Abstract
This article examines the contested identity of the Reformed church in urban China and its diverse approaches to religious politics, particularly since the 2010s. Despite profound differences in church polity and political engagement among Reformed circles, a set of shared ideals unites these communities. Most notably, Chinese Reformed church leaders commonly appeal to Puritan history to frame their commitment to civil obedience, uphold evangelism as the core mission of the church, and justify their separation from the state-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement (tspm). However, these rehearsed categories also empower them to promote markedly different pastoral priorities, social imaginations, and attitudes toward political conflict. Assessing both the ecclesiological unity and diversity of Reformed Christianity in urban China, this article delineates a distinctively Chinese vision of Reformed catholicity: hidden yet public, Sino-centric yet global and cosmic, and finally, politically marginal yet spiritually central.
The rise of Reformed Christianity as an urban movement in China since the 1990s has sparked extensive debate over its ecclesiological identity and political engagement. Some contend that these urban churches should no longer be labelled “house churches,” as if they still met clandestinely in private homes. Many of them now consist of large congregations and actively engage with public affairs and religious policy, hence representing a unique stream of piety within Chinese Christianity (Chow 2014:7; Hu 2021:142, 147–8; Yang 2011:29–31). At the same time, leading figures of this urban Reformed movement continue to embrace the term “house church,” highlighting both unity and historical continuity with that tradition.1 Furthermore, while some urban Reformed churches actively address issues of religious policy and negotiate their position vis-à-vis political authority both in print and online, others are low-profile and shun the public eye (Kang 2019; Xu 2022). It is evident that Reformed Christianity is really rather diverse.
This article, instead of resolving these debates, adopts a historical approach to explore the ongoing struggle over the identity of the Reformed church in China since the 2010s. The analysis argues in particular that, despite differences in church governance, political fervor, and attitudes toward the tspm, Reformed Christians have shared a desire to establish legitimacy independently of the tspm through constructing a Chinese “Puritan” movement. This collective pursuit fosters a sense of solidarity as a “godly minority” and nurtures aspirations for visible catholicity. However, it simultaneously serves as a mechanism of cohesion and division, empowering church leaders and congregants to promote different pastoral priorities and approaches to political conflict.
Highlighting these commonalities and divergences enrich current debates over the contours of public theology through a historical analysis of what is being articulated, enacted, and widely celebrated. While not primarily a study of nor an attempt at public theology, this article traces how front-line church leaders of the Reformed persuasion, such as Wang Yi and Guo Yijun, conceived of the responsibilities and contributions of the church to wider society.2 Pursuing this line of inquiry, this article treats them not only as Reformed clergy, but also, in a loose sense, as public theologians, not to confine them within a restrictive or monolithic category of thinkers and practitioners, but rather to highlight the complexity and plurality of Chinese Reformed public engagement today.
Reforming Memory: Chinese Appropriations of Puritan Legacies
The emergence of a Chinese “Puritan” movement is first evident in the strikingly popular self-identification of Chinese Reformed leaders as modern-day Puritans. In order to claim historic orthodoxy and justify their separation from the tspm, these leaders frequently invoke the legacy of Puritan dissent, while conveniently ignoring the internal tensions within the Puritan tradition itself, particularly with respect to ecclesiastical-political conformity. In doing so, they seek to align themselves with the international Reformed community and attach eschatological significance to the house church movement as a catholic and visible church.
Secondly, as Chinese Reformed Christians continue to appeal to Puritan history and theology, their emerging diversity, from their ecclesiological imagination to socio-political commitments, uncannily mirrors the inherent ambiguity of the tradition on which they draw. Take Puritan church polity as an example. There were Puritan Episcopalians, such as Joseph Bentham (1593/4–1671) and Nicholas Estwick (c.1584–1658). They were not only conformable during the 1630s, when anti-Reformed innovations became the new orthodoxy of the established Church, but they even sided with the Crown after the outbreak of war in 1642 and the ascendancy of Presbyterianism (Fielding 1989:228–32; Milton 2022). Edward Reynolds, a Presbyterian divine at the Westminster Assembly, likewise conformed before the war and eventually became Bishop of Norwich following the Restoration in 1660 (Wang 2024a). Even iure divino Presbyterians and many Congregationalists aspired to reform the national church, affirmed English monarchs as Supreme Governors of the Church of England, and praised the establishment as godly and blessed. They perpetuated Elizabethan conformist narratives by comparing English monarchs to Old Testament kings and extolling chief governors as “nursing fathers of the Church,” divinely instituted to oversee ecclesiastical matters.3 Therefore, despite contemporary Chinese Reformed portrayals of Puritanism as a unified front against secular encroachment on ecclesiastical authority, 17th-century English Protestants presented a much more complex legacy.
As the Chinese Reformed churches began to establish their own forms of governance under the context of tightening state control, Presbyterianism emerged as the predominant model. The availability of Chinese translations of Puritan studies, ranging from classic works that emphasize the Puritan/Anglican divide to more recent scholarship foregrounding the Presbyterian majority, has bolstered the appeal of the Presbyterian polity.4 Bruce P. Baugus (2014:18–21, 23), Reformed theologian and professor at the Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, approvingly observes that “a notable reformation is underway” in China: churches “are being organized or reorganized along Presbyterian lines,” and “a Chinese Presbyterian polity has been drawn up”. Jie Kang (2019:10), in her case study of a Calvinist church network in northern China, likewise affirms this Presbyterian priority, identifying Presbyterian governance as a “major criterion conventionally defining a Calvinist church.” In contrast to Presbyterian dominance stands the notable presence of Reformed Baptists in urban China. Among them, Guo Yijun, pastor of Beijing Endao Reformed Baptist Church, is a leading yet understudied public theologian. Preoccupied with house church survival, Guo emphasizes the primacy of local congregations as the apostolic model of the true church, especially in the form of Chinese house churches.5 Steven Hu’s recent study of Reformed ecclesiological identity in Shanghai similarly draws attention to Reformed Baptists, noting their promotion of “explicit membership” (Hu 2021:154–5). What Hu lays out are classic Congregationalist principles, and Puritan patriarchs of 17th-century New England, such as John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and John Davenport, championed highly similar ideals that focused on covenanted communities of visible saints (Bremer 2008; 2020; Winship 2022; Wang 2024b).
