In this session, the Chinese Christianities Unit features papers that explore exchanges and hybridities in Chinese Christianities. The papers in this session each explore the way that various Chinese Christian organizations, institutions, urban sites, political leaders, and writers have articulated their sense of 'Chinese Christianities' through the processes of dialogue and migration. In this way, they each also describe Chinese Christianities as a hybrid term that goes beyond a sense of blending 'Chinesenesss' with 'Christianities' toward other possible exchanges that have gone into the making of the term. Our paper topics include the transnationalism of the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelization, hybridity in a Jakarta Chinatown, the Christian roots of Kao Chun-ming's practices of democratization in Taiwan, and the Buddhist Master Taixu's engagements with Christianity.
The present research aims at investigating the characteristics of transnational exchanges of Chinese Christians and their socio-cultural impacts through the history of The Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism (CCCOWE). CCCOWE is arguably the first transnational and interdenominational Chinese indigenized Protestant Christian organization. It has 75 district committees all over the world and is the most developed transnational Chinese Protestant Christian network. CCCOWE makes impacts on cultural-religious life of overseas Chinese Christian communities. CCCOWE as a religious movement alleviates theological and ancestral local divisions of overseas Chinese Christian communities. It also initiates Christian social participation in moral and environmental issues that many Chinese churches would like to avoid. With its activities and ministries, it becomes another religious power centre that exerts influence other than the traditional denominations and local church councils. The ministries of CCCOWE articulates and contributes additional complexity to the concept of Chinese identity.
As Chineseness keeps evolving beyond geographical boundaries, the face of Chinese Christianity has become more hybridized and ambivalent as it keeps being renegotiated in its socio-cultural context. Thus, there lies the need to understand the Chinese Christian diaspora experience that goes beyond resinicization or assimilation. In this paper, I propose looking at Chinatown as a socio-religious space that encapsulates this hybrid experience. Chinatown has become the space that symbolizes marginalization and exclusion as well as survival and resistance. After conceptually exploring the making of Chinatown, I will make a study case from Glodok Chinatown located in Jakarta, Indonesia. I identify three meanings that Glodok Chinatown signifies: migration, remembrance, and embrace. I then conclude by drawing theological implications from the Chinese-Indonesian Christian perspective, focusing on the ecclesiological identity as migrant, the church as the site of remembrance, and the call to embrace others.
Rev. Dr. Kao Chun-Ming (1929-2019) served as the General Secretary of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT) from 1970 to 1989 and actively participated in the democratization of Taiwan, the Republic of China (ROC), from the 1970s to 1990s. This paper aims to analyze two aspects of Kao’s public identity, Taiwanese and Christian, through Kao’s The Prison Letters and his two memoirs. This paper argues that Kao chose to emphasize the Christian aspect of his identity during the authoritarian regime and underscore the Taiwanese aspect in the democratic period, although the two aspects of his public identity existed concurrently throughout his lifetime. This deliberate choice of highlighting different aspects of his public identity reflects his strategical political activism when he faced different political regimes and serves as a mirror to reflect the democratic transformation of Taiwan from the 1970s to the 2000s.
Responding to the call to focus on boundary crossings, the present paper aims to analyze how Chinese Christianities crossed over into the discussions of Buddhist Master Taixu, and how the topics he discussed, words he used, and persons he met can inform our understanding of contemporaneous Chinese Christianities. It introduces a novel method into the field by utilizing corpus analysis to conduct inquiries in the entirety of Taixu’s voluminous Classical Chinese language Collected Works. The research is conducted jointly with data scientist Ádám Radványi PhD, and the questions asked include the following. What were the main topics Taixu discussed concerning Christianity? What names did he use to refer to the religion? Who were his main dialogue partners from the Christian side? Did he differentiate between various branches of the religion? Answering these questions, the paper aims to uncover new aspects of Taixu’s views and trends within Chinese Christianities.