While not a sermon, this site seemed as good a place as any to post a paper presented to Phi Beta, a group of Methodist clergy that has been meeting in the Philadelphia area for over a century for the presentation and discussion of scholarship that undergirds or aids ministry.
“Some Things We Should Have Learned by Now”
presented to Phi Beta by Mark Young
November 6, 2014
A
wise woman, Sister Joan Chittister, has noted that
“When structures are in flux but ideas are stable,
there is room for error. When ideas are
in flux but structures are stable, there is room for confusion. But when both ideas and structures are in
flux at the same time, error and confusion are of the order of the day.”
She wrote this as part of her reflection on the
corporate life of some Benedictine nuns in Erie before, during, and following
the Second Vatican Council. Change, and
not mere adjustment, has been, she notes, the hallmark of our age in vast areas
of life and while individuals can sometimes forego change or insulate
themselves, institutions’ longer lifespans commit them to grappling with
change, like it or not.
“The evolutionary nature of institutions assumes a
continual process of adjustment. For an
institution to survive, it only makes sense that it must keep abreast of new
ideas in the field. At the same time,
simply upgrading a present process is seldom enough to assure the survival of
an institution when the whole nature of the undertaking and the world around it
changes.”
It is safe to say that in the second decade of the
second millennium, both the ideas and structures of Christianity as an
institution are in flux precisely because lesser adjustment no longer assures
survival, at least within Western culture.
It is one of those moments when the words of John 12:25 (“Those who love their life lose it, and
those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life”) carry a deep resonance.
Because we
stand at the edge of a time when the future may call not simply for revival of
the sort that Protestantism has seen so regularly that each wave receives its
own name, like a hurricane (“The Pietist Movement”, “The Great Awakening”, “The
Second Great Awakening”, “The Azusa Street Revival”, and so on), but for a more
thoroughgoing mission to a culturally non-Christian or even non-theistic
culture, it behooves us to consider how earlier
examples of attempts to meet missional need have called the Church to alter its
own ways, rather than insist that the
evangelized turn their backs on every established aspect of their lives. Sister Joan holds that particular instance up
as a precursor to the ideals she sees expressed in the decrees of the Second
Vatican Council, where
“…missionaries are, in the too lately discovered spirit of
the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, to be more presence than proselytes [sic].
They are to become enculturated and, as quickly as possible, enable the
new church to become native. The purpose
of missionary activity is not simply to convert people to a Western form of
Catholicism. It is to allow the culture
to flourish in a native church.”
Matteo Ricci’s work was indeed highly successful but because
it displayed flux in both ideas and structure he was charged with error and the
confusion that came in its wake lasted for generations on three continents. As the United Methodist Church passes through
a time when regional difference threatens schism across and within continents,
there is some comfort in recognizing that as nothing peculiar to our own age,
but an inevitable byproduct of any attempt at true change.
Before
looking at Ricci’s missionary efforts, which took place in China astraddle the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it would be good to glance at one approach
used in the introduction of Christianity into Northern Europe a thousand years
earlier. Setting aside the earlier traditions of Celtic
Christianity that had largely been driven out of Britain with the advance of
Germanic tribes, the evangelization (or re-evangelization) of Britain under
Anglo-Saxon hegemony was carried out at the instigation and under the direction
of Rome. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History [chapter xxx] records that in the year 601
Pope Gregory directed the missionary monk Mellitus how to go about winning over
the hearts and minds of the pagans.
“…the temples of the idols in that nation ought not
to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let water be
consecrated and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and
relics placed there. For if those
temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship
of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their
temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and
adoring the true God, may the more freely resort to the places to which they
have been accustomed. And because they
are used to slaughter many oxen in sacrifice to devils, some solemnity must be
given them in exchange for this, as that on the day of the dedication, or the
nativities of the holy martyrs whose relics are there deposited, they should
build themselves huts of the boughs of trees about those churches which have
been turned to that use from being temples, and celebrate the solemnity with
religious feasting, and no more offer animals to the Devil, but kill cattle and
glorify God in their feast, and return thanks to the Giver of all things for
their abundance, to the end that, whilst some outward gratifications are
retained, they may the more easily consent to the inward joys.”
Here, in
short, Pope Gregory encourages the maintenance of institutional structure in
order to limit flux in the cultural sphere.
This would, he judged, reduce resistance to the transformation of ideas.
Gregory’s approach was not the only
one open to him, and in June of 601, only a month before writing to Mellitus,
he had written to King Ethelbert of Kent, a convert to Christianity, advising a
harsh suppression of paganism and the destruction of its shrines. One writer, considering the contradictory
papal instructions, posits a reason based on the insufficiency of either alone.
