Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China. By Lian Xi. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010. xvi + 333 pp. $45.00 cloth.

摘要

In his first book, The Conversion of Missionaries (University Park:nPennsylvania State University Press, 1997), Lian Xi explored how life innChina changed some Protestant missionaries, moving them from theirninitially conservative and exclusivist attitudes toward more liberal theologicalnpositions. In a fascinating counterpoint, Redeemed by Fire shows how thencross-cultural religious encounter, grounded in the Chinese culture andnpolitics of the time, produced quite the opposite reaction among manynChinese Christians. The “Popular Christianity” of the title most often refersnto the many fundamentalist or pentecostal indigenous churches that took rootnin early twentieth-century China, some of which continue to influence thendevelopment and spread of Chinese Christianity today. In recounting thenstories of these groups, and generally eschewing any extended discussion ofnthe missionaries (though they appear here and there throughout the text, nownas inspiration, now as foil), Lian answers the call of scholars like DanielnBays, Tao Feiya, and Liu Jiafeng, who have been advocating for morenattention to Christianity as a Chinese religion, one not necessarily beholdennto what Bays calls the “Sino-foreign Protestant establishment.”