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The Modern World (1800 AD-Onwards) (Other Christianity: Asian Xianity)
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장부영
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2009-01-04 17:01:33, 조회 : 4,786 |
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(2) Asian Christianity
1) Asian Christianity has always been a minority faith, struggling to define itself in relation to older, more established religions.
2) Today the solutions that different individuals and communities have found are of more than academic interest to the West, where Christianity is once again becoming a minority faith.
3) Christianity was introduced into China in the 5th and 6th centuries - not by Catholics or Orthodox but by the Nestorian Church, which, after splitting off from Orthodoxy in the 5th century, began to spread eastward.
4) One of the heroes of this early period was a Nestorian monk named Olopen, who in the 7th century was a revered visitor to the court of Emperor Tang Taizhong. The Nestorian Church seems to have been mistaken for a kind of Buddhist sect and was known as Jinjaio; it suffered when Buddhism was banned by Wu Zhong, and it largely - although not completely - died out.
5) The 16th and 17th centuries saw renewed attempts to introduce Christianity to the East, especially by Catholic missionaries, above all the Jesuits.
6) In China none of these attempts was very successful, and in 1616 Catholicism was banned and all the missionaries sent home.
7) Japan, by contrast, was more welcoming, at least initially. The Great Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier arrived at Kagoshima in 1549, and the "Kirishitan" faith proved very popular as the Japanses welcomed the introduction of Western ideas.
8) By the end of the century there were 300,000 Christians in Japan. Nevertheless, it was far from unconversional, and the Christians suffered periodic persecution, the worst incident coming in 1597, when twenty-six Japanese and foreign Christians were crucified in Nagasaki.
9) In 1614 Christianity was banned throughout Japan. Fifty-one more Christians were martyred at Nagasaki in 1622, and two years later fifty were burned alive at Edo.
10) By the end of the 1630s Japan had expelled all the missionaries and closed its doors to the West completely. Christianity wad driven underground, but it survived.
11) In contemporary times Christianity has found that the best way to survive in Asian cultures is to change to match those cultures - exactly ad is did in late antiquity in the Mediterranean world.
12) In India, which has a strong Anglican tradition as a legacy of British rule in addition to the much older Nestorian Church, Christian priests and worshipers alike remove their shoes before entering a church and are careful never to turn their backs to the altar, just as in a Hindu temple.
13) A more dramatic example of this approach was discovered in the 1850s and 1860s when Japan finally ended its self imposed exile from the outside world.
14) To the amazement of foreign missionaries, around sixty thousand Christians were found who had kept the faith alive since the persecutions of the Kirishitan period. But their faith had undergone some serious changes.
15) Meanwhile, mainstream Christianity was reintroduced to Asia in the late 19th century and quickly found once again that only by adapting itself to the native culture could it hope to survive.
16) In China the Indigenizing movement made this its explicit aim, drawing on ideas from European liberal theology to present an understanding of Christianity that stressed its similarities to Confucianism. However, in the early 20th century manu Chinese theologians rebelled against this, just as Barth was rebelling against liberalism in Europe.
17) In 1920 the Apologetic Group was formed in Beijing, with the aim of presenting Christianity not as kind of variation on Chinese culture but as the solution to the Problems raised by culture.
18) Lei-ch'uan, who taught at Yenching University in the 1920s and 1930s, pointed out that Jesus was a political and social reformer who identified with the poor and called for the abolition of private property. While there are obvious similarities to the Communism that would shortly take hold of China, these ideas are a striking anticipation of South American liberation theology.
19) Nevertheless, all these liberal or radical interpretations of Christianity have proved less influential in China, and other Asian countries, than a Barth-style affirmation of traditional doctrine and practice.
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선교운동소개
세계역사 