God Worshipping Society

Seal of the Taiping heavenly kingdom
God Worshipping Society
拜上帝會
Hong Xiuquan, the self-proclaimed younger brother of Jesus Christ who started the God Worshipping movement
ScriptureBible
RegionChina
LanguageChinese
FounderHong Xiuquan
Origin1843
Guangdong, Qing dynasty
Defunct1864
Bai Shangdi Hui
Traditional Chinese拜上帝會
Simplified Chinese拜上帝会

The God Worshipping Society (simplified Chinese: 拜上帝会; traditional Chinese: 拜上帝會; pinyin: Bài Shàngdì Huì)[a] was a religious movement founded and led by Hong Xiuquan which drew on his own unique interpretation of Protestant Christianity[1][2] and combined it with Chinese folk religion, based on the faith in Shangdi ("Highest/Primordial God"), and other religious traditions.[3] According to historical evidence, his first contact with Christian pamphlets occurred in 1836 when he directly received American Congregationalist missionary Edwin Stevens' personal copy of the Good Words to Admonish the Age (by Liang Fa, 1832). He only briefly looked over and did not carefully examine it. Subsequently, Hong claimed to have experienced mystical visions in the wake of his third failure[b] of the imperial examinations in 1837 and after failing for a fourth time in 1843, he sat down to carefully examine the tracts with his distant cousin Feng Yunshan, believing that they were "the key to interpreting his visions" coming to the conclusion that he was "the son of God the Father, Shangdi, and was the younger brother of Jesus Christ who had been directed to rid the world of demon worship."[5][6][7][8]


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  1. ^ Lindau, Juan D.; Cheek, Timothy (January 2000). Market Economics and Political Change: Comparing China and Mexico. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 9780585122007.
  2. ^ MacKlin, Robert (25 July 2017). Dragon and Kangaroo: Australia and China's Shared History from the Goldfields to the Present Day. Hachette Australia. ISBN 9780733634048.
  3. ^ Gao, James Z. (2009). Historical Dictionary of Modern China (1800–1949). Scarecrow Press. p. 136. ISBN 978-0810863088.
  4. ^ Gray (1990), p. 55
  5. ^ Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement pp. 15–19 (1973)
  6. ^ Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement 20 (1973)
  7. ^ De Bary, William Theodore; Lufrano, Richard (2000). Sources of Chinese Tradition. Vol. 2. Columbia University Press. pp. 213–215. ISBN 978-0-231-11271-0.
  8. ^ Jonathan D. Spence, God's Chinese Son 64-65 (1996)

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