"Scholar from the West": Giulio Aleni S.J. (1582-1649) and the Dialogue between Christianity and China, and: The Bible in China: The History of the Union Version or The Culmination of Protestant Missionary Bible Translation in China (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: "Scholar from the West": Giulio Aleni S.J. (1582-1649) and the Dialogue between Christianity and China, and: The Bible in China: The History of the Union Version or The Culmination of Protestant Missionary Bible Translation in China Franklin J. Woo (bio) Tiziana Lippiello and Roman Malek, editors. "Scholar from the West": Giulio Aleni S. J. (1582-1649) and the Dialogue between Christianity and China. Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, 42. Brescia and Sankt Augustin: Jointly published by the Fondazione Civilta Bresciana and the Monumenta Serica Institute, 1997. xxvi, 671 pp. DM 120.00, isbn 3-8050-0386-2. Jost Oliver Zetzsche . The Bible in China: The History of the Union Version or The Culmination of Protestant Missionary Bible Translation in China. Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, 45. Sankt Augustin: Published by the Monumenta Serica Institute, 1999. 456 pp. DM 90.00, isbn 3-8050-0433-8. To try to draw one coherent theme out of these two books, one a collection of essays on a seventeenth-century Italian priest and the other a monograph on Protestant bible translation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is a daunting task. Nevertheless, I will attempt to review them together, running the risk of oversimplification and reductionism. Both volumes deal with religious history (one on the Roman Catholic Jesuits and the other on the evolution of Protestant bible translation), covering, respectively, periods that are about three centuries apart. One outstanding commonality is that they both focus on the work of Western missionaries in China in the changing contexts of Western world hegemony.1 This review looks at both from the perspective of today's postrevolutionary China. It is now more than two decades since China resumed the pursuit of its modernization agenda with the economic reforms of the late 1970s, following periodic interruptions caused by the ideological campaigns of almost thirty years up until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. With the opening of the People's Republic to the world, primarily for international trade and much-needed technology for modernization, valuable contacts with outside counterparts have indeed been established by almost every sector of Chinese society. This resumption of modernization is of significance to many aspects of the cultural life of China, including the arts, academia, and religion. Today, in the nation as a whole and in the Christian churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, there is a sense of hard-won Chinese self-identity and independence. Against a background of openness and increasing contacts with the rest of the world there is an awareness of the need for vigilance against any resumption of the Western domination and manipulation of the past. [End Page 441] That Christianity in China today is firmly under Chinese leadership and that there is great promise for a new intercultural interaction and transmission of ideas in this age of the information revolution were well attested to by scholars at an international conference held in San Francisco in October 1999: "Christianity and China: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future." The general sentiment regarding the relative autonomy of the Church in China today was captured in these words by historian Jessie G. Lutz: The history of Protestant [and Roman Catholic] Christianity in China was more than the story of heroic efforts by Western missionaries and resistance by Chinese, for Chinese Christians themselves had played a crucial role in propagating and interpreting Christianity. . . . The history of Protestant [and Roman Catholic] Christianity in China is being rewritten from a new perspective, this time with greater attention to the Chinese side of the story.2 In this context, these two volumes are of value not only for their historical interest, but for the lessons they have to teach about both religious and cultural interaction—or "dialogue," as the subtitle of the first book has it. Whether any cultural exchange is meaningful and fruitful depends on the attendant attitudes of the parties involved, and the attitudes toward China of the missionary personalities described in these two books span the entire spectrum of positive and negative. Cultural Sensitivity of the Jesuits Scholar from the West is about Giulio Aleni (1582-1649), an Italian priest who was part of the second generation of Jesuits in China...