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So go and get some books. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to New Books and Christian Studies, a channel on the New Books Network podcast. I'm your host, Crawford Griffin.
And today, my guest is David Woodbridge. David is the author of the recently published book, Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity, the brethren in 20th century China, just out from Brill. David, congratulations on the book, and welcome to the show. Thank you very much.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the background to the project? I guess the immediate background to the project was me going to University of Manchester for post-graduate studies. I did my masters and PhD there. And that's where I first got into Chinese history.
And decided I wanted to explore a bit more the history of the British involvement in China, and in particular to look at the missionaries. And I decided to begin by looking at the archive material I could find immediately around me. And the University of Manchester has an archive to do with the history of the brethren movement, and it recently acquired some of its missionary material. So I explored that initially for him, and made a citation, and then began to look at it in a bit more depth for a PhD.
And although I hadn't intended the whole project to be about the brethren, I found that the material was so interesting, so rich that there was certainly enough there to develop a larger project. So many of our listeners will know that the John Ryland's University of Leibian Manchester is one of the great academic libraries in the UK, isn't it? It's got enormous holdings in terms of documents of the New Testament, all the way through to the present day. And it has a very rich theme of what we might call Protestant dissenting archives as well as a Methodist archive.
And you've mentioned the archive called the Christian Brethren Archive. Just in case listeners aren't familiar with this group, could you briefly tell us who are the Plymouth Brethren or the Christian Brethren, and why did he matter? Yeah, so the archive itself actually was started by a member of the Plymouth Brethren that was F.F. Bruce, who was professor of, I'm gonna get his title wrong, Theology of Biblical Studies or something about it at the University of Manchester, so he began it.
But the brethren themselves were a nonconformist group, had his origins in the early 19th century in Britain and Ireland, and it's hard to pin down their origins. I guess they were initially started out as groups of evangelicals who wanted to try and push the great Christian unity between denominations and gradually emerge, divert into a movement in and of itself, but sought to return to face the practices of the early church, and to do that say, they sought to turn their back on, I guess, historical tradition and denominational tradition, and just to try and live by the tenets, an example of the New Testament. In your book, David, you give this the term primitivism, which is the ideal of living or organizing church as closely as possible, to examples provided in the New Testament. And in your book, primitivism obviously is there in the book's title, Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity, but in the book, you give us a couple of examples of what primitivism means for brethren, missionaries in China, and elsewhere, I suppose too.
One of those big themes is hesitation about engagement in politics, and I suppose the second of those big themes is the desire to live by faith. Could you talk us through what each of those themes, means or represents, or how they were worked out in practice? Yes, I think in terms of politics, when the brethren were emerging kind of in the early mid-19th century, missionary activity was largely carried out by a large established missionary societies. And I guess the expansion of these missionary societies was very much closely entwined with the expansion of the British Empire.
They tended to follow where colonialists went or where areas of being opened up to trade. And brethren felt that the model of the missionary society was very much a secular one. It seemed very kind of business-like. They would have a board of trustees, and they would try and get people to subscribe and donate, and they would recruit and employ missionaries and send them out.
And the brethren felt that this had more in common with the modern secular business model than it did with the original vision of the early church. So they sought to re-organise missionary work, to try and return to the idea of church, sending out missionaries, and for the church and for individual missionaries to be responding to the call of the Holy Spirit, rather than being organised by human institutions, I suppose. There is an anti-institutional theme running through a lot of people, because that's what primitivism seems to mean for many of these rather missionaries. I suppose one of the great advantages of being a missionary with a mission organization was that fair chance of getting your salary on time.
How did brethren missionaries finance their endeavour? Yeah, I mean, that brings us to the second or two points you mentioned, which is living by faith. So rather than missionaries relying on a salary paid by a missionary society, the brethren felt that missionaries should be relying on God to provide for them. And that was an idea that, I guess you can probably trace it back to a figure called George Miller, who wasn't one of the early brethren, bigger heads, who put into number of orphanages in South West England, and sought to use them as a demonstration to people that God would provide for those who set out to do stuff according to his well, according to his purposes.
So living by faith, it wasn't missionaries weren't saying that God would send support all in from the sky like Manate from Heaven, although they testified that it need be in situations where there was an need, he could do that and he would do that. It was more that rather than missionary support being initiated and organised by a human organisation or committee, it should be individual Christians, individual churches responding to God's calling, of prompting for them to give them to support the missionaries, it was very much, it's still essentially, it was churches, it was individual people supporting missionaries, but it wasn't done in an organised way, the idea was that you responded to leading the prompting of the spirits to give support to individual missionaries. So in some ways, this anti-institutional impulse within brethren, missionary culture, it could be seen as anti-modernist, couldn't it? It's a post-organisation, it's deeply individualistic, you might say it's certainly quite in tune with a romantic tenor of the Indian century and perhaps even early 20th century.
But you describe the impact of and development of this primitive of sculpture within a very specific context, which you describe as Chinese modernity. So how does brethren anti-modernity impact upon or be impacted by Chinese modernity? What's happening? Just a reminder, what's happening in China in the first half of the 20th century and what ways does that represent an alternative modernity to that of the brethren?
