第三章 为这城求平安：王怡牧师、城市家庭教会与公开化使命

Footnotes

1. Wang Yi, “Wo shengming zhong de wuge yi gongcheng” 我生命中的五个一工程 [The Five Constructions of One in My Life], in Linghun shenchu nao ziyou 灵魂深处闹自由 [Revolution in the Depth of Soul] (Taipei: Christian Arts Press, 2012), 245. ↩

2. Ibid., 246. officials from the Religious Affairs Bureau who came to investigate the ERCC. One of them even replied, expressing his gratitude.3 At the Beyond Conference in California in December 2008, he recalled that the night of the earthquake had made it increasingly clear that the Christian vocation is to “rule the world with the word of God” rather than “actual authority.”4 He therefore announced his resignation from the university, stating that he had seen that China urgently needed healthy churches and preachers.5 The earthquake also marks a crucial point for the house church’s vision of publicisation. It became an opportunity for several urban house churches to commit jointly to a ministry that aims to realise public transformation. The ideological turbulence since the reform and opening- up has created the conditions for the growth of house churches. In the 1980s, it experienced what Wang calls “the great revival of the fundamentalists,” whose development roughly followed the trajectory of reform and opening up, from rural areas to cities.6 Then, as mentioned in Chapter 1, the nihilism and value vacuum resulting from the 1989 massacre created unprecedented conditions for intellectuals’ conversion to Christianity. Many of the new churches that emerged in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu did not hold the separatist view of politics and religion that was common among traditional house churches. ↩

3. Wang Yi, “Cong gaigezong shenxue kan zhengjiao guanxi yu zaihou chongjian” 从改革宗神学看政教关系与 灾后重建 [The Relationship between Politics and Religion and Post-Disaster Reconstruction from the Perspective of Reformed Theology], in Jidu shi zhu: Lun zhengjiao guanxi 基督是主：论政教关系 [Christ is Lord: On the Relationship between Church and State] (2019), 198. https://www.wangyilibrary.com 师文集：论政教关系》. ↩

4. Wang Yi, “Wo shengming zhong de wuge yi gongcheng”, 245. ↩

5. Ibid., 245-246. ↩

6. Wang Yi, Beifu shijia: Zhongguo jiating jiaohui shi 背负十架：中国家庭教会史 [Bearing the Cross: A History of the House Church in China] (2020), 91. https://www.wangyilibrary.com/post/lecture-23311. According to the differences in the organisational models of churches, Jieren Li further distinguishes the house church model of this period into the “traditional” mode and the “network” mode of house church. The latter is more organised than the former, and churches in the same region are more closely connected to each other. Jieren Li, “Multi-Identity of the Chinese Christianity in Postmodern China: A Missiological Reflection of Premodernity, Modernity towards Postmodernity,” in Mission and Postmodernities, ed. Rolv Olsen (Edinburgh: Regnum Books International, 2011), 178-179. Wang does not make this distinction. This is probably because, as we will see, Wang is dedicated to rooting the urban intellectual church in the life tradition of the rural house church, which inherited from the persecuted fundamentalist Christians who insisted on staying out of the TSPM from the 1950s onwards. Therefore, church typology based on different organisational models has never been his main concern. I am grateful to Shalom Li for drawing my attention to Jieren Li’s article. Their members “maintained the earlier fervour to transform Chinese society, but now from within the context of the church,” emphasising the public influence Christianity should exert on the country and society.7 The publicisation of the house church has thus played a significant role in their public pursuit.8 1.2. Publicisation: A Common Vision of House Churches Emerges in the Disaster Although the Beijing Shouwang Church had begun its registration attempt in 2005, the 2008 earthquake was of undeniable significance in inspiring the vision of publicisation. In Wang’s words: “The earthquake shook the entire house church from underground to the surface.”9 During the national disaster, many Christians from across China, regardless of whether they belonged to the Three-Self Church or house churches, came to Sichuan to participate in relief efforts. The previously hidden churches appeared as charitable volunteers, and the long-accumulated social momentum suddenly exploded. This “disrupted the delicate balance of the relationship between politics and religion” and “prompted the government to re- examine, investigate and test the waters on the issue of house churches.”10 On the other hand, house churches that wished to step out from the private spheres also established a network, breaking through their isolation and laying the foundation for forming the subjectivity of Chinese house churches as a nationwide community. This sense of common agency was further ↩

7. Alexander Chow, “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today,” International Journal of Public Theology 8/2 (2014), 163. https://doi.org/10.1163/15697320-12341340. ↩

8. “Therefore, the process of the church promoting registration is: from avoiding the regime to actively facing it; from a passive ‘illegal’ status to striving for its ‘legality’ through legal means; from emphasising the spirituality of the church to consciously undertaking its mission in society, so that the church has gradually moved from the margins of society to the mainstream. These mark the transformation, or the beginning of the transformation, of the Chinese house church.” Jin Tianming, “Tuidong jiaohui dengji dao jintian” 推动家庭教会到今天 [Promoting House Church Registration So Far], Xinghua 杏花 [Almond Flowers] (Spring 2008), 40-41. Jin is a pastor of Beijing Shouwang Church, which, according to Alexander Chow, “is perhaps the most internationally well-known of a number of newer so-called ‘urban intellectual churches’ in China.” Chow, “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today,” 160. ↩

