导论

Footnotes

1. The Early Rain Covenant Church evolved from the Early Rain Blessing Church, which began in the Wang's home in 2005. When the church was formally established in 2008, its official name was set as Early Rain Blessing Church. In 2017, due to internal disputes, some members, elders, and pastors separated under the name of establishing a new congregation, founding the Early Rain Baihua Church. The congregation continuing to be led by Pastor Wang was renamed Early Rain Covenant Church in 2018. This thesis adopts the current name ERCC to refer to the church led by Wang throughout his pastrol career. ↩

2. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1943), 156. accommodated to it. This is a challenge that has persistently confronted Christians who insist on the public nature of their faith yet refuse to reduce it to any worldly moral agenda. Several famous theological theories have been developed to give more clarity to the complex and paradoxical relationship between the kingdom of salvation and the earthly kingdom. Augustine's two-city theory in The City of God3 and Martin Luther's "the doctrine of the two"4 articulated during the Reformation, are arguably the most influential of such theories. These theories are not themselves definitive conclusions; they open an interpretative space which often gives rise to much more refined and subtle theoretical tensions.5 This thesis examines the faithful disobedience of the Chinese house-church pastor Wang Yi and the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu and how they navigated this tension between withdrawal and engagement. Wang's dual background as both a legal and political public intellectual and a house-church pastor makes his case especially instructive for Christian political theology. Wang had already gained widespread recognition in China as a civil rights lawyer and liberal public intellectual when he converted to Christianity in 2005 and then became a full-time pastor in 2008. He became a pastor in a house church movement that had long focused on representing a separatist, privatised, and underground tradition. While upholding the communal identity of house churches, Wang resisted this retreat into seclusion. Instead, under the slogan "writing God's words upon the city gates"6 —an allusion to ↩

3. See De civ. Dei 19. ↩

4. Martin Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms is widely known and discussed, yet this thesis will address how the different meanings conveyed by Luther's use of terms "two kingdoms," "two regiments," and "two churches" are frequently overlooked in those discussions. This conflation even led the German church to employ this doctrine to justify its endorsement of the Nazi regime's political authority. Hence, the deliberate use of "the doctrine of the two" here preserves space for this overlooked diversity, avoiding the problematic but common understanding of Luther's "two kingdoms." This theme will be examined more thoroughly in Chapter 7. ↩

5. D. Stephen Long in "Protestant Social Ethics" explains this developmental tendency in Christian political thought, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Political Theology, eds. Craig Hovey and Elizabeth Phillips (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 88-108; and See also Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 10-13, 75- 148. ↩

