Bathsheba as an Object Lesson: Gender, Modernity and Biblical Examples in Wang Mingdao's Sermons and Writings

Abstract

Western and Chinese scholarship on Wang Mingdao has with good reason focused exclusively on the apologetic aspect of Wang's ministry, his polemics against modernist theology and his resistance to the Chinese Communist regime in the 1950s. Yet a significant, albeit smaller, portion of his writings and preaching emphasised practical Christian living. In Wang Mingdao Wenku, a seven-volume collection of Wang's sermons and writings, there are a total of twenty-one articles, sermons or allegorical stories dealing specifically with women, marriage or family relations: six from the 1930s, fourteen from the 1940s and one from 1950. They span Wang's most productive years, and some deal with issues specific to China's dramatic social changes in the Republican era, such as concubinage, widowhood and women's fashion. Many of these profound changes, especially changes in gender relations, were advanced by the May Fourth Movement. One sees in Wang's writings and sermons on marriage, women and family relations a concrete example of the indigenisation of Christianity in China, as this Chinese Christian leader wrestled with the implications of his Christian faith in a process complicated by China's encounter with Western modernity.