Lars Laamann

Memories of Faith: The ‘Christian Sutras’ of Eighteenth-Century China

Drawing on official documents filed at the First Historical Archives in Beijing, and on missionary correspondence located at the Archivio storico ‘de Propaganda Fide’ in Rome, this paper will focus on printed manifestations of popular Christianity during the mid-Qing period. It will argue that, following the exclusion of foreign missionaries after the imperial edict of 1724, tendencies towards inculturation accelerated. Early nineteenth-century sources reveal that the Christian villagers were well aware of the fact that they had preserved but a fraction of what the foreign priests had introduced several generations earlier, yet the sheer memory of their ancestors’ faith was sufficient to provide the religious and social cohesion which characterized Christian life during the eighteenth century. While developing into a syncretic expression of a belief originally introduced by European missionaries, popular Chinese Christianity absorbed elements of other religious systems, mainly popular Daoism and Buddhist millenarianism, as well as ‘Confucian’ patterns of social morality. The spiritual writings memorized and passed from generation to generation in semi-literate rural communities played an important part in the formation of a new, Christian expression of popular religiosity.

Apostasy and martyrdom in eighteenth-century China

Abstract During its long history in China, Christianity has undergone a thorough-going process of inculturation, incorporating key aspects of the religious and social elements inherent in Chinese civilisation. This article analyses the perceived lack of willingness of China’s Christians to defend their faith unto death – a characteristic which foreign Christian clerics repeatedly commented on with horror and condemnation. The apparent preference for apostasy over martyrdom contradicted the eternal and total claim of Christian faith over the convert and within the surrounding community. The tendency also stood in stark contrast to the willingness of Christians in early Tokugawa Japan, as well as other parts of Asia, to sacrifice themselves for their faith. What the Western missionaries failed to understand was that Chinese religious experience, in general, was characterised by flexibility and tolerance. State repression was comparatively mild, and the reaction of the Christian communities to any occasional persecutions was of evasion rather than confrontation. The sincere belief in Christian values and biblical tenets by the individual believer, moreover, usually outlived any public declarations of having deserted their faith.