Type of site | Online encyclopedia |
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Editor | Global China Center |
URL | www |
Launched | June 2006 |
The Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity (BDCC) is a biographical dictionary which focuses on the lives of Chinese Christians and foreign Christian missionaries to China. [1] It is published in both Chinese and English. [2]
The BDCC was initially based on the Dictionary of African Christian Biography (DACB) produced by the Boston University School of Theology, and was supported by the DACB and the Overseas Ministries Study Center. [3] The BDCC began with already published biographical materials, especially from the Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions (1998), [4] [5] and invites contributions from other researchers and institutions. [6]
The history of Christianity follows the Christian religion as it developed from its earliest beliefs and practices in the first-century, spread geographically in the Roman Empire and beyond, and became a global religion in the twenty-first century.
Missiology is the academic study of the Christian mission history and methodology. It began to be developed as an academic discipline in the 19th century.
Indigenous churches are churches suited to local culture and led by local Christians. There have been two main Protestant strategies proposed for the creation of indigenous churches:
Protestant Christianity entered China in the early 19th century, taking root in a significant way during the Qing dynasty. Some historians consider the Taiping Rebellion to have been influenced by Protestant teachings. Since the mid-20th century, there has been an increase in the number of Christian practitioners in China. According to a survey published in 2010 there are approximately 40 million Protestants in China. As of 2019, Fenggang Yang, a sociologist of religion at Purdue University, estimated that there are around 100 million Protestant Christians in China. Other estimates place the number of Protestant Christians at around 40–60 million
The Church of the East historically had a presence in China during two periods: first from the 7th through the 10th century in the Tang dynasty, when it was known as Jingjiao, and later during the Yuan dynasty in the 13th and 14th centuries, when it was described alongside other foreign religions like Catholicism and possibly Manichaeism as Yelikewen jiao.
Griffith John was a Welsh Christian missionary and translator in China. A member of the Congregational church, he was a pioneer evangelist with the London Missionary Society (LMS), a writer and a translator of the Holy Bible into the Chinese language.
Robert Elliott Speer was an American Presbyterian religious leader and an authority on missions.
David Howard Adeney was a British Protestant Christian missionary and university evangelist in Hunan, China and East Asia. He served with the China Inland Mission (CIM), InterVarsity Fellowship, and International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES). In 1968 he founded the Discipleship Training Centre (DTC) in Singapore.
Political theology is a term which has been used in discussion of the ways in which theological concepts or ways of thinking relate to politics. The term is often used to denote religious thought about political principled questions. Scholars such as Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi jurist and political theorist, who wrote extensively on how to effectively wield political power, used it to denote religious concepts that were secularized and thus became key political concepts. It has often been affiliated with Christianity, but since the 21st century, it has more recently been discussed with relation to other religions.
Rev. Fr. Duraiswami Simon Amalorpavadass was a Catholic South-Indian theologian who played a vital role in the renewal of life and mission of the Roman Catholic Church in India, particularly after Vatican II. He was fluent in Tamil, French and English. He was the younger brother of Cardinal Lourdusamy.
Tzu-ch'en Chao, also known as T. C. Chao, was one of the leading Protestant theological thinkers in China in the early twentieth century.
Thomas Torrance (1871–1959) was a Scottish Presbyterian minister and Protestant missionary to Sichuan, western China. He was first sent there by the China Inland Mission (CIM), and later by The American Bible Society. He married Annie Elizabeth Sharp (1883–1980) of the CIM in 1911. He was the father of the 20th century theologian, Thomas F. Torrance.
Cheng Jingyi or Cheng Ching-yi was a Chinese Protestant leader who worked for an independent, unified Chinese Christian Church and a nondenominational unity of Christians in China. He received honorary doctorates from Knox College, Toronto, Canada (1916); the College of Wooster, Ohio, USA (1923); and St. John's University, Shanghai (1929). He died in Shanghai after his visit to the mission work in southwest China and Guizhou in 1939.
North China Theological Seminary was one of the largest and well-known fundamentalist Protestant seminaries in mainland China in the first half of the twentieth century. It was founded in 1919 and was eventually merged into Nanjing Union Theological Seminary after the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
Dana Lee Robert is a historian of Christianity and a missiologist. She is a professor at Boston University, where she has worked since 1984. She was the co-founder of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission in 2001, one of the first university-based Centers on World Christianity in North America. For years, Robert held the School of Theology's Truman Collins Professorship in World Christianity and History of Mission, but in 2022 she was installed in the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorship, the highest distinction bestowed upon senior faculty members who remain actively involved in research, scholarship, teaching, and the University’s civic life.
Johannes Zimmermann was a missionary, clergyman, translator, philologist and ethnolinguist of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society of Switzerland, who translated the entire Bible into the Ga language of the Ga-Dangme people of southeastern Ghana and wrote a Ga dictionary and grammar book. Mostly an oral language before the mid-nineteenth century, the Ga language assumed a written form as a result of his literary work. Zimmerman's work built upon the single introductory grammatical treatise written by the Euro-African Moravian missionary and educator, Christian Jacob Protten, in the Ga and Fante languages, and published a century earlier in Copenhagen, in 1764.
The National Christian Council of China (NCC) was a Protestant organization in China. Its members were both Chinese Protestant churches and foreign missionary societies and its purpose was to promote cooperation among these churches and societies. The NCC was formed in 1922 in the aftermath of the Edinburgh Missionary Conference.
Johann Gottlieb Christaller was a German missionary, clergyman, ethnolinguist, translator and philologist who served with the Basel Mission. He was devoted to the study of the Twi language in what was then the Gold Coast, now Ghana. He was instrumental, together with African colleagues, Akan linguists, David Asante, Theophilus Opoku, Jonathan Palmer Bekoe, and Paul Keteku in the translation of the Bible into the Akuapem dialect of Twi. Christaller was also the first editor of the Christian Messenger, the official news publication of the Basel Mission, serving from 1883 to 1895. He is recognised in some circles as the "founder of scientific linguistic research in West Africa".
Christian Gonçalves Kwami Baëta was a Ghanaian academic and a Presbyterian minister who served as the Synod Clerk of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast from 1945 to 1949. He was among a number of prominent individuals, corporate organisations and civil society groups that were instrumental in the establishment of the University of Ghana, Legon in 1948.
The Dictionary of African Christian Biography (DACB) is a biographical dictionary which focuses on the lives of African Christians and foreign Christian missionaries to Africa. Its biographical stories are published in English, French, Portuguese, and Swahili.