Contextualizing Christianity: In Memory of Matteo Ricci

On March 31 last year, The Economist published an article about “Sinifying Christianity,” that is, seeking to make Chinese Christians more “Chinese.” The article begins by referring to James Hudson Taylor, the famous 19th-century Protestant missionary. They could have looked back much further.

Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci sought to Sinicize (=to change or modify by Chinese influence) Christianity in the 16^th century. His pioneer evangelistic activity is noteworthy even now, and there are Protestants as well as Catholics who remember his missionary work with deep appreciation.

Christianity Today, the flagship moderate evangelical Christian magazine, published an article in June of this year with praise, and a picture, of Ricci. 

Ricci and Chinese scholar Xu Guangqi

Ricci was born 470 years ago, on October 6, 1552. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1581, and the next year he arrived in Macao and prepared for entering China. He did enter the mainland in 1583 and remained there until his death 27 years later, in 1610.

As Baptist missiologist Justice Anderson wrote in 1998, “to win the favor of the Chinese, Ricci adopted their culture and appeared in the guise of a Confucian scholar.” He was quite successful: by 1650, forty years after his death, there were some 250,000 Christians in China.*

According to the article in The Economist, since 2018 the Chinese government has encouraged churches “to use Chinese architecture and Chinese tunes for hymns, as well as Chinese-style painting, calligraphy and other ‘popular cultural forms.’” All this would have pleased Ricci.

The Catholic Church, though, was not pleased with Ricci’s emphasis. Ricci and his successors “permitted converts to engage in ancestral and state rites regarding those as social and civil rather than religious in character.”**

That led to what is known as the Chinese Rites controversy (which is summarized well in Wikipedia). It was settled by the Pope in the early 1700s—against the Jesuits and to the great detriment of the continued expansion of Christianity in China.

I first learned about Ricci when I was a graduate student in the 1960s. Dr. Hugo Culpepper, a Missions professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, stressed the importance of what was then often called accommodation.

Later the terms indigenization, inculturation, or contextualization became more common. The emphasis was the same, however: effective mission activity must seek to relate intentionally and positively to the culture in which the missionary is located. That is certainly what Ricci sought to do.

Even now, and perhaps now even more than in past decades, there are many who criticize missionary activity as being a form of imperialism.

The critics think that Western missionaries were intentionally linked to the Western powers that sought to gain political and economic control over Asian and African countries.

Unfortunately, that was often the case in the 19^th and early 20^th century. Missionaries sought to make Christians and churches in non-Western lands look much like the Christians and churches of the West. Converts were given “Christian” names, and church buildings exhibited Western architecture.

My first Japanese pastor was an elderly man who was born into a samurai family in 1890. When he was baptized as a young man, he was given the name Timothy. (Fortunately, he was not using that name when I first met him in 1966.)

As the article in The Economist notes, “long before the Communist Party seized power in 1949, people used to say, ‘One more Christian, one fewer Chinese.’ Officials in China still mutter this phrase today.”

But to cite the same 4/3/21 source again, in 1867 the prominent English missionary Hudson Taylor (1832~1905) “wrote a letter home defending his policy of encouraging fellow preachers in China to wear Chinese robes and the Manchu-style pigtail.”

Taylor’s emphasis was quite similar to what Catholic missionary Ricci had advocated 275 years earlier.

While the specifics changed, the central point of Ricci (and Taylor) was adopted more and more in the last half of the 20^th century.

Along with many of my missionary colleagues, during my 38 years in Japan I intentionally sought to practice accommodation/indigenization as much as possible—and have bristled some when accused, directly or indirectly, of fostering Western (Christian) imperialism.

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* “Medieval and Renaissance Missions (500-1792),” Missiology: An Introduction to the Foundations, History, and Strategies of World Missions (1998), p. 192.

** R. Pierce Beaver, “The History of Mission Strategy,” Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader (1981), p. 194.