politics remained so strong that he decided that he needed to learn classical Chinese in order to become a more effective missionary.Footnote 80
Faber the Literary Missionary
In the mid-1860s, then, Faber started writing and publishing more in Chinese. He realized that he needed more biblical tracts and “suitable literature for the Chinese” to distribute in his travels to the countryside.Footnote 81 He printed tracts and digests, written in Hakka and Cantonese, in order to reach members of the rural populace. Instead of giving the tracts away for free, he decided to sell them because he felt that the “Chinese would treasure them more since it had cost them something.”Footnote 82 Faber boasted that he sold more than 200,000 copies of his tracts, and due to their popularity, the London Missionary Society's Religious Tract Society in China asked to reprint and reissue his tracts. Faber estimated that half a million people in Guangdong read his tracts.Footnote 83
In 1870, Faber wrote a series of editorials for a Chinese newspaper, comparing the Prussian educational system with the Chinese one. The editorials came to the attention of the influential missionary W.A.P. Martin, who circulated the editorials among various Qing officials.Footnote 84 Martin introduced Faber's writing to Young J. Allen, who had just established in Shanghai the first missionary journal published in Chinese, Church News (教會新報), and Allen invited Faber to contribute to the journal.
Young J. Allen started Church News in 1867 in Shanghai with the hopes of engaging Chinese intellectuals, literati, and reform-oriented bureaucrats, and to convince them of the necessity of reforming the Chinese Confucian world order. Church News provided news reports from all around the world, and it became “the primary sources of information for Chinese interested in the West.”Footnote 85Church News later secularized its name to Wanguo Gongbao (萬國公報, translated as Chinese Globe Magazine, and later, A Review of the Times), and together they were the ”most important magazines of ideas published in China before the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–1895.”Footnote 86
Faber's first publications in Church News were reprints of his articles criticizing the Chinese educational system. He wrote that the West had “academies and schools of various sizes, funded by both public and private funds, and increasingly the state had taken on the responsibility of educating its citizens.”Footnote 87 In “Prussia alone, men, women, poor, and rich, were all compelled to go to school from the ages of 7 to 15, and if they resisted, their parents would be punished.”Footnote 88 Thus, “there are very few illiterate men and women in Prussia.”Footnote 89 In order for China to modernize, Faber argued, it should follow the Prussian model and also institute mandatory education for its children.
At the same time, Faber started publishing tracts and digests in English and German, introducing the Confucian tradition to his fellow missionaries, as well as a broader German audience. Faber's first major publication was The Teachings of Confucius (Lehrbegriff des Confucius), published in 1872. The digest was a collection of lectures Faber had given at a Rhenish Missionary Society conference. In the digest, Faber surveyed the Lunyu, Daxue, and Zhongyong, three of the core texts of the Confucian canon. Using a Protestant interpretation of the Chinese classics, Faber distinguished between the historical Confucius, and the “Confucius who is wrapped up in the incense of sacrifices—between the doctrine which was promulgated by him and the explanations of later centuries.”Footnote 90 After a brief historical overview of the various texts that constituted the Confucian canon, Faber provided a concise introduction to what he perceived as the central ideas and tenets of Confucianism. He thus began his survey with an identification of various Christian concepts within Confucianism, such as the definitions of “man,” “heaven,” and “God.” Faber continued to summarize Confucian ideas about personal cultivation, familial relations, the relation of the individual to the state, and Confucian ideas about the Dao.
Faber concluded with a list of twenty-four “defects and errors of Confucianism.”Footnote 91 Faber's evaluation of Confucianism was not completely negative—he prefaced his list of Confucian deficiencies with the disclaimer that there was much to admire about Confucianism, and that in certain aspects “Confucianism almost echoes the doctrines of Christian revelation.”Footnote 92 For example, Confucianism, like Christianity, believed in an afterlife, as well as transcendent moral laws that bounded all human action.