“Perhaps Gregory thought that the most that could be
expected of Aethelberht at this stage was that he should bring all his political
weight to bear in opposing paganism and promoting Christianity in its place. The
letter to Mellitus, on the other hand, seems to imply a recognition that royal
opposition to paganism was not enough to defeat it permanently. The theory that
the inconsistency between these letters represents a deliberate, two-pronged attack
on paganism is naturally attractive, but the danger of a disintegration of the
missionary enterprise is clear: Gregory sets Aethelberht to destroy pagan
shrines, and very soon afterwards tells Augustine (via Mellitus) to preserve
them—a recipe for confusion, if not conflict.”
The two
conflicting approaches would reappear during the Chinese Rites Controversy, one
championed by the Dominicans and Franciscans, the other by the Jesuits. The cautionary insight that Pope Gregory the
Great himself felt ambivalent about fully backing either policy is telling. So is the fact that the advice to Mellitus
prevailed over the advice to Ethelbert.
How successful was this approach? Peter Orton observes that
“By minimising the disruption of existing patterns of pagan
observance, it was hoped that damaging, open conflict between Christianity and
paganism could be avoided, and that the former would absorb and eventually
replace the latter. Gregory must have been confident that Christianity would
emerge as the dominant strain in this hybridization; but his new policy seems
calculated to lead to a syncretistic religion combining Christian and pagan
elements.”
Whether or
not syncretism truly emerged, the institutional structure of revelry certainly
persisted and despite being relabeled or repurposed, the worldly spirit
that accompanied the celebrations did not completely evaporate, even given a
thousand years to do so. Francis Beaumont, one of Shakespeare’s collaborators, wrote
of the “church ale” festivals that supported the parish churches of Elizabethan
England.
“The churches must owe, as we all do know,
For when they be drooping and ready to fall,
By a Whitsun or Church-ale up again they shall go
And owe their repairing to a pot of good ale.”
Puritans
tried to eliminate church-ales as a regular part of their reforms. In Twelfth
Night [II. iii.] Shakespeare’s drunken character, Sir Toby Belch, addresses
the sanctimonious steward Malvolio, asking, “Dost thou think, because thou art
virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” To use Sr. Joan Chittister’s language, the
structure persisted (with adjustments) over time and so apparently did the idea
(again with adjustment rather than complete change). So despite Puritan and later Victorian efforts
to suppress the church-ales, to this day pastors often face the suggestion that
the church should find money to fix the roof by holding a beef-and-beer.
While the continuity of the pagan
and the Christian festivities in this case seems a matter of folkways, other
examples from across the world display outright syncretism. A case in point would be the popularity,
among Mexican Catholics and their American cousins, of devotion to the Virgin
of Guadalupe. The legend is recounted by
one web site dedicated to Marian devotion:
“Mesoamerica, the
New World, 1521: The capital city of the Aztec empire falls under the Spanish
forces. Less than 20 years later, 9 million of the inhabitants of the land, who
professed for centuries a polytheistic and human sacrificing religion, are
converted to Christianity. What happened in those times that produced such an
incredible and historically unprecedented conversion?
In 1531 a ‘Lady
from Heaven’ appeared to a humble Native American at Tepeyac, a hill northwest
of what is now Mexico City.
She identified herself as the ever virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the True God for
whom we live, of the Creator of all things, Lord of heaven and the earth.
She made a request for a church to be built on the site, and submitted her wish
to the local Bishop. When the Bishop hesitated, and requested her for a sign,
the Mother of God obeyed without delay or question to the Church's local
Bishop, and sent her native messenger to the top of the hill in mid-December to
gather an assortment of roses for the Bishop.
After complying to the Bishop's request for a sign, She also left for us an
image of herself imprinted miraculously on the native's tilma, a
poor quality cactus-cloth, which should have deteriorated in 20 years but shows
no sign of decay 480 years later and still defies all scientific explanations
of its origin.”
What
none of this account mentions is that, as is pointed out elsewhere,
“Before the fall of the Aztec capital of
Tenochtitlan in 1521, the hill where Juan Diego had his vision had also been
the site of an ancient temple to the Aztec goddess Tonantzin (Our Revered
Mother), later leveled to the ground by the Spaniards.”
The
subjugated Mexicans, in other words, substituted one Revered Mother for
another, one who revealed herself not to the foreign, episcopal potentate but
to a representative of the indigenous people, becoming first the unofficial and
eventually the official patroness of the native population. Juan Diego, to whom she appeared, was
canonized by John Paul II in 2002. The
Spanish bishop who doubted his visions was not.