6. Liu Tongsu and Wang Yi, Guankan Zhongguo chengshi jiating jiaohui 观看中国城市家庭教会 [Observations on the Urban House Churches in China] (Taipei: Christian Arts Press, 2012), 17-36. Deuteronomy 6:9—he committed to the mission of publicisation that was emerging at that time among urban house churches. It advocated that religious practices be fully public and sought legitimate status as a religious association independent of the state-registered Protestant organisations' mandate to supervise the ideological purity of the churches. Wang first presented his view of the church's public mission as inextricably intertwined with his pre-conversion liberal-conservative political aspirations. In this early phase, his turn to Christianity bore the marks of a post-June Fourth intellectual seeking to re-anchor the shattered democratic hopes of 1989 in a religious framework capable of sustaining liberal claims to rights, law, and public reason. Christianity thus appeared less as a rupture with his prior political commitments than as a spiritual foundation upon which those commitments might be resecured. It was under these conditions that the perennial dilemma confronting pilgrims of the heavenly city resurfaced. The tension between withdrawal and engagement now took the form of a concrete challenge: whether the tether named "publicisation" could genuinely bind together the martyrdom tradition of Chinese house churches and the liberal civil rights agenda inherited from post-June Fourth activism. As this thesis will demonstrate, at least until Wang's arrest and imprisonment in 2018, his intellectual development consistently revealed his struggle with this tension. In order to do interpretive justice to the tensions and dynamism in Wang's thought, this thesis adopts a cultural-linguistic interpretative approach proposed in postliberal theology. This approach avoids treating his thought as a propositional system or as expressions of an inherent human nature, but rather as a trajectory guided primarily by the church community's worship practices. It will show how Wang's shift from the public intellectual community of conservative liberals to the house-church pastoral career turns out to be crucial for understanding his strategies of public engagement. This thesis argues that Wang's conversion and career transition ultimately signified a radical break with his earlier liberal ideological stance. This rupture stemmed essentially from his emphasis on the martyrdom tradition of traditional house churches and his absorption of diverse theological resources, including but not limited to Anabaptist and Lutheran theologies, that finally led him beyond the neo-Calvinist theologies that are ascendant among house-church Christians in China. This interpretative approach will open up new dimensions for understanding the political- theological significance of faithful disobedience as practiced by Wang and the ERCC, or even other Chinese house churches. First, it helps break through the established Kuyperian framework that currently dominates academic research on Wang's theology. Secondly, it repositions Wang's theological vision through Stanley Hauerwas's Christian apocalyptic eschatology and ecclesiology. This highlights how the communal life of worship possesses a radical critical force not only against China's totalitarian regime but also against the liberal political imagination that widely sets the grammatical rules for contemporary civic philosophical discourses. Finally, this thesis demonstrates that the Lutheran theological resources that have profoundly influenced Wang empower his public theology to maintain a profound critique of liberal politics while affirming, more so than Hauerwasians in Chinese- speaking circles, the pursuit of a genuine civil society. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to penetrate the intricate web woven from Wang's intellectual resources across different periods, thereby revealing the profound critical force underlying the practice of faithful disobedience by Wang and the ERCC. Such critical force is not merely directed against China's communist totalitarian regime, as has been widely recognised, but, more fundamentally, challenges the assumed binary opposition of "westernisation (or Americanisation) versus sinicisation" that very often frames contemporary Chinese theological discourses. Against the backdrop of the theological roots identified in this thesis, the public practice of Wang and the ERCC will be revealed as the performance of exploratory and original theological discernment. Guided by a form of life centred on the gospel, worship, and martyrdom, their theologically resistive stance—manifested through Lutheran theology within a context of persecution—shares considerable common concerns with the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This theological resistance differs from conventional critical theory in that its critical capacity fundamentally challenges all emancipatory endeavours grounded in human nature or capacity, or those that invoke God's name to endorse such natures or capacities. In other words, it extends even to doubting the very possibility of the "suspicious agency" of human beings. Simultaneously, elements inherent in Lutheran theology, such as the conceptions of hiddenness and simplicity, guide these disciples, who willingly embrace a fractured self-identity, back onto the public square to advocate for their neighbours' rights. Under the same civil society and rights advocacy, its conceptual fulcrum is no longer the liberal convictions, but rather the way of the cross—the path of disciples who willingly surrenders their life in following Christ. The term "Sino-theology" broadly encompasses all expressions of Christian theology written in Chinese. This thesis can be understood as a study of "Sino-theology" or "Chinese theology" only in the broadest sense. In Chinese academic circles, a specific, narrow usage has emerged, around which a substantial scholarly community has developed. This specific usage deliberately distinguishes Sino-theology from Chinese theology, defining the latter as an approach that, within the historical context of modern China's colonial experience, presupposes Christianity as an "alien" and "foreign" religion. Chinese theology thus carries pronounced nationalist concerns, with its fundamental premise being the agenda of "contextualisation", which demands that the foreign Christian faith must be accommondated with Chinese cultures such as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Scholars of Sino-theology in the narrow sense, following Liu Xiaofeng—one of the late 20th-century representatives of "cultural Christians"—are critical of this contextualisation agenda. They strive to achieve a "paradigm shift" in theology by distinguishing themselves from the "sinicised" Chinese theology.7 They do so with the aim of liberating Christian theological research in the Chinese-speaking world from its nationalist shackles. Instead of presupposing the traditional "Chinese-Western" dichotomy, they focus their theology on the "existentialism of individual faith," emphasising the connections between "the Gospel and humanity's primal existential experience." Liu and his followers term this shift as a turn towards a "problematic of modernity."8 This thesis will employ the term "Sino-theology," when referring to specific "Sino- theological scholars." It will not do so as an affirmation of the need for a "contextualised" Chinese theology, but rather to indicate all theological discourse conducted in Chinese, or research that takes Chinese-language theology as its subject. Only in this most expansive sense can this thesis be regarded as a Sino-theological study. Yet, we will also observe how, within this broadened Sino-theological academic circle, a pervasive pressure is always exerted that Christian theology discussing the Chinese church undergoes "sinicisation." Wang's approach does overlap with Sino-theological scholars in the narrow sense of intentionally resisting this pressure. It is important, however, to be aware that neither "contextualisation" nor "individual existential problem" adequately captures the core character of Wang's theology. As this thesis will demonstrate, the profound focus9 of Wang's intellectual journey is the possibility of a credible and trustful language. This quest led him, through Lutheran theological resources, to a way that bears significant overlap with Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity." He rejects making God a "Deus ex machina" invoked to address human philosophical or value dilemmas. Instead he willingly embraces a fragmentised self in his encounter with God. God's presence ↩