Crucially, while the Presbyterian-Congregationalist conflict dominated the Westminster Assembly of Divines in the 1640s, the house church leaders in China today have largely tolerated the differences over church polity among themselves. United in their opposition to the tspm, they share a keen interest in teasing out dissent, if not outright separatism, as the Puritan norm.6 In doing so, house church leaders have consistently overlooked the scholarly developments of the past fifty years that have dismantled the traditional Puritan/Anglican antithesis and firmly established Puritan activism as a movement largely situated within the Church of England (Collinson 1967:14; 1988:94–126; Lake 1993; Tyacke 1987). Ironically, the Westminster Confession of Faith, upheld by many Chinese Reformed churches as their creedal authority, emerged out of puritan aspiration to reform and reestablish the national church. Furthermore, recent historiography on early modern English Protestantism has effectively restored the Reformed conformist tradition, alongside Puritanism, as a mainstream expression of Reformed piety in post-Reformation England (Hampton 2008; 2021; Counsell and Griesel, 2024). The overwhelming reliance on Puritan nonconformity among the Reformed house church leaders therefore reveals the existing gap between Chinese imaginations of what puritans were and the historical reality.
Despite this emphasis on Puritan dissent as the ecclesiological common ground, Reformed house churches continue to experience internal divisions over public engagement and political conformity – the focal point of the Reformed struggle for a unified identity and legitimate visibility in China. The most widely accepted framework for understanding Reformed diversity in political engagement is the elite/grassroots dichotomy. The elite response to state control of religion is active engagement, conversation, and rights defense. Its most prominent figure is Wang Yi (b. 1973), pastor of Early Rain Covenant Church (ercc) in Chengdu, who was convicted of inciting subversion in 2019 and is currently serving a nine-year prison sentence. A prolific writer, public theologian, and legal scholar, Wang exemplifies the hardline defense of religious liberty and the separation of church and state, profoundly shaping Reformed political activism in 21st-century China. Scholars characterize this Reformed subgroup as urban, young, intellectual, and high-profile, cast in contrast to an alternative, much quieter grassroots Calvinism that shuns political confrontationalism (Kang 2019: passim, e.g., p. 3; Xu 2022:179–80; Starr 2016:2).
Jie Kang’s case study (2019) of the Reformed network in northern China highlights the grassroots model. Her findings underscore a posture of outward civil obedience, paired with an internal clerical authoritarianism that is now evolving towards Presbyterian synodical government. Ximian Xu, drawing on firsthand experience in Wenzhou, reinforces Kang’s theory. Although many churches in Wenzhou turned to Reformed theology from the 1990s onwards, leadership remained in the hands of older, non-elite ministers “not well educated due to the Cultural Revolution” (Xu 2022:179–80). Scholars further attempt to label this distinction through models such as the “cultural mandate (
What we have outlined above is a picture of ecclesiological diversity from church polity all the way to political engagement. It seems that the educated Presbyterian elite, their grassroots counterpart, and Reformed Baptists formulate their identity and purpose in the Chinese society in drastically different ways. If this were the case, could scholars still regard the Chinese Reformed Church as a unique force in World Christianity? In the following analysis, this study turns to primary sources from diverse ecclesiological pockets within the Chinese Reformed world to explore a shared set of ideals and vocabulary, centering on their intentional appropriation of Puritan history for self-identification. The clear presence of this ideological overlap enables us not only to speak of Reformed churches in China, but also to conceive meaningfully the singular presence of a Chinese Reformed Church and a common aspiration for catholicity. These unifying threads in the highly intricate and colorful tapestry of Chinese Reformed ecclesiology focus on the engagement with politics, particularly in the areas of civil obedience, evangelical priority, and appropriation of Puritan nonconformity. It is to these key tenets that we now turn.
Key Themes and Rhetoric in Chinese Reformed Politics
This historical study does not seek to evaluate the extent to which the Chinese Reformed Church “politicizes” religion. Rather, like current scholarship on Puritan politics, this analysis examines attitudes toward and engagement with the communist regime and its public policy among Chinese Reformed Christians through their own eyes and in their own words. Three central and interconnected themes emerge as the ideological common ground between various Reformed subgroups in urban China today. First, most Reformed house church leaders affirm civil obedience, albeit with divisions over the extent to which conformity is owed to the Chinese state. Second, while virtually all Reformed leaders prioritize evangelism as the core mission of the church, the ways in which they carry out this mission vary considerably. Third, most Reformed pastors and public theologians appeal to Puritan nonconformity to justify their rejection of the tspm. However, they set forth various reasons and rationales for the separation, with differing levels of intensity and eschatological urgency.
Beneath these similarities and differences, house church survival as well as the separation of church and state remain the unifying convictions among the Reformed. Yet, diverging interpretations of where the boundary between ecclesiastical and political jurisdiction lies produce a wide range of Christian lifestyles and postures toward the state. Recognizing the commonalities is crucial, because much current scholarship has emphasized internal diversity without sufficiently accounting for the shared ideals and rhetoric that render such diversity intelligible. Once unity comes to the fore, the true shape of diversity becomes visible.
Civil Obedience
Urban Presbyterians in China often differentiate themselves into two distinct camps based on their attitudes towards public engagement, and current scholarship confirms this dichotomy. One stream of Reformed engagement with the wider society emphasizes the so-called “cultural mandate,” advocating societal transformation, whereas the other restricts the ecclesiastical mission to conversion and discipleship (Kang 2019:7; Sun 2008:25–31). Adherents of the latter often claim to be more politically compliant than those of the former. Kang (2019) and Xu (2022), for instance, describe a grassroots preference for low-profile ministry centered on Reformed soteriology. Kang (2019:6–7), in particular, contrasts this grassroots Reformed alternative with figures like Wang Yi, stressing that many Reformed churches refrain from political activism and affirm the legitimacy of the Chinese government. According to Kang (2019:6), these churches view the secular power of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) as “God-given,” and therefore “do not oppose the authorities and do keep a distance from government.” She derives most of her observations from first-hand interviews with a “Pastor Liu” in an urban Reformed church, who prefers the “evangelizing mandate” over the politically rigorous “cultural mandate” (Kang 2019: 3, 7).
