This article is Part 4 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. It is reproduced with permission from Dr. Ruth Okediji, faculty director.
In Part 3, we traced a modern crucible in which Christianity was alternately utilized and resisted. Here, we follow how a Western dispute—often summarized as “liberal” and “fundamentalist”—was transplanted and refracted in China. What arrived was not a photocopy, but two enduring instincts that shaped institutions, preaching, and the public face of Christian faith.
Track One: Social Modernizers (campus, city, institutions)
In the early twentieth century, Christian educators and organizers in China worked to align faith with social renewal. Universities and colleges associated with Christian work, together with organizations like the Chinese YMCA/YWCA, invested in:
- higher education and leadership formation,
- public health and social service,
- student movements, inter-school forums, and civic habits.
The instinct was incarnational and institutional: inhabit the city’s needs, teach virtue and responsibility, and show that Christian ethics could help a society in transition make sense of law, citizenship, family life, and work.
Strengths: Credible bridges into wider society (education, medicine, social work); scholarship and translation that connected Christian thought to Chinese questions; leadership pipelines that placed Christians in conversations beyond church walls.
Blind spots: Confidence in culture sometimes thinned confession and catechesis; proximity to prestige made co-option a risk; suspicion toward revival spirituality could calcify into a bias against evangelism.
Track Two: Evangelistic Planters (chapel, Scripture, revival)
Alongside the institutional stream, another current emphasized conversion, holiness, and resilient local fellowships. Agencies such as the China Inland Mission (CIM) prioritized itinerant evangelism, Scripture distribution, and chapel planting in market towns and rural counties. Later, Chinese revival preachers—notably John Sung (Song Shangjie) and Wang Mingdao—pressed repentance and discipleship with searching clarity. Their communities learned worship, accountability, and endurance.
Strengths: Clear proclamation; visible conversions; formation of disciplined fellowships; capacity to stand when formal institutions were constrained; a holiness emphasis that guarded against triumphalism.
Blind spots.: Anti-intellectual tendencies and suspicion of scholarship; ambivalence about institution-building and public-facing service; risk of sectarianism when boundary-keeping overshadowed catholic breadth.
Not Either/Or: Chinese Indigenization and Unity Efforts
Chinese Christian leaders did more than choose sides. Many sought a church in China that was truly Chinese—not a denominational franchise of the West—and at the same time attentive to the global church. Cooperative efforts (e.g., the Church of Christ in China) attempted to hold together confession, mission, and common life across imported denominational lines. Financial responsibility, Chinese leadership, and local liturgical voice were treated as essential, not optional.
This work of indigenization complicates any simple map of “liberal” vs. “fundamentalist.” What mattered to many Chinese pastors and teachers was whether the gospel could take root in Chinese soil without losing its depth—and whether Western arguments could be received as tools rather than total frameworks.
“Another May Fourth” Inside the Church?
The divide was never merely doctrinal; it was method and imagination.
- Is the primary sign of Christian presence the chapel or the classroom?
- Should a Christian university justify itself by public goods or by explicit confession—or both?
- Can a revivalist cherish scholarship, and can a scholar cherish revival?
China needed both: the cross and the city, catechesis and compassion, evangelistic urgency and patient institution-building. When these were held together—pastor and professor, altar call and after-school program—the church gained depth and credibility.
When Storms Came
Mid-century pressures exposed each track’s limits. Institutional confidence discovered it could not guarantee protection or permanence. Revival piety discovered it needed theological depth, accountable leadership, and mutual care to avoid fragmentation. Where communities learned from the other track’s gifts, they endured with greater steadiness. Suffering, oddly, proved ecumenical.
Lessons to Carry Forward
- Hold the tensions on purpose. Evangelism without public virtue shrinks the gospel; public virtue without confession hollows it out.
- Honor local conscience. Methods will vary by region and season; unity does not require uniformity of approach.
- Form leaders for both tracks. Preachers who can read a room and a book; scholars who can teach a class and love a neighbor; organizers who can pray.
- Translate without surrender. Let Western debates serve Chinese questions; don’t let them swallow them.
Why This Still Matters
Today’s conversations—urban ministry, intellectual life, social engagement, the place of revival—still echo these two currents. If the liberal–fundamentalist argument arrived as a dispute, it should remain as a discipline: a reminder to seek catholic breadth and evangelical depth, not a license to harden into camps. China’s church has flourished most when it refused small binaries and chose both fidelity and neighbor-love.
Next in the series (Part 5): Since 1949—policy swings (hard/soft line), the “Christianity Fever” after 1978, and center–local variance.
