Christian Encounter Research Articles

The Luminous Way to the East: Texts and History of the First Encounter of Christianity with China

The Luminous Way to the East: Texts and History of the First Encounter of Christianity with China

Your lords, not mine: Buddhist–Christian encounter and the language of directive in the ‘Kitchanukit’

Your lords, not mine: Buddhist–Christian encounter and the language of directive in the ‘Kitchanukit’

The Encounter of Christianity With The Old Religion of Minahasa

The purpose of this article is to carry out an in-depth analysis of the encounter between Christianity and the old Minahasa religion. The problems that arise related to the revival and re-existence of old Minahasa beliefs affect the faith of congregation members in Minahasa today. Christianity has been embraced by the Minahasa people since 1831 and has transformed Minahasa culture. The way to transform it is through the preaching of the Gospel and Christian religious education. The research method used to solve this problem is a qualitative research method with stages of collecting scientifically tested literature exploration such as books and journals, without ignoring field data. Through this discussion, the author offers a new perspective that the old Minahasan religion needs to be studied critically and constructively to highlight the local wisdom contained in it in order to enrich theological efforts within the Evangelical Christian Church in Minahasa. The author's thesis is that the manguni bird is a form of local Minahasa cultural wisdom, enriching the theological efforts of GMIM congregation members. The author then differentiated this thesis in depth with the following systematics: First, the religion of the Minahasa tribe, Second, the entry of Christianity in Minahasa, Third, the encounter of Christianity with the religion of the Minahasa tribe, Fourth, GMIM theology in its service. The end of this article is a conclusion which confirms that the goals have been achieved and problems have been answered.

Unlearning hope: White Christian encounters with grace as a logic of exchange

AbstractHow do humans develop hope in the face of seemingly irreparable harm against each other? Drawing on interviews and participant observation with 30 BIPOC Christians and 40 White Christians whom they identified as long‐term allies, in this article, I consider how a slim minority of White Christians develop ways of hoping that sustain lasting antiracist engagement. I identify contributing factors to reorientations of hope, focusing on a type of catalytic event that I analyze as a form of exchange. As economic anthropologists from Marcel Mauss to David Graeber have elaborated, structures and moralities of gift giving reveal and define relationships. I extend that theory to argue that experiences of exchange relationships in turn shape the ways people hope. I trace a logic of exchange that interlocutors conceptualized using the term grace, an incongruous, freely given gift that anticipates future relationship in the context of unrepayable debt. As White Christians became highly aware of the systemic and historic immensity of racial injustice, their combined awareness of indebtedness and grace became formative to new kinds of relationship and hope. In response, they imagined and pursued a society in which love and repair across chasms of past harm are not taken for granted but are not impossible.

The Politics of God: Christian Encounters with Empire in Acts 4–5

Abstract In this essay, I draw attention to part of the Acts narrative that should be included in an investigation of Luke’s political stance but often gets left out: the narratives of Acts 4–5. Studies typically focus on Jesus’s trial before Pilate and Herod; Christian encounters with Roman officials in the diaspora (Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, and Ephesus); or Paul’s trials before Claudius Lysias, procurators, and King Agrippa II in Judea. Few give more than passing glances at these early chapters in Acts. The lacuna is, prima facie, reasonable: What, after all, does Christianity’s encounter with Jerusalem authorities have to do with Christianity’s encounter with Roman political authority? A historically textured investigation into the question, however, yields a much more complicated picture. From the time of Herod the Great till the outbreak of the Jewish war, high priests were appointed by Roman legates, prefects, and Herodian kings, and they played an important role in mediating imperial authority to the Jewish people. They thus served as representatives, in part, of the Roman state. The narratives of Acts 4–5 therefore constitute important evidence that should be included in an investigation into Luke’s theological politics because they describe Christianity’s repeated collision with the Roman-appointed priestly aristocracy. In the end, I argue that when these narratives are included, the critical volume of Luke’s theological politics becomes amplified appreciably, and the wider theological character of Luke’s political perspective comes into greater focus.

A Buddhist Christian Encounter in Late Ming Dynasty: New Insights from the Chengdu Conflict of 1643–1644

A Buddhist Christian Encounter in Late Ming Dynasty: New Insights from the Chengdu Conflict of 1643–1644

Polygamy Re-Imagined and Re-Negotiated: A Postcolonial Reflection on Gender, Sexuality, and Narrative Theology in Africa Christianity

Abstract The impact of the Christian message on the family’s existential foundation underpins this article. The quest/ion of polygamy has been in public discourse as extramarital affairs where husbands in monogamous unions increasingly “cheat” on wives with mistresses, referred to in modern parlance as “side chicks.” Historically, polygamy assumed a new turn when Western culture became Christian virtue, thus a civilizing “norm.” The demonization of polygamy stirred converted-husbands to divorce all wives except one. This article uses multidisciplinary approaches to theologize and interrogate the impact of Christian encounters on the culture of Benin City, Nigeria. I argue that the family disruption pointedly impacted mothers and created a “new social order” with the commodification of sex and a surge in sex work, workers, traffickers, and trafficking in Benin, and thus it is a form of religious violence. I conclude that the value of African polygamy reasonably exceeds the alternative establishment and proliferation of divorce or serial relationships situated within the “civilizing” Western culture.