9. Wang, Beifu shijia, 113. ↩

10. Wang Yi, “Zongjiao fagui: Dangqian de zhengjiao chongtu ji qi qushi” 宗教法规：当前的政教冲突及其趋 势 [Religious Regulations: Current Conflicts between Religion and Politics and Their Trends], in Jidu shi zhu, 189. strengthened in 2010. To participate in the Third Evangelical Lausanne Congress, many house churches raised funds and selected more than two hundred representatives together. However, in the end, almost all of them were blocked and prohibited from leaving the country.11 These house churches which identify themselves as evangelicals joined forces to promote the vision of publicisation in various places. Many of them have joined the house church registration movement initiated by the Beijing Shouwang Church, directly applying to civil affairs departments at all levels for registration, with the aim of establishing legal religious groups outside the TSPM and CCC. If successful, this would set a precedent for church activities free from patriotic supervision. Unsurprisingly, these applications were all rejected. Religious policy has become increasingly restrictive since Xi Jinping came to power, culminating in the imprisonment or exile of many pastors and church leaders. 2. Evangelicalism and Martyrdom: The Self-Identity of the Publicising House Churches 2.1. Rural and Urban House Churches: One or Two Traditions? Because of their particular background, the intellectual churches that emerged in the cities after 1989 sparked internal debates over self-identification. What is their connection to traditional house churches? Can they be considered “house churches”? Or should they be categorised as the new “third church” type?12 The new urban churches are strongly influenced by neo-Calvinism and attentive to political issues and social transformation.13 This is quite ↩

11. Wang calls it “the largest operation to block the exit of citizens from their own country since 1949 (when the Kuomintang regime fled to Taiwan).” Wang, Beifu shijia, 137-138. Parenthesis added. ↩

12. See Chow, “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today,” 163; and Li, “Multi-Identity of the Chinese Christianity in Postmodern China,” 179. ↩

13. On the influence of Dutch Neo-Calvinism on urban house churches, see Chow, “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today,” 158-175; Gerda Wielander, Christian Values in Communist China (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 108-129; 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, eds. Yang Fenggang and Chris White (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2021), 267-287. different from the quietist tendency of traditional house churches in the past. Wang, along with many other urban church leaders involved in the mission of publicisation, is committed to (re)rooting the urban church’s self-understanding in the tradition of the early house churches. This is not merely a practical consideration for the power of unity; it also reflects their significant theological concerns. Unlike the fundamentalist church that revived in the 1980s, Wang calls the urban house churches that emerged after 1989 “evangelical”. Influenced by overseas Chinese evangelical Christians, especially Chinese theologians with a strong Westminsterian Reformed background, including the Chinese theological educator Zhao Tianen (赵天恩, Jonathan Chao) and the renowned evangelist Tang Chongrong (唐崇荣, Stephen Tong), these churches seek to transcend fundamentalist separatism and fulfil the cultural mandate of Christians.14 However, it is worth noting that for Wang and many other Christians who share the same vision, the term “fundamentalist” is largely positive. They affirm that, under intense religious repression, the fundamentalist character helped the church protect and strengthen its identity in faith, free it from assimilation into the state’s political ideology, and, through grassroots efforts in villages, nurture the basic forms and living traditions of a fully indigenous community of faith.15 Evangelicalism is therefore not a new tradition of faith for Wang and other church leaders with similar convictions. Rather, it is defined as a form of response from the fundamentalist tradition ↩

14. “We can say that the entire reformed evangelical movement (in China) was brought about by the efforts of Pastor Tang, his sermons, and Pastor Zhao’s translation.” Wang, Beifu shijia, 162. See also Chow, “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today”, 170-171. Interestingly, as Xu Ximian points out, certain earlier-rising house churches, such as those in Wenzhou, which were similarly influenced by the Reformed theology of this genealogy, still despised cultural labours. According to Xu’s analysis, this is related to the internal controversy of neo-Calvinism, i.e. Van Til’s critique of Herman Bavinck and Kuyper’s view of common grace. Xu Ximian, “Give Us Dutch Neo-Calvinism: Retrieving and Reconsidering Dutch Neo-Calvinism in the Chinese Context,” in Modern Chinese Theologies Volume 2: Independent and Indigenous, ed. Chloë Starr (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 69-88. In order to be consistent, I will adopt the hanyu pinyin system and call them “Tang Chongrong” and “Zhao Tianen” in the following context. ↩

15. 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), 92-93. to a new social situation. This sense of continuity is so strong that Wang sometimes even uses the term “neo-fundamentalist” as a synonym for “evangelical”.16 Wang and Liu Tongsu, a pastor who also promotes the vision of publicisation, adopt the distinction between the “life essence” and “external forms” of the house church to explain this transfer.17 As Liu suggests: The emergence of new urban churches is indeed not primarily the result of traditional house church missions. Most new urban house churches have no direct lineage with traditional house churches. However, if one looks deeply into the essence of life, it is not difficult to see that the half-century-long way of crucifixion of the house church, as the foundation and background of the church, has defined the fundamental direction the urban house church’s life. Although they have the appearance of foreign missionaries, the essence of life has completely inherited the basic traditions of the house church.18 Despite the old and new house churches’ different theological sources and views on politics and religion, the emphasis on the way of the cross as the life essence allow Wang and Liu to discern their common basis: martyrdom. They suggest that “the ‘underground’ and ‘illegal’ statuses both reflected the external social conditions of the era in which the house church emerged,” but this also means that “away from the previous specific socio-cultural conditions, the state of being ‘underground’ and ‘illegal’ does not necessarily come from the essence of the church’s life, and may even oppose the essence of the church.”19 In contrast, “the ‘martyrdom’ essence of the church will not change, because that is the eternal essence of ↩

16. Wang, Beifu shijia, 94. ↩

17. Liu and Wang, Guankan Zhongguo chengshi jiating jiaohui, 37-40, 216-217. ↩

18. Yu Jie and Wang Yi, “Jidujiao shi yizhong gonggong shenghuo: Meiguo Jiujinshan Shanjingcheng jiaohui zhuren mushi Liu Tongsu fangtan” 基督教是一种公共生活：美国旧金山山景城教会主任牧师刘同苏访谈 [Christianity Is a Public Life: An Interview with Liu Tongsu, Senior Pastor of the Mountain View Chinese Christian Church in San Francisco, USA], in Yisheng yishi de yangwang 一生一世的仰望 [The Expectation for Whole Life] (Taipei: Christian Arts Press, 2010), 237. ↩

