Ding Guangxun: Maintaining the Church

Ding Guangxun (K. H. Ting, 1915–2012) was heralded during his lifetime as the premier church statesman of the PRC era, a figure whose leadership of the authorized Protestant church and its national seminary spanned five decades and whose theological thought guided the church through much of that period. Ding’s theology is highly pragmatic in orientation, and his effect as a church leader was as important as his effect as a theologian. This chapter concentrates on the early writings of Ding Guangxun, from the 1940s and 1950s, to create a base understanding of his theological position in the first years of his ministry as comparator for later developments. The period encompassed intense debate on the relationship of church and state and includes Ding’s difficult debates with the staunchly separatist church leader Wang Mingdao—debate that precipitated the split of the Chinese Protestant church and whose ramifications are still ever-present.