Nicolini-Zani, Matteo. The luminous way to the East: texts and history of the first encounter of Christianity with China

Nicolini-Zani, Matteo. The luminous way to the East: texts and history of the first encounter of Christianity with China

A sign of great penitence : food, fasting and the dilemmas of evangelization in Early Modern Chinese and Japanese missions

Since their very first entry into the Ming empire (Jesuits 1580s, Franciscans 1630s), Christian missionaries produced an extensive body of testimonies on this exotic and unknown territory, in which they described Chinese history, philosophy, nature, culture, religions, society, and people, including Chinese food, culinary practices, and habits. This extensive corpus of missionary documents not only discussed "things Chinese" but also interpreted this unknown country for their European readers in a process our current scholarship has deemed as "transcultural translation", during which the foreign culture is explained using familiar European terms. In my article, I focus on one particular aspect of food intake, or rather its voluntary absence: the practices of ecclesiastical fasting. I analyse how the first Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries understood fasting in the particular context of Chinese and Japanese culture and, more importantly, what obstacles and dilemmas they had to face in establishing it in their missionary work. I then relate these doubts and questions to contemporary missionary casuistry and moral theology. Finally, I explore ecclesiastical fasting as a compelling symbol of Christianity's encounter with the alien spiritual and cultural idioms of China (and Japan). I argue that it exemplifies the nature of the inter-cultural and inter-religious confrontation, displaying the inevitable difficulties inherent in rendering the Christian message. As far as the methodology is concerned, I explore some central assumptions of transculturality, transcultural translation, and Otherness, though I also point out the potential flaws and deficiencies of these perspectives when applied to this textual material. However, I do not aim at establishing an unambiguous methodology for dealing with these sources; my intention is rather to emphasize the absence of a reliable methodological approach for Early Modern missionary documents.

Love or Perish: A Holocaust Survivor’s Vision for Interfaith Peace by Harold Kasimow

Reviewed by: Love or Perish: A Holocaust Survivor’s Vision for Interfaith Peace by Harold Kasimow Peter A. Huff Harold Kasimow,Love or Perish: A Holocaust Survivor’s Vision for Interfaith Peace. Mesa, AZ: iPub Global Connection, 2021. Pp. 175. $19.99, paper. Kasimow’s has long been an important voice in the dialogue about dialogue—especially the dialogue about engaged dialogue, the intersection of contemplation and action. This book puts on full display the sources of that distinctive voice. Shaped by the desperate silence of survival and the elected silence of disciplined meditation, as well as the challenges of global displacement and the blessings of transformative study with great souls from one of history’s most troubled ages, Kasimow speaks the language of prophecy—that is, the language of hope mixed with anguish and the sort of spiritual audacity made famous by his teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel. Now professor emeritus at Grinnell (IA) College, Kasimow is one of the world’s most articulate and trustworthy apologists for interfaith friendship. This is the book his readers have long awaited. A collection of many of Kasimow’s best previously published essays, woven together with strikingly original autobiographical material, the book takes its title from Heschel’s discerning observation about interreligious and intercultural existence in the wake of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: “The choice is to love together or to perish together” (p. 20). In many ways, this stark alternative is the crucible from which the full range of Kasimow’s works have been generated. His books on Heschel, on the adventure of the spiritual search, and especially his [End Page 129] edited volumes on John Paul II, Pope Francis, and life-changing Jewish and Christian encounters with Buddhist traditions have all set forth the urgency of a decision for empathy and mutuality. Love or Perish does the same but takes a crucial step further. Here, for the first time, Kasimow views the “cosmic choice” (p. 6) of compassionate co-existence through the lens of his experience as a Holocaust survivor. The eleven chapters cover topics such as Jewish approaches to the Holocaust, Heschel’s view of religious diversity, Muslim perceptions of Judaism and Christianity, and Jewish and Christian reflections on Buddhism—all demonstrating Kasimow’s use of theologically skillful means as he ponders the intricate relationship among seemingly contradictory perspectives and savors the wisdom of even troubling positions. Kasimow possesses a special genius for theological portraiture. In his penetrating treatments of figures such as Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Israel Salanter, Vivekananda, Martin Luther King, Jr., Maurice Friedman, and John Paul II, he exercises an interpretive virtuosity that reveals the same interreligious artistry he attributes to his master Heschel. Arguably, Kasimow is at his best detecting signals of sanctity and sainthood despite difference. He finds spiritual heroes populating all dimensions of life—from the Baal Shem Tov and the Dalai Lama to his teachers in Japan and the U.S. and his revered father, whose desperate quests for food in the Eastern European winter nights of wartime 1942–43 kept his family alive in the bleakest of circumstances. A sober realism permeates Kasimow’s work and worldview, as does a sense of chronic unease laced with existential doubt, but nihilism and cynicism find no home in his capacious thought. The supreme value of the book is Kasimow’s remarkable gift of self-portraiture. In recent years, he has shared with an increasing number of in-person and virtual audiences around the world the harrowing tale of how his Lithuanian family resisted genocidal Antisemitism and successfully eluded the Nazis and their accomplices by hiding in a hand-dug pit under a barn for over nineteen months. Here he breaks his long literary silence and joins the ranks of Shoah witnesses in print. His unforgettable account of nearly five years of stolen childhood—in the grub or kever (Yiddish for grave), in forest hideouts, and in a displaced persons camp—now takes its honored place in the canon of Holocaust survival. Sadly, the production of the book itself does not match the exquisite quality of Kasimow’s personal and scholarly generosity or meet the highest standards of the industry. Typographical errors mar the text, and copyediting...

