BTJ’s latest book reveals China’s most controversial missionary, preacher, and government spy and it is bound to shake the foundations of what you think you know about missions in China.
His name was Karl Gutzlaff and most people have never heard of him, and those who have heard of him only know what has been written about him as a failure and fraud. In truth, Karl Gutzlaff might be the single most influential figure in the history of China. He was the very first German Lutheran missionary to China and sacrificed everything to preach the Good News in Asia. He abandoned his citizenship, his family, and even gave his life on the mission field to share the name of Jesus Christ and in the end was vehemently hated by many of his contemporaries.
Karl isn’t remembered fondly. Mission history books purposefully omit his name, but his legacy is stubbornly impossible to erase. His opponents and fellow missionaries denigrated him as a charlatan, a fraud, a drug dealer, a colonialist and a liar.
They weren’t wrong, but they weren’t entirely right.
Those who knew him best said he was a cross between a preacher and a pirate, a doctor and a devil, a missionary and miscreant. He was a pioneer; the first Lutheran missionary to China as well as the first missionary to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Korea, and Japan. He was a brilliant linguist, speaking about 20 languages, translating Scriptures into Thai, Laotian, Cambodian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese and writing books and articles in German, Dutch, and English.
He was a medical doctor helping to heal the sick and developed the first methods to treat drug addiction, while at the same time assisting the opium trade. He was a printer, sailor, navigator, spy, diplomat, magistrate, fundraiser, editor, and drug runner. At one point, he became a farmer just to introduce the potato for the first time in Korea!
He is called a racist by modern-day missionaries and a sell-out to his own race by those he served with. He dressed like the Chinese, but aided the British military to mount a successful attack on China. He campaigned for Chinese autonomy, while officially negotiating the succession of Hong Kong to the British.
He is remembered as a thief, stealing from mission communities, yet for most of his ministry he never took a salary as a missionary. He is accused of being ethnocentric, but not one western missionary of his day was so given over to living like the Chinese as he was.
More than anything, Karl was an unapologetic renegade, not belonging to any nation, organisation, or denomination and was responsible for bringing one missionary to China who stands above all others – Hudson Taylor. BTJ’s latest biography about Karl Gutzlaff is available now in ebook on the BTJ website or get the paperback on Amazon.com
God’s Renegade
