John Song: Modern Chinese Christianity and the Making of a New Man, by Daryl R. Ireland.

Abstract

Until now, scholars have remembered the story of Chinese revivalist John Song (Song Shangjie) primarily in the form of variations on a single theme: that of Song’s dramatic encounter with Jesus and resultant conversion experience while a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York, of his facing discrimination under modernist professors who lured him into a mental institution, and of his returning to China to propagate a fundamentalist expression of Christianity through his influential revivals. Daryl Ireland, in John Song: Modern Chinese Christianity and the Making of a New Man, draws on previously unreleased archival material to promote a different version of the story: one featuring Song’s repeated revising of his own faith testimony. Ireland makes the case that Song’s continual reinvention of himself corresponded to the cultural movement in twentieth-century China centered on renewal on both the national and individual levels.The introduction, subtitled “The Quest to Become New,” features the May Fourth Movement, beginning in 1919 and building on the larger New Culture Movement, in which proponents sought to modernize all of China in order to strengthen the nation and overcome vulnerability to foreign oppression. In chapter 1 Ireland reinterprets Song’s sojourn in New York, including at the Bloomingdale Hospital for mental patients. Ireland unveils accounts from Song’s personal journal about intimate spiritual interactions with an all-consuming figure Song called “the Mother,” whose identity apparently combined those of three women accompanying Jesus in the Gospel of Luke: Mary, Jesus’ mother; Mary Magdalene; and Susanna (23). Song’s understanding of the Mother evokes the deities Guanyin and the Queen Mother of the West associated with Chinese Buddhist and indigenous cosmology (34).Ireland asserts in chapter 2 that it was in China, after conversing with missionary W. B. Cole, that Song truly came to view his New York experience as an example of Jesus’s intervention—rather than the Mother’s— and also as a conservative victory in the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy (37). Ireland claims that Song’s career as an evangelist was characterized by his repeated reinterpretation of his testimony, in addition to his strategy to invite the hundreds of thousands who attended his revivals to likewise sever ties with their past and become new. In chapter 3 Ireland describes Song’s adoption of a three-step revivalist method of preaching through the Bethel Mission, as well as techniques associated with traditional Chinese storytelling (74, 78). Chapters 4 and 5 describe Song’s ministry as an independent, itinerant revivalist, marked by wild popularity and significant expansion among the “petty urbanites” (114–15). Chapter 6 highlights the ways in which Song’s scientific education—including a PhD in chemistry—afforded him leeway to promote a supernatural spirituality which the government deemed superstitious, but which women often found salient (156). Chapter 7 emphasizes Song’s faith healing, an alternative route to the bodily renewal which those longing to become New Men and New Women so fervently sought (202). Due to its expansive reach, the expression of Christianity Song promoted—associated with traveling Bible teachers, supernatural healing, and urban life—remains the prevalent form in China and its Southeast Asian diaspora today (204–5, 207).This book offers a nuanced portrait of Song’s ministry and introduces a fresh perspective on his conversion. In retelling Song’s story, Ireland compellingly highlights the influence of women on Song’s work, including his sister (148); his female supervisors at the Bethel Mission (183–84); Mrs. Guan, a woman from whom Song willingly receives spiritual correction (136); and the many Singaporean women serving on evangelistic bands in response to his invitation (145). Ireland also underscores Song’s penchant for applying feminine imagery to himself and to Jesus (127, 148–49, 201). One question I would raise relates to Ireland’s interpretation of Song’s relationship with the Mother. Ireland asserts that Song eventually came to realize that “it was not her, but Jesus Christ” with whom he had interacted at Bloomingdale (51). Given Song’s account of the Mother as one who revealed to him “the failures of Jesus Christ” (23), however, I find it difficult to imagine Song conflating Jesus and the Mother. In light of Song’s claim that individuals who “invoke the spirits” thereby “become the subject of them” (192), I wonder if Song reinterpreted at least some aspects of his connection to the Mother not as union with Jesus, but with a malevolent spirit. Nevertheless, with its groundbreaking research and captivating style, John Song constitutes an invaluable scholarly contribution. I highly recommend this book to professors of World Christianity and church history, and also to seminary students interested in the development of Chinese Christianity.