Christianity’s Earliest Encounter with the Ancient Techno-Scientific China: Critical Lessons from Jingjiao’s Approach

This article investigates the earliest Christian encounter with ancient China through the missionaries of the Church of the East in the seventh century. In his monumental Science and Civilisation in China, Joseph Needham argues that China was then a country with one of the world’s most advanced science and technology. It was also a time when Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Manichaeism, and Zoroastrianism contributed to a pluralistic society. The paper attempts to answer questions such as: How did the Christian missionaries, as representatives of a minority religion, engage with techno-scientific China theologically? Were their efforts successful? What critical lessons can we learn from their successes and/or failures? By studying the earliest Christian texts in China, the proposal argues that, being equipped with advanced Greek-Byzantine scientific knowledge and skills in medicine, architecture, astronomy, and mechanics, the Church of the East missionaries boldly engaged with the ancient techno-scientific and pluralistic China through their qi-tological, or creative pneumatological approach, which is closely intertwined with the Chinese metaphysical concept of qi (or Chi, breath, air). The article proposes that such an approach serves as a crucial bridge toward a constructive Chinese theology of science for the pluralistic world of the third millennium.

Two Strangers in the Eternal City: Border Thinking and Individualized Emerging Rituals as Anti-Patriarchal Epistemology

This paper is a work of autoethnography in which I (the author) observe critical practices that I and my colleague, Aisha, thought, said, and embodied during our tenure as the only Muslim Nostra Aetate Fellows at the St. Catherine Center for Interreligious Dialogue in the Vatican City, Italy. The paper focuses on our survival strategies that took on an interreligious and anti-patriarchal character within our interreligious, Muslim–Christian encounters. The framework of border thinking, as theorized by Maria Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa, and the concept of emerging rituals proposed by Ronald Grimes, will serve as analytical tools to understand our practices. I argue that our embodied thoughts and practices, as seen from the lenses of emerging rituals and border thinking, represent an anti-patriarchal, interreligious epistemology that questions and deconstructs the hegemonic presence of patriarchal Catholic praxis around us within that specific context.

Monks and the Muslim Enemy: Conversion, Polemic and Resistance in Monastic Hagiography in the Age of the Crusades, c. 1000–1250

AbstractAlthough most accounts of Christian encounters with Muslims in the period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries pay particular attention to conflict and violence, a body of hagiographical texts emanating from monastic circles points to a different kind of approach. In this article I foreground three examples of Italo-Greek saints’ lives from the tenth and early eleventh centuries in which the saints in question treat Muslims whom they encounter as potential converts, and explain to them the tenets of Christian theology. These texts are examined as precursors of the Cluniac ‘dossier’ compiled about Abbot Maiolus's encounter with Muslims in the 990s. Two of the three saints’ lives were translated from Greek into Latin, one in the late eleventh, the other in the late twelfth century. The motives for and circumstances of these translations are discussed in light of growing hostility towards the Islamic world during the period of the crusades.

Sunni and Shia Muslim and Christian encounters in northern Nigeria

AbstractThis article analyses how the circulation of ideas and hybrid rituals between Shia Muslims and Christians reveals a much more intentional political process whereby minority religious groups consciously create shared experiences and a sense of commonality in the face of political marginalization in northern Nigeria. One example is the Shia invention of Jesus’s Mawlid (Jesus’s birthday), which they perform in a different way from the conventional Christmas but that is attended by some Christians. Also, some Christians participate in the annual celebration of Mawlid al-Nabiy (the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday), organized by Shias. Despite the adherents of the two religions participating in mixed religious practices, they continue to see themselves separately as Muslims and Christians. Reactions to these hybrid rituals impact relationships among the mainline Sunni groups. Sufis (Tijanis and Qadiris), who were previously united in the face of the anti-Sufi reform movement (Izala), now diverge over how to respond to Shia Islam. While they disagree with Shias intellectually, not everyone supports the attacks against Shias by Salafi activists. These dynamics add to the understanding that the concept of ‘tolerance’ is not sophisticated enough to capture all forms of religious coexistence in Nigeria.

The Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN) since 1954: education, Muslim–Christian encounters and regional variation

AbstractThe Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN) is a movement that promotes the Islamic identity of Muslims in Nigeria’s educational institutions. Despite promoting the same objectives around the country, a comparison of the MSSN’s activities between the northern and southern regions of Nigeria suggests that the success of the movement varies in many aspects. This is because there are two main types of regional variation relating to the MSSN: the success of Christian opposition to the MSSN’s objectives; and the attitude of many Muslims and the government to those objectives. For example, in the Muslim-dominated northern states, the call by the MSSN to let Muslim girls wear the hijab in schools and the MSSN’s support for the reintroduction of sharia were welcomed by the state governors. However, in the south-west region, where the populations of Muslims and Christians are roughly equal, the MSSN struggled to get the state governors to accept the hijab and the call for sharia was rejected. This article thus argues that, despite envisioning the same notion of Islam for all Muslim students in Nigeria, the MSSN’s activities do not produce a monolithic Islam, and that this reflects differences in the practice of the religion across the country.

World Christianity and Indigenous Experience: A Global History, 1500–2000, by David Lindenfeld.

<i>World Christianity and Indigenous Experience: A Global History, 1500–2000</i>, by David Lindenfeld.

Drawing on Trouillot’s concept of the savage slot to analyze the rehashed imaginaries of Latin American indigeneities

ABSTRACT The world order that germinated with the colonial encounter of Christianity with indigenous peoples from the ‘new continent’ created the ideological construct of ‘the West.’ The purpose of this work is to show that there is coherence and continuity between the world order that started at the end of the 15th century and contemporary processes such as ideological mestizaje in Latin America, identity politics, transnational political identities, and the flourishing of Indian hobbyist groups in several European countries. To this end, I will deploy Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s notion of the savage slot – an ideological construct through which ‘the West’ organizes the world and thinks about itself. Moreover, I will put Trouillot approach in dialogue with the contributions of other contemporary authors to understand the specific social and ideological dynamics involved in the representation of indigenous peoples in Latin America, particularly in Colombia.

The Holy Spirit and Other Spirits in Asia: Discernment of Spirits in Non-Christian Religions

Malaysia is an ethnically diverse and religiously pluralistic nation. Within its population Christians number 9.2% while the remainder is comprised of Muslims (61.3%), Buddhists (19.8%), Hindus (6.3%), and other religions (3.4%) such as Confucianism, Taoism, folk/traditional/animistic religions, and others (Department of Statistics Malaysia, 2010). It is thus not surprising that any non-Christian to Christian encounter should implicate followers of Jesus, who are trying to understand whether non-Christians may be following the right path towards truth and also whether the spirits they worship are in any biblical sense the Spirit of truth of which Jesus speaks (Jn. 14:17; 15:26; 16:13) or that of another spirit. If interreligious relationships can be understood in this context, then the task of discerning the spirits, whether it is the Holy Spirit or “other” spirits at work, is of great importance. Biblically, all Christians are called to discern the spirits (1 Jn. 4:1-3) of those at work in this world as well as the truth or error that may be perpetuated behind these spirits.

Spiritual ambiguity in interfaith humanitarianism: Local faith communities, Syrian refugees, and Muslim–Christian encounters in Lebanon and Jordan

AbstractLiterature on faith-based responses to forced displacement has described, but not fully unpacked or theorized cross-religion humanitarian aid in ‘South–South’ contexts. This article interrogates the various ambiguities, particularly spiritual ambiguities, inherent in faith-based humanitarianism where local providers are the minority religion. In unpacking these, we identify three modes of faith-based aid to Muslim Syrian refugees by local churches and Christian charities in Lebanon and Jordan: hospitality, humanitarian, and spiritual development. These may present successively deeper opportunities for fostering openness to spiritual pluralism. We argue for greater appreciation of what we call spiritual ambiguity in interfaith humanitarianism. While humanitarian space is always shaped by a web of power relations, it is vital to develop new, more nuanced ways of thinking about cross-religious faith-based humanitarianism beyond Western neo-colonialism or refugee strategizing.

Book Review of "Edmund Kee-Fook Chia: World Christianity encounters world religions: a summa of interfaith dialogue"

Book Review of "Edmund Kee-Fook Chia: World Christianity encounters world religions: a summa of interfaith dialogue"