19. Liu and Wang, Guankan Zhongguo chengshi jiating jiaohui, 39. Christ’s life.”20 Martyrdom is so highly regarded that they even directly proclaim that “as long as it is the life of the heavenly kingdom, it must be ‘martyred’ in the world”; therefore, “a church that does not ‘martyr’ is not a church at all.”21 For them, martyrdom is not only the essence of the life of the Chinese house church, but also of the entire catholic church. The transformation from fundamentalism to evangelicalism and the vision of publicisation to a large degree are proposed in response to the crisis of the split between the house church and the catholic church tradition. In their own words, “the greatest weakness of the Chinese house church is that it has been cut off from the catholic church and the inheritance of the saints through the ages.”22 The oppression of the totalitarian government is certainly a cause, but it stems more essentially from the nationalist ideology that has always been entrenched in China. In the modern history of China, which was marked by the invasion of Western powers, “‘saving the country’ has become the theme of the Chinese nation,” which exists at the “foundation of all governing principles” and “the depths of all national complexes.”23 They also admit that even early leaders of the house church, such as Wang Mingdao and Watchman Nee, were not completely immune to this kind of nationalist “anxiety disorder.”24 It was the environment of religious persecution that prevented the life of the church from being poisoned by this nationalism. A traditional house church Christian who insisted on resisting the patriotic supervision of the Bible, doctrine, and church management, and insisted on gathering together (even if it was private), had already put themselves in danger of persecution by mainstream society and even loss of life. During this period, “the persecution of the world helped the church to ‘shepherd’ Christians; as long as the church sanctified ↩

20. Ibid., 127. ↩

21. Ibid. ↩

22. Ibid., 17-19. ↩

23. Ibid., 49. Here we can see how Wang’s critique of the scholar-official tradition continued into his reflection on the ecclesiastical tradition. ↩

24. Ibid., 18. On the Confucian elements of Wang Mingdao’s thought, see Christopher Payk, Following Christ and Confucius: Wang Mingdao and Chinese Christianity (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2024). Christians in their gatherings, the world would compel Christians to be sanctified in their daily lives.”25 As the circumstances have changed, external pressures have gradually subsided, Liu and Wang Yi believe that the martyrdom passed down by the house church should be presented in a different external form, transitioning from the fundamentalist “red martyrdom” to the evangelical “white martyrdom.”26 Although contemporary persecution has become relatively milder, and the tension with the world may not be so tense that it leads to bloodshed as in Roman times, this does not mean that the life of the church is therefore more stable and secure. On the contrary, the world’s attacks on the church adopted a “lentil soup strategy.” With the target shifting from the flesh to the soul, the threat is even greater.27 As Christians gradually become able to re-enter society and are no longer forced to become marginalised aliens, the ‘pastoral’ effect that could be achieved simply by holding on to the congregation gradually faded. The boundaries between the city on earth and the city in heaven, between the world and the church, gradually blurred, and awareness of the essential nature of martyrdom was gradually eroded. As the label “marginalised alien” is gradually removed and Christians re- enter society like any other citizen, the postive “pastoral” effect that could be achieved simply by holding on to the congregation also loses force. The boundaries between the heavenly city and the earthly city, between the church and the world, become blurred, so eroding Christian awareness of the essential nature of martyrdom. 2.2. The White Martyrdom: Establishing Church Buildings and Registration The vision of publicisation turns out to be the urban house churches’ solution to the waning of the church’s martyrdom life essence. In their current political context, establishing ↩

25. Liu and Wang, Guankan Zhongguo chengshi jiating jiaohui, 131. ↩

26. Ibid., 125-129. ↩

27. Ibid., 127. church buildings and registration became the most pressing issues. According to the Regulations on Religious Affairs implemented in 2005, all religious activities must take place in so-called “premises of religious activities,” and only legally registered “religious groups” can apply for registration of a premise.28 Practically, the state-registered National Committee of Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches in China (TSPM 中国基督教三 自爱国运动委员会) and China Christian Council (CCC 中国基督教协会) are the only legal Protestant religious groups. This precludes churches from legally holding religious activities, including worship and preaching, without patriotic supervision. Therefore, registration, not under the TSPM or CCC, but directly under the Civil Affairs Bureau as independent religious organisations, became an immediate priority. Related to registration is establishing church buildings, which serves as the core concern of publicisation: establishing a holistic body of pastoral care (muyang 牧养). Liu and Wang argue that pastoral care is not just “teaching a universal truth of the kingdom of heaven” but “nurturing and sustaining a form of life (shengming xingtai 生命型态) of the kingdom of heaven within the Christian life as a whole.”29 The church’s essence of martyrdom is passed down through the communal pastoral relationship, which originated from Christ: “Pastoring is about allowing people to tangibly and practically live the life of Christ. Pastoring conveys the living Christ, the Christ who is flesh and blood and living.”30 This is also the key to the church’s collective martyrdom life being able to be carried on by individuals. They propose the conceptions of tanghui (堂会) and huitang (会堂), which are widely used in the Sino-Christian world whose precise meanings are somewhat ambiguous, to further explain the importance of establishing church buildings to pastoral care community. Tanghui ↩

28. See The State Council of the People’s Republic of China 中华人民共和国国务院, Regulation on Religious Affairs 宗教事务条例, §12-13 (2005). https://www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2005/content_63293.htm. ↩

