The Quest of the Historical Hong Xiuquan

Lunatic, Liberationist, or Local Theologian?

When the Baptist missionary Issachar Roberts fled Nanjing, he declared Hong Xiuquan to be crazy, a lunatic. And the general consensus among missionaries was to measure Hong and his movement by his presumed mental state and character, and the standards of Christian orthodoxy. Given the staggering bloodshed of the civil war that enveloped the Taiping, there seemed to be little motivation to pursue it further. And the missionary entanglements with the inception of the Taiping’s were best forgotten.

Nineteenth-century drawing of Hong Xiuquan

However, by the mid-twentieth century, the Chinese Communist Party had embraced Hong Xiuquan as a revolutionary. Mao Zedong found inspiration in Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping. Viewed through a Marxist lens, the Taiping was a revolutionary movement that foreshadowed the Communist takeover. Here was a peasant uprising that had thrown off the shackles of imperial and feudal past and established an egalitarian society. Marx himself had called the Taiping, “the first cry in the creation of a Chinese Republic.” With the religious aspects viewed as incidental accretions, or perhaps demythologized, it was reckoned to be a social revolution all the way down. Communism could learn from the Taiping mistakes and carry out the revolution consistently. Interestingly, even in China’s Republican era, Sun Yatsen and Chiang Kai-shek had variously adopted the mantle of the Taiping.¹ And the study of the Taiping in this revolutionary vein continues on in China today.

Statue of the revolutionary Hong Xiuquan

Recently in the West, there has been a reassessment of Hong Xiuquan, viewing him through the lens of local, or vernacular, theology. Perhaps (with a wink at the so-called Third Quest of the historical Jesus) we can call this a Third Quest of the historical Hong Xiuquan. Now it’s a story of contextual theology. And there is a lot to be said for this view.

If you have been following this series of posts on Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping uprising, you will recall that we began with the significance of using the Chinese word Shangdi for “God” in translating the Bible. (See “Dancing on the Altar of Heaven” below)

For missionaries like James Legge, this term was associated with the idea that the Chinese were originally monotheists, but this had been obscured over the centuries. And for Hong Xiuquan, the blame for this theological eclipse fell at the feet of the imperial order, lately manifest in the Qing dynasty. Through the course of his visions, his frustrating failures to advance in the imperial examinations, and his encounter with Christian teaching (largely mediated through reading Liang Fa’s book and the translated Bible), Hong came to view the Qing as demonic and idolatrous. And his visions and their subsequent interpretation convinced him that he was Jesus Christ’s younger brother, God’s Chinese son. As such, he was invested with a mission to raise up God fearers and restore China to its proper worship of Shangdi.

Carl Kilcourse has reassessed Hong Xiuquan and the theology of the Taiping by viewing it as an example of a specific, “local” cultural encounter with Christian Scripture that is also exemplified in African Independent Churches.² For Kilcourse, a theological “essentialism” has obscured our understanding of Hong. That is, Western Christian orthodoxy has viewed Hong through what it considers a universal Christian understandings of God (trinitarian) and Christ (ontologically the Son of God) as set out in credal Christianity.

Kilcourse argues that Hong did not view Christ as ontologically the Son of God. Hong was a strict monotheist, who wanted “to protect the oneness and uniqueness of the Heavenly Father Shangdi.”³ Hong’s view of Christ as son was a metaphorical understanding. Jesus was chosen as the greatest messenger of God, to carry out a divine mission. And as Jesus’ younger brother, so was Hong called. In fact, the missionaries Griffith John and Joseph Edkins had suspected that this was the case.⁴ Hong was not claiming that his own divine sonship made him part of the godhead.

Significantly, Kilcourse points out that Hong’s “Great Peace” (Taiping) bears the imprint of a Confucianized vision of a perfect world, a concept which had ancient roots in Chinese history, going back to the first century B.C. In turn, this was reflected in a Buddhist-Daoist text of the fifth century. While this was not the source of Hong’s understanding, it was part of the cultural matrix in which his understanding arose. And that understanding was shaped by Hong’s hermeneutical encounter with texts such as Matthew 5:13-48, from which he understood the Kingdom of Heaven as “a spiritual realm of the afterlife and a physical kingdom to be realized on earth…. Hong…believed that he was fulfilling the elder brother’s prophecy and bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to earth.”⁵ As Kilcourse points out, early Mormon millenarianism bears similarities with Hong’s understanding. But for Joseph Smith, it was apostate Christendom had corrupted the original teaching of Jesus.

