West Meets East

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West Meets East

The Catholic Missionary Impulse. Roman Catholic missionary work in Asia dates to the arrival of the renowned Jesuit missionary Matthew Ricci (1552-1610) in China in 1583. After impressing the emperor with his clock-making skills, Ricci eventually secured permission to remain in the imperial capital, where he was able to establish a Christian base and introduce Christian literature to the Chinese people. Like all pioneer missionaries to the East, Ricci faced the challenge of finding Eastern equivalents for Christian terms and managed to introduce the Christian message in terms understandable to the Chinese world view. As long as Ricci’s approaches to missionary outreach were followed, the Jesuit mission in China flourished. By the early eighteenth century, however, new missionaries to China reported to Rome that the converts of the Jesuits embraced a pagan form of Christianity. In a series of papal bulls, Rome ultimately insisted that missionaries must not accommodate the gospel to the “superstitions” of the Chinese people. Some of the orders sent from Rome angered the Chinese emperors, who threatened to banish all Catholics who refused to follow the rules established by Father Ricci. For the next two hundred years, the tenuous relations between the Church and Chinese state officials hindered the success of Catholic missionary work in China.

The Protestant Missionary Impulse. Just as the sixteenth century was a century of Catholic geographic expansion, the nineteenth century was a century of Protestant globalization. This era of extensive Protestant missionary outreach coincided with the colonial expansion of the West into the East, and at times the relationship between missionary penetration and colonization was hostile rather than friendly. For years the powerful British East India Company barred missionaries from

the lands under its control. Nonetheless, by the end of the nineteenth century European Protestant missionaries were widespread in less-industrialized regions of Asia.

Women and Ecumenicalism. Before the nineteenth century, Protestant efforts to export Christianity were largely financed either by the state or by a single religious denomination. Early in the eighteenth century, for example, a Danish king affected by Pietism sent missionaries to India. Similarly, various Protestant churches created missionary societies to export their particular brand of Christianity. The Church of England established the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1698 and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1701. Later in the eighteenth century, the Moravians and the Methodists also founded missionary societies. During the heyday of the nineteenth-century missionary impulse, however, the voluntary, ecumenical missionary society, rather than the state-supported or denominationally controlled institution, took the lead in spreading Protestant doctrines beyond the boundaries of Europe. To a greater degree than before, women played a major role in these privately financed, nondenominational efforts to spread Christianity. Women at home contributed their time and money to fund worldwide missionary activity. Overseas, they assumed teaching duties and preaching roles often forbidden to them at home. Thus, the missionary movement contributed not only to ecumenicalism among mainstream Protestant denominations but also to the feminist movement among Western Protestants.

The Spread of Protestantism in Asia. The individual most commonly recognized as the “father of modern Protestant missions” was William Carey (1761-1834), an Englishman born into an Anglican household and converted to Baptist teachings in 1783. In 1792 Carey founded the Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Heathen (later, the Baptist Missionary Society). The next year, Carey himself left England for India. During his lifelong career in India, Carey organized Christian churches and translated portions of the Bible into some thirty-five languages. His labors inspired many other Europeans to follow his example. In 1795, for example, the English Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists united forces to found the London Missionary Society; the following year the Scottish Missionary Society and the Glasgow Missionary Society were begun. In 1799 evangelicals within the Church of England started the Church Missionary Society. Four years later Protestants across Britain created the British and Foreign Bible Society, the first of many Bible associations with the purpose of supplying copies of the Bible to households around the globe. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, dozens of organizations were raising funds, training preachers, printing Bibles, circulating religious tracts, and sending missionaries to remote areas distant from their European origins.

THE GOD WORSHIPERS

One unexpected consequence of the spread of Christian teachings into China was the rise of a powerful religious movement that drew on Christian teachings but was not truly Christian. After coming into contact with Christian literature) a charismatic Chinese rebel named Hung Hsiu-ch’uan (1814-1864) proclaimed himself a son of God who was called to reform China. In 1846 he and a friend formed the Association of God Worshipers, a semi-Christian group that taught that all property should be held in common, that the sexes were equal, and that the state must prohibit prostitution, adultery, slavery, opium, alcohol, and the binding of women’s feet. By 1850 Hung’s followers included more than one million disciplined soldiers, who set out to make Hung the new emperor of China, launching the so-called Taiping Rebellion. In 1853 they conquered Nanking, making it their “Heavenly Capital.” Their attempt to take Beijing failed, but they continued to hold Nanking until 1864, when the city fell to government troops. As the outcome became apparent, Hung committed suicide. The God Worshipers continued to fight sporadically, and by the time their movement was finally crushed in 1873, more than twenty million Chinese had been slaughtered.

Source: Jonathan D, Spence, The Taiping Vision of a Christian China, 1836-1864 (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 1998).

The Impact in China. In 1807 the London Missionary Society sent Robert Morrison (1782-1834) to Canton. As the first Protestant missionary to China, Morrison enjoyed few immediate successes. Distrusted both by the Chinese and officials of the British East India Company, Morrison won few converts. His major achievement was working with another missionary, William Milne, to translate the Bible into Chinese, a task they completed in 1821. Significant Protestant inroads in China were not realized until four decades later. In 1839 a war broke out between England and China, when the Chinese government attempted to suppress the trade in opium, which was being sold by British merchants, who used their profits to buy tea for sale in Europe. This Opium War ended with a British victory in the Treaty of Nanking (1842), which gave Hong Kong to the British and opened five important ports to British trade. The treaty also allowed Protestant missionaries greater access to the interior of China. In 1865 J. Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) founded the China Inland Mission, an organization that accepted missionaries of all denominations. Through its influence, hundreds of churches were established throughout China. Many Chinese feared and resented the growing influence of foreigners in their country. In 1899 a violent uprising against foreigners, which became known as the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), took the lives of thousands of European missionaries and their Chinese converts before the Western powers succeeded in crushing the rebellion.

Asian Religions in Europe. Increased contact between Europe and Asia not only resulted in the exportation of Western religious traditions to the East but also increased Westerners’ awareness of previously little-understood Eastern religious traditions. Thus, during the nineteenth century, comparative religions arose as a scholarly discipline, especially after the publication in 1847 of The Religions of the World by F. D. Maurice (1805-1872). Soon, the extensive and mysterious texts of Hindu and Buddhist scriptures were being studied in Western universities. After Max Muller’s multivolume edition of Eastern scriptures (1875-1901) was published, Eastern concepts such as karma, reincarnation, and nirvana entered the religious vocabulary of Europeans. By the end of the nineteenth century, a growing minority of Westerners who were dissatisfied with the Judeo-Christian traditions was turning to the religions of the East for spiritual solace.