At the end of that same century, an
attempt to expand Western Christianity eastward from Europe was made by the
newly-organized Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), who were given official sanction
by Pope Paul III in 1540 and again in 1550 by Pope Julius III
“to strive especially for the defence and propagation of the faith and
for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine, by means of public
preaching, lectures and any other ministration whatsoever of the Word of God”.
One of the many fronts on which the Jesuit work went on was in Asia. The foundational document noted that they
were especially charged to evangelize and to nurture the faithful “by means of retreats, the education of children and
unlettered persons in Christianity”
and so it was that one of the order’s early members, an Italian priest named
Matteo Ricci, entered China with a mandate to share the gospel and to educate.
He
and his coworkers made a decision that would have wide-reaching consequences
and that stands out sharply in comparison to the earlier activity of Mellitus
and his European contemporaries. Rather
than beginning by adapting the local culture to their own ways, the Jesuits
began by adapting themselves, at least outwardly, to the local culture.
“The Jesuits quickly decided that missionaries must
adapt themselves to Chinese customs.
This involved much rapid self-education.
Their first great missionary, the Italian Matteo Ricci, on his arrival
in 1582, adopted the dress of a Buddhist monk (bonze), without realizing
that bonzes were despised by
the people who mattered. When his
mistake was pointed out, he and his fellow Jesuits began dressing as Confucian
scholars, complete with long beards; they were determined to show that their
learning was worthy of respect in a culture with a deep reverence for
scholarship (an ethos of which naturally they greatly approved). …The Chinese
upper class was indeed impressed by the Jesuits’ knowledge of mathematics,
astronomy and geography, and the Society gained an honored place at the
emperor’s court through its specialist use of these skills, even taking charge
of reforming the imperial calendar – but not gaining many converts.”
The Jesuits were off to a slow start but were
undeterred. In one of his letters to a
missionary in Ethiopia, Ignatius Loyola had laid out a path that Ricci would
follow in China.
“Without taking away from anything in which they are
particularly interested or which they especially value, try to get them to
accept the truths of Catholicism. …Although you are ever intent on bringing
them to conformity with the Catholic Church, do everything gently, without any
violence to souls long accustomed to another way of life.”
The practicality of this approach shows itself in
the outcome. At the end of the
seventeenth century the Jesuit presence at the Chinese court established by
Ricci put French Jesuits on hand to provide the emperor K’anghsi with quinine
when he fell ill with malaria and European mediation when Peter the Great began
to expand Russian hegemony into the Chinese sphere. Partly out of gratitude for these acts,
in 1692 an unusual decree of tolerance was issued for Chinese Christians.
“The
Europeans are very quiet; they do not excite any disturbances in the provinces,
they do no harm to anyone, they commit no crimes, and their doctrine has
nothing in common with that of the false sects in the empire, nor has it any
tendency to excite sedition . . . We decide therefore that all temples
dedicated to the Lord of heaven, in whatever place they may be found, ought to
be preserved, and that it may be permitted to all who wish to worship this God
to enter these temples, offer him incense, and perform the ceremonies practised
according to ancient custom by the Christians. Therefore let no one henceforth
offer them any opposition.”
The Jesuit approach had been applied in Japan in
the previous century, where Francis Xavier had arrived with his associates in
1549. Fifty years later there were
possibly as many as 300,000 converts. A
native clergy was in formation, drawn especially from the classes of the
nobility and samurai.
This stands in stark
contrast to events following the arrival in 1593 of the Portuguese Franciscans,
carrying the baggage of the confrontational, forced conversions of South
America had entered the Asian mission field in a different spirit. There
“they adopted an aggressively negative attitude
toward Japanese culture, which led to a number of them suffering death by
crucifixion. In the early seventeenth
century the Tokugawa expelled Europeans from Japan except for one rigorously
policed trading post. They then launched
one of the most savage persecutions in Christian history, and their repression
of Japanese Christians was not without some military assistance from the Protestant
Dutch, who were doing their best to wreck Portuguese power in eastern Asia.”
What
Emperor K’anghsi may not have realized was that the Jesuits whom he honored as
peaceable were at that time embroiled in controversy with those Dominican and Franciscan
orders who had acted imperiously in Japan.
“When Dominicans
and Franciscans arrived in China from the Philippines in the 1630s, they
launched bitter attacks on their Jesuit rivals, and raised major matters of
missionary policy. The friars, with a
background in America assuming total confrontation with previous religions,
violently disagreed with the Jesuits in their attitude to the Chinese way of
life, particularly traditional rites in honour of Confucius and the family;
they even publicly asserted that deceased emperors were burning in Hell. …Complaints about the ‘Chinese rites’ were
taken as far as Rome itself, and after a long struggle successive popes
condemned the rites in 1704 and 1715.”
