New Agricultural Gospel: Protestant Agricultural Missions in China in the Early Twentieth Century
Abstract
Agricultural mission was a mission taken by Protestant missionaries to improve
people livelihood and, at the same time, to preach the Gospel, typically through
applying modern science to the improvement of farming.This mission could be taken
directly by an American missionary, or, more commonly, indirectly by a Chinese rural
worker trained by agricultural education. In this project, I aim to address a seemingly
paradoxical part of agricultural Missions in China with a more comprehensive
understanding of the movement: how did the missions combine agriculture and
Christianity?
The project consists of five chapters. The first chapters is a brief introduction
to
agricultural missions, and the second chapter a chronological review of the missions’
early development in China. In the third chapter I will discuss the challenges that
agricultural missions faced, and the missionaries’ theoretical attempts to combine
Christianity and agriculture. The fourth chapter is an attempt to discuss how their
rhetorics/theories were applied to rural churches in practice. I will conclude by
suggesting that a missionary rhetoric and a Christian theology emerged in the process
of
the movement to bridge the “spiritual” and “material” side of the movement. Even so,
the combination of agriculture and Christianity served to defend the pursuit of secular
interests in China, and agricultural missions may represent more of broadening the
boundary of Protestant missions into secular realms than a Christianization of China’s
rural communities. This is a key question that I will leave unanswered in this project,
as
an invitation for further conversation and research.
Type
Master's thesisDepartment
Graduate Liberal StudiesPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17154Provenance
Version 2 of PDF uploaded by mjf33 at request of author 2018-06-08.
Citation
Cheng, Mengliu (2018). New Agricultural Gospel: Protestant Agricultural Missions in China in the Early Twentieth
Century. Master's thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17154.Collections
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