7. Chin Ken Pa, "Shenme shi hanyu shenxue?" 什么是汉语神学 [What is Sino-Theology?], in Shenme shi hanyu shenxue? 什么是汉语神学 [What is Sino-Theology?], Rev. ed. (New Taipei City: Taiwan Christian Literature Council, 2017), 8. ↩

8. Ibid., 8-23. See also Liu Xiaofeng, Hanyu shenxue yu lishi zhexue 汉语神学与历史哲学 [Sino-Theology and Historical Philosophy] (Hong Kong: Institute of Sino-Christian Studies, 2000). ↩

9. I have deliberately avoided using the term "ultimate concern" here, as its usage, particularly under the influence of existentialist thinkers such as Paul Tillich, is all too easily drawn back into the philosophical context of individual existential problems. dissolves existential questions rather than answering them. This rendered his theological quest an alternative paradigm distinct from the aforementioned Sino-theology and Chinese theology. Moreover, this thesis will also clarify that rejecting contextualised theology does not imply that Wang has reverted to the old path of American liberal ideology. On the contrary, even if not sharply articulated, Wang's more mature theology has already diverged markedly from his former conservative allies. This observation dispels the widespread academic accusation that these urban house church leaders ultimately sought only to build an "American City on a Chinese Hill,"10 thereby absolving them of charges of colonialism or Western cultural chauvinism. 2. Review of the Current State of Research The English-speaking world has now accumulated a substantial if extensive body of research on Wang. Gerda Wielander stands as a pioneer who opened the field of study and sparked academic interest in it. Beginning in 2009, she published essays examining the influence of China's urban Christian intellectuals on the country's democratisation movement.11 Her 2013 work, Christian Values in Communist China,12 can be regarded as the culmination of these phased research achievements. Her research influentially established an interpretive framework for understanding the public theology of Wang and other urban house churches, grounded in the fusion of post-June Fourth intellectuals' rights defence movement and neo-Calvinism. Subsequent research, whilst occasionally offering insightful references to ↩

10. Bai Yucheng, "American City on a Chinese Hill: American Fundamentalism in Contemporary Chinese Christianity," PhD diss. (Duke University, 2025). ↩

11. Gerda Wielander, "Protestant and Online: The Case of Aiyan," The China Quarterly 197 (2009), 165–182. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741009000095; "Bridging the Gap? An Investigation of Beijing Intellectual House Church Activities and Their Implications for China's Democratization," Journal of Contemporary China 18 (November 2009), 849-864. ↩

12. Gerda Wielander, Christian Values in Communist China (New York: Routledge, 2013). other denominational theological elements in Wang's discourses, has never efficiently challenged the dominance of the analytical framework she used to frame Wang's lifework.13 Unfortunately, the first academic monograph examining Wang and the ERCC has had a tragic fate. 14 Although the author Ma Li described it as integrating "social theories, organization behavior research, and theological analysis," employing balanced sourcing to achieve an objective and interdisciplinary study of the events of sexual ethics and schism the ERCC experienced,15 since its publication, the book has faced considerable doubts regarding its academic integrity. Criticisms include widespread issues with scholarly formatting, biased sourcing, altered interview materials, selective quoting, and forced interpretations. 16 Considering the academic ethical concerns surrounding this work, this thesis sets aside this controversial publication for further scrutiny, noting only its status as the first English monograph dedicated to the study of Wang. Distinct from the dominant research frameworks, this thesis argues that Wang Yi's later thought draws upon a wider range of theological and political resources than Calvinism alone, incorporating elements from communitarian political philosophy as well as theological ↩

13. See, for example, Alexander Chow, "Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today," International Journal of Public Theology 8/2 (2014), 158-175; Chloë Starr, "Wang Yi and the 95 Theses of the Chinese Reformed Church," Religions 7/12: 142 (2016). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7120142; and Bai Yucheng, "One Foot above Liberalism: Wang Yi's Search for Civil Society," in Christian Social Activism and Rule of Law in Chinese Societies, ed. Yang Fenggang and Chris White (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2021), 267-288. ↩