What is known in the West as the “Chinese Rites Controversy” had begun not
long after Ricci’s death and lasted nearly seventy years. The Jesuits had begun with a respect for
Chinese culture that was reflected in a willingness to adapt to its forms.
“We have let our beards grow and our hair down to
our ears, at the same time we have adopted the special dress that the literati
wear … of violet silk, and the hem of the robe and collar and the edges are
bordered with a band of blue silk a little less than a palm wide.”
They were accused of altering, on that account and others, of
surrendering core Christian beliefs in the course of adopting Chinese cultural
practices. Specifically, controversy
centered on the Jesuit acceptance of converts’ participation in rituals
honoring their ancestors, which the Franciscans and Dominicans held to be
unacceptably idolatrous. Likewise,
certain aspects of liturgy had been freely altered in ways that diverged from
the European norms that the mendicant orders had forcibly established in the
Americas and the Phillipines. They did
not see why the Jesuits had not maintained those standards in China.
The waters were further
muddied by theological antipathies in the West that were being projected onto
China, so that the Chinese Rites Controversy turned into a proxy fight.
“Notoriously, different religious orders had
divergent theologies, and none more so than the two ‘intellectual’ orders, the
Society of Jesus and the Order of Preachers. Jesuits and Dominicans lined up on
opposite sides on the theology of grace, on moral casuistry, and on the
Christian response to modern science. By the end of the seventeenth century
with French Jesuits and French priests from the Missions Étrangères de Paris
arriving in large numbers, the shadow of the Jansenist controversy reached out
to China. China became a sort of
surrogate battleground for European ecclesiastical conflicts.”
Nor was the battlefield limited to China.
The principles of enculturation expressed and attacked there were also
present in Africa. Philip Jenkins notes:
“From about 1700
too, the Kongolese church now began a long period of decline, which represents
one of the greatest wasted opportunities in the story of African
Christianity. Political fragmentation in
the Kongo state was partly to blame, but much more significant was the Church’s
refusal to approve native liturgies and its reluctance to ordain African
clergy. Nor was the Vatican willing to
grant other key concessions to African values, including a married clergy – a
model that was accepted elsewhere, in parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle
East. The Chinese Rites debacle, and the
cultural rigidity it symbolized, crippled the progress of Catholic missions
worldwide for a century.”
The first generation of the eighteenth century saw
the official condemnation of the work of the previous hundred years, as
witnessed in two competing magisterial decrees.
The first was issued in Rome in 1715.
“Pope Clement XI wishes to make the following facts
permanently known to all the people in the world. ...
I. The West calls Deus
the creator of Heaven, Earth, and everything in the universe. Since the word Deus does not sound right in the
Chinese language, the Westerners in China and Chinese converts to Catholicism
have used the term "Heavenly Lord" for many years. From now on such
terms as ‘Heaven’ and ‘Shangti’ should not be used: Deus should be addressed as the Lord of
Heaven, Earth, and everything in the universe. The tablet that bears the
Chinese words ‘Reverence for Heaven’ should not be allowed to hang inside a
Catholic church and should be immediately taken down if already there.
II. The spring and autumn worship of Confucius, together
with the worship of ancestors, is not allowed among Catholic converts. It is
not allowed even though the converts appear in the ritual as bystanders,
because to be a bystander in this ritual is as pagan as to participate in it
actively.
III. Chinese officials and successful candidates in the
metropolitan, provincial, or prefectural examinations, if they have been
converted to Roman Catholicism, are not allowed to worship in Confucian temples
on the first and fifteenth days of each month. The same prohibition is
applicable to all the Chinese Catholics who, as officials, have recently
arrived at their posts or who, as students, have recently passed the
metropolitan, provincial, or prefectural examinations.
IV. No Chinese Catholics are allowed to worship ancestors
in their familial temples.
V. Whether at home, in the cemetery, or during the time of
a funeral, a Chinese Catholic is not allowed to perform the ritual of ancestor
worship. He is not allowed to do so even if he is in company with non-Christians.
Such a ritual is heathen in nature regardless of the circumstances.
