Urban Intellectual Christianity

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the development in the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century of intellectuals in the study of Christianity with a stronger faith commitment than their predecessors discussed in Chapter 3. Whilst many of these individuals would initially see themselves as being cultural Christians, they would later shift and see themselves as Christian scholars (Jidutu xueren) who serve as elders and pastors of local urban intellectual churches and develop their theological engagements based on the Calvinist tradition. Moreover, in contrast to the cultural Christians who spent most of their more formative years during the Cultural Revolution, this new generation of Christian intellectuals was born towards the end of the Cultural Revolution and was often more shaped by—and may even have been part of—the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.