Kilcourse goes on to show that the features of the Taiping community (e.g., compassion for others beyond one’s immediate family) were rooted in a Confucian understanding. But, of course, Liang Fa’s “Good Words” was instrumental in Hong’s constructing a “localized vision” of salvation. Prominent in this understanding was that Buddhist idols and the gods of Daoism and Chinese mythology were demonic. They were departures from the ancient religious heritage of true Chinese religion and culture. And the path toward the spiritual renewal of China was the violent destruction of these demons and idols (as well as human opposition).

Hong had not given up his “Confucian lens” in which he had been deeply invested through his upbringing and scholarly training. That Confucian lens “was thus responsible for the foundational beliefs of his localized (and later revolutionary) discourse of world salvation…. As culture is always embedded in language, the recognition of such text-world overlaps is an almost inevitable consequence of vernacularization.”⁶ Deeply imbedded in his culture, Hong heard—and articulated—the Christian message in a certain way (as did Liang Fa).

And here lies a critical point. It is mistaken to view “Christianity” or “the Bible” as we know it, as a cross-platform program that can be plugged into the “religion” slot in a culture, and which will then operate in a predetermined manner. The title of William Dyrness’s older book How Does American Hear the Gospel? (Eerdmans, 1989) expresses something important here. It should awaken us to a self-awareness that American Christianity does not represent a “zero point” on the scale of the cultural reception of the gospel. Just look around at what presently and popularly goes by the name “evangelical” in the USA and compare it with, say, particular expressions of global evangelicalism. Or read a book such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne. (I am resisting the urge to enlarge and qualify my point in a dozen ways!)

And having mentioned Dyrness’s book, I should mention another that lies adjacent to Kilcourse’s work on the Taiping: Insider Jesus: Theological Reflections on New Christian Movements (IVP Academic, 2016). The focus here is on the so-called insider movements, Christian movements that are currently emerging within the cultural fabrics of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and other contexts. These are contemporary examples of how, as humans, we are deeply embedded in our cultures and languages. And the translation of Christian Scripture into the vernacular is part of a process of interpreting and inscribing “the message” of Scripture into a new and local cultural context—without leaving it all behind.

But the process of that cultural hearing and its particular effects cannot be predetermined. This is a big subject, of course, and I don’t want to get entangled in it here. But I will say that while I sympathize with Kilcourse’s aversion to theological “essentialism,” I want to offset his apparent tilt toward a (modest?) theological relativism by appealing to ecumenicity, the “oneness” of faith. The church in all of its particular cultural expressions is called to unity, and that unity includes some essential theological unity across cultures. This calls for listening and conversation across cultures, including a careful listening to the conversations of the church’s past (including the distant patristic past⁷), of mutually refining and correcting our cultural expressions of biblical faith. There have been numerous examples of this in the past. This process takes time, sometimes centuries! But for Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping, this process—despite some incipient starts and opportunities—was tragically curtailed.

Hong Xiuquan had thrust shoulder and might against the great spoked wheel of China’s imperial dynasties. He would restore the Heavenly Kingdom to its ancient setting. He leaned into it. The wheel began to move, then gained momentum. But as he struggled to ascend the ancient Altar of Heaven, to return the nation to the heavenly mandate of Shangdi, the wheel caught. It shuddered. Then, rolling back and gaining force, it crushed him.⁸

In all, it was the greatest civil war in history, and entailed the loss of some twenty to thirty million Chinese lives.

Next, we will turn to that tragic story and its aftermath.

1. See Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China (Stanford University Press, 2013), 12-13. For a perspective very sympathetic to the Communists, see Agnes Smedley, The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Te (Monthly Review Press, 1956), 29-34.

2. Carl S. Kilcourse, Taiping Theology: The Localization of Christianity in China, 1843-64 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). I will only touch on some salient points in my discussion below. I commend the book for those interested.

3. Kilcourse, Taiping Theology, 106.

4. Kilcourse, Taiping Theology, 82-85.

5. Kilcourse, Taiping Theology, 73.

6. Kilcourse, Taiping Theology, 77.

7. See, for example, Michael N. C. Poon, “Patristic Theology” in Global Dictionary of Theology, ed. William A. Dyrness and Veli-Matti Karkkainen (IVP Academic, 2008), 628-637. Writing in an Asian context, he wisely considers how the Asian church might engage the early theologians of the Christian church.

8. With a hat tip to the conclusion of Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 2^nd English edition (Adam & Charles Black, 1911), 516.