A closer examination of primary sources by Wang and others within the reformist camp tells a more complex story. From the Presbyterian Wang Yi to the Baptist Guo Yijun, civil obedience remains central to their defense of the house church movement. Emphasis on distance from secular authorities also features prominently in their opposition to the state-sanctioned tspm. In August 2015, Wang’s ercc issued a statement, entitled “Ninety-Five Theses,” a deliberate mirroring of Martin Luther’s 1517 disputation.7 The document called for a clearer separation between religion and politics, arguing for the God-given right for house churches to worship and evangelize freely8. The major concerns of the church at the time were the Sinicization of Christianity and the deepening pressure to conform to the tspm. As combative as the “Ninety-Five Theses” might have been in tone, Wang, its primary author, nevertheless endorsed the authority of the communist regime as divinely instituted.9 Citing the classic scriptural text on civil obedience, Romans 13, he went so far as to declare that resisting the power of the secular sword was to “oppose God.”10 In September and October 2018, anticipating arrest and imprisonment, Wang composed the much shorter “My Declaration: Defiance out of Faith,” published by ercc shortly after his arrest in December 2018.11 In this piece, the modern Reformed luminary reiterated his belief that all governments were “set up by God, his respect for the Chinese communist regime “as a temporary ruler,” and his willingness to “obey their rule in my physical body, as if obeying the Lord’s discipline and training.”12
Guo Yijun, pastor of Beijing Endao Reformed Baptist Church, likewise underscored civil obedience under highly similar political conditions. He penned his ecclesiological manifesto, “From Sheba to Jerusalem: Here We Stand,” following a new wave of government harassment, including police raids on three separate Sunday services on 2 January 2022 and pressure on members to shift to tspm churches. Like Wang, Guo was deeply concerned with religious freedom outside the confines of the tspm. Both leaders, in their respective moments, were navigating intensifying surveillance and the growing threat of legal reprisal. In an effort to rebut accusations of disobedience and disloyalty, Guo emphasized that house church Christians were, in fact, patriots.13 He invoked the examples of English Puritans as well as their much-loved Reformation legends beloved, Martin Luther and John Calvin, who, Guo argued, all sought to obey the state while keeping a distance from secular politics.14 Christians, Guo insisted, were to be good citizens: they must “engage in honest labor, conduct business legally, pay taxes, and strive as citizens to serve their local communities and their country.”15
Few Reformed leaders in China dismiss the importance of civil obedience as a biblical mandate. Even Wang Yi explicitly denies that his resistance to state control of religion is in any way “civil disobedience.”16 However, they do frequently contest the boundary of political conformity. Kang and Xu have demonstrated the strong presence of a politically passive Reformed faction, but even within the vocal faction, represented by Wang and Guo, there exists considerable diversity in priorities and polemical strategies. Both Wang and Guo appeal to the two kingdoms doctrine to legitimize ecclesiastical independence outside the tspm while pledging civil obedience, but their theological articulations diverge sharply. Wang prefers to employ the language of mutual exclusivity, whereas Guo presents a more complex spiritual reality that transgresses the boundary between the tspm and house churches.
As early as 2007, Wang had appealed to the “Puritan worldview” to endorse the distinction between the earthly kingdom and the kingdom of heaven, further arguing that it was Calvin who perfected the Augustinian distinction by placing both kingdoms under the sovereignty of God, a view that 17th-century Puritans (and later 20th-century Evangelicals) perfectly inherited.17 In continuity with this appeal to Puritan “political philosophy” – “the most developed, most matured of all religions” –, Wang insisted on the sovereignty of Christ over the limited power of the state.18 In the “Ninety-Give Theses,” Wang proclaims that, since Chinese society now stands under the sovereign reign of the resurrected Christ, the “spiritual reality” is that Christ, “not any kings, political parties, cultures, or wealth on earth,” rules over Chinese history and the hearts of its people.19 On this basis, he declares that the church does not, in any sense, belong to the state.20 While many Chinese Christians may assent to this claim in principle, Wang’s unqualified insistence that the state has absolutely no jurisdiction whatsoever in ecclesiastical matters, without distinguishing between the invisible catholic church and its visible local expressions, is striking.