29. Liu and Wang, Guankan Zhongguo chengshi jiating jiaohui, 132. ↩

30. Ibid., 129. is the organisational form of a local church entity that becomes “the structure in which pastoral care can unfold in the church.”31 In their view, a local church entity, that is, the “substantially visible church” that “belongs to a certain community in time and space,” is the “basic unit of spiritual life”, which corresponds to the “the Christian life as a whole” mentioned above.32 On the other hand, huitang refers to the “external space and pattern” of tanghui.33 Or more specifically, huitang is the church building where the form of life of tanghui unfolds most naturally and properly. Wang confirms that there is a certain transformed continuity between the Christian huitang and the Jewish synagogue, which is also commonly translated as huitang in Chinese. The Jewish community developed from a family to a nation-state, and eventually became a dispersed, transnational community during the period of captivity, when the synagogue appeared.34 However, the Jews “fell on the stumbling block of the cross of Christ”, so the church in the apostolic period once again turned to the family, and “went beyond the family to establish new Christian huitang” through missionaries.35 The origin of the Jewish synagogue shows how the establishment of the huitang was linked to Wang’s resistance against the homogeneous social imagination of nationalism. The church building represents that the community’s life is openly displayed to the world in a distinctive form, and this constitutes a crucial part of the white martyrdom. Wang cites Jeremiah 29, which encourages the exiled Israelites to “build houses and settle” (Jeremiah 29:5) in Babylon and “pray for the peace of the city” (Jeremiah 29:7) as an example, pointing out that the same moment of choice faces the house church: separation or becoming a visible community?36 If the latter is essential to maintaining the pastoral life of the church, then the church building should become an “external manifestation of a communal lifestyle” that is simultaneously engaged in and distinct from the ↩

31. Ibid., 136. ↩

32. Ibid., 134. ↩

33. Ibid., 151. ↩

34. Ibid., 152-153. ↩

35. Ibid., 153. ↩

36. Ibid., 157. world.37 It manifests the community of God’s people that pray for the peace of Babylon, the earthly city. The vision of building churches is undoubtedly in direct conflict with the government’s religious regulation agenda. But for Wang, a former legal scholar, it is a right guaranteed by China’s constitution and an opportunity for the martyred church to “communicate” with the government. ERCC purchased a church space in an abandoned commercial building in 2010. Their policy was to open up the church’s activities and all operations to the government and, as long as they believed it did not go against the gospel and biblical teaching, to cooperate with the government’s policies to the fullest extent possible, such as providing lists of attendees at worship and not accepting foreign financial aid.38 Ian Johnson records that when ERCC first purchased their own space, public securities banned the church members from entering the building. Therefore, they held outdoor public worship services for several weeks. Finally, for reasons unknown, the authorities relented and allowed the church to enter the building, which in the next few years led to the curious spectacle that hundreds of members of illegal churches worshipped together while a group of agents of national security watched over them behind, ready to stop any obvious anti-government speech.39 However, this delicate balance was gradually eroded by Xi Jinping’s increasingly strict religious controls and the announcement of revised religious regulations in 2017.40 Since 2018, major public house churches have been banned and successively forcibly shut down . Hundreds of members of the ERCC were arrested on 9 December 2018. At the end of the following year, Wang was sentenced to nine years in prison. ↩

37. Ibid., 158. ↩

38. See Ian Johnson, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017), 57. ↩

39. Ibid., 59. ↩

40. The State Council of the People’s Republic of China 中华人民共和国国务院, Regulation on Religious Affairs 宗教事务条例, Rev. version (2017). https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2017-09/07/content_5223282.htm. For Wang’s response to it, see Wang Yi, “Wo dui Zongjiao shiwu tiaoli de wuge lichang” 我对《宗教事务条例》的 五个立场 [My Five Positions on the Regulations on Religious Affairs], in Jidu shi zhu, 126-132. 3. Dual Criticisms Faced by Evangelical House Churches These urban intellectual house churches, which identify themselves as evangelical, seek to establish a link between the traditions of fundamentalist churches and the civil rights movement. Like many ambitious pioneering attempts, they face challenges from established models during the exploratory process. Doubts arise mainly from two sources: the more separatist impluses of traditional fundamentalist house churches and the conceptual accommodation pursued within the Sino-theological community. For the former, emerging urban house churches may exhibit an overly strong social motive. Traditional house church members who have long been immersed in a separatist environment tend to worry that the strong political concerns of these Christian dissidents have crossed the boundaries of faith and may even bring unnecessary calamity to the church. On the other hand, some intellectuals, especially in the academic Sino-theological circle, who have inherited the focus on the “sinicisation of Christianity” of earlier Chinese liberal theologians and cultural Christians, worry about their pro-American tendencies and hostility towards Chinese culture. They regard these dispositions as detrimental to the plurality and contextualisation of contemporary Chinese Christianity. This chapter will then investigate these two critical approaches in depth and contrast them. This will highlight an interpretive confusion in the study of Wang’s ecclesiology. 3.1. A Constantinian House Church? Continuing the previous discussion of church typology, the designation of the urban intellectual church as a “third church” emerges from two markedly different quarters. On the one hand, some urban house churches employ this label to underscore their heightened public engagement; on the other, certain fundamentalist churches invoke it in order to distance themselves from what they perceive as a departure from separatist practice. Despite their divergent intentions, both usages presuppose a discontinuity in ecclesial life that denies the shared tradition binding urban and rural house churches alike. Zhao Wenjuan, a proponent of the fundamentalist house church model, terms the urban intellectual churches “radical Protestant house churches” in her article “Being a Protestant Church in Contemporary Mainland China” to distinguish them from the traditional “conservative Protestant house churches.”41 These two house church systems, along with the official-registered churches, constitute the three main types of Zhao’s church typology in China. According to her assessment, the Protestant conservative church best fits the Pauline and Hauerwasian understandings of the “church”.42 In contrast, the other two showed themselves to be trapped in Constantinianism in different ways. Zhao’s portrayal of the radical house church is based on Yu Jie’s account of politics and religion, supplemented by the theories of other liberal-conservative Christians—including Wang Yi and Liu Tongsu—in order to present a composite account of this camp’s theological positions. Zhao sees this camp as a contemporary Chinese version of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism, which approahes Christianity as “a resource for democracy, human rights, and building a democratic state.” 43 She accurately captures the belief in “totalistic Westernisation,” or “totalistic Americanisation,” intertwined with those intellectuals’ Christian faith.44 This has led the radical house church to a kind of American Christianity that ↩

