From Christ to Confucius by Albert Monshan Wu

Author:Albert Monshan Wu
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300225266
Publisher: Yale University Press

THE SVD’S CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF SPACE

Like the BMS, the SVD also saw itself as besieged by global enemies in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The image of China as a dangerous place, filled with adversaries to the gospel, proliferated in the SVD’s journals. SVD reports were littered with descriptions of robbers and bandits who destroyed church property. There was nothing new about these attacks on Christianity: missionaries saw them as the latest incarnation of Chinese xenophobic assaults on Catholicism, which they had been forced to confront repeatedly since the beginning of their work in China.39

Still, the Catholics acknowledged that they faced a different type of enemy. In the nineteenth century SVD missionaries saw the enemy as an inept, recalcitrant Confucian bureaucracy. Now they described the “battle for China” as a clash between Christianity and an alliance of “Bolsheviks” and “nationalists.” Adam Mayer, a missionary in Shandong, called Communism a “brother of Chinese nationalism. They have been bound together in the past ten years, knocking on the gates of the Middle Kingdom.”40 Communists and nationalists, he believed, were united in their collective hatred of religion. Together, these secular opponents advanced an antireligious, and moreover anti-Christian, sentiment. In local elementary schools, Bolsheviks and nationalists swayed students to “reject Christ.” Mayer reported with dismay that Chinese schools had begun to teach Darwinism to students. Editors of the SVD journal Steyler Missionsbote reprinted a drawing from Chinese textbooks that taught the progression from ape to human to show the proliferation of evolutionary thinking. The caption accompanying the image ridiculed the way that the Chinese taught evolution in their schools.41

SVD missionaries understood that they no longer faced a local enemy, but rather a Chinese manifestation of broader global assaults on Christianity. In 1932, the SVD director of a missionary school in Henan reported that Communists, “determined not to negotiate,” stormed the school, overturned tables, and destroyed books. The vandals would be familiar to his German readers, the missionary lamented, because “similar types of people exist in Germany as well.”42 In the nineteenth century, the SVD framed Chinese anti-Christian outbursts as contained problems, inflamed by local officials who felt threatened by the incursion of foreign Christianity. Now the plight of Chinese Christianity was inextricably linked to an implacable global revolutionary insurgency.

How did the German missionaries justify their presence in China in the face of these new global enemies? Some defended the work by drawing on traditional missionary tropes, situating themselves in a long tradition of missionary martyrdom. Marshaling rhetoric similar to that of the nineteenth century, one missionary wrote, “It is honorable to shed our blood for the sake of a new, free China.” SVD missionaries claimed that they traveled to China for the same reasons as their nineteenth-century predecessors. The fact that China was an enormous country, in desperate need of more Christian presence and conversion, had not changed. Some of China’s fundamental problems persisted: well into the 1930s, the SVD’s missionary journals continued to idealize the country’s poverty. The journals described missionaries as staying in China out of an enduring and pure “love of the Chinese,” not for political gain.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.