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This is Your Hour: Christian Intellectuals in Britain and the Crisis of Europe, 1937–49. By John Carter Wood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. xii + 304 pp. $120.00 hardcover.

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appreciated unless the importance placed on evangelism as an essential part of its mission is also understood” (290). The final substantial chapter recounts how both the political and financial pressures… Click to show full abstract

appreciated unless the importance placed on evangelism as an essential part of its mission is also understood” (290). The final substantial chapter recounts how both the political and financial pressures in the atheistic and Cold War atmospheres of the early PRC period brought the BSD to a close in 1955. The author concludes the book by suggesting the potential of the cooperative model of church-state relations, exemplified in the case of the BSD, to refute the prevailing claim that “conflict between the Chinese state and Christianity is the only possibility” (354). Overall, the book contributes to a yet underexplored topic, locating it within the scholarship on state-religion relations in China. It also adds to the discussions on religion in Southwest China (alongside the recent treatments by, among others, Aminta Arrington’s Songs of the Lisu Hills [Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020] and Megan Bryson’s Goddess on the Frontier [Stanford University Press, 2016]) and Christianity during the Sino-Japanese War (alongside the contribution made by, for example, Timothy Brook’s “Toward Independence: Christianity in China under Japanese Occupation, ” in Christianity in China, ed. Daniel H. Bays [Stanford University Press, 1996])—both of which have not yet received enough scholarly attention. There are, however, three areas which I think require more attention. To begin with, the book would have been more relevant had it offered a comparison with other cases when church-state relations in China were also more cooperative than antagonistic, such as the first two decades of the twentieth century or postwar Taiwan. Secondly, the argument in chapter 7 that the Three-Self Patriotic Movement was originated by the Protestant leaders instead of imposed by the government requires further consideration in light of the recent full-length Chinese-language treatments of this topic in Song Jun’s Making Choices in the Midst of Change (Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture, 2017), Liu Jianping’s The Cross under the Red Flag (Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture, 2012), and Ying Fuk-tsang’s Christianity’s Failure in China? (Logos and Pneuma, 2012). Finally, biographical studies of the leading BSD figures such as Zhang Bohuai could have been investigated in more detail to balance the institutional-historical nature of the book. Despite these quibbles, this valuable study may be of interest to scholars working on the history of the CCC itself, the history of Chinese Christianity, church-state relations, as well as the relationship between ethnicity and religion in China.

Keywords: university press; manchester; christianity; state

Journal Title: Church History
Year Published: 2020

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