Challenging heaven's mandate: An analysis of the conflict between Wang Mingdao and the Chinese nation-state

Problem of the dissertation. This dissertation examines the conflict that erupted in the 1950's between Wang Mingdao, who led an independent Christian Church in Beijing, and the Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Movement in the People's Republic of China. Up to the present, most Christian scholars have dismissed Wang's resistance to state control of religious association and identity as escapist, irrelevant and otherworldly. In contrast, this dissertation explores in what manner the Christian fundamentalism of Wang Mingdao resisted the totalitarianism of the nation-state even as liberal and modernist Christians sought to find their identity within national ideology and to provide its theological justification.; Materials and methods used. The dissertation examines the problem in terms of the categories of context and counter-text. The context, in this case, was China after 1949 wherein the imposition of united-front ideology set the parameters of political and religious existence for Chinese Christians. Though most Christians conformed their beliefs and practices according to the political common ground of the nation-state, Wang Mingdao refused and through his essays and preaching offered a counter-text to the prevailing social order whereby he attempted to set the terms of existence according to what he regarded as the fundamentals of faith based on Scripture and doctrine. The materials used in this investigation are his own writings and those of his religious opponents in the Three-Self Patriotic Movement as well as subsequent academic analysis of the conflict.; Conclusions. In an age where national identity in large measure shapes individual and communal consciousness, Wang Mingdao's conflict with the nation-state of China brings out the tension Christian fundamentalists represent to nation-states in offering an identity whose locus of authority resides not in the nation, but in the Church through its reading and application of Scripture. Whereas Christian modernist at the time of the revolution and in subsequent academic assessment have seen the establishment of the nation-state and its ideology as reflective of God's will, Christian fundamentalists have resisted that hegemony based on their belief in an authority which transcends that of the nation-state.