For Faber, Confucianism's prime failure lay in its inability to provide an understanding of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity—sin, salvation, and God. Confucianism, which to Faber was a theological system, had “no relation to a living God,” it was “generally devoid of a deeper insight into sin and evil,” and it knew “no mediator, none that could restore original nature in accordance with the ideal which man finds in himself.” In a Confucian worldview, “it is impossible to explain death.”Footnote 93
Faber also pointed to the social problems that Confucianism encouraged, such as polygamy, a reliance on superstition, the subjugation of women as “slaves,” and the “deification of parents.”Footnote 94 As a result, Confucianism worshipped genius and “deified man.”Footnote 95 Thus, Faber concluded, “Confucianism is incapable of effecting for the people a new birth to a higher life and nobler efforts, and Confucianism is now in practical life quite alloyed with Shamanistic and Buddhistic ideas and practices.”Footnote 96
Faber's book was well received by the missionary community. In the China Review, E. J. Eitel, of the London Missionary Society, praised Faber as “a thorough Chinese scholar, well versed in Confucian literature, ancient and modern, a man of learning and independent thought, and a veritable book worm.”Footnote 97 Other than some minor complaints, Eitel wrote that he had “nothing but admiration and praise of this concise digest and critical view of the ethical system of Confucius.”Footnote 98 Eitel took Faber's critiques of Confucianism one step further: “[W]e cannot discover in Confucius, in his life or teaching or writings, anything extraordinary … He was simply a Chinaman; his very weaknesses, his very errors, were characteristically Chinese.”Footnote 99 Moreover, Eitel blamed Confucius for what he saw as the negative traits of Chinese society. Confucius “left the Chinese their feudal system, their concubinage, their ancestral worship, their idolatry, their superstition.” Confucius “was a great man—from a Chinese point of view. His teaching is the very essence of philosophical wisdom—to the mind of a Chinaman.”Footnote 100
Faber's vehement criticism of Confucianism belonged to the mainstream opinion of most Western missionaries at the time. Missionaries, for the most part, believed that China needed to make a choice between Christianity and Confucianism. The London Missionary Society missionary, James MacGowan, for example, asked in a popular tract:
Which shall the nation choose, Christ or Confucius? Shall it be the great sage whose chilly hand has held the nation bound for all these ages, or shall it be the Son of Man, whose heart throbs with sympathy for every human being, and whose gentle touch, the inheritance of the Church, brings hope and comfort to men today? Need we doubt what the answer will be?Footnote 101
From his publications and writings, Faber emerges as a savvy missionary publicist who recognized the different audiences that he needed to address. He did not write provocative, accusatory pieces in Chinese; rather, his pieces in Church News possessed a consistent tone of clinical reason. For his Western audience, he wrote in a much more inflammatory style, seeking to mobilize support for the mission society. Faber's publications in Church News introduced his Chinese audience to Western secular institutions, while his writings in Western journals criticized the moral, religious, and cultural conditions of China. By 1876, Faber had essentially abandoned street preaching, partly due to laryngitis and damaged vocal chords, but also because of the increasing amount of attention that he devoted to his literary work.Footnote 102
Break with Pietism
In 1880, a scandal broke, forcing Faber to leave the Rhenish Mission. This ended a period of traditional missionary work. The scandal began as a personal conflict and ended as a struggle between members on the home front and missionaries abroad.
