Missionary Optimism

This chapter focuses on German missionary work in China, in particular the work of the Berlin Missionary Society and the Society of the Divine Word in the decades before and after 1900. It examines how the missionaries responded to a new political and social landscape after the Boxer Uprising in 1900. The first decade of the twentieth century was a moment of missionary optimism for the BMS and the SVD. The cataclysmic events of the Boxer Uprising convinced German missionaries that Christianity was going to replace Confucianism. At the same time, German missionaries began to introduce new initiatives for more Chinese church independence, even though they continued to evince anti-Confucian attitudes and beliefs.

Unfulfilled Promises

This chapter asks: If by the 1920s, both German missionary societies had embraced the impetus to transfer control to Chinese church leaders, why did independence still remain such a slow and arduous process? The chapter argues that persistent political, social, and economic instability hindered the missionaries from giving their Chinese Christian leaders more power. The Chinese themselves also thought that they were not ready for church independence. Ultimately, a series of catastrophic political events—the escalation of the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in 1933—catalyzed the Germans to relinquish their power.

Order Out of Chaos

This chapter tells the story of how German missionary leaders, unable to raise funds from Europe, began to transfer more power to their Chinese church leaders. The mission directors of the SVD and the BMS both traveled to China, hoping to encourage Chinese church independence. Yet, these reforms came with strings attached, and the missionaries delayed the transition to an independent church. The chapter also examines how the German missionaries formulated their ideas for Chinese church independence out of fears of a rising global socialist and secular threat.

Failure and Success

The conclusion offers some suggestions for the broader implications of studying the German missionary enterprise in China. It argues that the German Protestant and Catholic models of missionary work, with the stress on individual conversion, devoid of direct social and political critique, look remarkably similar to the type of Christianity driving religious conversion in China today. The debates between liberal and conservative approaches to indigenization within the German missionary enterprise in the 1920s also continue to exist within the global Christian community. The chapter concludes by comparing the trajectories of two individual German missionaries, one Catholic and one Protestant, as a way to illuminate the broader arguments in the book.

Falling in Love with Confucius

This chapter serves as the narrative hinge of the book. It examines how the once theologically conservative and vehemently anti-Confucian German missionaries came to grips with Confucianism in the 1920s and 1930s. It argues that the rise of Communism hastened the shift from an anti-Confucian to a pro-Confucian stance. The specter of a global Communist insurrection pushed the two German societies to turn toward Confucianism as an ally. The political situation in Germany was just as important as the one in China: German missionaries embraced Confucianism because they witnessed the threat of Communism in both countries. The chapter compares the German experience with other international missionary organizations and argues that the German embrace of Confucianism was conditioned by their particular experience of failure after World War I. It also examines how missionaries continued to criticize rival religions, such as Buddhism.

Responding to Failure

This chapter explains how the confidence that permeated the missions field in the middle of the nineteenth century quickly dissipated and how missionaries responded to perceptions of their failures. The rapid missionary expansion in the nineteenth century inspired violent response, particularly in China, which continued to outlaw Christian evangelization. Not just in China, but worldwide, Christian missions faced slow growth, and missionary leaders grew impatient. This chapter examines the participation of German missionaries at a series of international conferences held in Liverpool, Shanghai, and the Vatican in the second half of the nineteenth century. Spurred by these conferences, German missionary leaders argued that creating a Chinese church was a crucial component of missionary work. The chapter also examines how national rivalries prevented missionaries from creating a united front in China.

Fruits of the Spirit

This chapter examines and compares the lives of two Chinese Christians, Ling Deyuan and Chen Yuan, who worked with the BMS and the SVD. Their stories illustrate the narrowing political options that Chinese Christians faced between 1945 and 1950. By 1950, both Ling and Chen had to denounce their missionary allies and declare allegiance to the new Communist state. Ling and Chen’s stories attune us to the ironies of history and reveal how the missionary encounter helped lay the foundation for Christianity’s position in postwar China. Their engagement with German missionaries, the chapter contends, prepared and armed them with the anti-imperial, anti-Western rhetoric that the Chinese Communists could accept. Their stories help us understand the monumental and dangerous individual choices that Chinese Christians had to make after the Communist victory in 1949.

A Fractured Landscape

This chapter examines how the First World War devastated the missionary work of both the SVD and the BMS. The war humbled both missionary societies, and this chapter narrates how missionaries tried to reorient themselves in a dramatically altered global missionary landscape. Confessional differences shaped the responses of the missionary societies to their respective international missionary communities. After the war, German Protestants became increasingly nationalist and refused to work with their American and British rivals. The Catholic missionary society, on the other hand, embraced the Vatican and shed its nationalist character.

The Missionary Impulse

This chapter investigates the broader global context that generated the nineteenth-century missionary revival, which laid the foundation for missionary organizations like the Protestant Berlin Missionary Society (BMS) and the Catholic Society of the Divine Word (SVD). Witnessing the rise of revolutionary anti-clerical forces swell in the late eighteenth century, the founders of both missionary societies lived during a period of deep anxiety about the fate of Christianity. Missionary leaders channeled these anxieties. They recruited pious young men and sent them across the globe with the hopes of winning new converts as a way to combat the forces of secularism. This chapter argues that anxiety and optimism formed the dual pillars that propped up the nineteenth- century German missionary mind.

Perceptions of Failure

The introduction begins with examples of German missionaries and mission societies who started as cultural chauvinists in the nineteenth century but had cast such beliefs aside by the 1930s. It lays out the broader arguments and questions of the book: German missionaries, propelled by their sense of failure in the missionary field, began to repudiate their former beliefs. The German missionary encounter produced new reflections not only on the relationship between Europe and China, but also on the nature of Christianity itself. The introduction also explores how a study of the German missionary encounter with China intersects with three broader scholarly literatures: the history of modern China, modern German religious history, and the history of global Christianity. It also sheds light on broader conceptual concerns, such as secularization, globalization, and cross-cultural encounters.