41. Zhao Wenjuan, “Being a Protestant Church in Contemporary Mainland China: An Examination of Protestant Church-State Relations,” Asia Journal of Theology 33/2 (October 2019), 1-31. Zhao’s use of the terms “radical” and “conservative” refers merely to the extent of the church’s resistance to the Chinese government, and does not involve the “leftist” and “rightist” connotations of these terms in the Western political context. Obviously, given the close connection between the right-wing conservative ideology and the urban house churches described in the previous chapter, if the latter definition is adopted, these churches, which Zhao calls “radical,” are actually “conservative”. ↩

42. Ibid., 19, 26, 30. ↩

43. Ibid., 15. ↩

44. The debate between “totalistic Westernisation” and “Chinese Learning as Substance, Western Learning for Application” has existed since the early twentieth century. In the end of the nineteenth century, faced with the modern military powers from the West, the Qing dynasty regime and intellectuals widely believed that the reform only needed to be on a material level, learning Western technology and science, while maintaining Chinese tradition in other areas. However, during the period of the Republic of China in the early twentieth century, increasing intellectuals came to believe that the cause of China’s national crisis lay in the cultural and spiritual level, and a debate between the two sides ensued. After the reform and opening up in the 1980s, the confrontation between the rightists and new leftists continued the fierce debate in the beginning of the century. As the Hauerwas worries about, which assumes that “American church’s primary social task is to underwrite American democracy. In doing so, they have unwittingly underwritten the moral presuppositions that destroy the church.” 45 The destructive presuppositions of such Christianity include “the legacy of slavery still lingers in American society,” “its call on its citizens to kill in its defense,” and most worryingly, the temptation “to secure Christianity as the established religion and then seek the privilege of the church by the state,” that is, a Constantinian Christianity.46 Given the centrality of patriotism in its identity, the TSPM’s and CCC’s Constantinian characteristic needs no further elaboration. Zhao Wenjuan’s insight lies in the observation that radical house churches may have been led down the same path as those whom they resist. She cites the views of Zhao Zichen, a representative early Chinese liberal theologian who was an important founder of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, to illustrate this point. Though Zhao Zichen, who took the Three-Self approach of the “sinicisation of Christianity,” and the radical house churches, which were deeply influenced by Zhao Tianen’s Westminsterian neo- Calvinism and pursued the “sanhua yixiang” (三化异象 the vision of three “-isations”),47 held completely opposing attitudes towards Chinese culture, the former’s “view represented Protestant radical theological thought patterns regarding how to build culture or supply the moral tone of Chinese society through Christian principles.”48 But in Zhao Wenjuan’s Hauerwasian perspective, both are destructive to the church. She claims: introduction of the “Schmitt-Strauss Fever” in the previous chapter shows, the leftists sought to return to Confucian tradition for resources supporting the legitimacy of the communist regime. See Chapter 2, sec. 1.1. As for the rightists, Liu Xiaobo and Yu Jie are well-known advocates of totalistic Westernisation. On the Chinese rightists’ unreserved admiration for Western civilisation and their colonialist suspicion, See Chapter 2, sec. 1.2. ↩

45. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014), 32. Cited in Zhao, “Being a Protestant Church in Contemporary Mainland China,” 18. ↩

46. Zhao, “Being a Protestant Church in Contemporary Mainland China,” 18. ↩

47. The three are “Zhongguo fuyinhua” (中国福音化 the evangelisation of China), “jiaohui guoduhua” (教会国 度化 the kingdomisation of the church), and “wenhua jiduhua” (文化基督化 the Christianisation of culture.” For Wang’s advocacy of them, see, for example, Wang, Beifu shijia, 165. ↩

48. Ibid., 17. For Hauerwas, the church must refuse participation in the earthly political order because, as an alternative polis, it “does not have a social strategy; the church is a social strategy.” … In contrast, it would be a challenge for the Protestant radical house church to perceive it, which explains why it has attempted to seek the theological resource of the Reformed tradition to endorse Christians’ participation in the secular politics in recent years.49 Her critique of the radical house church echoes John Howard Yoder’s church typology’s critique of the “activist church”, to which Hauerwas appeals in Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony.50 For them, the activist church focuses on social reform rather than church reform. It often presupposes a triumphalist view of history in which social justice will ultimately triumph. The church, on the other hand, witnesses the glory of God by participating in this process of triumph (standing on the right side of history).51 The serious problem of such an approach “is that the activist church appears to lack the theological insight to judge history for itself. Its politics becomes a sort of religiously glorified liberalism.”52 Such triumphalist tones are prevalent among modern Chinese advocates of political reform. Stimulated by the threat of Western colonialism at the end of the 19th century, China began to compose a national symphony called “Saving the Nation.” The tension between “quanpan xihua” (全盘西化 totalistic Westernisation) and “zhongti xiyong” (中体西用 Chinese Learning as Substance, Western Learning for Application) in the early 20th century formed the core of the two theme movements in an opposing way. The conflict between the rightists and the leftists at the end of the 20th century added a fluctuating variation to the opposing harmonies of the two movements. The underlying theme of saving the nation was ↩

