China’s Christianity: From Missionary to Indigenous Church, edited by Anthony E. Clark

From the editor's introduction it appears that this volume arose out of an academic meeting and it bears the marks of its origin in its diversity.The contributions are mainly on "China's Christianity" (a nice way around the the linguistic trap of "Chinese") in the twentieth century, and cover a remarkable range of Christian denominations and geographic regions.This is both a positive and a negative: it illustrates well the complexities, but almost forbids generalization about not only "China" but also "Christianity."Anthony Clark makes a heroic attempt in his introduction to deal with the terminological and historical dilemmas raised by this heterogeneity, but is wisely satisfied with a range of reflections rather than any firm conclusions on issues such as missionary "invasion."He raises one question that has long bothered me: the attachment of Chinese Christians to Western forms of architecture and forms of worship.In my view, his tentative solution of a Chinese Christian "Way" that is "aesthetically and culturally largely Western" (6) creates more problems than it solves.Is Christianity in its historical origins and essence "Western" at all?The first Christian missionaries to China were Eastern Christians.Early Catholic church architecture in China was Iberian and strongly influenced by Islamic, rather than Roman, forms.Indeed, there were and are many varieties of "Western" Christianity.Perhaps the answer lies in the defensiveness and somewhat desperate clinging to orthodoxy, as they perceive it, of persecuted and "underground" Catholics described so vividly by Jean-Paul Wiest in his contribution.Or is it a proud display of an assumed modernity?I hope I am not showing my bias in beginning with the one contribution on the Jesuits of the pre-modern period, Audrey Seah's study of the 1670 Chinese Catholic Missal (Chapter Three).A scholarly examination of Ludovico Buglio's Chinese translations of the liturgical books, and even more his thirty volume translation of Aquinas' Summa theologica is long overdue, and this is a good beginning.There are a few problems over dates and identifications-surely the romanization for St. Sylvester, clumsy though it be, is purely phoneticand I disagree with the translation of a key phrase in the offertory as an overt reference to the Rites Controversy: "rather than to relatives."I would read it inclusively not exclusively as a direct translation of the Latin suisque omnibus, "as well as for all our families and friends" (111): it is in classical Chinese not baihua.Furthermore, 1670 was a time of truce in the Rites Controversy after Rome's gnomic judgment in 1669, that both contradictory decrees on Chinese Rites still held "according to the questions, circumstances and doubts raised."I am looking forward to more from this author on this topic.