Wang Ming-Dao : biography
WangArthur Reynolds, who translated and edited Wang’s autobiography, translated Wang’s family name as "Wong." A Stone Made Smooth, "Publishers’ Preface." MingdaoWang’s personal name was "Yong-shung" until 1920, when he "unconditionally submitted to God" and formally changed his name to "Mingdao," which means approximately "Testify to the Way." A Stone Made Smooth, 49. () (July 25, 1900 – July 28, 1991) was an independent Chinese Protestant pastor and evangelist imprisoned for his faith by the Chinese government from 1955 until 1980.
Biography
Childhood and conversion
Wang was born in the foreign legation quarter of Beijing in 1900 while it was under siege of the Boxers.Lian Xi, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 111. His father was so terrified of being tortured by the Boxers that he strangled himself a month before his son was born. A Stone Made Smooth, 2. His early life was one of extreme poverty and repeated illness; but he had an inquiring mind and did well at a London Missionary Society school. He later said his poverty had been something of a spiritual advantage because there were many sins that took money to commit.Stone Made Smooth, 7-20, 27. At first Wang hoped to become a great political leader, and he put a picture of Abraham Lincoln on his wall to remind himself of his goal.Stone Made Smooth, 31-32.
Converted to Christianity at fourteen, Wang came to believe "that all kinds of sinful practices in society had their exact counterparts in the church." He decided that the church "needed a revolution" and that God had entrusted to him the mission of bringing it about.Stone Made Smooth, 20-21, 48-49. In 1919 Wang became a teacher at a Presbyterian mission school in Baoding, a hundred miles south of the capital, but was dismissed in 1920 when he insisted on being baptized by immersion.Stone Made Smooth, 42-64. His mother and sister thought his behavior so peculiar that they believed him mentally ill, and Wang himself later admitted that the "persecution" he had received from others was in part the result of his own immaturity.Stone Made Smooth, 66-67.
Pastor
In 1923, after a good deal of personal Bible study but no formal theological training,"I have never studied at a theological college, but I have been taught in the theological college set up by God. I have not yet graduated." Stone Made Smooth, 106. Wang moved towards a more mature understanding of the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith.Stone Made Smooth, 71-73, 81-82. Wang also credited the teaching of an elderly Norwegian, one Eric Pilquist (who wore "extremely untidy clothes"), with pointing him away from salvation through obedience to the law. In February 1925, he began holding religious meetings in his home in Peking, meetings which eventuated in the founding of the Christian Tabernacle, a church which by 1937 had its own building seating several hundred, and which was one of the largest evangelical churches in China during the 1940s. Wang also had an itinerant ministry throughout China, visiting twenty-four of the twenty-eight provinces and taking the pulpit in churches of thirty different denominations.Xi, Redeemed by Fire, 116. Wang was often absent from his own church for six months of the year. In 1926, Wang began publishing a religious newspaper, Spiritual Food Quarterly.Stone Made Smooth, 144-52. Wang was gratified that the publication could continue for twenty years without a subsidy from foreign missionaries and that, except for the original capital, he neither put money into it or took money out of it.
Conflict with the Japanese and the Communists
Wang believed both that church and state should be separate and that Christians should not be "yoked together with unbelievers."Stone Made Smooth, 216; Stephen Wang, 89. When the Japanese occupied Peking during World War II, they insisted that all churches join in a Japanese organized federation of churches. Wang refused on a number of occasions. Despite threats of various kinds, he was not arrested, and his church was allowed to continue to hold services.Stone Made Smooth, 215-38.