Yeah, so this is a very tumultuous time in China. The final imperial dynasty, which was the Qing dynasty, had come to an end in 1911, it had really struggled through the 19th century, there had been internal rebellions and increasingly pressure from the West from the outside, but it had kind of staggered on, kept going, but finally collapsed in 1911. It was an effort after that to form a Chinese republic, but that was not a great success. The country really fragmented into a lot of different regions, many of them controlled and run by local warlords.
So yeah, during the first half of the 20th century, China was very divided and there were different political groups in particular, you had the nationalist party who were effectively governments for most of the time, but you also had the communist party, which was emerging and becoming stronger and stronger. So you had a very chaotic internal situation, but also there was a growing threat from outside as well, particularly from Pan, which had rapidly modernized during the 19th century, had become a very powerful country and was looking to expand its influence into East Asia. So yes, this is the kind of political context of what's going on. And like you say, it's really the beginnings of modern China, I guess as we know it as we see it today, had the collapse of a centuries old and millennial even kind of imperial system with an emperor and a ruling dynasty and an effort to create something else, a state along modern lines with modern governments, modern statecraft and institutions.
So yes, the brethren were operating within a China that was seeking to break away from the past and establish some kind of new form, which they could take them on and flourish in the modern world. So in some ways that might seem to be quite an unpromising context for a Western missionary group, or deeply anti-politics and very apathetic, if not hostile, actively hostile towards organization institutions. But how did the brethren get on? Were they influential in China?
How many Christians are there in China now and have the brethren influenced them in any distinctive ways? Yeah, so listeners are probably fairly aware of the situation in China, regards Christianity as being a huge growth in the number of Christians in China, particularly of Protestants and that gets kind of erratic news coverage in the West, particularly when there's instances of conflict with the government. So numbers are difficult to come up with, reliable numbers are difficult to come by, I guess, mostly because you have a government to prove church in China, but you also have many Christians who choose not to be part of government to prove meetings and they are much more difficult to count. So estimates in terms of numbers range from about 20 million, which is more around the official government estimates to some of estimates 100 million plus.
So this really huge range of opinion there. So probably safer to put it somewhere in the middle around 50 or 60 million, I suppose, but even then it's very hard to tell. But I would argue that the book argues that the brethren have been very influential in making this happen. I don't think as a distinct missionary presence, they weren't particularly big and I'm sure you can find churches today in China, but I know you can do that will trace their origins to churches set up by brethren missionaries, but the main influence the brethren have had on the present day Chinese Protestant church is from the influence they had on what's your knee, who set up on the first independent Chinese churches, which has proven to be very successful both in terms of the numbers of people who claim to be part of this movement, but also the broader influence through his life and through his writings that he's had on Chinese Protestantism.
Now you give us in the book a chapter on Watchmen Knee and somebody's this is the heart of the book isn't it? It's the moment when what might be quite abstract or quite Western brethren theological ideas or church practices become voiced in a Chinese context. Which you argue in the book in a very interesting way is a Chinese context, which is a port city context, a middle class context, and a context in which I think you tell us Watchmen Knee is a third generation Protestant context in which Christianity is already a very familiar world. Yeah, that's right.
So what's written in the book isn't appear out of nowhere. He emerges from a context where Christianity and Protestantism has become relatively well established. So when the West was first able to get access to China in the mid 19th century, it's initially was limited to operating in five major post-school ports and a sense of view that was portrayed, but also missionaries are able to follow him behind and begin operating. So in one of these ports, a Gisuk Joel where Watchmen Knee grew up, he was essentially a third generation of a family who had been converted to Christianity in the mid to late 19th century.
So there was already a fairly well established Protestant community in Vujong and Watchmen Knee, although he had his own individual spiritual journey, his own conversion story, he was very much operating within a well established Chinese Protestant community and one that was thinking about how it could stand on its own, how it could break away from its association with the West and really try and build its own identity as a local Chinese church. And in your book David, you show us how, perhaps it's not even how it's brethren ideas that actually make that possible idea of the self-supporting, being autonomous, preventing us from leadership, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So the brethren, as I mentioned before, it began in Britain as an attempt to break away from Christian historical traditions and the denominational traditions and to establish something that was based more on the earliest practices of Christian faith as outlined in the New Testament.
And you then see very kind of interestingly, this process kind of been repeated in China in the case of Watchmen Knee. He looks around him and sees a quite well established Protestant churches and denominations. And he is, he's looking for something more pure, I guess, something better than what he sees around him. And yes, he finds the ideas of the brethren very, very compelling, this idea that you can turn your back on human tradition and just return to a model of faith and practice that you don't need established leaders, you don't need to follow tradition, you just need to follow the simple guidelines in the New Testament.
So guess it's interesting how you see the process of the brethren, the century themselves, in the 19th century, they're kind of repeated among Chinese Christians in the early mid-20th century. And as opposed to in that chapter today, one of the paradoxes is that Knee's drive towards primitivism is enabled by the tools of modernity. You talk about his access to publishing, printing facilities, the family business that he takes employment in for a while. And you show in that chapter how the tentacles of that family business as they stretch gradually out from and eventually across China provide the mechanisms for travel, for currency exchange.