49. Ibid., 28-29. Citing here, Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, 43. ↩

50. Ibid., 44-45. ↩

51. Ibid., 45. ↩

52. Ibid. Emphasis added. bound to imply a triumphalist historical methodology based on the criterion of “who can successfully achieve China’s modern transformation and national revival.” This also permeates the understanding of Christianity, adding a religious embellishment to these two variations: one is dedicated to contextualising the spirit of Christian charity in a way that is compatible with, or even supervised by, Chinese patriotism and nationalism, while the other pursues the transplantation of Puritanism as one of the essential “roots of American order.”53 Therefore, Zhao Wenjuan believes that from Hauerwas’s ecclesiology, the radical house church, in its strong appeal to the social reformation “with slogans such as ‘peace,’ ‘justice,’ ‘human rights,’ and ‘democracy,’”54 has already compromised the “interpretive skills and a truthful understanding” that is necessary for the church understand what these slogans mean in the light of “the life and death of Jesus as decisive for the world’s status.”55 On the contrary, by insisting on its “political quietism,”56 the conservative house church lives out a communal life of an alternative polis and thus “retains the skill and ability to truly understand the nature of the world and to follow Jesus while not participating in the world.”57 As noted earlier, Zhao’s attacks on the radical church centres on Yu. The latter’s close friend, Wang, therefore also faced the same scrutiny and criticism.58 Zhao refers to the “Ninety-Five Theses,”59 an important statement drafted by Wang in 2015, which serves as the ERCC’s declaration on its position regarding the relationship between the church and politics, ↩

53. Russel Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 4th ed. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003). For Yu Jie’s recommendation of this book, see “Meiguo de diyi guanjian ci shi ‘zhi xu’: Lasaier keke: Meiguo zhixu de genji” 美国的第一关键字是「秩序」：拉赛尔‧柯克：《美国秩序的根基》[The First Keyword in the United States Is “order”: Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order], Chengguang Xuehui 承光学会 [Inherit Institute], 31 August 2021. https://www.inherit.live/post/美国的第一关键词是-秩序-拉塞尔-柯克：-美国秩序的根基. ↩

54. Zhao, “Being a Protestant Church in Contemporary Mainland China,” 29. ↩

55. Ibid., 30. ↩

56. Ibid., 5. ↩

57. Ibid., 30. ↩

58. For another study that categorises Wang’s and Yu’s political theologies within the same approach and subjects it to critique, see Bai Yucheng, “American City on a Chinese Hill: American Fundamentalism in Contemporary Chinese Christianity,” PhD diss. (Duke University, 2025). ↩

59. Wang Yi and Early Rain Covenant Church, “Ninety-Five Theses: The Reaffirmation of Our Stance on the House Church,” in Wang Yi et al., Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement, ed. Hannah Nation and J. D. Tseng (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2022), 104-124. culture, and the state. She asserts that it clearly demonstrates Wang and ERCC’s intention to be “involved in the world with its agendas” and work “within given social structures to make the world better.” 60 In the same footnote referring to the “Ninety-Five Theses,” she unequivocally expressed her understanding of Wang’s views on the relationship between Christian faith and constitutionalism: Wang has noted that “Christianity can bring democracy and human rights…but the Gospels aren’t about this…this doesn’t mean we won’t push freedom and democracy.” However, his strategy to engage in the issues shifts from the secular presumption to the Protestant Christian. For example, Wang continues to pursue his constitutionalism, and the only change to the notion of constitutionalism is that he names it Protestant Christian constitutionalism.61 Her question can be summed up as follows: Is Wang and ERCC’s public practice merely in pursuit of a Christian version of conservative constitutionalism? If so, it is fair to ask if the church giving so much attention to democratisation and liberal political reforms is just to turn China into another America, a worldly polis which largely relies on warfare as liturgy to sustain its own peace?62 Zhao accurately realises the potential critical power of Hauerwasian theology on the rightist intellectual churches in China. Although not in a Hauerwasian language, Bai Yucheng expresses similar concerns. He claims that even though Wang’s career change has introduced “Calvinism” and “the tradition of dissent of Chinese house church” to his thoughts, “the heritage of liberalism” still “permeates his social outlook and formed.”63 It “conditioned ↩

60. Ibid., 13. ↩

61. Ibid., 13n35. Citing here, Ian Johnson, The Souls of China, 206. ↩

62. To highlight the concern about the Americanisation of the church, Zhao Wenjuan particularly mentioned that Wang, Yu, and Li Baiguang were invited to meet George W. Bush at the White House in 2008. Zhao, “Being a Protestant Church in Contemporary Mainland China,” 17n45. For Hauerwas’s exposure of the liturgy meaning of warfare for the state, see Stanley Hauerwas, “Sacrificing the Sacrifices of War,” in War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity (Grand Rapids, MI.: Baker Academic, 2011), 53-70. ↩

63. Bai Yucheng, “One Foot above Liberalism,” 268. his perception of Christian public witness” and “also led to his often romanticized view of market capitalism and the American Christian right.”64 However, a possible flaw of this critical approach, which neatly places the public vision of Wang and ERCC within the liberal framework of the rightist Christians represented by Yu, is that it does not take into account the tension between the liberal-conservative camp and the churches pursuing publicisation. This leaves much room for doubt as to whether the Yoderian- Hauerwasian criticism is as applicable to the case as Zhao’s use of it. In contrast to Zhao’s typology, which lumps urban house church Christians into the same category, Alexander Chow’s analyses of intellectual Christians are more attentive to the complicity of Wang’s position and the significant differences between these urban house church members.65 He distinguishes between two major models of Calvinism in the church-state relations of urban house churches: “right defence” (weiquan 维权) and “dialogue” (duihua 对话).66 The former fits Zhao’s description of the radical house church. Wang, along with other rightist intellectuals such as Yu, was listed as a representative of this model. According to Chow, this model’s advocates widely assert “the superiority of the perspective of Calvinistic Puritans in its simultaneous pursuit of a constitutional polity and a transcendent power” and “see evangelizing culture as part of a greater vision of creating a Chinese ‘Geneva’ that can radically change China and Chinese society.”67 On the other hand, represented by the Beijing Shouwang Church’s vision of publicisation, the latter model actively seeks “constructive dialogue” with the state.68 It believes “that the church must have a more positive relationship with the civil government without compromising the gospel as the TSPM has done.”69 Chow also refers to the weiquan Christian Fan Yafeng’s ↩

