The Chinese translation of J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism by Samuel Boyle (包義森, 1905–2002) is of foundational importance for the evangelical church in China. And yet, though published in 1950, this magnum opus did not gain traction until around the 1990s. Then, to satisfy growing demand, a second edition was published in 2003, with a preface by the late Jonathan Chao (趙天恩, 1938–2004), and a third in 2020 along with an e-book version.
A missionary from the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, Boyle began translating Machen’s explosive text into Chinese in 1940. According to Chao’s preface, Boyle finished the first draft in about a year, and brought it to Guangzhou in 1947.1 In December 1948, Boyle was introduced to the young Charles Chao, Jonathan’s father, by none other than Lorraine Boettner and Johannes G. Vos.2 Boyle and Chao established the Reformed Translation Fellowship (RTF) Press, and they would work on many projects together in the years to come.
The communist takeover in 1949, with all of its theological implications, exposed an urgent need for the publication of Christianity and Liberalism in China. A form of theological liberalism, which was primarily American rather than German, had made its way to China around the turn of the twentieth century. It was first introduced to Chinese Protestants through organizations like the YMCA, which became active in China as early as the 1870s, and the National Christian Council of China (NCCC, 中華全國基督教協進會), founded in 1913.
Initially intended to include all denominations and missionary organizations in China, the NCCC’s progressive origins and its increasing advocacy for the social gospel soon began to alarm the more conservative leaders of Chinese churches. In 1926, China Inland Mission, founded by the great James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), withdrew from the NCCC. In 1950, the NCCC adopted a proposal by the social gospel proponent Wu Yao-tsung (吴耀宗, 1893–1979), co-founder of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement,3 to cut off all ties to foreign Christian groups and swear allegiance to the Communist Party. The rise of the communist regime in China was, in this and other ways, the culmination of the kind of progressivism that began to permeate cultural scenes in the nation around the turn of the century, and American theological liberalism was part and parcel of this progressivism.
Conservative church leaders and missionaries in China were opposed to the social gospel to begin with, and they saw the rise of the Communist Party as the culmination of this false theology. They were opposed to the Three Self-Movement as well, because they were opposed to all false gospels. This tenacity for faithfulness is preserved in the widely circulated 1955 article, “We, Because of Faith,” by Wang Mingdao (王明道, 1900–1991), honored by many in the West as the “dean of the Chinese house churches.”4
In Chao’s view, Christianity and Liberalism was and remains an important response to political life in China.
In his 2003 preface to Christianity and Liberalism, Jonathan Chao commented that the Three-Self Movement had always been characterized by theological “revisionism” that “subjects the Christian faith to the standards of socialism and dialectical materialism . . . emptying the Christian faith of its contents.”5 It was thus of the same nature as the kind of liberal theology imported from America. Chao was thus confident that “this book by Machen remains relevant to Chinese churches of the twenty-first century.”6 In Chao’s view, in other words, Christianity and Liberalism was and remains an important response to political life in China. This partly explains why, in 1949, Jonathan’s father Charles decided to edit and publish Boyle’s translation—and there were strong indications that conservative church leaders would appreciate its value.
According to Hong Kong-based church historian Ka-Lun Leung (梁家麟), Wang Mingdao’s text, Discerning the True Gospel (《真偽福音辨》), ranks among the most significant pieces of Sinophone Christian literature of the twentieth century.7 And Wang’s book, the title of which, literally translated, is “telling the true gospel apart from the false,” has in fact played somewhat of a similar role in the Chinese context as that of Machen's in America. Wang’s relentless critique of the social gospel would come to represent the definitive watershed between fundamentalism and Liberalism in Chinese Protestantism for decades to come.
Boyle and Chao adopted the “telling the true from the false” rhetoric made popular by Wang for the Chinese title of Christianity and Liberalism, Jidujiao Zhenweibian (《基督教真偽辨》), literally meaning “telling true Christianity from the false,” clearly an allusion to Wang’s influential treatise. And there are many similarities between the two works. Both are polemical. Both were written to defend the gospel. The former sought to refute social gospels from America, and the latter, liberal theology in America.
Christianity and Liberalism is of foundational import to the work of the RTF Press and to the Chinese Reformed movement in general.
There are, however, noteworthy differences as well. The arguments in Christianity and Liberalism are grounded on established academic research. The author spent a year in Germany as a student of theology and had been exposed to the challenges of Liberalism first-hand. The work as such invites critical thinking on the part of the reader.
Discerning the Gospel, by contrast, is didactic and homiletic in its tone, and pietistic in its content. Fraught with threats, warnings, and derogatory remarks against “false prophets,” this treatise offers very little theoretical analysis of the social gospel.
Most conservative Chinese Christians were so accustomed to this style of teaching that they were hardly prepared for a work like Christianity and Liberalism when it was first published in Chinese. Fundamentalist struggles against Liberalism in Chinese Protestant circles were for the most part driven by pietistic impulses that tended to be anti-intellectual. For decades, fundamentalist Christians in Chinese churches equated the term “theology” with “liberalism,” and deemed all academic and critical attempts at understanding the faith to be apostate. Perhaps that was the only way they knew to defend Christ’s little ones and his true gospel, once they no longer had foreign missionaries to help them.
Evangelical Chinese churches did not hold academic theology in high regard until the 1970s, when a group of Chinese alumni who attended Westminster Theological Seminary in the 1960s, including Jonathan Chao, launched a campaign for theological education. Their work led to the founding of China Evangelical Seminary in Taiwan and the China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong, in 1970 and 1975 respectively. The campaign eventually won the support of local churches and foreign missionaries, not least owing to the influence of the 1974 Lausanne Congress and the consequent founding of the Chinese Congress on World Evangelization in 1976.