Faber originally was not part of the dispute. In 1878 Wilhelm Hubrig, a member of the Berlin Missionary society who had helped found the Rhenish Mission's middle school in Canton, returned to Germany after his wife's death. Faber disliked Hubrig, due to the “dogmatic Lutheranism” that Hubrig sought to inculcate within the missionary school.Footnote 103 With Hubrig gone, two younger missionaries of the Rhenish Mission who had worked with Faber in Humen took over the administration of the school at Canton. None of the missionaries expected Hubrig to return, since he had a long-time lung ailment.Footnote 104 Yet in 1880, Hubrig declared his intent to return to China, and asked to resume his position as the head of the school at Canton. Fabri hastily agreed to the request. Upon hearing the news, the younger missionaries wrote a report to Fabri, asking him to keep the school in the hands of “Barmen-educated missionaries,” and refuse Hubrig's request to return to the post.Footnote 105
The request of the younger missionaries incensed Fabri. He chastised them for insubordination and disrespect toward Hubrig's work as the founder of the school at Canton. Fabri accused Faber of orchestrating the whole conflict. Fabri, as well as the rest of the missionary society, had long known of the personal disagreements between Faber and Hubrig.Footnote 106 Fabri thus charged Faber as the main culprit in impeding Hubrig's work. Fabri lamented that the requests to reject Hubrig lacked “any imprint of common civil morality, justice, or fairness.”Footnote 107
The missionaries in China escalated the conflict when Faber and the younger missionaries in China co-wrote an appeal (Appelationsschrift) addressed not only to the members of the General Council, but to the entire missionary society. The missionaries requested a consideration of their request within the general board of representatives, accusing Fabri of breaking protocol by refusing to pass the decision to the board for a vote.Footnote 108 They argued that they were “not missionaries of Dr. Fabri, neither of the representatives (Deputation) of Barmen, but of the Rhenish Mission.”Footnote 109
In April of 1881, the Rhenish Missions Committee denounced the Appelationsschrift as “irreverent and arrogant,” and found it a “moral impossibility” to continue its cooperation with the four missionaries.Footnote 110 The General Committee thus fired all four Chinese missionaries. The committee further decided to abandon its work in Canton, turning over the mission stations to the Berlin Missionary Society.Footnote 111 The Rhenish Mission would never again have a major impact in the missionary landscape in China.
Faber's “Liberal” Turn
Faber worked for five difficult years as an independent missionary in Hong Kong after being fired by the Rhenish Mission Society. His early career as a Pietist missionary had come to an end. Jobless, Faber survived primarily by receiving support from Carl Wilhelm Dörr, who had gathered twenty-three of his friends to help pay for Faber's costs. Gustav Warneck, then the editor of the influential Allgemeine Missionszeitschrift, asked for donations in his journal, and was also able to funnel some money to Dörr's efforts. Between 1881 and 1884, Dörr transferred 15,000 marks to Faber, of which 10,000 came from Dörr's own pocket.Footnote 112 Faber tried to associate himself with the London Missionary Society's missionary and tract society, but it refused to support him.Footnote 113
Faber's break with the Rhenish Mission allowed him to devote all of his efforts to writing. In 1884, he published Civilization, Chinese and Christian in classical Chinese. The first edition of the book contained seventy-two chapters, divided into five sections. Faber addressed the book to the “intellectuals and bureaucrats of China's Empire, who could benefit from the book's contents.”Footnote 114 He included some of the editorials that he had previously published in the Wanguo Gongbao.
In the preface to the book, Faber wrote that he hoped to use the work to “warn and awaken the Chinese.”Footnote 115 Even though the Chinese had for some time sent scholars and students to the West, and they had brought Western ideas and technical skills back to China, “the students had lost the essence of Western learning, and only learned the superficial, skin-deep aspects of Western ideas.”Footnote 116 The Chinese failed to recognize that the “truths and teachings of Jesus Christ” formed the foundation of Western civilization.Footnote 117 Because of Christianity, Western civilization was like a “beautiful tree, able to bear succulent fruit.”Footnote 118 Without this foundation, “the tree of China would produce fruit that was sour and bitter, and it would ultimately wither and die.”Footnote 119 It was not just the Chinese who had rejected and ignored the teachings of Christianity, but even “intellectuals of the West, who deny Christianity's centrality to Western civilization's material wealth and power.”Footnote 120
Faber thus argued that Chinese reformers and intellectuals needed to embrace Christianity in their “quest for wealth and power.”Footnote 121 In each section of the book, Faber compared a Western institution or idea with a Chinese one to demonstrate Western superiority. Faber used charity for the poor as one instance for his civilizational critique. “Beggars of all sorts, young and old” roamed the streets of China, and the “regular populace was trapped in poverty.”Footnote 122 Even though many charitable individuals existed in China, wealthy individuals primarily extended assistance to family members. Individuals decimated by “natural disaster or sickness,” and who had no family to rely on, were thus forced into a mendicant life.Footnote 123 In Germany, charitable work started as a “private matter,” but the “state now knows that poverty is not just a burden on the population, but a crucial element of the nation's future,” and thus had turned to taking on the burden of caring for the poor.Footnote 124 Faber further asserted that the Western state's attention to charity originated with Jesus's teaching, which was rooted in Jewish traditions of sharing property and caring for the poor.
