Hannah NATION and J. D. TSENG. Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2022. pp. 264. ISBN978-1-5140-0413-5. Reviewed by Pablo Munoz ITURRIETA, Catholic University of Chiapas, Mexico.

The totalitarian aims of the Chinese Communist Party are a serious challenge to the distinction between the church and the state, a distinction that arose from within Christianity as a response to the demands of the religious and political authority of the Roman Emperor. Christians in China face an old dilemma with Chinese characteristics: to submit to a state-controlled structure whose aim is to assist the Party to promote patriotism (i.e., allegiance to the CCP), and to raise a socialist consciousness. In China, the church must submit to the state to operate, for Socialism is conceived as the ultimate source of salvation. Christians have had to either submit to the authority of the communist government (with its limitations on preaching, quotas for the newly baptized, etc.), or had to draw themselves to a culture of secrecy within the “underground church”.

The present collection of essays, however, is about a third movement that arose as a response to the church-state dilemma: the house church movement. These are Christian communities that chose to be unregistered, refusing to comply with the government’s demands to register with and submit to the official structures, upholding a right to exist, and taking the bold step of leasing office space to set up houses of prayer and run educational centers for kindergartens, seminaries, and bookstores. These pastors took such a bold stance for they saw the conflict between their church and the state as a spiritual conflict within an eschatological dimension, a conflict between the city of God and the city of man regarding who has authority over humanity and creation (p. 2).

Chapter 1 is a pastoral letter written by Wang Yi to his congregation following the detention of the Chinese delegation traveling to the Third Lausanne Congress. It outlines his understanding of what the church is, his theological arguments for the separation of church and state, and the history of the Patriotic Movement (the state-controlled ministry of religious affairs). In Chapter 2, Jin Tianming identifies seven traits that all Chinese house churches hold in common. In Chapter 3, Wang Yi stresses how there is no public sphere in China, because all spheres of life remain under close control of the government. For that reason, he argues, the visible church is the one true public voice in China: “the essence of the church is to live out the most public faith in the most private setting” (p. 39). In Chapter 4, Jin Mingri provides an overview of the primary strengths of both the rural and the urban house church movements, along with some historical overview of their growth. Sun Yi, in Chapter 5, argues that any institution that requites national loyalty above loyalty to the universal church and to the Great Commission is not fundamentally a church. In Chapter 6, Wang Yi addresses the role of nationalism in the formation of the state church, while arguing in Chapter 7 that only the churches that do not cooperate with the Communist Party are the ones that practice and promote true constitutional freedom.

Chapter 8 is a document published by Wang Yi in 2015 to commemorate the arrest of Wang Mingdao, one of China’s most influential house church leaders, in 1955. In Chapters 9 through 16, Wang Yi seeks to answer the most fundamental question: “What is the church?” Chapters 17 through 22, deal with the responses to the New Religious Regulations imposed by the Chinese Communist Party in 2018. In this section, Wang Yi makes a sophisticated argument for disobedience, not as a matter of civil withdrawal or disengagement, but rather as a matter of the church’s allegiance to an alternative kingdom, while Li Yingoiang, an elder at one of the house churches, offers advice on how the church should face persecution.
The book offers a unique insight into the lives of Christians in China, the level of religious persecution by the Chinese Communist Party, and will be a very valuable contribution to and helpful tool for scholars of religious freedom, global theology, political theology, China studies, and more.