From God’s Chinese names to a cross-cultural universal God: James Legge’s intertextual theology in his translation of Tian, Di and Shangdi

Abstract

ABSTRACTOften referred to as a Victorian sinologist, James Legge has received much critical discussion in the discipline of Chinese studies. Yet few scholars have probed his role as a translator and the transmission of his theological ideas by examining his oeuvre. This article adopts the theoretical concepts of intertextuality and intertextual coherence to investigate Legge’s translation of Tian 天, Di 帝 and Shangdi 上帝, the three key terms that, in his view, convey the ancient Chinese notions of a supreme God. Drawing on Legge’s annotated Chinese Classics and various other works on religious issues in ancient and dynastic China, the article looks at how he establishes an intertextual theology through a coherent synthesis of Ruist (Confucian) hermeneutics and Christian (Congregational Protestant) argumentation. Ultimately, Legge’s vision of a universal God as known in the histories of China and the West reveals his work’s far-reaching implications for contemporary cross-cultural communication.