There's a huge number of aspects in that chapter isn't there of the ways in which modernity is enabling this primitivist mission of impulse. Could we talk also about two brethren missionaries that you also devote a chapter to, Jeffrey Bull and George Patterson. Tell us about these guys. Yeah, so Jeffrey Bull and George Patterson, both fascinating figures.
Jeffrey Bull in particular, I found, was someone who many people were familiar with. If I mentioned particularly, in church circles, the name Jeffrey Bull, when I was carrying out my research, quite a few people were familiar with his name or he read his books and not just brethren, he likes people familiar with him from wider circles as well. So Jeffrey Bull was famous for a book he wrote called When I Engaged Heels, which was an account of his time in prison under the Chinese Communist. He was arrested while he was a missionary after the Communist came to power spent three years in prison before being released.
And he was one of the last missionaries to leave China. So by the time he was released, there had been a lot of publicity, a lot of media attention to his plight. And so when he published his book, his account of his experiences, it's sold very well, it made him a bit of a celebrity. And so he had gone on, become a missionary, had gone to Tibet and he had gone with another revolutionary called George Patterson, who's a fascinating figure.
In fact, I decided to explore this story because when I began my research, I got in touch with Neil Dixon, who part of a Reverend Historians network. And he told me about George, who was still alive at that time and offered to take me to meet him. And I was fortunate enough to be able to interview him a couple of times. And yeah, his story is a fascinating one.
So Jeffrey Bull, George Patterson, were only missionaries for a short time. They went out to China after World War II and both wanted to try and preach the gospel into Tibet. They made it to Tibet and they made it further into the interior of Tibet. The most missionaries have been able to, but just as it seemed like they were going to get established there, you had the Communist Revolution.
And once they got into power, the Communists wanted to establish the borders of any states and that involved taking over Tibet. And once they've done that, then they didn't want any Westerners in there interfering. So George Patterson had left previously, but Jeffrey Bull was there when the Communist arrived and that was when he was imprisoned. They're both ex-rodden to characters.
Jeffrey Bull and George Patterson, aren't they? One of the really complicating factors that they have to think through on the field in the interior of Tibet, Hayop, on Plato, is how they relate to a culture that's so utterly alien, but also a culture that's so heavily politicized. And you're showing the book really wonderfully how they have to begin to consider or reconsider this anti-political impulse that has driven brethren missions up to this point. And you show how they align themselves with a particular family, a very significant family, with lots of financial and political interests, which they can begin to make use of to develop their work.
How does this political context challenge their apolitical sensibilities as they developed up to that point? One of the questions I was really interested in when taking on this project was to consider the relationship of missionary activity to the development of modernity in China. And the brethren were fascinating in this respect just because they perhaps, possibly more than other Protestant groups were in systems on trying to keep that division between their spiritual vocation and the modern world they found themselves in. And part of that was to avoid being involved in modern political movements.
But like you say, Jeffrey Bull, George Patterson, found this increasingly difficult in the context in the context of Tibet. And so they really found themselves in a situation where they had to make a choice really. To bet at that time, it's political status was uncertain. It had kind of been operating as not only part of the Chinese Empire, but effectively being led and governing itself autonomously.
And there was a lot of discussion with the internet itself about what the future would hold now that they didn't see a collapse and new possibilities and opportunities were open. So, Bull and Patterson found themselves in alliance with perhaps an unusual unexpected group into bet a kind of a growing middle class seeking greater political representation. So, Bull and Patterson really found themselves in a situation where they had to choose. They wanted to continue being missionaries in China.
In Tibet, they needed the support of its political elite. And they really threw their lot in with Anderson family who were seeking to set up some kind of modern constitutional arrangements in Tibet. And citing the dem really meant that they pitted themselves against the incoming communist government. Both men, as you described in the book, go on to very successful careers after that bull, although he becomes a literary celebrity with when Aaron Gates healed in a couple of full-on books.
He becomes a, I suppose, a fairly conventional brethren preacher, Patterson on the land. He publishes a string of books about his adventures with Fabrian Faber, very impressive London literary publisher, enters journalism, enters politics, loses his faith, sets up rehabilitation scheme with his wife, Meg Patterson, spends 1960s working with rock stars like Enoch Clapton, through whom he discovers his faith. That's interesting, comes out in the most recent Enoch Clapton biography as well. Goes on to her with the who.
I mean, it's an extraordinary story, of George Parsons, isn't it? David, you've written a phenomenal book, Missionally Permitivism in Chinese Modernity, the brethren in 20th century China, that speaks to so many big themes, both in terms of religious modernity, but also Chinese history during this tumultuous period. Just recently published by Brill, 2019, it's an exceptional piece of writing, and thanks very much for coming to the show to talk about it. You're welcome, thank you.
Well, thanks for your time and take care. And thanks to everyone else for listening in today. I'll see you next time on New Books and Christian Studies the channel on the New Books Network podcast. A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen.
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