Moreover, Wang and ercc consistently adopt a surprisingly expansive view of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, leaving little room for adiaphora (things indifferent or non-essential to the saving faith). For example, a central theme in both the “Ninety-Five Theses” and the “Declaration” is secular infringement upon the right of the church to observe scriptural teaching. This can be as restrictive as overt suppression of basic religious practices, such as evangelism and worship.21 However, secular encroachment can also be as comprehensive as forceful impositions of “any extrascriptural standards, isms, and commands” upon the church.22 This confrontational posture culminates in Wang’s repeated denunciation of the ccp as “wicked rulers” and their oppression of house churches as “an evil criminal act.”23 In the months leading up to his arrest, Wang took an even bolder step: naming President Xi Jinping directly in a sermon, declaring him a sinner. “The government he [Xi Jinping] now leads,” Wang proclaimed, “has greatly offended God, for it persecutes the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ! If he does not repent, he will surely perish!”24
By contrast, Guo presents a much more measured critique of the Chinese regime and the tspm. He paints a picture of Protestant consensus on the separation of church and state. Resorting to the Puritan/Anglican dichotomy, a common trope in Chinese Reformed ecclesiological writings, Guo asserts that all major Protestant denominations, except for Anglicanism, affirmed the stance of separation.25 In an earlier essay on the future of Chinese house churches, written in 2011, Guo distinguishes godly ‘separatism’ from sinful schism, commending the former as a religious term originating from English Puritanism and imbued with a spirit that can be traced back to the Reformation: “It was precisely the separatism of Reformation pioneers such as Luther and Calvin that gave rise to what we now know as Protestantism.”26 Similarly to Wang, Guo also appeals to the two kingdoms doctrine to argue that the faith of house churches demands their submission to “all policies and laws that do not conflict with the core tenets of the Christian faith”; however, the state “must not interfere in church affairs such as gatherings, personnel matters, worship, prayer, offerings, or evangelism.”27
In his ecclesiological manifesto “From Sheba to Jerusalem”, written a decade later, Guo affirms God’s “absolute sovereignty” over the Chinese Church and argues that the government-run tspm subverts the order of God’s two kingdoms by subjecting the church to state control.28 The tspm may be legally compliant to the Chinese government, hence a “lawful church” from the secular perspective, but spiritually, it is not a true church.29 However, the widely shared Reformed conviction of divine sovereignty over the church also empowers Guo to give a much more positive assessment of the tspm. It is precisely because of the lordship of Christ that, Guo argues, God can use true believers within the tspm to proclaim the gospel, citing Joseph Gu (Gu Yuese
Crucially, the Beijing pastor generally avoids Wang’s all-sweeping rebuke. Instead of casting the regime and the tspm as outright evil, Guo compared the tspm to the Prodigal Son in Luke 15, indicating the potential for repentance and salvation.30 This is not to say that hardliners like Wang would outright reject the specific observations proposed by Guo, such as the faithfulness of Joseph Gu, and indeed, Wang believes his fiery denunciation of Xi and the Chinese government is itself a call for repentance.31 However, their rhetorical divergence in negotiating for peaceful co-existence with the tspm is striking. High-profile Reformed leaders often appeal to opposite approaches, some confrontational, others conciliatory. Furthermore, once Wang and others set their mind on an expansionist approach to ecclesiastical jurisdiction and labelled the tspm and state intrusion as outright evil, the battle-lines with the state quickly extended. The theological stakes are high, because lay Christians heed their pastors’ all-inclusive application of the gospel across all areas of life. The evolving battle therefore has significant impact on the daily lives of Chinese believers and their relationships with the wider society, as the next section makes clear.
Centrality of Evangelism
Another commonly perceived difference between elite and grassroots Reformed groups in China is their varying emphasis on evangelism. In Kang Jie’s case study (2019:7), Pastor Liu and his church in northern China claim greater civil obedience by dedicating themselves solely to the “evangelizing mandate (
Samuel Ling, an influential voice in Chinese Reformed theology, champions a Kuyperian approach to evangelism that highlights contextual awareness and cultural transformation. He and Stacey Bieler’s edited volume, Chinese Intellectuals and the Gospel, interrogates the place of the gospel in “China’s search for an all-comprehensive national theology” (Ling 1999:3). Their proposed “‘Model C’ evangelism” goes beyond “Model A” (conversion) and “Model B” (discipleship), envisioning cultural renewal as integral to evangelism (Bieler and Ling 1999:cv; Ling 1999:3). Not all Reformed theologians agree. David VanDrunen (2014:217–18), for instance, denies the possibility of an “all-comprehensive ideology” and rejects Ling and Bieler’s Model C as a confusion of the two kingdoms. The historical theologian sees the attempt to transform all areas of Chinese society as a dangerous trend and a serious departure from the Reformed tradition. He repeatedly asserts that “the church is to minister and declare the Word of God only,” admonishing the Chinese Reformed churches to “observe the proper boundaries” and respect diversity over things not clearly spelled out in Scripture (VanDrunen 2014:219). Despite Kang’s evangelism/cultural mandate binary, leading Reformed activists such as Wang Yi and Guo Yijun affirm the primacy of evangelism and lean toward Samuel Ling’s interpretation of what evangelism entails. To them, the binary does not exist, but their activism is an integral part of evangelism. The key issue lies in how the church should delineate the boundary between the spiritual and the temporal realms.
To illustrate this diversity within the Chinese Reformed world, we now turn to one of the most notable and profoundly impactful attempts to Christianize Chinese society, i.e., the promotion of Christian education. Wang Yi and ercc were the driving force behind the Christian education movement among urban Reformed circles, setting up the Covenant Reformed School (crs) in 2013 and promoting Christian education as yet another biblical mandate through the 2010s and beyond (Chow 2018:144; Ma 2019:92–4, 112–39). At the crs’s opening ceremony on 2 September 2013, Wang again resorted to the language of mutual exclusivity: “Apart from the Bible, there is no true goodness in the world. We must also believe that any school which cannot teach the Bible is essentially a bus to hell” (Ma 2019:114–17).32 To define education, Wang first described it as a process of upholding God and his truth as the supreme authority against relativism; second, education was the reception of God’s grace and revelation, not autonomous self-realization; third, education was to cultivate a biblical culture of worship and to empower the educated to be truly human, i.e., to become worshippers of God rather than self-promoters; finally, through the work of the Holy Spirit, education was to foster fellowship in Christ rather than competition. The brilliance of Wang and ercc’s campaign for Christian education lay in their timely grasp of the growing anxiety among the urban Christian elite over both communist state schooling and Western progressive pedagogies. crs proved remarkably successful, attracting so many families from across the country that, at one point, the number of those on the waiting list exceeded those already enrolled (Ma 2019:116–17).