64. Ibid. ↩

65. Chow, “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today.” ↩

66. Ibid., 165, 167. ↩

67. Ibid., 167. ↩

68. Ibid. ↩

69. Ibid., 168. criticism of the Shouwang Church to highlight the tension between the two approaches. After the Shouwang church had to return to outdoor worship because the space they had purchased became unusable due to the political pressure, Fan suggested that the church rightly “abandoned her approach of constructive dialogue by initiating public worship services, and its members now must be described as rights defence activists.”70 While that is for Fan “a step in the right direction,”71 provided that Shouwang church continued to insist on establishing church buildings and registration, “the return of the prodigal son” did not happen as Fan had expected. The “right defence” and “dialogue” approaches maintained the tension in their cooperation. Chow not only rightly notes that the house church’s vision of publicisation cannot simply be subsumed into the right defence model, but also implicitly shows Wang’s ambiguity between the two models. Although Wang is clearly positioned within the right defence camp, he, in distinction from Fan, is construed as representing a sympathetic response to the Shouwang model of dialogue by Christian right defence intellectuals.72 However, attentive readers may have noticed from Wang’s discussion of the publicisation and life essence of the church that his endorsement of the dialogue approach is far more than sympathy. I will return to this issue in the next chapter, which will enable us to see one of the major blind spots in the study of Wang in the English-speaking world. Now we turn to the critical voices from the Sino- theological circle. Instead of accusing Wang of departing from the fundamentalist tradition, they criticise him of being too fundamentalist. ↩

70. Ibid., 169. ↩

71. Ibid. ↩

72. Chow opens his introduction to Fan Yafeng’s critique of publicisation with the following quote: “Oddly enough, Fan Yafeng, another rights defence lawyer (like Wang Yi) who writes a great deal about covenantal theology and constitutionalism, has attacked Shouwang’s approach of dialogue.” I think the words “oddly enough” here hints at the different positions between Wang and Fan. Chow, “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today”, 13. 3.2. An Anti-Cultural Church? Chloë Starr’s study of ERCC’s “Ninety-Five Theses”73 is outstanding in that, in distinction from most studies that locate Wang in the conservative liberal and Reformed traditions, it clearly recognises crucial Lutheran elements in Wang’s ecclesiology. She points out that “[m]any of Luther’s ideas resonate in Wang’s faith: from beliefs on church and state, to grace, to the need for discipline and obedience in churches.”74 This is particularly evident in Wang’s adoption of “the language of two kingdoms” and “an Augustinian anthropology.”75 Following Luther, the fifth section of the “Theses” defines the relationship between church and state in terms of the interaction of the two kingdoms.76 It asserts that the kingdom of God has come to all nations, including China, through what Christ accomplished on the cross.77 Although already under God’s absolute sovereignty and one day facing God’s righteous judgment, earthly regimes are allowed to retain the authority of sword in their hands;78 but the church has been entrusted with the “keys to the kingdom of heaven” that is, the “spiritual authority” to preach the gospel.79 This account of two kingdoms constituted by the two authorities that originate from God’s absolute sovereignty forms the essential perspective of the principle of separation of church and state.80 In elaborating its concrete practice, Wang and the ERCC, in a way that is different from the typical use of this term by right defence Christians, introduce the martyrdom tradition of the house church. They argue that because the church submits to the authority of sword given by God, ↩

73. Chloë Starr, “Wang Yi and the 95 Theses of the Chinese Reformed Church,” Religions 7/12: 142 (2016). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7120142. ↩

74. Ibid. ↩

75. Ibid. ↩

76. Wang and Early Rain Covenant Church, “Ninety-Five Theses,” §45. ↩

77. Ibid., §41-42. ↩

78. Ibid., §46, 53. ↩

79. Ibid., §47. 55. ↩

80. Ibid., §62. even if the government abuses this authority and causes the church and believers to suffer significant losses in external interests, as long as it is only a matter of interests and physical harm, the church argues and appeals according to the law, but this still does not exempt the church and its members from the responsibility of submitting to the government.81 Despite the responsibility of submission, if it involves spiritual things, for example, if the government attempts to “manage or judge a person’s conscience, faith, and religion,” the church must be loyal to the authority of the “keys to the kingdom of heaven” entrusted to it and not give it up.82 It must therefore “walk in the way of the cross, hold firm to the church’s sovereignty and freedom of faith, and protect the believer’s freedom of conscience.”83 Starr sees the “Theses” as a “timely stance on the gospel” in the particular context of China.84 The sacrifice of traditional house churches in the past “has given a strong moral voice” which now is used to protect “the interests of other citizens” and offered theological “impetus and strength” for contemporary legal activism in China.85 She, however, worries that the proposed absolute separation of church and state inspired by Lutheran two kingdoms theology may lead to “a potential inflexibility in dealing with the state,” and its stance of speaking on behalf of the entire family church tradition ignores the different positions within each family church on the relationship between church and state.86 Furthermore, she suggests that its stance of speaking on behalf of the entire house church tradition ignores the different positions within each house church on the relationship between church and state.87 Some of them may ↩

81. Wang Yi and Early Rain Covenant Church, “Women dui jiating jiaohui lichang de chongshen: Jiushiwu tiao” 我们对家庭教会立场的重申：九十五条 [The Reaffirmation of Our Stance on the House Church], in Wang, Jidu shi zhu, 166. I use my translation here because the English translation I quote elsewhere relatively downplays the martyrdom aspect and even adds some liberal interpretation from the right-defence perspective. ↩

