From Christ to Confucius

Abstract

This book examines how German Protestant and Catholic missionaries reconsidered their attitudes toward Confucianism and, more broadly, Chinese culture. In the 1860s, German missionaries attacked traditional Chinese values as antithetical to their goals of converting China to Christianity, and congregational leadership lay solely in German hands. By the 1930s, missionaries commented that Christianity’s global survival—both in China and the West—depended on a synthesis of Christ and Confucius. Even before they were forced by the Communists to leave in the early 1950s, the German missionaries had relinquished leadership to Chinese clergy. Why did these institutional and ideological shifts occur? How did German missionaries come to repudiate their former beliefs and tactics? This book argues that German missionaries, since their first entry into China, considered their missionary work in China as a failure. Propelled by failure, the German missionaries sought to reform their practices. These missionaries began to challenge Germany’s imperial project and even abandon central theological ideas such as the exclusivity of Christian salvation. Chinese Christians were crucial partners in the process, pushing the German missionaries to relinquish their previous claims of Christian superiority. In time, this thinking catalyzed a revolution among European Christians about the nature of Christianity itself. This book sheds light on the roots of Christianity’s global shift from being a predominantly European religion in the nineteenth century to a non-European one by the twenty-first century.