This comparison of Western and Chinese notions of charity typified Faber's manner of argument. He would point to major social, political, and moral issues that both China and Western states needed to tackle—for example, poverty, education, and the military. He would then explicate how the Western institution dealt with the problem, often arguing that it had Judeo-Christian origins; he then explicated the Chinese concept, pointing to the Confucian origins of the problem. In all of his chapters, Faber asserted the superiority of Western ways to those of the Chinese.
The study of history provides another example of Faber's logic. Even though the Chinese had a long and esteemed study of history, they myopically studied only the history of China.Footnote 125 Western historians, on the other hand, studied the histories of multiple nations and peoples, including the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Jews. The West thus drew lessons and ideas from a much wider pool of resources, learning from the “rise and fall of various nations and countries.”Footnote 126 Western approaches to science and learning were much more “systematic and specialized,” making scientists afraid to “talk about anything with requisite amount of knowledge.”Footnote 127 Chinese learning, on the other hand, was “dilettantish and unsystematic (雜亂).”
Due to the publication of Civilization, Chinese and Christian, Faber's reputation grew among reform-minded Chinese literati. In 1884, the viceroy of Liang-Guang, (湖廣總督）Zhang Zhidong, who was one of the most vocal advocates for the modernization of China along Western lines in the Qing bureaucracy, tried to employ Faber to join the Chinese civil service, but Faber refused.Footnote 128 Eight years later, Zhang would extend another invitation to Faber to work on a translation project of major Western works into Chinese, but again Faber would refuse.
By the 1880s, Faber had abandoned the ideal of personal conversion, and instead turned to articulating the superiority of Western civilization. Whereas in an earlier decade, Faber used Prussia as a basis of analysis and comparison in the Jiaohui Xinbao, now, Faber talked about the “West” as a unit. He drew examples from Germany, America, England, France, and Russia to illuminate his comparisons. When compared with his earlier writings in his sermons on Mark, it was clear how far Faber's preoccupations had shifted. While his sermons on Mark mainly focused on with methods of conversion, institution building, and preaching the Gospel, now he argued for the importation of Western values and culture into China as the primary means of bringing modernization.
This shift within his own thinking appealed to the Allgemeine evangelische Protestantische Missionsverein (AepMV hereafter), which approached Faber in 1885. Founded only a year earlier in Weimar, the AepMV hoped to find an experienced missionary to found its work in China. They thus invited Faber to join the society as its first missionary in China.