82. Wang and Early Rain Covenant Church, “Ninety-Five Theses,” §67-68. ↩

83. Ibid., §93. ↩

84. Starr, “Wang Yi and the 95 Theses of the Chinese Reformed Church.” ↩

85. Ibid. ↩

86. Ibid. ↩

87. Ibid. be more willing to take the “third way” or maintain a more ambiguous relationship with the TSPM. Starr’s criticism of the Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms in the “Theses” essentially stems from her sympathy for the liberal theological advocate of the “sinicisation of Christianity” in China. She believes that the use of sinicisation to consolidate official Chinese religious control and patriotic ideology is a “misrepresentation” of it.88 Against the background of the national crisis in the early 20th century, for many liberal theologians who were also committed to “evangelizing China and to ‘following Jesus’,” not caring about the sinicisation of Christianity would have been negligent.89 Furthermore, in line with many contemporary Sino- theology scholars, Starr hints at the affirmation of contextualisation inherent in Kuyperianism.90 She argues that the “Kuyperian refining of spheres of sovereignty and the function of government itself” is not clear in the “Theses”, and it has ignored “the more nationalist aspects of Calvinist thought.”91 Corresponding to Wang and ERCC’s resistance to contextualisation is their ignorance of the cultural load of foreign religions, and they seem to naively construe what they believe “as a neutral, culture-free Christianity.”92 3.3. Conclusion: The Interpretative Chaos of Wang Yi’s “Ninety-Five Theses” So far, based on our review, we can see that there is a tension, if not contradiction, between critical scholarly readings on ERCC’s “Ninety-Five Theses” and Wang’s other writings. On the one hand, the pro-fundamentalist critics argue that Wang and ERCC have drawn the church too close to secular culture and politics and lost the true church’s countercultural form of life. On the other hand, Starr has expressed a view widely held among Sino-theological scholars, which ↩

88. Ibid. ↩

89. Ibid. ↩

90. Ibid. ↩

91. Ibid. ↩

92. Ibid. worries that the house church’s antithetical stance may pull itself too far from the Chinese state and nationalism and lay unnecessary obstacles in the way of the contextualisation of Christianity. This paradox is most clearly demonstrated in the two critical approaches’ reference to Zhao Zichen. Zhao Wenjuan believes that the radical house church has inherited the May Fourth intellectuals’ concern for social reform, ultimately guiding them back to Zhao Zichen’s old path.93 However, Starr asserts that the house church’s absolute separation of church and state has led them to fail to appreciate Zhao Zichen and Chinese liberal theologians’ nation-saving consciousness in the context of their national crisis.94 Interestingly, despite these differences, both approaches lead to a critique of the American liberal implications of Wang’s views on the state-church relationship, but propose diametrically opposed reponses to it. In the next chapter, I will further explore the causes of this interpretive confusion and argue that it stems primarily from the complexity of Wang’s dual backgrounds as a conservative constitutionalist and a house church pastor. His experience as a human rights lawyer is so outstanding and attractive to researchers that his self-correction and self-criticism of his early constitutionalism has largely seen overlooked. This has led to a Kuyperian framework dominating academic interpretations of Wang’s ecclesiology and a tendency to underestimate the importance of his increasing drawing resources from other theological traditions in his later thinking. Even Starr’s study, which has insightfully recognised the Lutheran element of Wang’s theology, still regards Kuyperian constitutionalism as the keynote of Wang’s political discourses, inconsistently juxtaposing his pastoral language, which are mainly based on the problematic separatist theory of the two kingdoms.95 I aim to challenge this dominant interpretive framework and demonstrate how Wang’s pastoral experience has enabled him to ↩

93. Zhao Wenjuan, “Being a Protestant Church in Contemporary Mainland China,” 14, 16-18. ↩

94. Starr, “Wang Yi and the 95 Theses of the Chinese Reformed Church.” ↩

95. “If Wang insists on a transcendental source for secular values such as liberty or constitutionalism, in writing for Christian audiences, he offers a nuanced version of freedom of conscience.” Ibid. have a broader theological heritage. The following chapter will demonstrate the deficiencies of Kuyperianism as an overarching interpretative framework for Wang’s ecclesiology, and explore how the Anabaptist tradition of martyrdom has influenced Wang and transformed his imagination of the public through the long-term practice of faithful disobedience in Chinese house churches. Chapter 4 Give Me a Principle, and I Can Lift the World: Kuyperian Interpretations of Wang Yi and Their Limits 1. Kuyperian Defences of Wang Yi Chen Mingzhi and Jarred Jung have each proposed Kuyperian defences for Wang Yi and ERCC in response to critiques arising from different quarters. Although both approaches draw on the same intellectual lineage and converge in several key respects, they ultimately diverge in their stances on the sinicisation of Christianity. Through an engagement with Xu Ximian’s analysis of the role of Kuyperianism within the agenda of sinicisation, this divergence can be traced to an internal tension inherent in Abraham Kuyper’s own theoretical framework. This, in turn, suggests that an interpretive approach relying exclusively on Kuyperianism may be insufficient to capture a crucial dimension of the critical force at work in Wang’s public theology, especially in relation to his anti-sinicisation stance. The preceding chapters have shown that Kuyperianism served as a crucial intellectual bridge for right-wing Christian thinkers such as Wang and Yu Jie, facilitating the integration of preexisting political commitments with newly adopted religious convictions in the early stages of their conversion. Central to this process were Kuyper’s concepts of “common grace,” “sphere sovereignty,” and the “church as organism,” which came to constitute key components of their theoretical vocabulary. Before engaging with contemporary scholars’ Kuyperian interpretations of Wang’s political theology, the present chapter therefore offers a focused conceptual clarification of these foundational terms. ↩