Despite the above decisions, I have made it clear that
other Chinese customs and traditions that can in no way be interpreted as
heathen in nature should be allowed to continue among Chinese converts. The way
the Chinese manage their households or govern their country should by no means
be interfered with. As to exactly what customs should or should not be allowed
to continue, the papal legate in China will make the necessary decisions. In
the absence of the papal legate, the responsibility of making such decisions
should rest with the head of the China mission and the Bishop of China. In
short, customs and traditions that are not contradictory to Roman Catholicism
will be allowed, while those that are clearly contradictory to it will not be
tolerated under any circumstances.”
Six years later, in 1721, the same emperor who had issued a glowing edict
of toleration for Christianity in China, responded to Clement’s declaration by
rescinding his former decision.
“Reading this proclamation, I have concluded that the
Westerners are petty indeed. It is impossible to reason with them because they
do not understand larger issues as we understand them in China. There is not a
single Westerner versed in Chinese works, and their remarks are often
incredible and ridiculous. To judge from this proclamation, their religion is
no different from other small, bigoted sects of Buddhism or Taoism. I have never
seen a document which contains so much nonsense. From now on, Westerners should
not be allowed to preach in China, to avoid further trouble.”
The Jesuits remained in China, and eventually were joined by many other
Christian missionaries from the West, but the era of their official influence
and their honored position was over.
The twentieth century would eventually bring a
re-evaluation of the work of Ricci and his Jesuit successors in China. Both religious authorities and secular
historians would see in his work an opportunity for the expansion of
Christianity that was torpedoed by matters external to the work itself. A Chinese student of Chinese history, Caitlyn
Lu, observes:
“Ricci was finally vindicated by Pope John XXIII in
1958, when by decree in the encyclical Princeps
Pastorum he declared that ‘Matteo Ricci would become the model of
missionaries.’ But as historian Arnold
Toynbee lamented, ‘Christianity had during Ricci’s time and after the chance to
become a true world religion—but rejected it over internal squabbles over
semantics and local customs. Never again would history present itself on such
favorable terms.’ Had Ricci’s method of accommodation been embraced and
supported by Rome, the religious history of China might well have been quite different.”
John Paul II followed up on John XXIII’s encyclical forty-three years
later in a speech commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Ricci’s
arrival in Beijing, saying,
While the mainline Protestant
churches of the West do not work under the same magisterium as their Roman
Catholic brothers and sisters, and while the level of centralized control is
not anywhere near as enforceable as it was for the Jesuits working in China,
there remains the same possibility that those who engage in outreach toward a
culture that is increasingly alienated from both the institutional forms and
the ideas of traditional Christianity will be pulled back by those who identify
any deviation from the familiar as heretical.
Attempts to recognize the concerns of feminists by the introduction of
non-gender-specific language in the 1970s and 1980s were met with dismay and
change in the Trinitarian formula was equated with modalism. Attempts to open leadership to homosexual
persons or to recognize their innate value among the laity have been met with
accusations of moral laxity, disrespect for scripture, or cultural
accommodation. Alternate forms of
liturgy sometimes catch on in niche groups but fail to find support among those
enculturated to traditional ways, to whom they do not speak. Groups meeting for prayer and praise outside
familiar times and places are applauded but not copied. Even a conservative
writer such as Chris Altrock bewails the limitations that are found when the
inclusion of insider language and code-words that signify orthodoxy to the
already-converted place walls between the preacher and the potentially
Christian.
“It’s one thing to have a passion
for evangelistic preaching. It’s an
entirely different thing to preach evangelistically in a way that makes sense
to postmoderns who are unfamiliar with the Bible and with Christianity’s
worldview.”
Undoubtedly, the community has a
responsibility to evaluate innovative ministries of all sorts to make sure that
they are true to the gospel, but it is on the basis of the gospel itself, not
the institutions which have supported its propagation, that the evaluation
should take place. From our own
tradition, we would ask questions such as what it meant for Susannah Wesley to
hold Bible studies in her kitchen, for John Wesley to name Coke and Asbury as
superintendents for North America (fully aware of the Greek translation of the
word and its English cognate), for Asbury to have supported the work of Richard
Allen in establishing a separate denomination for African Methodists, or for
Bishop Welch to have altered the elements on the Lord’s Table when he fostered
the switch from wine to grape juice. All
of these actions could be seen within the pattern followed by Matteo Ricci and
other effective evangelists, to meet the people where they are and to speak to
them in their own language, as was done for all humanity when the Word became
flesh and dwelt among us.
Sr. Joan Chittister, The Way We Were: A Story of Conversion and
Renewal (New York: Orbis Books, 2005) 69.
S.
Neill, A
History of Christian Missions (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books 1964), pp. 189-l90.
This text is
part of the Internet Modern History
Sourcebook. The
Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for
introductory level classes in modern European and World history.