In 1884, the Swiss pastor Ernst Buss, the son of a Missionsinspektor at Basel, founded the AepMV in Weimar. Buss had the vision to reform German missionary efforts along more liberal, interdenominational, and nonnational lines.Footnote 129 The AepMV counted prominent theologians such as Adolf von Harnack, Ernst Troeltsch, and Martin Rade as its supporters.Footnote 130 Unlike Pietist missionary societies, which were patriarchal and more dogmatically confessional in organization, the AepMV was founded with a more democratic and open structure, as its work was dictated more by a general assembly, rather than a small group of directors.Footnote 131
Ernst Buss and the AepMV positioned themselves in opposition to the Pietist missionary societies. Buss wrote that the AepMV was the first missionary society grounded on the “principles of liberal theology,” and further declared that the new mission society had no desire to “build new churches in heathen lands.”Footnote 132 Buss was influenced by the ideas of Ernst Langhans, who had criticized Pietist methods in the 1860s. Langhans called the fundamental principles of Pietist evangelization “preposterous.”Footnote 133 He referred to Pietist principles of individual conversion as “humbug,” further criticizing the inefficiencies within the endeavor to try to evangelize to the “unbelieving.”Footnote 134 For Buss, the Pietists erred in not distinguishing between “civilized” (like the Chinese) and “non-civilized” peoples (like the New Zealanders or “Hottentots”).Footnote 135 Langhans accused the Pietist presses as exaggerating their “success” within the mission field through the proliferation of various missionary organs and propaganda.Footnote 136 The Pietists had utterly failed in their missions to the cultured civilizations such as the Hindus and the Chinese. The “fanatical” Pietist enterprise was filled with “outdated tradition, dogmatism, intolerance, and literalism.”Footnote 137
The AepMV saw itself as embodying a “new” approach to missionary work that consciously sought to overtake the “older” pietistic forms of evangelization. It proclaimed that its central mission was to develop and organize a Chinese national church that would be “appropriate” to the local conditions by “leaving the new Christians alone, so that they could avoid an imitation of non Chinese forms.”Footnote 138 Instead of preaching to the “primitive peoples” (primitiven Völker), they would concentrate on the cultured, and would take a “top-down” approach rather than a “bottom-up” one.Footnote 139 The missionary society would also only send fully trained academics into the field, so that they could engage in “theological and philosophical debates and arguments.”Footnote 140
Supporting Faber's literary work was thus extremely attractive to the AepMV. Ernst Buss wrote in 1885 to Faber, “You should be free to live out your convictions, continue to be effective as you have been as you see fit, and we will be pleased if you continued the literary and apologetic activity that you have initiated already.”Footnote 141 Faber thus had the blessing from the AepMV to continue his literary endeavors, publishing on Confucianism and Chinese religions through the help of the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge, and not engage in any pastoral or congregational duties.Footnote 142
With financial support from the AepMV, Faber transferred to Shanghai, where he could continue to expand his literary operations. Unlike in Humen, where he worked as the only European for eight full years, Faber was thrown into a fully cosmopolitan and “internationalized” Shanghai. In Shanghai, Faber encountered a city more modern, industrialized, and cosmopolitan than he had ever experienced before.
Faber immersed himself in the international community in Shanghai. In particular, Faber worked in close collaboration with British and American missionaries. As Otto Franke wrote of his time in Shanghai in his memoirs, the Shanghai “settlement was very international, but the English dominated, with an impressive majority, the total administration, finance, and security system.”Footnote 143 The British in Shanghai developed their own culture and fashioned their own identities as “Shanghailanders.”Footnote 144
Faber joined the British-run Chinese Book and Tract Society, which would later become the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge. Through this organization, he came to meet other missionaries who had been leading the effort in engaging with the Chinese gentry, such as Timothy Richard.Footnote 145 He established close relations with Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission. Faber was a valued member of German clubs in Shanghai, and often was consulted by not only members of the missionary community, but also merchants and other officials. He wrote for a diverse array of periodicals.Footnote 146
Faber also became one of the most active and influential missionaries in the Shanghai General Conference in 1890, a conference that attempted to unite all of the major Protestant missionary societies in China. In the conference, Faber led various panels and boards that advised and set directions for how to translate and interpret the Chinese classics to the West. He also sat on panels that talked about the relationship between the Chinese government and religious freedom.Footnote 147
The diary accounts of Wilfred Spinner, the AepMV's first missionary to Japan, give a sense of the type of person that Faber was, as well as the life that he led, in China. Spinner, upon meeting Faber, observed that Faber was a “small, but powerfully built man,” who “carried on his face the sorrows of previous experiences and strains of the work in China's inland.”Footnote 148 Spinner commented that Faber was “not a practical man,” often taken advantage of for his kindness, and suffered from strains of hypochondria.Footnote 149 Spinner further remarked that Faber was “truly pious.”Footnote 150 Spinner noted that Faber refused to wear Chinese garb.Footnote 151
Even though he was now employed by a liberal Protestant missionary society that promoted a more inclusive, respectful attitude toward Confucianism, Faber would continue to attack the moral and theological foundations of Confucianism throughout his stay in Shanghai. Faber clarified and advanced his thesis that in order for China to ever embrace Christianity, its Confucian roots had to be thoroughly destroyed. Confucianism protected “the stronghold of Chinese heathenism, which must be taken, if the battle is to be won.”Footnote 152 He believed that the Confucian classics were the foundations for the various social injustices that he saw within Chinese society. He railed against the practices of concubinage, ancestor worship, divination, blood revenge, and the encouragement of absolute subordination of the populace.