Wang and ercc’s absolutist view on education is even more evident in their “Christian Education Manifesto.”33 Ensuring the provision of Christian education is an obligation for all Christian parents and churches, and it would indeed be the “natural response” out of faith of all covenant-keeping parents.34 Once ercc categorizes education as a fundamental Christian duty, it no longer falls under temporal jurisdiction: “government officials are instituted by God to perform justice, not to administer education. Education has nothing to do with the ‘power of the sword’ entrusted to the state, but belongs to the ‘keys of the kingdom of heaven’ entrusted to the church.”35
Crucially, regardless of how radical and “political” Wang and ercc’s vision may seem to others, he and ercc consistently define this endeavor as evangelism. Education aims to propagate the gospel, expand the kingdom of God, and build up a “Puritan society” in the Chinese-speaking world. Without this purpose, all education becomes “rebellion against God.”36
Aspirations for a “Chinese Puritan” revival permeates Classical Christian Education, a 2018 collection of essays by Wang Yi and Su Bingsen, Principal of crs. In an essay entitled with Harvard College’s old motto, “Christo et Ecclesiae: The Purpose and Nature of Christian Education,” Wang claimes that crs was an attempt to revive the Puritan education of 17th century New England in present-day China. Citing Harvard’s founding precepts from New England’s First Fruits (1642), Wang asserts that the goal of education was “to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.”37 While Harvard was part of a theocratic church-state establishment in Congregationalist America, jointly overseen by six civil magistrates and six ministers, all appointed by the Massachusetts General Court, Wang upholds the institution as the exemplary model of ecclesiastical monopoly over education. Furthermore, while the precepts of Harvard College were drawn under the supervision of its Congregationalist-turned-antipaedobaptist president, Henry Dunster (Macfarlane, 2021), Wang argues that only Presbyterian “covenantal ecclesiology” warrants full-time Christian education as a divine command.38 Conveniently ignoring these contradictions, Wang first narrowly portrays the Reformed covenant of grace, with its implications from infant baptism to the provision of biblical teaching for covenant children at home and at church – beliefs shared among many of the Reformed persuasion, whether they be Episcopalians, Presbyterians, or even Congregationalists –, as the “Presbyterian” position. He then singles out Baptist resistance to state schooling as contempt for secular authority due to their rejection of believers’ children as covenanted members of the church who deserve covenantal education.39 It is noteworthy that Wang does not offer a richly theological elaboration from the Reformed covenant of grace or Presbyterian ecclesiology in his specific mandates for full-time Christian education. Instead, his frequent appeals to Deuteronomy 6:6–9 as a key verse and the imagery of Exodus as a “closed education system” demonstrate a heavy reliance on American conservative advocates for homeschooling (Blumenfeld, 1984; McDowell and Beliles, 1989).40
Most Reformed leaders and believers in China agree that parents and churches have the obligation to provide Scriptural teaching and spiritual guidance to the next generation, and many do prefer a form of education that incorporates the Christian faith. However, few adopt a rigid faithful/ idolatrous dichotomy and deny the role of temporal authority in all aspects of schooling. Returning to Guo Yijun’s “From Sheba to Jerusalem,” we find a more accommodative vision. Instead of claiming exclusive educational rights for the church, Guo emphasizes the usefulness of diversity. While state monopoly on education may produce temporary uniformity, he argues, voices of dissent will inevitably erupt and undermine social stability. By contrast, allowing Christians to set up their own schools cultivates social inclusivity and creativity, which ultimately enables the kind of peaceful co-existence that genuine stability requires.41 By safeguarding diversity rather than enforcing uniformity, the government can nurture a “more mature, open, and confident” society.42 In many respects, Guo and Wang advocate similar political reforms based on their shared commitment to the separation of church and state, such as educational freedom and the right to conduct religious activities outside state-run institutions. Nevertheless, Wang’s stark godly/idolatrous dichotomy and Guo’s more conciliatory approach reveal significant divergences that push their activism toward different directions. Interestingly, once Wang labels state institutions such as the tspm as evil and indeed as representatives of the Antichrist, he and his followers see no need to campaign for their reform, but demand believers to depart from state institutions, including public schools, as a godly “exodus.”43 In contrast, Guo, while ultimately urging the abolition of the tspm, couches his plea in the softer rhetoric of diversity and peaceful co-existence, emphasizing collaboration and patriotism.44 He contends that the tspm has fulfilled its “historical mission”, so that placing it in a “museum” rather than “in the current governance structure” better reflects China’s march towards “civility and progress.” Instead of demanding that the government relinquish control, Guo suggests that the state conceive a new form of governance that better serves “religious harmony.”45
“Puritan” Nonconformity
In order to justify their separation from the tspm against criticisms from both Christians and non Christians, Wang Yi, Guo Yijun, and many other house church leaders appeal to Reformation history and Puritan dissent as validations of their historical orthodoxy. It seems particularly crucial for them to enlist the Puritans to their cause, owing to the contextual parallels they perceive between 17th-century England and contemporary communist China: while Martin Luther spoke out against papal tyranny, and John Calvin strove to restore ecclesiastical governance, it was the Puritans who most famously opposed the idea of a state-controlled church.
While many house church Christians and theologians cite Puritan dissent as their role model, there remains a noticeable fluidity in the theologization of such nonconformity and disagreement over what precisely they are dissenting from. This fluidity is particularly evident in one of the most well-known house church controversies of the 2010s: the 2011 mass harassment of the Beijing Shouwang Church (hereafter Shouwang), which sparked a wave of commentary and interpretation demonstrating the highly varied use of Puritan nonconformity among Reformed circles (Chow 2018:92–3, 105–9; Zhu 2015:55–94). Shouwang, a flagship Reformed church, embarked on a long and arduous campaign to register as a lawful, yet non-tspm, church in 2005. In the following years, their pursuit of legal status was countered by a series of state-run tactics to deprive the church of a venue for gathering. The escalating conflict finally burst into the open and captured headlines in April 2011, when Chinese authorities detained church members and placed its leaders under house arrest after the congregation began to host Sunday services outdoors.46 Almond Flowers, a periodical run by the church, published numerous articles to address the controversy throughout 2011 and 2012, some of which drew direct comparisons between Shouwang’s commitment to separation from the tspm and Puritan dissent.