14. Ma Li, Religious Entrepreneurism in China's Urban House Churches: The Rise and Fall of Early Rain Reformed Presbyterian Church (New York: Routledge, 2020). ↩

15. Ibid., 13. ↩

16. See Carsten T. Vala, review of Religious Entrepreneurism in China's Urban House Churches: The Rise and Fall of Early Rain Reformed Presbyterian Church, by Ma Li, Review of Religion and Chinese Society 7/1 (2020), 149-152. https://doi.org/10.1163/22143955-00701007; Naomi Thurston, review of Religious Entrepreneurism in China's Urban House Churches: The Rise and Fall of Early Rain Reformed Presbyterian Church, by Ma Li, International Bulletin of Mission Research 45/4 (October 2021), 431-432. https://doi.org/10.1177/2396939320968002; G. Wright Doyle, "A Missed Opportunity: The Failure of a Bold Project," review of Religious Entrepreneurism in China's Urban House Churches: The Rise and Fall of Early Rain Reformed Presbyterian Church, by Ma Li, Global China Center, 6 May 2020. https://www.globalchinacenter.org/analysis/a-missed-opportunity-the-failure-of-a-bold-project; and G.K. Deng, "Xueshu waiyi xia de weiyan songting" 学术外衣下的危言耸听 [Sensationalism in Academic Disguise], The Gospel Coalition, 15 July 2019. https://tc.tgcchinese.org/article/sensationalism-disguised-as-scholarship. For one interviewee's complaint about how the book distorted his and others' interview content, see Chiou Mu-tien, "Shenpan Wang Yi? Xueshu waiyi xia de weiyan songting" 审判王怡？学术外衣下的危言耸听 [Trial of Wang Yi? Sensationalism in Academic Disguise], Facebook, 7 January 2020, https://www.facebook.com/breath35c. traditions such as martyrdom, postliberal theology, and Lutheran theology.17 In 2022, Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church was published,18 offering English translations of a substantial body of essays, lectures, and reflections by Wang and other participants in the mission of publicisation within Chinese house churches. In contrast to the texts most often emphasised in existing scholarship—namely Wang's earlier constitutionalist writings, later rearticulated through Kuyperian categories—these materials disclose theological resources that not only widen the interpretive horizon but also place significant pressure on, and in crucial respects move beyond, the Kuyperian framework through which Wang's political resistance was initially articulated. They provide English-language access to sources that had previously remained largely unavailable, thereby enabling a fuller interpretation of the public practice of Wang and the Early Rain Covenant Church. Yet, despite the availability of these resources, existing scholarship has paid little sustained attention to their theological significance, continuing instead to rely on established liberal and neo-Calvinist frameworks. One of the central aims of this thesis is to address this lacuna. 3. Overview of the Argument The source materials available for this study of Wang fall primarily into four categories. The first category is Wang's own writings. From the early 21st century until his imprisonment in 2018, his published works spanned a wide range of genres, encompassing poetry, political commentary, film reviews, theological treatises, pastoral letters, sermons, and personal reflections on faith, amongst others. It is worth noting that Wang's own writings, particularly ↩

17. The terms "postliberalism" and "postliberal theology" employed in this thesis refer to the theological approach that emerged from Yale Divinity School in the 1980s, centred on narrative theology and cultural-linguistic religious theory. This clarification is offered to distinguish it from the postliberalism found in contemporary political philosophy, which critiques liberalism's individualism, universalism, and free-market beliefs, even though some overlap may exist between the two. Thanks are due to Joel Pierce for suggesting this clarification. ↩

18. Wang Yi et al., Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement, ed. and trans. Hannah Nation and J.D. Tseng (Illinois: IVP Academic, 2022). after he became a pastor, rarely adopt rigorous academic formats. This stems not only from the diverse genres of his works but also reflects a prevailing writing tendency among rightist19 public intellectuals in China. Firstly, owing to the pervasive political pressures and censorship within academic circles, right-wing intellectuals such as Liu Xiaobo and Wang tend to bypass formal academic channels, instead relying more heavily on informal public opinion arenas, particularly the online forums that emerged in the early twenty-first century.20 Secondly, the language and formal requirements governing academia are frequently perceived by these political dissidents as crystallisations of China's cultural and ideological problems. Resisting these conventions is thus regarded as integral to their political resistance.21 This contextual feature of Chinese public discourses creates difficulties for researchers tracing the origins of ideas. Although this thesis cannot guarantee complete certainty in its conceptual genealogical work, it will endeavour to identify the upstream sources of Wang's ideas through multiple approaches within its scope, including examination of writing periods, terminology, conceptual overlaps, and descriptions by others. ↩

