Taking up worldly causes with a world -rejecting spirit: The religio -political identity negotiation of the Chinese Christian, Xu Baoqian (1892--1944)

The conflict of identities of Chinese Christian intellectuals has continually drawn the attention of students of Christianity in China, and the different intellectual and practical endeavours of Chinese Christians have often been pulled together by the problematic of identity. The present dissertation is meant to represent Xu Baoqian (1892--1944) as a vivid counter-example to the dominant representations of the religious identity of Chinese Christian intellectuals in past historical studies.;In past studies, Christian intellectuals are usually represented either as competitors in the political arena who were willing to sacrifice the integrity of their religious faith for the sake of winning the acceptance of the Chinese people, or as cultural conservatives who saw Christianity as a modern form for advancing their Confucian concerns, such as moral cultivation. Despite their valuable insights, these representations have produced too static, unified and all-encompassing---hence repressive---pictures that are said to represent the reality of the identity of Christian intellectuals, and thus have deplorably excluded many other different "realities". These pictures suggest that due to the enormous presence of the nation, either in the form of sociopolitical change (reform/revolution) or cultural inertia (Confucianism), their Christian identity was more or less shadowy, if not inauthentic.;This dissertation argues that although simultaneous identification with representations of the nation and representations of Christianity had indeed created constant tension, Xu Baoqian never once conceived the two identities as mutually exclusive, nor did he stick to "pure" Confucianism in order to escape from the tension. Instead the two identities constituted and reconstituted each other continuously under the effects of history. It was because of the change in the sociopolitical situation that he was forced to conceive and re-conceive his religious identity, and it was because of his religious faith that he always kept a suspicious eye on the sociopolitical realm.;In Xu's eyes, anything short of human unity and brotherhood was morally unsound, and so he was aware of the danger of those political ideologies which promoted the attainment of national unity and strength at the expense of ethical values and human moral relations. He argued that the Chinese people also needed moral renewal and universal human values, which could be brought to them by Christian religion. Should religion and the values it contained be neglected, the intermediate course toward the final goal would enter an evil state, in which human relations would be destroyed. It is exactly this "distantiated participation" that demonstrated the effects of the presence of Christianity on Xu's life and the history of modern China.