Editor’s Note: What holds from one era to the next? Reading across time has helped me. Recently, I revisited early ChinaSource essays that shaped our thinking—John Chang’s Striving toward the Chinese Century, Carol Hamrin’s Thinking about China, and two pieces by Samuel Ling—Chinese Intellectuals and the Search for Modern China, and Putting Christianity on the Map for Chinese Intellectuals. Alongside these, I also returned to Carol’s more recent reflection, Fervent Faith and Audacious Hope. As I read across these voices, I couldn’t help but ask: What would they say today?
Samuel Ling’s 2025 Harvard Law School lecture, adapted here as a series, feels like a timely answer to that broader question. Sam doesn’t offer certainties—he offers a map: four guiding questions traced across four axes—China, the West, the church, and ideas. He names tensions many of us feel (“everything you can say about China and the Chinese church, the opposite is also true”) and invites us to think alongside them rather than against them.
Read Carol Hamrin (1999, 2021) and Samuel Ling (1990s, 2025) together and a shared posture emerges: patient analysis, courageous hope, and practical love. That is the spirit in which we offer this series—as we look toward the 2040s with neither triumphalism nor despair but with steady faith and good work.
China and Christian Faith (Part 1): Four Questions for the 2040s
This article is Part 1 of a seven-part series adapted from a lecture delivered at Harvard Law School on May 1, 2025, at the Program on Biblical Law and Christian Legal Studies. Reproduced with permission from Dr. Ruth Okediji, faculty director.
This series proposes a way to think toward the 2040s by asking four guiding questions along four intersecting axes: China, the West, the church, and ideas. The aim is not to predict outcomes but to cultivate a watchful posture, attentive to how history, institutions, and thought shape the possibilities before us.
Four Guiding Questions
- What kind of China will it be in the 2040s?
Will China be the lone superpower or one of several? Will governance lean toward confidence or insecurity, openness or control? These choices shape the civic space in which people live and in which churches worship, serve, and bear witness. - What kind of Christianity will it be—and what will the West look like?
Christianity is often perceived as Western, yet it is a global faith whose center of gravity keeps shifting. By the 2040s, how will the West have changed culturally and spiritually, and how will those changes affect the forms and language of Christian faith that Chinese people encounter? - What will China’s response to Christianity be twenty years from now?
Modern Chinese history shows alternating curiosity and resistance—from rejection to guarded tolerance to periods of serious intellectual engagement. Which posture will predominate, and how might it differ from national policy to provincial practice to the neighborhood level? - How will Christian thought be received, appropriated, and transformed?
Beyond numbers and regulations, how will Christian ideas—about God, humanity, society, and hope—be taken up within Chinese cultural life? What will be preserved, what contested, and what rearticulated in distinctly Chinese ways?
Why Questions, Not Forecasts
Questions discipline us to observe before we prescribe. They help avoid two temptations: triumphalism (assuming our preferred narrative is inevitable) and fatalism (assuming the future is fixed against the gospel). A wiser posture is to stand at a watch post—patient, attentive, and theologically grounded (cf. Habakkuk 2).
Four Axes for Reading the Present
- China. An ancient civilization navigating humiliation, reform, revolution, and resurgence. The search for modernity and identity has mixed confidence and woundedness, science and superstition, openness and control.
- The West. From imperial confidence to disillusion; from Christendom’s influence to a contested public square. The American story includes the rise of evangelical power and subsequent soul-searching.
- The church. Protestant missions brought evangelistic fervor and social vision—and with them the liberal–fundamentalist divide. Chinese churches have grown through suffering and through periods of civic space, with marked diversity across regions and networks.
- Ideas. Christianity is also a body of thought—creation, sin, redemption, justice, and hope. Across the past century and a half, Chinese intellectual life has at times rejected these ideas as foreign and at other times engaged them with genuine curiosity.
A Word About Method
I like to say: everything you can say about China and the Chinese church, the opposite is also true. Tightening is followed by breathing room; suspicion coexists with sincere engagement; numerical growth can mask intellectual thinness, while small communities may carry deep thought and costly love. To name such tensions without panic is already to think more faithfully and to pray more wisely.
This series will therefore sketch decisive moments and patterns rather than attempt encyclopedic coverage. My standpoint is that of an evangelical Presbyterian who cares about the life of the mind and the health of the church. The purpose is not to score points for one camp or another, but to watch and to think along these four lines.
What this Series Will Cover
- Part 2: Traditional China’s worldview and Christianity’s early encounters—Confucianism, Daoism/folk religion, Buddhism, the classification of “heterodoxy,” and why Matteo Ricci was received as a clockmaker.
- Part 3: Crisis and critique (1862–1927)—two anti-Christian Movements, May Fourth imports, Chen Duxiu’s turn to Marxism, and the Levenson/Cohen thesis.
- Part 4: Two tracks in China—how the liberal–fundamentalist divide was transplanted; Yenching/Chinese YMCA vs. CIM; revivalists John Sung and Wang Mingdao.
- Part 5: Since 1949—policy swings (hard/soft line), the “Christianity Fever” after 1978, and center–local variance.
- Part 6: The West reconsidered—American turns, the 1976 “Year of the Evangelical,” deconstruction, and the rise of compassionate practice.
- Part 7: Periphery and center—diaspora feedback loops, scenarios for the 2040s, and a posture of watchfulness.
Next in the series (Part 2): Traditional China’s worldview and its early encounters with Christianity—three traditions, “heterodoxy,” and why Matteo Ricci was first welcomed as a clockmaker.
