Paper short abstract:

Is the grace of the divine beings of popular religion and that of the Christian God in Taiwan the same kind of grace? In this paper I argue that it is not. Furthermore, I show how the grace of the latter displaced that of the former for followers of the famous preachers Watchman Nee and Witness Lee.

Paper long abstract:

Is the grace of the divine beings of “Chinese Popular Religion” and that of the Christian God in Taiwan the same kind of grace? In this paper I argue that it is not. Furthermore, I show how the grace of the latter displaced that of the former for a group of Chinese and Taiwanese Christians, followers of the famous preachers Watchman Nee (倪柝聲) and Witness Lee (李常受), over the past century. While the “something extra” of the grace of popular religious deities in China and Taiwan lies in the “interest-free” time lag between a divine favour and its human repayment, there is nothing that the God of this Christian group can give without you first giving yourself to God. Grace here lies in the gift of subtraction (of ‘self’, desire’, ‘sin’) rather than addition (money, health, progeny). Taking my cue from conversations with members of this group between 2015 and 2019, I relate these two kinds of grace to two alternative modes of identification: the first being more temporal, grounded in feelings of indebtedness (to gods, ancestors, nations, parents) the other more spatial, characterised by feelings of displacement (from global and spiritual centres). Divine grace in each case placates as well as feeds these feelings. I conclude by exploring the resurgence of the grace of indebtedness in the lives of group members as manifest in their controversial cemetery-building project, centred around the second burial of Witness Lee, in Los Angeles, a project called “Grace Terrace” (恩典陵園).