The cleansing of God’s Chinese sons: baptism in 17th-century China

Abstract

This paper takes baptism, the first of the seven Catholic sacraments, as an exemplary case of the ritualistic exchange between China and the West during the 17th century. Though scholars have recently made in-depth studies on confession (Zürcher 2006) and funeral rituals (Standaert 2008), little attention has been paid to the adaptation of baptism to daily Chinese religious experience. By looking into both prescriptive texts of Catholic missionaries and actual practices in Chinese Christian communities, the paper will focus on the following key concerns: Why was baptism a unique case in the 17th-century Sino-European encounter? To what extent did the missionaries in China faithfully introduce this “gateway” sacrament according to the post-Tridentine model? How did the Chinese converts and non-believers (re)interpret and respond to those baptismal rites in parallel with their own ritualistic traditions? In what ways did this foreign ritual contribute to the formation of a hybrid religious identity among the Chinese converts, yet without confusing itself with the indigenous cleansing practices (e.g., the Buddha-bathing ceremony with “Pure Water”)? Answers to these questions will help us develop a more substantial understanding of Christianity as a “localized” living minority religion, which survived through the rapid political and social changes during the Ming-Qing transitional period. Moreover, the cross-cultural perspective in studying baptism (and other Catholic sacraments) will add a layer of new implications to the unity-or-diversity complex in late imperial Chinese culture.