Some commentators on the Shouwang controversy alluded to Puritan nonconformity as a way to promote toleration for the sake of social harmony. The winter 2011 issue features an article by Fenggang Yang (2011:34), professor of sociology at Purdue University, who argued that it was simply impossible for secular power to enforce nationwide religious uniformity, highlighting Puritan nonconformity as a notable precedent where enforced uniformity led to disastrous consequences for the ruling class. England had attempted to suppress religious plurality through “Anglicanism,” Yang (2011:34) noted, but it ended with the “Puritans being compelled to depart and immigrate to America, ultimately going so far as to wage war against England and become a new, independent country.” Instead of repeating this mistake, allowing Shouwang and other house churches to register as lawful alternatives to the tspm would create “a new and better religious order, one that would be more conducive to … social harmony and stability” (Yang 2011:35). Even Guo Yijun, who had denounced the tspm as a false church and called for its abolishment, advocated for the legalization of house churches based on the same rationale of fostering healthy diversity and social harmony. Both founded their vision of ecclesiological diversity on the shared conviction in the separation between church and state. Like Yang, Guo appealed to Puritan dissent from “Anglicanism” as the right model to emulate.47
One of the most fascinating reflections on the Shouwang controversy appeared in the subsequent issue of Almond Flowers. It was a short essay, written by a lay church member, Zheng Xiaomei (2012:65), who echoed the Puritan/ Anglican antithesis after reading D. M. Lloyd-Jones’ 1971 essay, “Puritanism and Its Origins”: “‘English church – Christ’s church. There you have the essential division between Anglican and Puritan.’ From this, I seem to sense a bit of the current state of the Chinese church” (Lloyd-Jones 2016:246). Zheng candidly admitted her ongoing confusion over contested issues such as the church-state relationship, the separation between house churches and the tspm, and, crucially, disagreements within house church leadership. Interestingly, reading Puritan history did not boost her confidence in any particular version of conformity; rather, it taught her to be more “open-minded” and “not be quick to condemn those with differing opinions” (Zheng 2012:65). Lloyd-Jones’ analysis of Puritan diversity over conformity to the state church as well as ecclesiological disputes between Presbyterians and Congregationalists demonstrated that even English Protestants had to navigate a wide variety of views on the church-state relationship. This deeper understanding of Puritan plurality instilled in Zheng a willingness to accommodate ecclesiopolitical divergences within her own church.
While many voiced their hopes for greater inclusivity, whether urging the government to accept religious plurality or calling for fellow Christians to bear with one another amid confusion and division over conformity, there were others who completely rejected diversity and accommodation. Wang Yi contributed several articles to Almond Flowers during the 2011–12 controversy as well, in which the prominent Reformed thinker enshrined Puritan nonconformity as the sole model of godliness. In a message to the church on 3 May 2011, Wang defined Shouwang’s ordeal as a critical moment of revival, comparable to significant revivals of the past, such as the European Reformation and the Puritan movement:
Some have also said that today is the Puritan era of China. The house church movement originated from a group of ‘pilgrims’ who refused to conform to the state church…. The so-called puritans were Christians who would rather be broken like jade than be whole like tile [i.e., they would rather die with integrity than live in compromise].
wang 2011:4
This Puritan model of uncompromising dissent is so central to Wang’s vision that the idea recurs frequently in his other speeches and writings. In a pastoral letter to ercc on 2 September 2012, Wang again asserted that God had “led the Chinese house churches on a sixty-year-long journey of nonconformity to the state church, similar to that of the Puritans.”48 For Wang, the battle for ecclesiastical freedom from state control was the battle for Reformed revival. It was a historic struggle of eschatological importance that China had inherited from the Reformed leaders of the Reformation and the Puritan movement.
This contemporary battle of cosmic significance, according to Wang, was the house church/ tspm struggle in China. Wang again resorted to an absolute dichotomy, dividing the world into Jerusalem, i.e., the “Anglophone Puritan tradition,” and Athens, i.e., the “nationalist tradition.”49 Reformed theology was the yardstick, and at times, Wang appeared to exclude non-Reformed Christians from the communion of saints: “wherever Calvinism is accepted, there is the new Jerusalem; wherever Calvinists are killed (the Huguenots), there is the new Athens.”50 For Wang, China would likely emerge as the center of this eschatological battle between Jerusalem and Athens “in the next few decades.” Its triumph in China hinged on the question of whether the Reformed faith would take root in the land. If this were indeed the case, Wang pleaded, then Chinese seminarians and new immigrants in North America should – mimicking the call of Abraham in Genesis 12 – “leave behind your foreign people, foreign country, and foreign home, and go to the land the Lord will show you,” i.e., to return to China, “the real ‘Narnia’.”51 The alternative was astonishingly bleak:
Stand with the persecuted church in the power of your faith, walk this final stretch of suffering with your brothers. Otherwise, there may be some among you who dwell in houses with ceilings, yet they and their descendants will find themselves in Jerusalem with no share, no claim, and no memorial there.52
Wang’s overseas influence was considerable, and many among the Reformed Chinese diaspora desired to participate in the co-suffering of churches like Shouwang, though few heeded the Chengdu pastor’s call to return. Hong Yujen, pastor of Faith Chinese North American Baptist Church, Vancouver, Canada, was so captivated by Shouwang’s ecclesiological vision and persistent activism for political change that he and his church decided to host two outdoor services per year in solidarity. On one such occasion in 2015, Hong preached a message of spiritual battle, and from separation from the tspm to Christian education, he closely followed Wang’s faithful/idolatrous antithesis to denounce conformity as outright idolatry and drew upon Puritan nonconformity to justify his stance.53 Beyond Scriptural revelation, Hong argued, God provided historical role models for the church today, among which the “best precedent” were “the Puritans in the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England,” specifically the “Nonconformists”.54 He asserted that the cause of Puritan nonconformity was their opposition to the Act of Supremacy, which upheld English monarchs as the heads or supreme governors of the Church of England. Puritan persistence in dissent eventually brought about their “most significant achievement for England, the enactment of the Bill of Rights” after the 1688 Revolution, rendering the monarch a mere titular ruler and achieving real religious parity.55
Hong’s version of Puritanism was historically inaccurate, not least because generations of Puritans, including many dissenting Congregationalists, had repeatedly affirmed monarchical supremacy in ecclesiastical governance. However, his pastoral message was clear: keep fighting in imitation of the Puritans. Their toil eventually overthrew the “autocratic rule of the union of church and state,” and in the present age, “God has also entrusted this matter to Chinese Christians.”56
Conclusion: The Chinese Future of Visible Catholicity
This study has traced the ecclesiological imagination and diversity among Reformed house churches in urban China, especially among the most vocal and politically active. In particular, this article has set forth nuanced divergences over their evolving negotiations with the state and strategic deployment of Puritan history, including highly contested notions such as civil obedience, evangelism, and the independence of ecclesiastical governance. Although this strain of Chinese Christianity has produced an ecclesiologically vibrant and politically varied set of self-identifications, a striking convergence undergirds this otherwise fractured body: a profound aspiration toward visible catholicity. This is not merely a theological claim, but a lived, contested vision of what it means to be the church in China today – public-facing, politically engaged, and proudly part of the global Reformed communion.
