274 the True Jesus Church

274 Book Reviews China and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church. By Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xx + 385 pages. Hardcover. isbn 978-0-19-092346-4. $99.00. The True Jesus Church (Zhen Yesu Jiaohui 真耶穌教會) has been a subject of much interest within studies of Chinese Christianity. Scholars such as Daniel Bays, Murray Rubinstein, Deng Zhaoming, Lian Xi, Ke-hsien Huang, and R. G. Tiedemann have written about the group, but the discussions have tended to be limited to short essays or parts of essays. Researchers have been prone to apply hermeneutical lenses such as revivalism, Pentecostalism, or popular religion to this group. These are religious analogues that legitimize the growth of the movement as a response to the “deprivation” of the poor and the marginal- ized. While there may be some benefit in these interpretive approaches, much of the early scholarship on the True Jesus Church was informed by the “Chris- tianity fever” (Jidujiao re 基督教熱) of the 1980s and 1990s which, according to sources in China, primarily spread among the four manys (si duo 四多)—that is, the many old, many women, many illiterate, and many ill. The book under review, which is a significant revision of a PhD dissertation, attempts to over- come these limits and biases in the study of this fascinating group. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye has written the first monograph-length study of the True Jesus Church, framing the movement as a form of restorationist Chris- tianity akin to Mormonism, the Disciples of Christ, or Seventh-Day Adventism (11). Doing so enables her to acknowledge the Pentecostal and Adventist roots of the group, which can be recognized in the priorities of glossolalia as first evi- dence and Saturday Sabbath observance, but also underscores the importance of its idiosyncratic ordinances, such as facedown immersion baptism and foot- washing. Most of these have biblical precedents, but restorationist groups in China and in the United States have also relied on extrabiblical sources, such as the prophetic visions of their leaders (90–91). This study draws on another major concept: the importance of the term “charisma.” While some readers may interpret this word in the framework of charismatic Christianity and its emphasis on the Christian gifts of the Spirit (which is of course very appropriate for the True Jesus Church), Inouye uses this term to emphasize the importance of the Weberian notion of charismatic authority—an extraordinary power channeled by individuals and organizations (she prefers not to use the term “institutions” [13]). This helps to explain the attractiveness of the True Jesus Church’s founder Wei Enbo 魏恩波 (1879– 1919) in bringing new converts into the church. But it also explains the tena- cious nature of this group. Although it was founded two years before Wei’s death in 1917, the True Jesus Church has spread and thrived in the Chinese © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/22143955-00702008 <UN> Book Reviews 275 mainland for over a century and has developed a global network, establishing religious enclaves in places like Taiwan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Using these conceptual tools to construct her canvas, Inouye paints the story of the True Jesus Church across nine chronologically-ordered chapters. Chapter 1 starts before Wei Enbo’s time and discusses a number of earlier charismatic organizations in China, such as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping Tiangguo 太平天國) and its founder Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全 (1814– 1864), God’s Chinese son, and the Qing imperial bureaucracy and the scholar- official Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 (1811–1872). Although the connection is not im- mediately apparent, Inouye offers these as earlier archetypes of charismatic authority in China. The next two chapters turn to Wei Enbo and the rise of the True Jesus Church. Chapter 2 tells the story of the Beijing cloth seller baptized in a London Missionary Society (lms) congregation in 1904, before he met the Norwegian American Pentecostal missionary Bernt Berntsen (1863–1933) in 1915. Inouye weaves into this story the providences of the time: the location of Wei’s shop five minutes’ walking distance from both the lms church and Berntsen’s Apostolic Faith Church, the global networks of Christianity and, especially, Pentecostalism, and the long-distance interconnectivity provided by communications and transportation technologies. Chapter 3 chronicles Wei’s 1917 vision in which Jesus instructed him to go to a river of flowing water and be baptized facedown before commencing a thirty-nine day fast. Inouye shows how these events, reminiscent of Jesus’s baptism as told in the Gos- pels, “created a public spectacle and an instant religious revival” locally (95), through oral exchanges, and nationally and internationally, with the aid of print technology. The fuel for the fledgling movement was found in the charisma of its leader—visions, miracles, and sacred rituals—and his restorationist message of an authentic Christianity against the sins of foreign mission denominations. Although Wei died only two years after his fateful vision in 1917, the remain- ing six chapters demonstrate how the charisma and the restorationist message of Wei has continued in the True Jesus Church beyond its founder’s death. Chapter 4 tells of how the True Jesus Church offered Deaconess Yang Zhendao 楊真道 a third way of charismatic empowerment, between millennia-old Con- fucian expectations of women and the growing secular image of the “New Woman.” Chapter 5 focuses on the years of 1932–1949 and discusses the dy- namics of competing organizations—Nationalist, Communist, and Japanese puppet governments—and compares them with the polity development of another organization, the True Jesus Church. The next two chapters discuss the decades after the establishment of New China, when True Jesus Church review of religion and chinese society 7 (2020) 271-285 <UN>.

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