Missionaries Agents of Light or of Darkness?—Part 3
Christendom’s Missionaries Return to Where It All Began
ASIA is humankind’s original home. It is where the Creator introduced pure worship. Although humans unwisely replaced it soon thereafter with false religion, true worship eventually found a continuation in Asia in ancient Israel and then in Christianity. So when Christendom’s European missionaries took their message to Asia, they went to the continent where human life and true religion had begun. Would they turn out to be agents of light or of deeper darkness?—Genesis 2:10-17.
What Is One God More or Less?
It is not possible to determine with certainty when and how the Christian faith first arrived in India. The fourth-century religious historian Eusebius says that the Christian apostle Thomas took it there in the first century. Others say that “Christianity” was introduced there between the second and the fourth centuries. When Portuguese explorers arrived there at the end of the 15th century, they found “Christians forming an accepted and respected element in Indian society.”—The Encyclopedia of Religion.
Spanish priest Francis Xavier set foot on the Indian subcontinent in 1542. He was an associate of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the religious order the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits. The New Encyclopædia Britannica speaks of Xavier as being “the greatest Roman Catholic missionary of modern times,” calling him “instrumental in the establishment of Christianity in India, the Malay Archipelago, and Japan.”
Though Xavier’s life was comparatively short—he died in 1552 at the age of 46—his ten years of missionary service were full of activity. He reportedly encouraged missionaries to adopt the customs and the language of the people they served.
The first Protestant missionaries to India arrived in 1706, some 85 years before William Carey published An Enquiry Into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. This book’s publication has been called “a landmark in Christian history.” After writing it, Carey served 40 years in India as a missionary.
As time passed, Christendom’s missionaries pushed out into all sections of the country. The underprivileged lower classes, particularly the outcastes, finding no hope of a better future in Hinduism, began turning to Christendom’s religions. The Encyclopedia of Religion notes, however, that this trend “was disapproved of by a great many missionaries and by the majority of educated Indian Christian leaders.”
Revealing Christendom’s ineffectualness, historian Will Durant writes: “India believes as strongly today as ever in the gods that have so long looked down with equanimity upon her poverty and her desolation. . . . When heresies or strange gods became dangerously popular they [the Brahmans] tolerated them, and then absorbed them into the capacious caverns of Hindu belief; one god more or less could not make much difference in India.” In his book The Jesuits, published in 1984, Manfred Barthel says: “The Indians stuck with their sacred cows in the end; Hinduism outlasted both the Jesuits and the Moguls, and today seems to be exporting its surplus divinities to the Christian West.”
Failing to Leave a Lasting Mark
Early Christendom, already divided into a Western and an Eastern church, suffered a further schism during the fifth century. Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, became embroiled in a controversy that led to the forming of a breakaway group from the Eastern church, the Nestorian Church.
The Nestorians emphasized missionary work. One of their missionaries, Alopen, apparently introduced Nestorian beliefs to China in 635 C.E. The Western church, on the other hand, did not reach China until about 1294, when the Franciscan friar, John of Monte Corvino, set up a mission there.
For all intents and purposes, however, missionary activity in China did not begin until the arrival in the 1580’s of Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit. While Protestantism was struggling to strengthen its foothold in post-Reformation Europe, Catholicism was busy seeking converts outside of Europe. The exploration campaigns of Portugal and Spain, lands both devoutly Catholic, well served the church’s attempts at doing so.
The 17th- and 18th-century missionaries had a degree of success possibly because, as The Cambridge History of China notes, “a substantial number of [them] (Jesuits especially) developed an attitude of great tolerance.” Professor of Chinese history Hans H. A. Bielenstein elaborates: “[The Jesuits] emphasized the similarities between Christianity and Confucianism, equating the Christian God with the Chinese Heaven, and raising no objection to ancestor worship. This explains why the Jesuits made converts in some circles, but also why they left no lasting mark.”
In 1724 the Chinese emperor denounced Christendom’s religions and expelled most foreign missionaries. As opportunity afforded, Catholic missionaries returned. Protestant missionaries joined them, Robert Morrison from the London Missionary Society being among the first to arrive, in 1807. He established a college designed not only to spread his beliefs but also to introduce China to Western culture and to introduce Western students to Eastern culture. By 1819, with the help of William Milne, Morrison had completed a translation of the entire Bible.
Some missionaries were dedicated to bringing a different kind of light. Dr. Peter Parker became the first medical missionary to China, helping to organize the Medical Missionary Society founded at Canton in 1838. Other missionaries devoted themselves to educational pursuits, to supporting philanthropic ventures, or to solving social problems. According to The Cambridge History of China, some of the translation work that missionaries did was “better suited to furthering European understanding of China than to building up Chinese receptivity to Christianity.”
Christendom’s missionaries also failed to give the Chinese an example of Christian unity and brotherhood. The Protestants were especially disunited. In four decades the number of their missionaries grew from 189 to 3,445. By 1905 each of the 60-and-more missionary societies was spreading its own particular version of Christian teaching. Catholic missionaries also presented a less-than-desirable image of what Christianity should be. The Cambridge History of China mentions “the widespread practice of interfering in local political and judicial affairs in order to win over potential converts.”
Seeking Converts Elsewhere
Less than a century after Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan first set foot on the Philippine Islands in 1521, Catholic missionaries there had baptized about two million people. Today, 84 percent of the population is Roman Catholic. The educational system set up by the church doubtlessly helps explain this success. But another factor not to be overlooked, says one writer, is that the missionaries “allowed the converts to retain many of their religious beliefs and practices.”
The church had less success elsewhere. For example, the number of Catholics in Japan is only 0.3 percent of all Japanese. In the Republic of Korea, the figure hovers close to the 6-percent mark.
Japan had its first contact with Europeans in 1542. In 1549, Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier, along with a few companions, was received with friendliness. Before long this initial enthusiasm cooled as Japanese leaders “began to suspect that European missionary activity might be a prelude to political conquest by the Spanish king (as they knew it had been in the Philippines),” writes professor of history J. Mason Gentzler.
In 1614 “the missionaries were proscribed as enemies of the state and the emperor decreed that Christianity would no longer be tolerated in his dominions. . . . Converts who refused to renounce the new religion were crucified by the tens of thousands . . . , whereas more elaborate horrors were reserved for the missionaries . . . who were burned or roasted alive, dismembered, thrown into pits full of venomous snakes,” among other atrocities.—The Jesuits.
Catholicism was introduced to Korea in 1784, Protestantism a century later. The latter “grew much faster because American missionaries brought not only the Gospel but also education, medicine and technology,” explains Time magazine. This policy of making converts by means other than religious instruction alone is apparently still in force. Philosophy professor Son Bong Ho of Seoul National University is quoted as saying: “Those churches that have emphasized material blessings have grown faster than mainstream denominations.”
What the Future Will Reveal
How should we view Christendom’s missionaries of the past? What they represented was not the pure form of worship introduced by Jesus. Yet, many of them were doubtless sincere. At any rate, they translated the Bible into many vernaculars and taught at least some Bible concepts.
What about Christendom’s missionaries to Africa, which has been called the Dark Continent? Read about this in our next issue in the article “Spiritual Light for a ‘Dark Continent.’”
[Box on page 23]
“Jehovah” in Chinese Bible
John W. Davis, a 19th-century missionary and translator reasoned: “If the Holy Ghost says Jehovah in any given place in the Hebrew, why does the translator not say Jehovah in English or Chinese? What right has he to say, I will use Jehovah in this place and a substitute for it in that? . . . If in any given case it is wrong to use Jehovah in the translation then why did the inspired writer use it in the original?”