Faber's synthesis of Chinese history found its culmination in his tract “China in the Light of History,” written on the thirtieth anniversary of his entrance to China. Faber wrote the tract in the wake of China's humiliating defeat to the Japanese, which, to Faber, proved that Confucianism could not deal with the modern world.Footnote 153 To Faber, the weakness of China's economy and industry stemmed from its culture and history.Footnote 154 For Faber, ever since the ancient Zhou dynasty, the Chinese emperor wielded “absolute power” and a “despotic will.”Footnote 155 Confucius and Confucianism enabled and promulgated a spirit of “subordination,” which led to an ossification and corruption within the larger Confucian bureaucracy.Footnote 156
Chinese religions also helped to prop up a weak and corrupt Chinese state. Faber compared Daoism to Roman Catholicism and the Greek Orthodox Church—all of which Faber considered “ancient religions” that reflected the “soul and spirit” of everyday life.Footnote 157 Daoism, originally a spiritual religion, embodied in the mountains and forests of the Chinese landscape, had developed into a religion of superstition, filled with numerous gods and formalistic rituals. The Chinese emperor, Faber explained, stood at the head of this religious system and functioned as a Daoist “Pope.”Footnote 158
Confucianism, to Faber, emerged as a movement to reform the problems within ancient Daoist religion. Yet unlike Luther's Reformation, Confucianism was a reform movement that “wanted nothing new.”Footnote 159 Confucius, Faber argued, rejected the “moral of activity,” and instead promoted “passivity” and “indifference.”Footnote 160 Confucianism embraced traditional patriarchal structures, the existing social order, and encouraged the stabilization of hierarchical power relations. Buddhism, for Faber, was even worse: it had “less positive substance than Confucianism,” since it preached a disengagement from the world.Footnote 161 Yet for Faber, the widespread adoption of Buddhism in China, a foreign religion from India, proved that China was receptive to the religions of other cultures, and thus it was possible that Christianity could gain a foothold in China.Footnote 162
Faber argued, then, that the “dark night” of China's situation in the nineteenth century stemmed from the deep-rooted, pernicious hold of Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism on the Chinese psyche. The emperor was nothing more than a “High Priest” (Oberpriester)Footnote 163 presiding over the spiritualistic rituals of Chinese superstition that filled the countryside. The outmoded and outdated Confucian educational system of China stymied progress. Faber's ideas about Confucian bureaucratic culture and its relation to broader religious culture would find their way into Max Weber's 1915 work, Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism.Footnote 164
Yet, Faber saw glimmers of “light of hope” with Western penetration into China. China had to strengthen commercial relations and open its borders to Western countries.Footnote 165 It needed to increase the amount of cultural and scientific exchange with the West; already many Chinese officials spoke and read English, and the Chinese had to strengthen those ties. Furthermore, Chinese emigration to other countries, such as the United States, Canada, Borneo, and Java, would provide further links with the West.Footnote 166
Faber and the “West”
But what did this Western culture consist of? Faber admitted that a “cultural diversity” existed among the different Western nations, but that at their core, Western nations were united by
a cleanliness of the body, clothes, living quarters and streets, and trustworthiness in word and deed. In particular, Western countries have seen a limitation on the capricious whims of the rulers by law and custom, and the curtailing of corruption through the separation of the judiciary from the legislative. The safety of life and property is ensured. Polygamy and slavery have been outlawed. The administration of justice is reliable. Financial administration is now accountable to the public. Superstition and errors of fact have been reduced among both sexes through mandatory general elementary education. The religious concepts are simplified and refined in love for God, our Heavenly Father, trusting in the Savior and communion with the Holy Spirit. This imposes a strong impulse to strive for the good and overcome evil.Footnote 167
Faber believed that China lacked all of these qualities: sanitation, codified system of laws, and a broadly Christian religious and public culture. Faber's experience in China helped him articulate an idealized image of the West. Through comparison with China, Faber defined what he viewed as the qualities that unify Western civilization.