19. Although in China, the term "right-wing" is often used broadly to refer to a wider range of political dissidents— such as those labeled as rightists during the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution—some of whom may actually be closer to Western socialism on the political spectrum, this article adopts a narrower definition. When this article uses the terms "rightist" or "right-wing," it refers to a group of intellectuals who consciously identify with Western liberal conservatism, typically revere John Locke and Friedrich Hayek, and embrace individual property rights and laissez-faire market economic systems, regarding them as the cornerstone of constitutional democracies. ↩

20. On the importance of online forums for the early twenty century Christian intellectuals' right-defence movement, see Wielander, Christian Values in Communist China, Chapter 5. ↩

21. For example, Liu Xiaobo explicitly stated that his refusal to use footnotes constituted a deliberate reaction against China's longstanding "academic practice of annotating classical texts" and its "obsessive citation culture." Yu Jie, Wo wuzui: Liu Xiaobo zhuan 我无罪：刘晓波传 [I Am Not Guilty: A Biography of Liu Xiaobo] (Taipei: China Times Publishing, 2012), 91. Wang, too, when discussing the importance of the rise of online opinion spaces, regarded academicisation as an obstacle to authentic language: "To date, the internet has held several major implications for China's intellectual sphere. The first is that it has definitively ended the dispute between liberalism and the New Left. In my view, this very conflict was virtual precisely because 'academisation' provided both sides with strategies and spaces for expression, while simultaneously erecting linguistic barriers. This created a rupture between us, our language, and the real world, ultimately leading to a loss of voice. As the common folk say, one ends up red-faced and unable to speak." Wang Yi, "Yuyan, zhengzhi he xinyang—'Rugu shalong' de zaixian yanjiang" 语言、政治和信仰—"如故沙龙"的在线演讲 [Language, Politics and Faith—An Online Lecture on "RGForum"], in Linghun shenchu nao ziyou 灵魂深处闹自由 [Revolution in the Depth of Soul] (Taipei: Christian Arts Press, 2012), 231-232. The second category of resources consists of secondary studies on Wang's theological thought. His essays and lectures from the period spanning 2005 to approximately the early 2010s have already attracted scholarly attention. This contributes to the aforementioned academic interpretative framework of Wang's political theology, which identifies the integration of a neo-Calvinist Christian worldview with his pre-conversion conservative constitutionalist philosophy as the central theme in Wang's theory. The third category comprises Chinese philosophy and political theory, primarily but not exclusively encompassing the Confucian classics alongside contemporary interpretations and applications. An in-depth examination of these materials fundamentally serves to construct a clear portrait of the Chinese scholar-official tradition against which Wang's resistance is radically engaged. In the contemporary context, it is particularly significant for revealing the close kinship between China's current Grand External Propaganda, which exports the "Tianxia" worldview, and the traditional Celestial Empire ideology and imperial cult. This helps illuminate the political implications of the house churches' faithful disobedience within the contemporary geopolitical landscape. The final group of texts to be engaged is composed of resources from Western theological scholarship. As previously stated, this thesis does not define itself as a standard Sino- theological study. The postliberal theological approach adopted here enables it to defend a linguistic common ground between the ERCC in the East and the Reformation theology, Anabaptist Hauerwasianism, and the Lutheran theology of the Confessing Church in the West. The affinity sustained through this common ground far exceeds that of so-called contextualised Chinese philosophical and cultural resources, or even the Western liberal legal-political philosophy often perceived as shaping Wang's political aspirations. Certainly, this does not imply that localised elements can be disregarded. However, much like the Acts' account of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended, the Gospel was articulated in diverse cultural languages. Its decisive significance depends on the disciples' reception of "tongues like as fire" (Acts 2:3), a common grammatical ground that transcends the incommensurability between linguistic systems, a phenomenon now widely recognised in contemporary philosophy and sometimes regarded as a threat to the reconciliation in pluralistic societies.22 From this perspective, drawing on Western resources to clarify the fundamental grammar of Wang's public theology can yield theological insights that extend beyond the scope of cultural anthropology. It reveals how, amidst the tug-of-war between Eastern and Western philosophical and political ideologies, Wang and the ERCC establish, or at least attempt to establish, an alternative model. It aims to observe, in such tension, through eyes transformed in worship, the new things the Heavenly Father is accomplishing in His world, and to listen, with ears opened, to the wondrous symphony of creation responding to the Lord who watches over it day and night. With this certainty, martyrdom-oriented Christians can return to the world and re- establish the foundations for civil life in a fragmented society. Structurally, this thesis is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 delineates Wang's biographical background, identifying the collective trauma inflicted upon civil rights intellectuals by the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 as the most significant orientational driving force in Wang's intellectual journey. Here, I reveal how the spiritual wasteland left by the massacre guided a group of post-June Fourth intellectuals to perceive the essence of social reform as the reconstruction of spiritual and religious values. Drawing upon Liu Xiaobo's recollections of the June Fourth movement, I demonstrate how a more profound and radical reflection on the legacies of nationalism and the Confucian scholar-official tradition emerged among those post-June Fourth activists. Guided by the signpost of "totalistic westernisation," this intellectual trajectory fostered an interest in Christianity. Notably, this spiritual quest ↩

