宗教还是世俗:中国传教医学的多元结构

Sacred or Secular?: The Multiple Configurations of Missionary Medicine in China

不同学科背景的学者都认同西方传教士是世俗化的推动者。20世纪中叶,许多世俗政府已经全面将教会学校和医院国有化,这意味着基督教对于"文明"来说是多么无关紧要。尤其是在医学传教方面,对生物医学的需求消减了宗教的重要性。人们常常假定世俗化会持续、不可逆转地侵蚀对宗教的笃信。但是,在中国拿撒勒人医学传教活动(1920~1942)的缩影中,可以发现现代医学传教并不能一概而论。医务人员从未就宗教在现代医学中的角色达成一致看法。每位医生、护士都试图将各自对信仰和治疗的不同理解施加于工作和所处机构,结果成败参半。医学传教留下的并不是宗教衰落和传教士带领自己、学生和病人摆脱超自然话语的线性故事。相反,它是一个不断实践探索的过程,传教士在这个过程中创造了多种复杂、复合的思想体系,来引导他们的信仰和生物医学实践。

Scholars from a variety of disciplines have agreed in their characterization of Western missionaries as agents of secularization.By the middle of the twentieth-century many secular governments had seamlessly nationalized mission schools and hospitals,revealing how tangential Christianity had been to"civilization."In medical missions in particular,the demands of biomedicine are thought to have lessened the importance of religion.Secularization often presumes a steady and irrevocable erosion of religious commitments.However,in the microcosm of Nazarene medical missions in China(1920-1942),one discovers that modern medical missions was not monolithic.Never was the medical staff in agreement on the role of religion in medicine.Each doctor and nurse sought to impose different understandings of faith and healing on their work and in their hospital,with mixed success.The legacy of medical missions is not a linear tale of religious decline,with missionaries stripping themselves,their students,and their patients of referents beyond the physical world.Instead,it is a laboratory wherein missionaries created a variety of complex and compound ideological systems that helped them navigate their faith and their biomedical practice.This essay thus complicates a simple trajectory in medical missions from a"religious"to a"secular"orientation,suggesting instead a complex intertwining of the two.