Assessing Christianity in Contemporary China

Thirty-five years ago this week, I made my first of three delightful visits to China and first-hand contact with Christians there. My last trip to China was in 2004, and in the 18 years since then there have been some definite changes: both increased persecution and increased growth.

Grace Church, Shanghai

Visiting Grace Church in Shanghai (1987)

In August 1987, I went to an academic meeting in Hong Kong. When the meeting ended, rather than fly directly back to Japan as originally planned, I decided to take the train to Guangzhou (Canton) and fly from there to Shanghai—and then from there to Nagasaki three days later.

On Sunday morning, Aug. 23, I hailed a taxi and showed the driver the address of what in English is called Grace Church. He took me there without difficulty, and it turned out to be a delightful morning. I was greeted (in English) by an elderly gentleman and then introduced to a Mr. Wu.

Mr. Wu sat by me and translated the sermon during the worship service, which was attended by 1,500~2,000 people. After I treated him to a nice Sunday dinner at a local restaurant, he took me to see the first Baptist church built in Shanghai. His grandfather was pastor there in the 1920s.

Grace Church was originally a Baptist church also, but it was forced to close in 1966 at the beginning of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Four years after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, the church was able to reopen, and from then until 1987, the church had baptized 1,600 people.

Hearing Christian Philosophers in Beijing (1994)

My second trip to China was in October 1994 when I was able to attend a fascinating symposium of Christian philosophers from the United States and philosophers at Peking University.

(This year, Peking [the old spelling of Beijing] University was ranked [here] the best university in China and the 12^th best in the world.)

I was not only impressed with the Christian philosophers, particularly Alvin Plantinga,* who had come from the U.S. but also by the brilliance of the Chinese philosophers, who were eager to learn more about Christianity. I was told that one or more of them were “crypto-Christians.”

Visiting Churches in Shandong (2004)

Shandong (Shantung) is a province of the People’s Republic of China on that nation’s eastern coast, the part of China closest to South Korea.

On the last day of July 2004, June and I left Japan, which had been our home for one month shy of a full 38 years. We took the two-hour 45-minute flight from Fukuoka, where we had lived for 36 years, to Qingdao on the eastern coast of Shandong Province.

The next day we made a three-hour trip to Penglai (Tengchow) and visited the church Lottie Moon first attended in China. (If you don’t know who Lottie Moon was, see this 12/26/12 blog post.) We had a delightful conversation (in Japanese) with Rev. Shin, the 80-year-old pastor there.

The four-hour return trip to Qingdao took us by the inland city of Pingdu (Pingtu), where Lottie Moon started a church, and, appropriately, the senior pastor was Rev. Wang, a woman. (Her picture is in the link above.)

So, What About Now?

In recent years, you may have read stories about the persecution of Christians and the destruction of Christian churches in China—and there have been many such cases. Opposition to Christianity increased after 2013 when Xi Jinping became president of China.

But in Sept. 2020, The Economist posted an article titled “Protestant Christianity is booming in China.” With about 3% of the population being Christian, there are now more Christians in China than in France or Germany.

Much of this growth has been since 2004 when I was last in China—and has primarily been by adult conversion not by the birth of children to Christian parents. Moreover, this growth has been without the assistance of Western missionaries.

If present trends continue, which they may not, in a few decades there may well be more Christians in China than in any other country in the world. Imagine that!

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* My Sept. 15, 2017, blog post was about Plantinga.

Plantinga's Prestigious Prize

Alvin Plantinga is not a well-known name among the broader public, but his is one of the best known and most respected names among contemporary Christian philosophers. Yesterday (Sept. 24) he was awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize at The Field Museum in Chicago.

Who Is Plantinga?

Alvin Plantinga is an American philosopher whose main work is in the philosophy of religion and epistemology. He served as president of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 1983 to 1986.

The son of first-generation immigrants from the Netherlands, Plantinga was born in 1932. He graduated from Calvin College, where his father was then teaching, and then after completing his Ph.D. at Yale University, his teaching career was mostly at Calvin College and the University of Notre Dame.

Plantinga’s most influential books are God and Other Minds (1967), and a trilogy of books on epistemology, culminating in Warranted Christian Belief (2000). The later was revised for a wider audience and published as Knowledge and Christian Belief in 2016.

Also, Alvin Plantinga is the title of a book published in 2007 by Cambridge University in their “Contemporary Philosophy in Focus” series. 

Meeting Plantinga

The Society of Christian Philosophers organized a conference on the campus of Peking University in the fall of 1994. I was able to fly from Fukuoka, Japan, to Beijing (about a 4½ hour flight) and attend that stimulating meeting.

There were several top Christian philosophers from the U.S. there, but it was Plantinga whom I most wanted to hear—and I was not disappointed in what I heard at the meetings and in the personal chat I had with him while walking across the spacious campus of Peking University, the premier university in China.

That academic meeting, which fruitfully focused on dialogue between the Christian philosophers from the U.S. and the Chinese philosophers who taught at Peking University and were atheists, was led by Plantinga. I was impressed by his brilliant mind, his respect for the Chinese scholars, and his deep and reasoned Christian faith.

Plantinga’s Prize

John Templeton was a financial investment whiz and a philanthropist. According to the Templeton Prize website (see here), Templeton (1912-2008) “started his Wall Street career in 1938 and went on to create some of the world's largest and most successful international investment funds.”

After becoming a wealthy man, in 1972 Templeton “established the world's largest annual award given to an individual, the Templeton Prize, which honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.”

The first Templeton Prize was awarded to Mother Teresa, and a wide variety of religious practitioners and academics have received the prestigious, and lucrative, prize in the succeeding years. (This year Plantinga received $1,400,000 as the recipient of the Templeton Prize.)

Some “liberals” have been critical of some choices for the Templeton Prize, such as Billy Graham in 1982 and especially Charles Colson in 1993 and Bill Bright in 1996. But most recipients have not been conservative Christians; for example, the Prize was awarded to the Dalai Lama in 2012 and to Desmond Tutu in 2013.

(For those of you who have the time and interest, I recommend opening the Templeton Prize website, here, and following the links to the various articles and videos found there.)

I am grateful to Alvin Plantinga for the significant contributions he has made to critical thinking as a Christian philosopher. His being chosen as this year’s recipient of the prestigious Templeton Prize accentuates the fact that Christians can, indeed, be deep, cogent thinkers.