22. For a feminist perspective on this issue, see Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). unfolds centrally through aesthetic theory, particularly poetics. Here, freedom was presented primarily as a problem of philosophy of language. How to discover a new language that breaks free from China's traditional aesthetic sensibilities, historically employed to maintain social order and harmony, became the core concern of these political dissidents. Chapter 2 critically examines Wang's constitutionalist discourse. It highlights ambiguities and contradictions within Wang's early conservative legal-political theories. These issues reveal the vacuum of value pervading the spiritual world of post-June Fourth intellectuals. Thanks to Wang's reflections on his writings from this period following his conversion to Christianity, we can now discern, with hindsight, the stark dissonance and inauthenticity between the nihilistic playfulness of the poet Wang Yi and the constitutionalist Wang Yi's unreserved praise for human tradition. Wang's dramatic conversion to Christianity brought him into contact with the transcendent he had long sought, embarking him upon a protracted journey to learn the new language of Christianity. At the outset, the neo-Calvinist concept of a Christian worldview, familiar to urban house churches, helped Wang swiftly bridge the gap between his Lockean conservatism and his faith. The implicit ambiguities, nevertheless, foreshadowed the fragility of this connection and its future revision. Chapter 3 begins by reviewing the historical context of Wang's calling to full-time ministry when the urban house churches' mission of publicisation was emerging. After outlining the practical focus of publicisation on legal registration and the establishment of church buildings, this chapter draws on secondary research to highlight the dual critiques faced by evangelical house churches engaged in this mission. These polarised critiques reflect the identity tensions confronting urban house churches as they ascend. Leaders of the mission, like Wang and Liu Tongsu, employed martyrdom as the common ground they shared with separatist-leaning traditional house churches, insisting on the continuity between the two. This, however, precipitated interpretive chaos regarding the public significance of their faith practices. Some scholars express concern that these dissidents have drawn the church too close to secular politics, placing the Christian witness at risk of being reduced to a liberal political agenda; others point out that adherence to the tradition of early house churches has distanced them too far from China's cultural and social context, hindering the cause of Christian contextualisation. However, these two critical approaches ultimately converge upon anxieties surrounding the "Americanisation" of faith. Chapter 4 first examines several Western-based scholarly analyses of Wang that defend his theology from a Kuyperian perspective. However, the divergent attitudes towards the sinicisation agenda also reveal tensions among these defenders. This chapter demonstrates that this tension fundamentally stems from an internal ambiguity within Abraham Kuyper's theory, situated between theological propositionalism and experiential-expressionism. This ambiguity not only risks undermining the theoretical foundations of the ERCC's anti-sinicisation practices but also obscures the original social-critical force of ecclesiology and eschatology on which these practices are grounded. The chapter concludes with a genealogical synthesis of English scholarship on Wang's theology, revealing how the dominant Kuyperian interpretative framework overlooks several crucial turning points in Wang's intellectual trajectory. These include his later critical engagement with Lockean liberalism, his embrace of martyrdom theology, and the Lutheran theological resources that enabled his critical reflection on Calvinist theology. A reconstructed alternative interpretative framework for reading Wang's lifework commences in Chapter 5. It introduces the cultural-linguistic approach of postliberal theology and reveals its presence within Wang's later theological works. Given the long-standing bloc confrontation in modern Chinese church history between "conservative-evangelical house churches" and "liberal-universalist Three-Self Church," postliberal theology—largely born of universalist concerns—appears deeply at odds with Wang's house-church identity. Nevertheless, this chapter takes a detour. It first demonstrates through the theological transmission and transformation between George Lindbeck and Hauerwas, how postliberal theology has already transcended its initial ecumenical objectives to embrace a catholicity