Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology: A Conference on Chinese Ecclesiology

In the last few weeks, I've travelled to a couple places and want to make a bit of a record as to what's been going on vis-à-vis my research and ancillary items. I'll focus on Cambridge and Oxford (both two weeks ago) and will devote this post to my activities in Cambridge. My post on the Oxford conference will be posted separately soon.

The Cambridge conference will perhaps be a surprise to those who know my research; however, there is a deep connection, and one that will in time I hope become more apparent for its value. This was a conference hosted by the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and the Cambridge Divinity Faculty. The main excuse for going (beyond my current research), if indeed I need one, was the fact that I was going to present on my current research in Oxford immediately after this conference, and going to the UK a few days in advance to take in this conference seemed a very good use of time and resources (two birds with one stone). Besides, I've known a number of scholars active in connection with this Centre for some time, and I wanted to finally check in to see what's going on there after being asked to attend for the past couple years.

The Heavenly Jerusalem in China

The heavenly Jerusalem, which is at the heart of my DFG-funded fellowship, has had as long and interesting a history in China as it is perhaps unknown to Westerners. As I mention in an article soon to be published (I hope--it's cleared peer review!), and as others have developed more substantially, the book of Revelation likely had had an early reception in China via Oriental Christians who might have known the book (the Xian Stele mentions a book that might well be Revelation). Further, many Mongols were Christian, and though reception of Revelation was scarce amongst them (as members of the Church of the East), the idea of the heavenly Jerusalem, esp. via the Psalms, prophets, Galatians, and Hebrews, was present in that form of Christianity.

Revelation and the heavenly Jerusalem also had a presence in the Far East when Jesuit missionaries made their way there in the sixteenth century. Notable among them was a founding member of the Jesuits, St. Francis Xavier, a Navarrese priest and missionary, who spent about a year on the Chinese island of Shangchaung in 1552. A few decades later, in 1582, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and others began setting up Catholic missions in China, where they became valued advisors in the imperial government while at the same time establishing Roman Catholicism and the influence of Christian scripture and ideas in China.

Protestant missions arrived in China in1807, when Robert Morrison and many others sailed to China and began evangelistic activities. It was the teachings of these missionaries and their books that in part inspired a young Chinese scholar, Hong Xiuquan, after he had a series of visions about himself and Jesus Christ (namely that he was Jesus' own brother!), to begin a partially Christian inspired popular movement in China. Some years after these visions, Hong successfully incited a political and religious revolution that merged ideas of Protestant Christianity, Daosim, and millenarianism, and he proclaimed the arrival of the heavenly kingdom in China. The movement, Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, was wildly successful, and it militarily occupied Nanjing for nearly 12 years--from 1853 through 1864. Scholars have called this the single greatest and most disruptive anti-imperial Chinese revolution prior to the 20th century.

The royal seal of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (1850s-1870s)

Suffice it to say that the notion of a heavenly kingdom--indeed one with heavily Christian inflection and association with the New Jerusalem of Revelation--was deeply ingrained in Chinese memory and political consciousness when the twentieth century rolled around. 

By the middle of the twentieth century, two indigenous Chinese teachers--Watchman Nee and Witness Lee--made much of Revelation's teaching of the New Jerusalem, defining it not merely as the future home of Christians after the present age, but as a reality that could be realized within the life of the church here and now. In fact, Witness Lee's ministry (he relocated to the USA in 1962, where he taught until his death in 1997) culminated in a series of teachings that hinged on the New Jerusalem--teachings that in many respects carries on the mystical interpretations of the New Jerusalem that I wrote about in  my 2025 Brill book City of Gods. 

A small book by Chinese theologian Witness Lee, published in 1995; its presentation of the New Jerusalem bears remarkable similarities to patristic elaborations of the same topic

The lives of ideas, once they are released into the wild, are amazing to behold; witnessing the presence of the idea of the New Jerusalem in the East is especially amazing, given its its sources and early development in the Jewish, hellenistic, and Roman imperial worlds. There's a bigger story to tell here, but now isn't the time. However, a large part of my intention in visiting this particular conference was to investigate how the early Christian theology and imagination of the heavenly Jerusalem might show up in a modern conference that focuses specifically on twentieth century Chinese Christian theology and ecclesiology. 

Patristics and Modern Chinese Theology

Second, I went to this conference because I'm interested in how modern Protestant-inspired Christianity from the 19th C. onward might have drawn inspiration from ancient Christian texts and teachings, whether directly via the ancient writings themselves or indirectly through secondary literature that was influenced by these ancient writings. 

Many Chinese Christians received formal Christian instruction as clergymen or as lay persons--such education and the books that conveyed it were heavily (if not always explicitly) inflected with patristic teaching. Watchman Nee (Ní Tuòshēng, 1903-1972) was well known to be a voracious reader and autodidact who received an excellent secondary education at Trinity College, Foochow, and in the years following school, had a close relationship with a London bookseller who would send him Christian books. A friend of Nee's once reported that Nee's dwelling was lined and piled so high and thick with books that it was hard to make one's way around his house. Given other reports, it's highly likely that Philip Schaff's works on ancient Christianity were included in his personal library. Given the highly allusive manner of Nee's spoken and written ministry, and the fact that the publishing company he founded early on placed a heavy emphasis on the translation of Western christian classics, it is impossible to think that his imagination, and that of the Chinese Christians whom he influenced, were untouched by patristic theology, even if indirectly.

With regard to both objectives for this conference, I found that (1) no one is doing much work on either topic, and (2) that people are interested in both of them, and want to see what might develop. While there's little published scholarly work on the connection between Chinese Christianity and the New Jerusalem (beyond the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which has attracted considerable attention at least from historians), there is a huge trove of primary material by Chinese Christian authors who wrote in both Chinese and English. Further, I'm currently editing an anthology in which we editors will feature an article that spotlights the theology of the New Jerusalem in Nee's and Lee's theology in relation to patristic Christian teaching on the same. I've just seen the first draft, and it's going to be an excellent piece. 

As regards the broader connection between patristic Christianity and Chinese Christianity, there also seems to be a lot of interest. But again, few scholars are doing much at all, which leaves an immense lacuna for someone like me to come and fill, what with my particular qualifications (on which I might one day elaborate on this blog).

It was a lovely conference, well hosted and well planned, with plenty of extraordinary and eye-opening presentations. On a personal note, I was privileged to get to know--including at a formal dinner at Christ's College for which I was woefully unprepared in the wardrobe department despite knowing better--many new friends and colleagues, including Christ Jacob Chengwei Feng, Shu-chen Hsuhsiung, and Songzang Xu, pictured below.

I trust there will be more to report in due time once research opportunities opened at this conference begin to bear fruit. 

Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology Conference: Chinese Shu-chen Hsuhsiung, me, Jacob Chengwei Feng, and Songzang Xu, at Christ College formal dinner