Different factions within the Chinese Reformed world conceptualize visible catholicity in notably distinct ways. Presbyterians, particularly those aligned with Wang Yi’s absolutist and all-encompassing vision of Christianization, locate catholicity in the public articulation of the Reformed faith. In an interview with Liu Tongsu, Nanjing-born public theologian and pastor of the Assembly of Living God Community Church, San Francisco, California, both Wang and Liu repeatedly asserted that the church is, by nature, necessarily public.57 House churches had historically maintained their public identity by preserving communal worship in private homes, both pastors affirmed, and now they must strive to gather, worship, preach, and evangelize publicly wherever possible. This ecclesiology is also eschatologically charged: to be visibly catholic is not only to stand against the tspm at a national level, but to partake in a cosmic Reformed struggle against spiritual tyranny. In Wang’s writings, the visible church is simultaneously militant and triumphant, its clarity forged through political defiance and cultural reform, and its universality purified through separation from the anti-Christian state and tspm. The house church, in this light, is not a tactical refuge, but becomes the very site of God’s redemptive action in global history, demanding even the return of the Chinese godly diaspora for co-suffering and co-glorification.
Others, however, refrain from Wang’s eschatological fervor and absolutist rhetoric. Guo Yijun, for example, likewise affirms the public nature of the church, once citing Wang for support.58 Like Wang, Guo defines the house church and its catholicity through faithful embodiment of local congregational life apart from the tspm as well as unity with the international Reformed world.59 Yet Guo, along with others such as Fenggang Yang, embraces a softer, more conciliatory vision of catholicity – one that actively pursues peaceful co-existence and even co-flourishing with religious others in a pluralistic society. For Guo, the visibility of the church in 21st-century China lies not in antagonism toward an evil state per se, but in the faithful lifestyle of true believers who are simultaneously godly pilgrims as well as law-abiding, useful citizens to the secular state.
These divergent visions of the visible church are not merely derivatives of European Reformation and Puritan paradigms. Rather, they represent the emergence of a distinctly Chinese ecclesiological grammar – one shaped by lived experience under authoritarian surveillance, the historical burden of being muted outlaws, the aspiration for cultural impact, and highly creative historical analogies. Precisely because of these contextual features, the Chinese Reformed church embodies a paradoxical visibility: hidden yet public, marginal yet central to God’s purposes. The persistent appeal to Puritan nonconformity, for example, is not a naïve reproduction of 17th-century English models, but a strategic appropriation, filtered through decades of house church survival. The figure of the Puritan, whether invoked to justify radical dissent or patient endurance, has become a cipher through which Chinese Reformed leaders articulate ecclesiological fidelity in the face of persecution and providential hope for their ultimate triumph.
So, having traced the historical contours of Chinese Reformed ecclesiology and its appropriation of Puritan history, how can we go from here? How might the Chinese Reformed Church continue to pursue a visible catholicity that is truly contextually attuned and historically informed? Rather than treating history as a static source of legitimacy, Reformed communities in China would benefit from a rigorous, critical re-examination of the Puritan past before drawing contextual parallels and pastoral applications within the drastically different conditions of contemporary China. This shift from faithful historical reconstruction to ecclesial imagination is vital if Reformed catholicity is to be more than a rhetorical ideal. It must explore authentic continuity with the international Reformed world, instead of being captive to a simplistic, utilitarian view of church history.
This means that history, including the Puritan legacy, remains useful and deserves attention. Resisting the temptation to conflate disparate contexts does not mean that we should throw the baby (history) out with the bathwater (poor contextualization). Rather than adopting Puritan nonconformity as a flat template, Chinese Reformed theologians could recover the internal diversity of early modern Reformed ecclesiology – including the constructive roles played by conforming divines – and discern afresh the implications of Puritan (non)conformity in a non-Christian political order (cf. Hampton 2008; Wang 2024a). This theological recalibration would also benefit from a deeper engagement with ongoing global conversations on public theology. David Ford (2011:25, 124), a leading Anglican theologian and advocate of interfaith dialogue, has cautioned the church against overly simplistic and authoritarian impositions of “systems” and “comprehensive structures,” which he identifies as “epic ambitions.” While such impulses toward coherence have long enriched the Reformed tradition, Ford’s warning against over-reliance on the epic mode resonates well within the Reformed Chinese circles. From absolutist governance, brutal silencing of dissent, to repetitive misreading of church history to justify ecclesiological idiosyncrasies, it has been the Reformed Christians themselves who have suffered the most from epic expressions of faith from within. Inviting both historical depth and dialogical breadth into theological reflection and ecclesial life could promote both internal unity and meaningful engagement with “the complex particularities of our time” (Ford 2011:41).