centred on particular locality. Furthermore, it shows how Wang's later pursuit of faith as a form of life resonates with postliberal theology's cultural-linguistic critique of propositionalism and expressionism. Finally, drawing on a postliberal, cultural-linguistic perspective, the chapter examines a concrete Kuyperian proposal for Christian sinicisation that centres on interreligious dialogue with New-Confucian philosophy. By following this proposal through to its theological implications, the chapter argues that sinicisation strategies focused primarily on academic exchange and conceptual convergence underestimate the formative role of communal Christian practices—especially worship and the sacraments—and thus rely on an unduly idealised view of interreligious reconciliation that overlooks incommensurable differences of grammar and practice. Chapter 6 addresses the tension between Wang's public theology and Hauerwasianism. Drawing upon the theological critiques of civic movements offered by Hong Kong Hauerwasians during the Occupy Central movement, it illuminates the potential conflict between the modern idea of civil society and an ecclesiology that emphasises the Christian community itself being the public and, as such, an alternative polis. To reconcile these two key elements coexisting in Wang's thought, this chapter draws in Bonhoeffer's Lutheran theology to explore the seemingly contradictory concepts of Christianity's "visibility" and "hiddenness." It partially concurs with Jonathan Malesic's critique that Hauerwas's interpretation of Bonhoeffer's testimony may have insufficiently acknowledged the latter's teaching on Christian hiddenness. However, through an in-depth analysis of Bonhoeffer's texts, this chapter also demonstrates that Malesic erroneously presupposes a strictly binary opposition between "hiddenness versus visibility (or publicity)." Instead, drawing upon perspectives offered by contemporary Lutheran theology, this chapter proposes the concept of "publicisation as hiddenness" to interpret the theological significance of the public practices of urban house churches. Accordingly, this not only re-establishes a pathway for the church toward civil society but also deepens its critical capacity, enabling it to engage with reflections on self- identity, a theme that profoundly shapes contemporary discourses on civic philosophy. Chapter 7 opens by offering Wang's educational theory as an example demonstrating the limitations of the two-kingdom or two-city theological frameworks he employs. It then proposes how the Lutheran doctrine of the three estates can better provide a supportive theological context for the public concerns of house churches, while also preserving the eschatological apocalyptic tension between God's kingdom and the world. This repaired account of the church's nature as a public provides potentially valuable resources for Wang's theological integration. Finally, this chapter concludes with a synthetic review of the thesis, outlining the breakthroughs, significance, limitations, and prospects of the interpretative approach presented. Chapter 1 Biographical Background 1. A Smelly but Thinking Flower 1.1. Post-June Fourth: The Spiritual Generations Fed by Blood and Tanks In 1989, protestors gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. What began in April as a commemoration of Hu Yaobang, a former general secretary who was seen, or shaped, by protestors as representing the voice of liberalisation and reform within the Chinese Communist Party, had grown into a nationwide demonstration. Earlier, in a political struggle within the Party, Zhao Ziyang, who represented the same reformist faction as Hu and succeeded the former, was defeated. The return to power of the political conservatives, who advocated a hard line against the student demonstrations, meant that a bloody storm was imminent. That night, the army was ordered to clear the square. Armed with weapons and tanks, soldiers easily broke the students' meagre defences. Despite the efforts of negotiation of a few core intellectual leaders in the square that made the army agree to open a corner for the students to evacuate safely, the clashes throughout the clearing process still resulted in the deaths and injuries of many protesting citizens and students. What followed was a period of strong political control and liquidation in the 1990s that was grossly disproportionate to China's economic liberalisation. Such memories not only left physical and psychological scars on the protesting intellectuals and citizens at the time but also greatly affected the youth who had not yet been able to participate. Wang Yi was a member of the generation that grew up in the post-June Fourth atmosphere. ↩