Jonathan Chao also founded numerous underground theological training centers across mainland China. He and his colleagues at China Missions International brought to the mainland books and cassette tapes featuring sermons and theology seminars by his close friend and ally, Stephen Tong (唐崇榮), whose contribution to the popularization of Reformed theology in Chinese churches remains unparalleled. The once-seemingly obsolete publications of the RTF Press suddenly became widely circulated among Chinese Christians in mainland China and beyond in the 1990s.
Despite its quiet rise to prominence, today Christianity and Liberalism is of foundational import to the work of the RTF Press and to the Chinese Reformed movement in general. Not only was it the first book ever published by the press, but it was also the first Chinese publication of a theological volume that presents an intellectual and critical way of clarifying and defending sound doctrine.
Regrettably, receptions of the work in Chinese contexts up to our own day have not always reached the author’s intended results. To honor Machen’s classic, then, I shall conclude by way of two caveats.
Machen’s intent is stated at the very beginning of the treatise:
The purpose of this book is not to decide the religious issue of the present day, but merely to present the issue as sharply and clearly as possible, in order that the reader may be aided in deciding it for himself. Clear-cut definition of terms in religious matters, bold facing of the logical implications of religious views, is by many persons regarded as an impious proceeding…, but it is always beneficial in the end.8
Despite this explicit statement, many Chinese readers, and in fact many American readers as well, still approach the work with an anti-intellectual mindset. The polemical tone of the book easily appeals to the fundamentalist mind that regards “clear-cut definition of terms” and analyses of “the logical implications of religious views” as “an impious proceeding.” Critical analyses in the book can easily be overshadowed by the polemics for the fundamentalist reader who, after having read the book, still regards fair-minded theological debate with suspicion.
A striking phenomenon is that many Chinese church leaders have presented Christianity and Liberalism with the kind of derogatory rhetoric found in Discerning the Gospel. One widely circulated online review, for instance, describes “Machen” as “making fun” or “laughing at” the “failed attempt of the new theology,” and “liberalism” as “wishful thinking [一廂情願],” “poison to the soul,” “pathetic and ludicrous [啼笑皆非],” “apostate,” and “entirely bankrupt.”9 This way of defending the faith, I am afraid, runs contrary to the intent of the author.
My second caveat applies to both Chinese and American readers: we must avoid relying on Machen’s volume as if it were an inspired text. Its context is significant. For one thing, Christianity and Liberalism was in large part a response to a specific sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969), titled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”10 And so the form of Liberalism that Machen sought to address was a specific brand of American theology. Schleiermacher is not mentioned at all, and the only mention of Kant reflects a now debunked mischaracterization of Kant’s critique of metaphysics as an “attack upon the theistic proofs.”11 Machen’s criticisms, then, can hardly apply to every strand of liberal theology that has influenced America and China today.
Liberalism was not monolithically guided by ‘Enlightenment naturalism.’ In fact, some liberal theologians like Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), rejected the kind of naturalistic consciousness characteristic of the later Ritschlians and sought to honor the immanence of divine revelation in history—however much that immanentization went too far. Naturalistic consciousness—what Weberians have described in terms of “disenchantment”—was only a first moment in the development of theological modernism. A second and more predominant moment was that of re-enchantment, the sacralization and transcendentalization of nature and history, to borrow from German sociologist Hans Joas.
Academic theologians and seminary students today should follow Machen’s example and study Liberalism for themselves.
This is a relevant note for our own day because this re-enchanting form of liberal theology, once espoused by German theologians like Troeltsch and Emanuel Hirsch (1888–1972), has re-appeared in some conservative Christian circles in America under rubrics such as “Christian nationalism.” If our understanding of theological liberalism remains too narrowly focused on the naturalistic modernism addressed in Christianity and Liberalism, we can easily miss grave ideological dangers that are right under our noses.
Machen has run the good race. His work remains pertinent to churches worldwide even a century after its initial publication. Academic theologians and seminary students today should follow Machen’s example and study Liberalism for themselves. His express intent was never to do the homework on Liberalism for us, but rather to call each one of us to do our own homework and continue to engage Liberalism, and any theological aberration whatsoever, with academic seriousness and integrity, so that we might, in the words of brother Wang Mingdao, tell the true gospel apart from the false.
1. J. Gresham Machen [梅晨], Christianity and Liberalism [基督教真偽辨], ed. Charles Chao [趙中輝] and John Shen [沈其光], trans. Samuel Boyle [包義森] (Taipei: CRTS Books [改革宗出版社], 2020), 11.
2. Ibid., 12.
3. A Chinese government organization devoted to the removal of foreign influence in the church.
4. Wang Mingdao [王明道], “We, Because of Faith [我們是為了信仰],” in The Wang Mingdao Collection [王明道文庫], volume 7 (Taichung: Conservative Baptist Press, 1998), 320.
5. Ibid., 16.
6. Ibid., 15.
7. Wang Mingdao [王明道], Discerning the True Gospel [真偽福音辨] (Taichung: Morning Star, 2000). See Ka-Lun Leung, “A Hundred Years of Sinophone Christian Writing [百年回顧：華人基督徒著作],” in Faith Monthly 6 (August 2003): http://www.godoor.com/xinyang/article/xinyang6-11.htm (accessed 21 July, 2023).
8. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 1.
9. See Li Xian [李賢], “New Theology or Fake Theology? A Review of Christianity and Liberalism [新神学还是假神学？—《基督教真伪辩》书评],” Christian Sermons [基督教講道網], http://www.jiangzhangwang.com/shenxue/22656.html (accessed 22 July 2023).
10. Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 343–344.
11. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 50.