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On the December 25, 2020, Prof. Lu Jie, the Emeritus Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Education at Nanjing Normal University passed away. The sudden news struck me and recalled my nearly 30 years’ friendship with Prof. Lu since 1991, stirring up also my memories of pre-1949 Christian colleges of China, and the promotion of “education of love” at Ginling College and Nanjing Normal University, from the time of Prof. Wu Yifang, Prof. Minnie Vautrin, Prof. Tao Xingzhi and Prof. Lu Jie. In this paper, I shall recall the various meetings with Prof. Lu Jie, and how her life has inspired my re-thinking of the development of “education of love” in China. I shall relate especially her humanistic educational ideals, especially the “education for life” and “cultivating human beings” with Prof. Tao Xingzhi’s “education of love.” Their educational ideals reflected the humanistic education taught at the University of Nanking and Ginling College in the first half of 20th century China. Though the two colleges had brought in a Western style of education, they had exemplified good models of indigenization, especially regarding how humanistic education could become Sinifized in Chinese soil today.

Christian higher education (CHE) had been totally disappeared from the China mainland since the 1950s, and related studies only revived in the past 40 years since Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up policy in 1978. The present paper is an attempt to report what had happened in the past 40 years, and to illustrate some significant contributions the resurgence of the study of CHE had made to the academia in the development of higher education in China. New forms of representation of CHE are found and new approaches to the study of CHE are also explored.

This article focuses on the history of Christian higher education in China as a case study, building upon the work of scholars who have been seeking to better understand the identity and di...

There had been two stages of development of Protestant dissenting traditions in China. They both were found to be related closely with the indigenous Christian movements in China. This paper is an attempt to study both the dissenting traditions and the indigenous Christian movements in China. Three important theological forces were found actively behind these movements. They were namely: the Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, and Holistic Movements, which helped to account for the close relationships between dissenting traditions and the indigenous Christian movements in twentieth-century China. The latter comprised those which attempted to move beyond the Western mainline/denominational understanding of Christianity, hence developing an independent Chinese Christianity.]

The Curriculum Development Council in Hong Kong published A Guide to the Preprimary Curriculum in 2006, which proposed a holistic approach in designing preprimary education curriculum. The introduction of Holistic curriculum emphasizes the importance of implementing spirituality into education. However, Spirituality has been construed in some Western, Christian traditions as individualistic and private matters, to the exclusion of communal practices. Hence, the present paper will attempt to investigate the concept of spirituality in Eastern and Western studies and explore the communal or relational aspects of spirituality in education as understood by the Eastern and Western scholars. Implications for religious education will be discussed too.

The Christian missionary movement is a kind of global movement that aims to evangelize the whole world; hence the concept of globalization can be useful for the study of Christianity as a worldwide movement. However, recent studies have suggested another equally important concept: the process of localization, which runs parallel to the process of globalization. Hence, the present paper attempts to take Christian higher education as a case study and tries to reveal a better picture of the interplay between the processes of globalization and localization. An attempt was made to compare the sociopolitical contexts in three Northeast Asian countries, namely China, Japan, and Korea, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to see how Christian higher education had responded to the issue of nationalism in these countries. It was found that Christian higher education in the three countries played very different roles when they were encountering different situations, and they had come to different fat...

This article aims to apply the concept of 'glocalization' to the study of theology and culture. China is chosen as a case study, with particular focus on a Chinese theologians discussion of the interplay between Christianity and Chinese Culture in the early twentieth century China. Francis Wei was the first Chinese President of Huazhong University in Wuhan, 1929–1952, and he was appointed as the first Henry Luce Visiting Professor of World Christianity in 1945–46. Wei's conviction was that Christianity and Chinese culture could be complementary. He held that China needed Christianity for a better understanding of God's nature and the way human beings could communicate with God, while maintaining that Christianity needed China to move beyond western denominationalism. Moreover, Christianity could not become a universal religion without including China. This article argues that Wei's work is relevant to the contemporary discussion about interaction between globalization and localization, known as 'glocalization'.

Will our Christian colleges in Asia serve as possible venues for the cultivation of communication and understandings among people of different cultures? This is the issue addressed in this paper and the author attempts to give a report of the work of Chung Chi College overall, with special reference to her distinctive contribution as a Christian college in Hong Kong, China, and its Asian contexts. As a Christian college, Chung Chi College has found herself serving not only as a light to the gentiles but also as ‘a bridge’ between the Eastern and Western cultures, between Christianity and other religious traditions.

Newman's ideas concerning university education address the concrete situations which are Western and Roman Catholic in orientation. The practices of Chung Chi College, a foundational college of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, located in the southern part of China, are in accord with Newman's ideas, yet with more Eastern contextual reflections and an addition of Chinese ingredients. This paper attempts to furnish a critical contextual dialogue between Newman's ideas and Chung Chi's practices.

