Earthen Vessels and Transcendent Power: American Presbyterians in China, 1837-1952 (review)

Abstract

Reviews 59 G. Thompson Brown. Earthen Vessels and TranscendentPower: American Presbyterians in China, 1837-1952. American Society ofMissiology Series, no. 25. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1997. xxiii, 428 pp. Hardcover, isbn 1-57075-150-1. Thompson Brown's knowledge ofthe American Presbyterian missionary movement in East Asia is extensive and intimate. He was born in China, where his parents ' missionary service spanned the tumultuous half-century from the old empire through the Nationalist period and on up to the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. As a young boy in China, Brown experienced the nationalist revolution of the 1920s and 1930s. His own missionary career was in Korea, and he later served as director of the International Mission Program of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and as China Consultant to the Church during the 1980s. Brown has previously drawn on these experiences to write articles on the missionary movement in China and Korea and a book on the revival of Christianity in contemporary China. For this volume on the Presbyterian Church's missionary work in China, he has carefully researched the archives and official records of the northern (PCUSA) and southern (PCUS) branches of the denomination to provide the reader with a comprehensive account ofthe mission from its inception in 1837 to its expulsion from China in 1952. As Brown traces the history ofPresbyterian missions in China, he provides the reader with two essential contexts: the developments within the home church that affected mission work and the key events and changes, many of them quite dramatic, that occurred in the host country of China in these 115 years. While these accounts cannot capture all the complexities of their subjects, they are sufficient to highlight the opportunities and problems faced by the missionaries as they sought to create a Christian church in China and promote far-reaching changes in the politics and society that would nurture that church. From the beginning, there were controversies in the Presbyterian Church over the nature ofmission work. Should it be undertaken by the church itselfor by independent missionary societies such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions? In 1837 the General Assembly of the denomination decided on the former position and chose China as its initial mission field because ofits size, the availability of a common written language through which to reach the masses with printed literature, and the almost total lack ofpracticing Chris9 by University t^ans ^eK xheri) as superior Western military organization and weaponry opened up China in the 1840s and 1850s, Presbyterian missionaries had to find a satisfactory working relationship with the colonial powers that would provide a protective framework for their evangelizing efforts and yet not tarnish their work 6o China Review International: Vol. 6, No. i, Spring 1999 as being imperialistic. At the same time, the question ofpresbyteries in China arose. Should presbyteries be in the form ofa church government imposed on the Chinese Christian community, should they be linked with the mother church in the United States, and should missionaries be members ofthese Chinese presbyteries ? The General Assembly answered affirmatively in each case—decisions that were later to bedevil the missions when nationalism became the rallying cry of the Chinese. The Presbyterian Church and its mission work in China split in the 1860s as a result ofthe American civil war. The Southern branch sent its first missionary to China in 1867 and established its missions along the Grand Canal in the lower Yangzi valley province of Jiangsu and to a lesser extent in Shandong. Despite the conflict at home, the Northern and Southern branches in China cooperated in evangelistic campaigns, in establishing institutions ofhigher education, in publishing a common weekly newspaper, and in establishing a united Chinese Presbyterian Church. Arriving later, Southern Presbyterian missionaries usually patterned their mission work and structures after their northern counterparts. Brown's study is divided into two parts, covering, respectively, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But this is more than a chronological convenience. A qualitative change in missions accompanied the entrance into a new century. The Boxer Rebellion of 1900, with its attacks on numerous Chinese and Western Christians and the martyrdom among them, "tested...