These inaugural publications from Daniel Bays and Peter Phan auger well for the Blackwell Guides to Global Christianity. Seeking a broad readership, the Guides’ ambitious commissioning editors aspire to publish popular yet authoritative explorations of the world's most significant historical and contemporary Christianities. Both Bays and Phan fulfil this commission. Most impressively, Bays surpasses our high expectations with a tour-de-force account of China's multifarious Christianities.
Admirably concise, Bays's book opens with the Christology-based missions of the Nestorian age and closes with entrepreneurial constructions of a sinicised Church in contemporary China. The contents comprise eight chronological chapters and an appendix on the Russian Orthodox Church's terminated mission in China. Perhaps inevitably given the broad ranges of its time span and targeted readership, the book's evidential base is drawn from the leading secondary sources rather than archival researches. Bays's insightful account reconfigures the narrative of China's diverse Christianities by incorporating indigenous agents of influence with the more historiographically salient foreign-led missions. He reveals the complexity of the seminal conjunctions which incrementally sinisised the Church in China, and produced the hundred-flowered plurality of Chinese Christianities in the present day.
Bays's historiographical researches have bearing on scholarship outside the field of ecclesiastical history. Open-minded students of China's rural, urban or international affairs will profit from reading this book. In addition to charting the outcomes of the globalising processes of foreign missions inside China, Bays provides a revisionist account of the national and international influence of Chinese Christians. His pioneering analysis of the indigenisation of Christianities in China stands alongside recent publications by Yoshiko Ashiwa, Nanlai Cao and David Wank. Methodologically pluralistic, this new ecclesiastical sinology incorporates the global historical antecedents of China's contemporary Church, State and politics as well as particular local Christian reactions and actions to corollary challenges and opportunities in the present day. Bays's impressively comprehensive historiography approaches Christianity in China from the top down, the bottom up, the outside in, and the inside out. With such a complex subject, wide chronological range and omnidirectional approach it is not surprising that this trenchant book is the career-summary of a doyen historian. Bays elucidates a governing dynamic of Christianity's history in China: ‘Chinese Christians were first participants, then subordinate partners of the foreign missionaries, then finally the inheritors or sole “owners” of the Chinese church’ (p. 1). This prime dynamic in Sino-foreign ecclesiastical relations provides an illuminating comparative case study for other international engagements with China in politics, economics, science, culture and statecraft.
A professor at Georgetown University and former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, Peter Phan has close connections to the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences. This unique personal background is discernible in his editorship of Christianities in Asia. Phan commissioned scholars in this collection to present the cornucopia of Asia's Christianities as strikingly diverse parts of ‘a vibrant contemporary religious movement’ (p. 4). A powerful global generator of religion, in addition to Christianity Asia has produced Bahá'í, Bön, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Shinto, Sikhism, Taoism and Zoroastrianism. The book situates Asia-based Christianities in their global historical contexts as integral parts of a world religion, and is intended to serve as a single-volume introduction to the subject.
During Christianity's founding four centuries, the religion's most successful missions operated in Asia and Africa, with Syria serving as the governing ecclesiastical centre. The seminal actions of western missions in the east are properly studied in this collection. However, the diverse receptions and transformations of Christianity by indigenous Asians are the governing focus of the book's twelve appropriately heterogeneous chapters. Explicating the processes by means of which Christianity was indigenised in seventeen predominantly East Asian nations, the assembled studies include a summary chapter on Syriac-speaking Christians in the Middle East. Most of the chapters provide useful endnotes, chronologies and lists of further reading. In addition to an introduction and a conclusion, Phan contributes a chapter on Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand that is focused mainly on Catholicism.
The salient issues in contemporary literature on Christianities in Asia are engaged in the collection, and its contributing scholars do not shy away from the field's more difficult domains of research. For example, in his chapter on Malaysia and Singapore Edmund Kee-Fook Chia writes discerningly on the five-hundred-year-old perception of Christianity as a foreign religion:
This is a sore point considering that all the other religions (Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, etc.), even as they were initially foreign, have long since been considered local religions. It is only Christianity which is perceived as foreign not only in the Malay world but also in the rest of Asia as well… The dynamics of this foreign missionary versus local Christian relationship went unquestioned for most of Christian history in the Malay world until the Second World War. The event surrounding the occupation by Japanese forces was the watershed for local consciousness… With this the myth of Western superiority crumbled just as British colonialism crumbled all over the world. As the Union Jack descended in Malaya, the search for an indigenous identity and local autonomy began to increase. This sentiment was not only shared in the socio-political realms but extends to the Christian churches as well. (pp. 82–3)
Indigenous priesthoods and leaderships did not take charge of Asia-based Christianities until the end of the colonial era.
Asian Christians, particularly Protestants, blossomed in the aftermath of European colonialism. As the centres of gravity for global growth and relative power migrated from the North Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, Christians in East Asia exerted a powerful agency on the world-wide transformation of their religion. Christianity is evolving from a religion of the north and the west to one of the east and the south. These praiseworthy books from Bays and Phan will enhance their readers’ understanding of the manifold Christianities of China and Asia as well as of the global history of east-west relations.
