When Chinese Catholics returned to church in 1978 after the Cultural Revolution, they were greeted by familiar sights: fiddle-back chasubles, eastward-facing priests, Gregorian plainchant, and ecclesiastical Latin. Over a decade ago, the Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965 had overhauled Catholic theology and introduced a new liturgy in the vernacular tongue. While the rest of the Catholic world had moved on, Chinese Catholics seemed to be living in a time warp. It wasn’t until 1983—five years later—that documents of Vatican II finally arrived in China through Hong Kong.
Jin Lu’s book challenges this narrative of China’s relative isolation. Turning her gaze back to the decades between 1912 and 1962, she tells the captivating story of a group of polyglot Chinese Catholic theologians who indirectly paved the way for Vatican II. Lu’s protagonists were part of nouvelle théologie—the theological movement that shaped the discussions of Vatican II. As members of a global Catholic network, they lived alongside and corresponded with the movement’s intellectual giants, such as Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou. Through extensive archival research in France, Belgium, and Taiwan, Lu meticulously traces these complex currents of intellectual influence. The result is a rigorously researched and persuasively argued study.
One of the book’s many merits is Lu’s creative use of the concept ‘inculturation’, which she distinguishes from ‘indigenisation’. The former has ‘grown from Vatican II’s spirit of openness to world cultures’ (p. 284), while the latter dates back to missionary ideals in the 1920s to contextualise an alien, Western Christian faith into Chinese culture. Unlike ‘indigenisation’, ‘inculturation’ sees Chinese culture not as a static, unsullied category, but rather as something multifaceted and evolving over time. In this view, Chinese culture is not inherently incompatible with Christianity. Chinese expressions contribute to the development of theology along with Western ideas, together enriching the universality of Catholicism. Lu’s preference for ‘inculturation’ sidesteps an essentialist reading of ‘Chinese culture’. But her focus on the universality of Catholic theology does not preclude her from acknowledging the epistemic hegemony imposed by Western missionaries. Instead, she carefully balances the universality and the unevenness of Catholic theologising. Through the neologism of ‘inculturation’, Lu finds an even-handed paradigm to demonstrate how theological knowledge was co-created within a global Republic of Letters.
The global co-creation of a universal theology is made possible by translingualism—the use of languages other than the author’s mother tongue. Lu rightly highlights Chinese Catholic theologians’ writings in French, as it was their command of the French language that enabled them to contribute to nouvelle théologie. But what made them truly ‘translingual’—she reminds us—was their ability to express Chinese cultural and theological concerns in a foreign language. Lu illustrates this intercultural nature of her protagonists in a richly layered narrative of people, places, and ideas. The book is populated with numerous theological figures, both Chinese and Western, each in dialogue with another in an intricate global web. Shanghai, Lyon, Paris, Bruges, and Rome serve as key nodes in this vast network, and Lu heroically tackles the diverse ideas that exercised her protagonists’ minds, from Laozi to Yangming, from Origen to Marcel Lefebvre.
The chapters unfold in broadly chronological order. In the first two chapters, Lu begins by reviewing the evangelisation methods of sixteenth-century Jesuits, who adapted Christianity to Chinese culture. In the early 1900s, Chinese Catholic theologians such as Ma Xiangbo, Ying Lianzhi, and Lu Zhengxiang saw themselves as heirs to this Jesuit tradition. Alongside sympathetic Western missionaries, they formed a global alliance aimed at grounding Chinese Catholicism in its own culture, while also connecting it to the universal Church. But the author’s textual analysis also reveals that Chinese theologians were not always in agreement with their Western allies. Whereas Western missionaries were content with ordaining native clergy, Chinese theologians wanted to go one step further and revive the Jesuit ideal of integrating evangelisation with learning. True evangelisation must not only initiate the Chinese into the Catholic faith, but also cultivate virtue through scholarship.
The author delves deeper into her protagonists’ inner world in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 focuses on Lu Zhengxiang and his time as a monk at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-André in Bruges, Belgium. Archival research at Bruges enables the author to situate Saint-André at the centre of a global Sino-Catholic network, in which letters flow in from China, France, and Rome to seek Lu’s guidance. Chapter 4 shifts gear from a historical account to a textual analysis of Lu Zhengxiang and Wu Jingxiong’s conversion narratives. The author notes the universal nature of the conversion narrative genre, but highlights how her two protagonists incorporated Chinese perspectives to challenge these genre conventions. Lu Zhengxiang’s Souvenirs et pensées, which presented his conversion as a steady Confucian progress towards self-fulfilment, was a uniquely Chinese narrative. Its warm reception by de Lubac and Yves Congar led to its playing a key role in shaping the nouvelle théologie movement.
Whereas the first half of the book explores relatively well-known Chinese Catholics, chapter 5 moves into less-chartered territory. Wang Changzhi, a crucial yet oft-neglected Chinese contributor to nouvelle théologie, studied at the movement’s headquarters—the Jesuit Fourvière Theologate in Lyon. Lu carefully examines the correspondence between de Lubac and Gaston Fessard to establish Wang’s close relationship with these leading nouveaux théologiens. She then provides a detailed analysis of Wang’s two French monographs, both addressing the salvation of non-Christians. La philosophie morale de Wang Yang-ming compared the neo-Confucian pursuit of ‘good knowledge’ (liangzhi) with Ignatian spiritual exercise, while Saint Augustin et les vertus des païens rejected Augustine’s view that lack of faith indicates a lack of virtue. Both works suggested that genuinely righteous people pursuing moral perfection implicitly carry Christ’s teachings in their hearts and are worthy of salvation—an argument echoing Vatican II’s subsequent teaching on the matter.
In chapter 6, we tarry in the city of Lyon, where the theologian François Houang spent three decades of his life as an expatriate. Lu recounts Houang’s intriguing conversion from Marxism to Catholicism when attending the Instituit Franco-Chinois in Lyon. There, his friendships with Catholic chaplain Edouard Duperray and idealist philosopher Jean Wahl inducted him into the world of de Lubac, Daniélou, and Fessard. Houang’s seminal work, Âme chinoise et christianisme, examined Laozi and Mozi in a Christian light, arguing that Chinese renditions of theological concepts would help realise the true universality of Catholicism. He envisioned the Church ‘as a rose window of which Christ would be the centre, and each pedal the symbol of […] a particular culture’ (p. 222).
The final chapter brings together three figures we have encountered before and introduces Jin Luxian, whose theological formation spanned Shanghai, Lyon, Rome, and Innsbruck. Lu offers a panoramic overview of their writings, suggesting that their growing interest in traditional Chinese mysticism was part of the ressourcement trend within the nouvelle théologie movement, which sought to revive the mystical traditions of the ancient Church. Wang Changzhi paralleled Zhuangzi with Jesuit spirituality, which both emphasise that a mystical interior union with God must not be divorced from action in the exterior world. Lu Zhengxiang and Wu Jingxiong embraced translating ‘Logos’ in John 1 as Dao, believing this allowed Christianity to draw from Chinese mystical traditions. Jin Luxian’s doctoral thesis at the Pontifical Gregorian University, written in French, examined the Gospel of John through both Daoist and patristic perspectives, seeking to unite Chinese and Christian mysticism.
Lu’s book is grounded in sound archival research, weaving a wide range of people, locales, and ideas into a magisterial narrative that pays due attention to both text and context. Her competence in both theology and history, and her mastery of both French and Chinese, make her uniquely qualified to undertake this unprecedented task, which she accomplishes with virtuosity. This is an impressive achievement that has broken much new ground in the study of Chinese theology and world Christianity.