For Faber, missionaries would act as the most important ambassadors of Western culture. Missionaries represented the West, and therefore they needed to obtain a broader understanding of science, politics, and Western philosophy in order to help reform China. But showing his Pietist roots, Faber argued that the primary goal of missionaries in China should be conversion, not broader social work, such as alleviating the misery and suffering of the “heathens.”Footnote 168
Despite his triumphalist view of Western cultural superiority, Faber did not fully embrace Western imperialism. He criticized the British for focusing on commercial rather than humanitarian interests.Footnote 169 Faber was also skeptical of the need for an official German imperial presence in China. Faber's experience in Shanghai, and his observations of British and American dominance in China, convinced him that Germany was already late to the imperial game. In 1897, in a review of W.A.P. Martin's Cycle of Cathay, Faber cautioned about the perils of Germany obtaining a formal protectorate in China. In a fairly prophetic set of words, Faber wrote,
I do not begrudge the other [Western] Powers for staking out property in China, but for Germany, I would consider such a property in China as a misfortune. The expense would be enormous. Competition from England, especially via India, Russia, France, Japan and the United States would make it impossible for a successful outcome for Germany. In the case of a European war, Germany would be cut off. Frequent rebellions of the Chinese population would be unavoidable, and inevitable friction among the Western Powers would not be long in coming. Germany would have to spend millions each year and merchants would lose hundreds of thousands.Footnote 170
Germany would not heed his suggestions, and in November of 1897, Germany acquired Jiaozhou Bay as a protectorateFootnote 171 Soon thereafter, the AepMV requested Faber to move into Qingdao in order to be close to the German political establishment. Faber arrived in Qingdao on April 5, 1898, as the first German Protestant missionary in Qingdao. He moved to Qingdao uninterested in engaging in missionary station building, and continued to write and translate. His stay in Qingdao would not be long. On September 26, 1899, Faber died after a week-long bout of dysentery.Footnote 172
Conclusion
A year after Faber's death, the Boxer Uprising would sweep throughout Northern China, calling for the expulsion of Christian missionaries from China. Faber's dreams of a Christian China appeared more remote than ever.Footnote 173 By the time of his death, almost all of Faber's purported goals for converting China to Christianity would seem to have failed. He did not establish a local, indigenous, financially sustainable church in Humen. He saw very few elite literati conversions to Christianity. A strong faction within the Qing bureaucracy continued to resist the Western ideas that Faber and his fellow missionaries advocated. It would seem that Faber's Chinese audience rejected his message at every turn.
Western missionaries were hardly prepared for such a vigorous rejection. As Faber's early career shows, mid-19th-century missions work was understaffed, missionaries were sent to China with little to no preparation for the culture that they were going to encounter, and the missionaries themselves often disagreed over the best methods to spread Christianity in China. These conflicts were at times theological, as Pietists and liberal Protestants disagreed over the method and purpose of evangelization, and at other times personal, as personal egos clashed in the field.
Faber's career shows us that the boundaries and definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” employed in Germany were often crossed when the missionaries entered China. Even though “conservatives” and “liberals” debated the method and approach to missions, they were united in their attack on Confucianism. Conservatives and liberals alike agreed that in order for China to become Christian, Confucianism was something that needed to be overcome and replaced with Christianity.
