Many Chinese writers dismiss the relative importance of Christianity in producing the Taiping ethic, which spread like wildfire in Southern China through the middle of the 19th century, it was adopted so quickly and deeply by so many, that the result was the bloodiest known pre-industrial conflict in history. The Taipings, now often depicted as a proto-communist cult, which constituted a ‘warped’ vision of Christanity are often the subject of the ‘no true scotsman’. Taiping theology is dismissed as not really being Christian, Carl S. Kilcourse, and other contemporary historians have recently challenged this narrative, rather than a bastardisation of Christianity, they perceive it as a highly original form of Early Chinese Christian theology, which is best understood on its own terms, In this brief piece, we will engage in a brief rebuttal of the claim that the Taipings were in any way ‘innately unchristian’.
Many western writings attempt to deconstruct Taiping Theology based on the assumption that it is a “misunderstanding” of some “true” scriptural message. Samuel Moffett, for instance, argues that it is a bastardization of “Liang Fa’s Good Words to Admonish the Age (1832) .The issue with Moffet’s assumption is that it assumes both Liang Fa’s Good Words and any perception of the gospel built on the frame of belief it establishes must innately be a perversion of the text. The notion that the Taiping synthesis must rest on some misunderstanding of the text, rather than a localized interpretation, has been a fundamental aspect of the western scholarship of Taiping ideology -((Kilcourse, 2016, pg.3)).The development of this misconception arises partially out of continual reaffirmation of the racism and imperialist attitudes of the missionaries who established the first scholarship on the taiping rebellion in the nineteenth century. Such missionaries originally saw the Taipings as vehicles for the christianisation of China but quickly grew discontent, and judged their beliefs incompatible with their respective doctrine’s. Their judgement of the Taiping Theology arose out of the notion that converts could only be judged as Christians if they accepted the “pure” truths of orthodoxy, and relied on the guidance of the missionary community, in essence, they saw it as impossible to accept the word of Christ and reject the West as the two were perceived as inseparable. Nicolas Standaert calls this “an a-priori expectation that a ‘successful’ trans- mission is a transmission which keeps the cultural element in its ‘pure’ form”1.
This perception of Taiping theology, as fundamentally un-christian and “grievously marred with error” in the words of one nineteenth century missionary, also arose out of a fundamental misapprehension of the process of meaningful substantive transformation that a text undergoes when it is translated into another language and therefore encounters an entirely new worldview2. If one were a fan of postmodernist thought, they might characterise it as an encounter with an entirely new set of binaries against which meaning is created, with the potential of thereby creating an entirely new synthesis of meaning even through an excellent translation of the text. Beyond issues of direct translation, one must also consider the effect of both Hong and his followers various encounters with Chinese Christian literature, which innately implies an encounter with a myriad of unique metaphorical imagery, literary styles, local folk traditions, metaphysical reference points, all of which had a significant influence on the collective consciousness of the taiping ethic, or in other words, how most people within the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom understood their place in the universe. To deem Hong’s antagonism towards protestant ‘orthodoxy’, or the scriptural deviations of the Chinese bible from the King James bible or some other English bible, as so severe as to distance it completely from the word of christ, is to dismiss out of hand a reciprocal and constantly evolving relationship between the Judeo-Christian worldview and a series of local and national perceptions which add, rather than subtract to their understanding of the biblical text. If authors such as Samual Moffet are to be taken at their word, that these linguistic and cultural transformations amount to a dilution of a substantively purer religious outlook, than they should logically apply the same outlook that any translation from the original aramaic as a distortion of the true gospel, to European understandings of the biblical texts as well. Under this paradigm, the King James Bible (an English translation from Latin) and the Latin Vulgate (Greek to Latin), are both perversions of the word of God.
References:
Kilcourse, C. S. (2016). Taiping theology: The localization of Christianity in China, 1843-1864. Palgrave MacMillan.