The emergence of scholars studying christianity in mainland China

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Notes

* This paper was first presented at the fourth Annual Meeting of Boon‐Dang Central House, 24–28 June 2003, Paris, on the theme ‘Doing Theology with Context: Exploring the Course’.

The Baptist University of Hong Kong, for example, was originally established by the Baptist Church and thus has a department of religion and philosophy; the Chinese University of Hong Kong has a religion department (with a theology division financed by churches as a constituent part) because Chung Chi College, one of the member colleges of the university, was formerly a Christian university in mainland China.

The Enlightenment spirit is critical of religion but not necessarily antireligious. The antireligious stance of most communist governments may partly originate from their political motives.

One of the reasons why Cultural Christians keep themselves distant from the institutional churches, although there is no bar to their becoming involved with them, may be that want to avoid being suspected of trying to gain popularity among the vast numbers of Christians in mainland China.

Before 1949 the Second World War and the Chinese civil war meant that most people in mainland China were unable to receive a formal education.