Discussions of the missionary's failure to engage with Chinese society are not new conclusions. Yet Faber's career shows us that missionaries themselves were extremely cognizant and sensitive to the lack of success of Christianity in China. Faber, for example, wrote about these failures honestly, and he responded by changing his missionary tactics and approaches to evangelization. He was practical and savvy, and adjusted his positions to ones that he believed would be the most successful. He started out as a Pietist street preacher, but then transformed into a prolific writer and translator of the Chinese classics and texts. Instead of choosing the traditional route of direct, individual conversion, he became passionately engaged in civilizational critique. Writing for Chinese and Western audiences, he crafted his arguments accordingly.
How representative was Faber's experience? Many of the most influential early missionaries in China had biographies that mirrored Faber's. James Legge, the most important sinologist in the Western world in the nineteenth century, also started out as a Pietist missionary for the London Missionary Society, but soon experienced various “painful events” and became frustrated with the lack of results and the difficulty of learning the various Chinese dialects in the field.Footnote 174 He soon became convinced of the need to engage with the Confucian classics, and his translations became foundational for the establishment of sinology as an academic field. Young J. Allen also started his career as an itinerant preacher in the rural areas surrounding Shanghai, but soon became dissatisfied with the mission's attempts to reach the Chinese by preaching.Footnote 175 Missionaries who wrote for the educated classes and engaged with Confucian literati were still in the minority, but their reach and influence made decisive impacts on the mission field both in China and in the West.
Allen's and Legge's careers have been used as examples of the West's successful engagement with China. Adrian Bennett has argued that Young J. Allen's ‘conversion’ was an increasing move toward toleration, a precursor to a turn toward liberal Social Gospel ideas in America, and an increasing tolerance and acceptance of traditional Confucian culture. In the case of James Legge, Norman Girardot posits that Legge's “views gained a new degree of tolerance, comprehensiveness, and synthetic consistency” with ever longer exposure and contact with the Chinese classics.Footnote 176
Faber never demonstrated such a “conversion.” In spite of his prolonged engagement with the Confucian classics, his abandonment of his Pietist roots, and his transfer to a more liberal missionary society, Faber did not become more tolerant of Chinese culture. Rather, his increased engagement with Confucian classics, alongside his immersion in cosmopolitan society, provoked greater confidence, and indeed certainty, of his critique of Confucianism. Instead of being softened to a more liberal, tolerant, and inclusive understanding of Chinese culture, Faber's experience in China crystallized his belief in the superiority of Western culture. His observations of the deficiencies of Chinese culture clarified and defined the qualities that he believed to be were common to the West. His initial failures in the empty-pewed churches were now in the past; Confucianism—or more specifically, its defects—could provide partial reason for those failures.
Faber's career reminds us that entering a transnational, cosmopolitan space does not inevitably lead to progressive, cooperative, or liberal ideas. Instead, Faber's career points to dogged persistence of, using Patricia Clavin's phrase, “transnational repulsion.”Footnote 177 Faber's transformation from a provincial tinsmith to a cosmopolitan missionary was more geographical rather than intellectual. The failures that he experienced in his early years in China made a deep mark on him. Although he altered his missionary tactics, the fundamental distaste for the Chinese and Chinese culture remained unchanged throughout his work. This distaste—this “repulsion”—inspired him to create, articulate, and disseminate a particular mode of thinking, a structure of analysis, in which the “West” possesses a fundamental “core,” a unified being that compels its superiority. In this mode of thinking, two behemoth categories of “West” and “Chinese” were placed side by side, their complicated histories simplified in a mostly ahistorical and essentialist way.
Faber's career presents the complicated nature in which cosmopolitan identities were constructed in the nineteenth century. Kwame Anthony Appiah has celebrated the idea of a “rooted cosmopolitan”—an individual who is simultaneously tied to specific nations, histories, or people, while still pledging allegiance to a universal form of worldwide citizenship.Footnote 178 Yet Faber's life demonstrates how difficult “rooted cosmopolitanism” thinking is: despite all of his learning, his travels, and his experience, Faber never shed his allegiances to the West, or Western notions of superiority. He was, at best, a reluctant cosmopolitan, rather than a rooted one.
