Encountering China

The Evolution of Timothy Richard's Missionary Thought (1870–1891)

Andrew T. Kaiser

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532664151
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Welsh Baptist missionary to China Timothy Richard (1845-1919) was once widely regarded as "one of the greatest missionaries whom any branch of the Church, whether Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, or Protestant, has sent to China." Today, few have heard of Richard and his remarkable lifetime of ministry in China. As the first critical examination of Richard's missionary identity, this groundbreaking historical study traces the narrative of Richard's early life in Wales and his formative first two decades of service in China. Richard's adaptations to the common evangelistic techniques of his day, his interest in learning from grassroots Chinese sectarian religions, his integration of evangelism and famine relief during the North China Famine (1876-79), his strategic decision to evangelize Chinese elites, and his complicated relationships with Hudson Taylor and other China missionaries are all explored through the writings and personal letters of Richard and his contemporaries. The resulting portrait represents a significant revision to existing interpretations of this influential China missionary, emphasizing his deep empathy for the people of China and his abiding evangelical identity. Readable and relevant, Encountering China provides a new generation with an introduction to this lost legend of China mission.

1

Introduction

Researching Timothy Richard

In her early work on the Christian colleges in China, Jessie Lutz drew attention to the challenges to effective cross-cultural communication inherent in the missionary encounter with “the other-ness of Chinese culture and people.”1 For most nineteenth-century missionaries to China, their ties to Western cultural norms led them initially to view this other-ness in negative or even hostile terms.2 The hoped-for conversion of the other required that the missionaries learn to communicate effectively across this gulf of cultural other-ness. Ironically, crossing these cultural boundaries—“translating the message”—involved the missionary in a multi-directional adaptive process whose goal of changing others necessitated at least some degree of change on the part of the missionary as well.3 This process of mutual transformation that results when groups of individuals from different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact is known as acculturation.4 Beginning with their initial struggles to learn a new language, missionaries to China were forced to divest themselves of the culture they wore so comfortably. While the degree of resistance or acquiescence in this process of acculturation varied greatly, effective cross-cultural communication ultimately demanded at least some degree of accommodation—linguistic, social, and in some ways even religious—from every missionary. Ostensibly focused on the transformation of the Chinese people they had come to evangelize, the missionaries themselves were being transformed.

While nearly all China missionaries shared this experience of change and adjustment, they did not have the modern language of cross-cultural communication to describe their transformation. Prior to the twentieth-century development of a functional anthropological understanding of plural cultures, culture was merely a gloss for civilization.5 And yet, despite the absence of the terminology, the phenomenon itself was readily evident as different missionaries to China negotiated their cultural accommodation in different ways. Some, such as Martha Foster Crawford of the American Southern Baptist mission, developed such a marked degree of empathy for the Chinese context that they experienced a “cultural conversion.”6 Having devoted several decades of her life to the civilizing mission project and its attempt to introduce Western and specifically American Southern cultural norms as a precursor or companion to the gospel, Crawford in 1883 abandoned all such efforts and, under the influence of fellow Shandong missionary Alfred G. Jones of the English Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), committed herself to a deeply indigenous “three-self” model of mission that focused on serving and respecting the Chinese Christian community.7 For others, such as Eva Jane Price with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in Shanxi, the increased empathy that emerged from her growing awareness of the hardness of Chinese life resulted in a still stronger push for the civilizing aspects of mission that she believed would be the natural by-product of evangelical conversion.8

In his 1997 book The Conversion of Missionaries, Lian Xi brought a new level of sophistication to discussions of missionary adaptations in the face of Chinese cultural distinctness. This study of the interactions between Republican China, the American Protestant missionary community in China, and American sending churches in the first half of the twentieth century focused on “the unraveling of nineteenth-century missionary mentality” and its relation to the rise of American theological liberalism.9 Throughout the book, Lian Xi highlighted the ways in which cultural differences were negotiated by various subjects, drawing attention to two kinds of ironic missionary conversion. The first referred to the intentional and unintentional “reflux influence” or “reverse missionary impulse” of the missionaries on their home constituents, and the ways in which missionaries converted their own communities by problematizing certain theological assumptions and bringing a new complexity to long-cherished perceptions of the world.10 The second kind of conversion referred to the ways in which sympathizing missionaries themselves were converted from their exclusivist conceptions of Christian salvation to embrace more theologically liberal motivations for mission.

For Edward Hume, Frank Rawlinson, and Pearl Buck, the three subjects of Lian Xi’s study, the transformation was particularly acute. In sympathy with Chinese nationalist movements, and out of respect for China’s religious and cultural traditions, these three abandoned their earlier commitments to Christian conversion by rejecting the traditional salvific justification of evangelical mission and preserving only “the moral and social message of Christianity.”11 As Lian Xi makes clear, the comparatively extreme nature of their transformations in the face of Chinese other-ness was made possible by a number of significant contextual factors that did not pertain to the earlier nineteenth-century experience of Crawford, Price, or their peers. Confronted with the rapid institutionalization of China mission during the “golden period” of the first two decades of the twentieth century, the growing influence of theological liberalism within the American home bases, and the powerful rise of Chinese nationalism, Lian Xi’s subjects “began to cast doubts on their Christian missions.”12

Andrew Walls’s article, “The Multiple Conversions of Timothy Richard,” offers a similar exploration of acculturation—this time focusing on how the Welsh missionary Timothy Richard (1845–1919) responded to his encounter with China.13 Having served in China with the BMS from 1870 to 1915, Richard is best known for his political, educational, and literary contributions near the end of the nineteenth century. In Richard, Walls identifies yet another kind of missionary conversion or, in his terms, “multiple conversions”—referring both to Richard’s desire to see the rapid conversion of many Chinese people to Christianity, as well as to the series of reactive adaptations that transformed Richard’s own understanding and practice of mission during his years in China.

Like so many of the Protestant missionaries in China, Richard’s acculturation and its resultant effects on his idea of mission evolved over time. Raised, baptized, and educated within Welsh nonconformity, Richard’s intense experiences in China—his isolation in the interior, frequent interaction with Chinese religious leaders, and intimate involvement in the North China Famine (1876–1878)—produced in him a deep sense of identification with the local people. Beyond conventional missionary acculturation, this paradigmatic shift in sympathies combined with his evangelical interest in conversion to produce a series of adaptations to his missionary methods that made Richard, at the halfway mark in his career in China, the subject of strong criticisms from his closest colleagues in the BMS.

Richard is a particularly fruitful subject for exploring the nature of missionary adaptation in response to cross-cultural encounter. Unlike some China missionaries, much of Richard’s early years were spent in what was at the time considered China’s remote “interior”—in places such as Taiyuan, Shanxi and Qingzhou, Shandong, far from the culturally reinforcing foreign enclaves of the coastal treaty ports. As he pioneered these two fields, Richard spent years living with little or no foreign contact in communities noted for their extensive and active communities of religious sectarians. Additionally, the pioneering nature of much of his early work in China gave him an unusual degree of freedom to experiment with his adaptations and put them into practic...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abstract
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part One: Richard Encountering China
• Part Two: Richard Encountering Famine
• Part Three: Richard Encountering Conflict
• Appendix 1: Selected List of Chinese Terms
• Appendix 2: Publications by Timothy Richard
• Bibliography