Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity

Last updated
Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity
Type of site
Online encyclopedia
EditorGlobal China Center
URL www.bdcconline.net
LaunchedJune 2006;17 years ago (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]

Contents

History

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]

See also

Related Research Articles

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:

  1. Indigenization: Foreign missionaries create well-organized churches and then hand them over to local converts. The foreign mission is generally seen as a scaffolding which must be removed once the fellowship of believers is functioning properly. Missionaries provide teaching, pastoral care, sacraments, buildings, finance and authority, and train local converts to take over these responsibilities. Thus the church becomes indigenous. It becomes self-supporting, self-propagating and self-governing.
  2. Indigeneity: Foreign missionaries do not create churches, but simply help local converts develop their own spiritual gifts and leadership abilities and gradually develop their own churches. Missionaries provide teaching and pastoral care alone. The church is thus indigenous from the start. It has always been self-supporting, self-propagating and self-governing.

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

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Griffith John</span> Welsh Christian missionary (1831-1912)

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Elliott Speer</span> American Presbyterian religious leader and missionary

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">T. C. Chao</span>

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.

Timothy C. Tennent is an American Methodist theologian. He is the current president of Asbury Theological Seminary.

Geoffrey William Bromiley was an ecclesiastical historian and historical theologian. He was professor emeritus at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, having been Professor of Church History and Historical Theology there from 1958 until his retirement in 1987.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Torrance</span> Scottish missionary to China

Thomas Torrance (1871–1959), born in Shotts, Scotland, was a Scottish Protestant missionary to 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kwame Bediako</span> Ghanaian Christian theologian

Kwame Bediako, also known as Manasseh Kwame Dakwa Bediako, was a Ghanaian Christian theologian and Rector for the Akrofi-Christaller Institute for Theology, Mission and Culture in Akropong, Ghana.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Johann Gottlieb Christaller</span> German missionary and linguist

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".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christian Baëta</span> Ghanaian academic and minister

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.

References

  1. Chow, Alexander (2018). Chinese Public Theology: Generational Shifts and Confucian Imagination in Chinese Christianity. Oxford University Press. p. 169. ISBN   978-0-19-880869-5.
  2. "Introducing the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity". ChinaSource. Retrieved 11 June 2018.
  3. "Our Story". Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity. Retrieved 11 June 2018.
  4. Tiedemann, R. G., ed. (2009). Handbook of Christianity in China. Vol. 2. Leiden: Brill. pp. 113–114, 514. ISBN   978-90-04-11430-2.
  5. Gerald H. Anderson, ed. (1998). Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN   978-0-8028-4680-8.
  6. "Guidelines for Writers". Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity. Retrieved 11 June 2018.