Ching-yi Cheng was one of the three Chinese delegates who attended the World Missionary Conference. Speaking on behalf of Chinese Christians, Cheng made a strong appeal for the development of indigenous Churches in China. This chapter reviews the situations regarding the development of indigenous Christianity in China before and after the 1910 Edinburgh conference, and review Cheng's speeches and subsequent work for the Christian Church of China. It was found that there was indeed a strong desire among Chinese Christians for the development of independent, indigenous Christianity in China especially in the early years of the twentieth century which laid a solid background and justification for Cheng's speech at the 1910 conference. As we are celebrating the Centenary Anniversary of the World Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh in 1910, the development of indigenous Christianity in China needs to be given greater attention and its implications further explored.Keywords:Chinese; Ching-yi Cheng; Christians; churches; Edinburgh Conference; indigenous Christianity; World Missionary Conference

Viewing Chinese Christianity from a globalization perspective, this volume describes the interplay of “universal” and “particular” aspects as well as the global and local forces which shaped the characteristics of Chinese Christianity.

In this volume, the author, Peter Tze Ming Ng, shall collect some papers he has written in the past fifteen years with the aim of illustrating the development of his thoughts during this period, especially regarding the concept of 'Chinese indigenous Christianity' and the re-discovery of 'local Christianities' and 'the Chinese side of the story'. The author wants to elaborate a new understanding of Chinese Christianity from a global-local perspective, and stimulate more follow-up investigation which will result in a more comprehensive understanding of the development of Chinese Christianity in the past two centuries. The author reviews the historical contexts in which these changes of his thought took place. These papers are put together in one single volume so that scholars can see in a more comprehensive way how the concept of globalization has evolved and how these thoughts have been developed in their academic, social and cultural contexts.Keywords:China; Chinese Christianity; education; globalization; history; personal life; Peter Tze Ming Ng; scholars

Viewing Chinese Christianity from a globalization perspective, this volume describes the interplay of “universal” and “particular” aspects as well as the global and local forces which shaped the characteristics of Chinese Christianity.

A pioneer in comparative cultural studies, Dr. Francis C.M. Wei became a channel for the cultural exchange between the Western world and China. He was an outstanding Chinese intellectual, yet unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not despise Christianity or Western cultures. Early on, he had great interest in the study of Christian religion and Western philosophies, and was baptized into the American Protestant Episcopal Church. He possessed a strong sense of Christian identity yet he did not forsake his own Chinese identity, but kept up a keen interest in the exploration of his national culture. Wei attempted a new way of synthesizing Eastern and Western cultures, by interpreting Christianity in terms of Chinese culture and by transforming Chinese culture with Christian world values, hence demonstrating a vivid interplay between Chinese and Western cultures and the construction of ?an ideal, universal and ecumenical culture'. Keywords:Chinese culture; Christianity; Francis C.M. Wei; national culture; religion; Western cultures; world values

Author attempts to look at Chao's theology from beyond the Chinese context and see how these wider contexts, such as the World Council of Churches and Anglicanism had helped shaped Chao's indigenous theology. There are three stages of development in T.C. Chao's indigenous theology, namely: during the years 1922-1937; 1937-1949; and in the years after 1949. Chao not only developed his own Chinese theology in theory and doctrines, but also wrote poems and hymns for the practical use of Chinese Christians. Many scholars considered the first period as the golden period of Chao's theology, as Chao developed his theology more freely during the 1920s and early 1930s, and he could construct his indigenous theology from a purely philosophical and rational discourse. The second period was especially during the eight years of the Sino-Japanese War. The third period came in the years after 1949. It began with the New China era.Keywords:Anglicanism; Chinese; Chinese Christians; Christian Theology; New China era; Sino-Japanese War; T.C. Chao; World Council of Churches

Introduction: studies of Christianity in China since the new China era I first visited China in 1981, almost 30 years ago and attended the first conference in Wuhan in 1989. I went into several bookstores in the early 1980s (Friendship Store and Zhonghua Shudian) and wanted to find some scholarly work on Christianity but could not find any, except a couple of books on Marxist views on religion. But now, 30 years later, we can find more than 3000 books on Christian studies or religious studies in most academic bookstores in China. Another thing we should note is that scholars in the 1980s could not approach Christianity from explicitly religious or sociological perspectives, because ‘sociology’ and ‘religion’ were still very sensitive terms, if not taboo subjects, in those days. That was why scholars had to start from historical studies. I myself was trained in the fields of religious studies, sociology and education. But still, I had to join the group as historian in the 1980s and started my research on the history of pre-1949 Christian higher education in China. We were later joined by educators, theologians and philosophers. And in the last 10-13 years we have scholars from the fields of cultural studies, anthropology and sociology. In this chapter, I shall discuss the shift of paradigms and changing approaches in the past three decades. These would shed light on our study of Christianity in contemporary China too.