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Christopher Payk

The first full-length critical biography and theological analysis of Wang Mingdao, the spiritual father of China’s House Church Movement.

One of the most influential figures in Chinese Christianity, church leader and evangelist Wang Mingdao rejected state control of religion in favor of the religious freedom of the unregistered House Churches—a choice that made him a frequent target of government persecution.

In this thorough new biography, scholar Christopher Payk traces Wang’s life and Christian development through the sociopolitical tumult of twentieth-century China. Drawing on unpublished sermons, journals, and additional sources in English and Chinese, Payk argues persuasively that Wang’s theology—while largely based on Christian scripture—was shaped by Confucian tradition, reason, and personal experience. Following Christ and Confucius brings new clarity to Wang’s uncompromising faith and lasting impact.

University of Notre Dame Press

Liu Institute Series in Chinese Christianities

Following Christ and Confucius: Wang Mingdao and Chinese Christianity

Jonathan A. Seitz

With a focus on Robert Morrison, Protestant Missionaries in China evaluates the role of nineteenth-century British missionaries in the early development of the cross-cultural relationship between China and the English-speaking world.

As one of the first generation of British Protestant missionaries, Robert Morrison went to China in 1807 with the goal of evangelizing the country. His mission pushed him into deeper engagement with Chinese language and culture, and the exchange flowed both ways as Morrison—a working-class man whose firsthand experiences made him an “accidental expert”—brought depictions of China back to eager British audiences. Author Jonathan A. Seitz proposes that, despite the limitations imposed by the orientalism impulse of the era, Morrison and his fellow missionaries were instrumental in creating a new map of cross-cultural engagement that would evolve, ultimately, into modern sinology.

Engaging and well researched, Protestant Missionaries in China explores the impact of Morrison and his contemporaries on early sinology, mission work, and Chinese Christianity during the three decades before the start of the Opium Wars.

Protestant Missionaries in China: Robert Morrison and Early Sinology

Christie Chui-Shan Chow

Schism is the first ethnographic and historical study of Seventh-day Adventism in China.

Scholars have been slow to consider Chinese Protestantism from a denominational standpoint. In Schism, the first monograph that documents the life of the Chinese Adventist denomination from the mid-1970s to the 2010s, Christie Chui-Shan Chow explores how Chinese Seventh-day Adventists have used schism as a tool to retain, revive, and recast their unique ecclesial identity in a religious habitat that resists diversity.

Based on unpublished archival materials, fieldwork, oral history, and social media research, Chow demonstrates how Chinese Adventists adhere to their denominational character both by recasting the theologies and faith practices that they inherited from American missionaries in the early twentieth century and by engaging with local politics and culture. 

This book locates the Adventist movement in broader Chinese sociopolitical and religious contexts and explores the multiple agents at work in the movement, including intrachurch divisions among Adventist believers, growing encounters between local and overseas Adventists, and the denomination’s ongoing interactions with local Chinese authorities and other Protestants. The Adventist schisms show that global Adventist theology and practices continue to inform their engagement with sociopolitical transformations and changes in China today.

Schism will compel scholars to reassess the existing interpretations of the history of Protestant Christianity in China during the Maoist years and the more recent developments during the Reform era. It will interest scholars and students of Chinese history and religion, global Christianity, American religion, and Seventh-day Adventism.

Schism: Seventh-day Adventism in Post-Denominational China