Crucially, this proposal in favor of historical sensitivity, especially an honest recognition and empathy toward Reformed plurality, both in the past as well as today, does not entail a dilution of doctrine or compromise of confessional integrity. Rather, it calls for a deeper literacy in both church history and public theology – disciplines that equip Reformed leaders in China and among the Chinese diaspora to discern the contours of an already present diversity, within their own traditions and within a broader civic and inter-religious landscape. By nurturing academic curiosity and courage to embrace the Reformed drama as a symphonic, not monotonic, story, front-line ministers, theologians, and congregations alike may cultivate a more resilient and recognizably catholic witness: one that does not merely survive within hostile or uncertain conditions, but enacts with clarity and grace the visible catholicity to which the Reformed Church aspires.
Acknowledgment: This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Notes
Wang Yi
Martin E. Marty is widely recognized as the first person to propose the term “public theology”: “Two Kinds of Two Kinds of Civil Religion,” in American Civil Religion, eds. Russell E Richey and Donald G Jones (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1974), 139–57. For the contested notion of public theology and its development in meaning since Marty’s seminal chapter, see E. Harold Breitenberg, “To Tell the Truth: Will the Real Public Theology Please Stand Up?”, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 23:2 (2003), 55–96; Sebastian Kim and Katie Day, introduction to A Companion to Public Theology, eds. Kim and Day (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 1–21.
A few examples are provided here from a wide range of confessional sources: John Jewel (Elizabethan conformist), An Apologie or Answere in Defence of the Churche of Englande (London, 1564: rstc 14591), N7v; Thomas Cartwright (Elizabethan presbyterian), A Reply to an Answer made of M. Doctor Whitgift against the Admonition to the Parliament (Hemel Hempstead, 1573, rstc 4712), 51; John Davenport (conformable Puritan turned New England Congregationalist), preface to An Apologeticall Reply to a Booke [by J. Paget] called An Answer to the Unjust Complaint of W.B (Rotterdam, 1636: rstc 6310); Edward Reynolds (conformable Puritan, Presbyterian Divine at the Westminster Assembly, later Bishop of Norwich), The Peace of Jerusalem: A Sermon Preached in the Parliament House, Jan. 9, 1656 (London, 1659: R1245A), 27.
Popular Chinese translations of Puritan writings or Puritan studies include Martyn Lloyd-Jones, et al., Puritan Papers
Guo, “Cong Shiba dao Yelusaleng”
Interestingly, Puritan Presbyterians and Congregationalists were able to collaborate and maintain a sense of solidarity during the 1630s, when there was enormous pressure to conform to state-sanctioned ceremonial innovations. One can say that inter-confessional solidarity in the face of a common enemy is simply a transhistorical phenomenon.
Contemporary Chinese Reformed invocations of Martin Luther as the quintessential Reformation hero are widespread and, perhaps unintentionally, echo early modern English Protestant and Puritan efforts to enlist Luther in support of their own preferred models of church-state relations: Alec Ryrie, “The Afterlife of Lutheran England”, in Sister Reformations: The Reformation in Germany and in England, ed. Dorothea Wendebourg (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 213–34.
Early Rain Covenant Church (henceforth ercc), “Women dui jiating jiaohui lichang de zhongshen (jiushiwu tiao)”
Ibid., art. 6.
Ibid., art. 54.
Wang Yi, 12 December 2018, “Wode shengming: Xinyang shang de kangming”
Ibid.
Guo, “Cong Shiba dao Yelusaleng”
Ibid., section 3.3.
Ibid., section 2.5.
Wang, “Wode shengming”
Idem, 20 May 2007 “Qingjiaotu shijieguan yu xianzheng zhuyi (zhi si)”
Ibid.
ercc, “jiushiwu tiao”
Ibid., art. 50.
Ibid., art. 54.
Ibid., art. 16.
Wang, “Wode shengming”
Idem, 9 September 2018, “Yiqi denghou deshu de rizi”
Guo, “Cong Shiba dao Yelusaleng”
Idem, “Zhongguo jiating jiaohui lu zai hefang?”
Ibid., section 2.4.
Idem “Cong Shiba dao Yelusaleng” 從⽰巴到耶路撒冷 [From Sheba to Jerusalem], introduction and section 3.7.2.
Ibid., section 2.1.
Ibid., section 3.7.1.
See also Wang Yi 王怡 and Liu Tongsu
Wang Yi, “Bei shangdi jiaoyu de ren you fule”
ercc, “Jidujiao jiaoyu xuanyan”
Ibid., 274.
Ibid., 275.
Ibid., 277, 282.
Anon. New Englands First Fruits (London, 1643: Wing E519), 22; Wang Yi, “Wei Jidu, wei Jiaohui—Jidujiao jiaoyu de mudi he xingzhi”
Wang, “Wei Jidu, wei Jiaohui—Jidujiao jiaoyu de mudi he xingzhi”
Ibid.
Ibid., 23–24, 29.
Guo, “Cong Shiba dao Yelusaleng”,
Ibid.
ercc, “jiushiwu tiao”
Guo, “Cong Shiba dao Yelusaleng”,
Ibid.
Michael Bristow, 12 April 2011, “Chinese Shouwang Church Vows to Hold More Services”, bbc, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-13048472 (accessed April 19, 2025); Andrew Jacobs, 18 April 2011, “Illicit Church, Evicted, Tries to Buck Beijing”, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/world/asia/18beijing.html (accessed April 19, 2025); Nicola Davison, “Chinese Christianity will not be Crushedʼ, The Guardian, 24 May 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/may/24/chinese-christianity-underground (accessed April 19, 2025).
Guo, “Cong Shiba dao Yelusaleng”,
Wang Yi, 6 September 2012, “Muhan: Naniya de zuihou yizhan”
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. Here Wang cites from Nehemiah 2:20: “Then answered I them, and said unto them, The God of heaven, he will prosper us; therefore we his servants will arise and build: but ye have no portion, nor right, nor memorial in Jerusalem.” (English Standard Version).
Hong Yujen,
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Su and Wang, “Jidujiao shi yi zhong gonggong shenghuo”
Guo, “Cong Shiba dao Yelusaleng”
Ibid.
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