The Discovery of Genesis: How the Truths of Genesis Were Found Hidden in the Chinese Language
Posted on 03/02/2008 11:31:57 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Two and a half centuries ago a stormy dispute surged through the Christian world about the nature of China’s culture. In Rome, the Catholic Church was deeply divided over the nature of Chinese culture. Did the ancient Chinese, long before they encountered Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, have an understanding of God in a monotheistic sense as creator and sustainer of the universe? The Jesuits, who had an intellectually brilliant and profound impact on China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thought they did. So, two centuries later, did Rev. James Legge, translator of the Chinese classics into English and a deep admirer of Confucius. But in the eighteenth century, Dominican and Franciscan opponents of the Jesuits, who distrusted the confident Jesuit influence within the Chinese imperial court, disagreed noisily. Ancient Chinese beliefs, they said, were so many pagan superstitions, and needed to be discarded by prospective Chinese converts to Catholicism. Legge’s opponents took the same position, and were only partially deflected in their opposition to his views because the Scottish clergyman was so brilliant that he became Oxford University’s first professor of Chinese.
The “Rites Controversy” in the Catholic Church was so destructive that it caused the Chinese emperor himself to shut down all Christian activities in China in disgust. Catholics who had been granted total freedom to teach and convert in 1691 were by 1722 being hounded out of China. At issue was the question whether Chinese traditional veneration of ancestors was a form of “worship,” or was merely an affirmation of respect for them. Many have speculated how different China’s modern history might have been if China’s greatest emperor, Kang Xi, had been won over to the Christian faith instead of being driven to exasperation by Vatican pettiness.
Chan Kei Thong, a Singaporean Chinese Christian resident in Beijing, and co-author Charlene L. Fu, a former Associated Press reporter in the Chinese capital, have re-examined the issue of China’s cultural origins and come to a powerful conclusion. Not only did the ancient Chinese worship Almighty God (Shang Di, in the Chinese), they say, but also, in Thong’s words, “striking similarities exist[ed] between the Hebrew and the Chinese approach to moral truth.”
“I have become convinced,” Thong, the president of Leadership Development International, a management consulting firm, writes in his personal introductory chapter, “that the ancient Chinese worshipped the Creator of the Universe in a manner similar to that prescribed in the Old Testament.” Thong’s evidence for this statement, skillfully articulated by Fu, lies in three main sources: the root meaning of many Chinese characters, the references to shang di in the Chinese literary classics, and the elaborate religious ceremony practiced by all eighteen Chinese dynasties called the “border sacrifice.” In the case of the third source, one of Beijing’s most beautiful and famous architectural monuments, the Temple of Heaven, was the site of the “border sacrifice,” an elaborate annual ceremony on the winter solstice, right up to the collapse of imperial rule in China in 1911. In the ceremony, the emperor, who had fasted for three days and was reverentially humble in demeanor, bowed before an altar in recognition of his—and China’s—compact with shang di. In fact, the correct translation of tian tan, the Chinese name for the monument, is “Altar of Heaven.” The building is in no way a religious temple in the manner, say, of a Buddhist or Taoist Chinese temple. For one thing, there are no statues or idols in it.
Thong and Fu skillfully make the point that the Chinese classics are filled with symbolic signposts to shang di as a creator deity who watched over the affairs of humankind and whose moral favor needed to be carefully placated. In fact, the Confucian emphasis on the “virtue” of rulers as the Chinese sine qua non of good government derives from a Confucian understanding of humanity’s moral obligation to the divine. Confucius himself, in his introduction to one of the Chinese classics, the Yi Jing (“Book of Changes”), said that the purpose of this classic was to help people “pursue an exhaustive understanding of the universe in order to do God’s will.”
Many Sinologues might be curious about this dispute, but the pathway that Thong took to write the book was not academic. A student atheist who became a Christian in college in Singapore, Thong says that it wasn’t until 1996 that he realized during a visit to the Temple of Heaven that whatever had been worshiped there originally wasn’t a pagan idol, because there wasn’t a single idol throughout the Temple area. His motivation to begin the research that led to the book, however, derived from his sense of sadness at a common Chinese misperception—common even today—that Christianity is a “Western” religion and that “God” is a Western concept. As a devout Christian of Chinese ancestry, he had probably heard about the dismissive nineteenth- and twentieth-century references of many Chinese towards Christianity: “One more Christian, one less Chinese.”
Although the book was written in English, a Chinese translation was published first for Chinese readers, whom Thong wanted to convince that Christianity was entirely compatible with ancient Chinese thought and the deepest roots of Chinese culture. Startlingly, an official Chinese publishing house in China agreed to publish the book in Chinese, then later, in English. The English version is a handsomely illustrated and laid-out volume, complete with time-lines of world, Hebrew, and Chinese history, a bibliography, and high quality color photographs of Chinese cultural objects that, Thong believes, give support to his thesis.
Western secular Sinologists have traditionally paid scant attention to the monotheistic component of traditional Chinese culture. They, and Chinese scholars, may also not be as convinced as Thong is that the characters in China’s ancient writing system contain symbolic leftovers of moral concepts familiar from Biblical times. But evidence that China manifestly believed in a sustaining, creator God with moral attributes very similar to those of ancient Israel’s Yahweh are hard to dispute. Even harder to dismiss is the sense that the Chinese emperors inherited an understanding that each of them acted as the “Son of Heaven” in ruling China and owed a regular accountability to a force infinitely above themselves: shang di, or the often-used synonym tian (“heaven”).
The question arises therefore, if the ancient Chinese worshiped God, why did they depart from that practice and admit a pantheon of Buddhist and Taoist deities in the course of their long history? Thong and Fu argue that the plethora of lesser deities arose during a turbulent period of China’s history, the so-called Warring States period (475–221 BC). At that point, China also became enamored of the dragon, says Thong, and worship of the creator became worship of the creature. It was downhill from then onwards in China’s cosmology, the authors argue.
Why would a publishing house in the People’s Republic of China be willing to issue such a book? This is an intriguing question. The answer may be found in the fact that Christianity has made powerful inroads into the society during the Communist period, especially since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. A report from a generally respected observer of the Christian scene in China cites a Chinese official as having complained, behind closed doors, that China’s Christians now totaled approximately 130 million, or ten percent of the population. Perhaps, even in official publishing houses or in the government offices that approve titles to be published, there are hidden adherents—or at least admirers—of the Christian faith. Or, as Thong and Fu would have it, the ancient Chinese faith.
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David Aikman, Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, is author, among other books, of Jesus in Beijing.
good read.
May God add new Christians in China!
PERSONAL INTEREST PING OF THE END TIMES PING LIST PLUS SOME OTHERS:
I have come across this historical truth a number of times.
I believe it.
IIRC, the border sacrifice was originally carried out as many as 5000 years ago on the border of Fujian Province or maybe even of the city of Fuzhou.
And, IT WAS FAITHFULLY CARRIED OUT EVERY YEAR OF THE THOUSANDS OF YEARS SINCE UNTIL 1911.
It was to the God above all Gods, Creator etc. and involved a lamb sacrifice, iirc. Quite HEBREW possibly even before Moses if my timeline is not mangled.
Very puzzling . . . but fascinating.
PERSONAL INTEREST PING OF THE END TIMES PING LIST PLUS SOME OTHERS:
Sorry, but that is poorly written.
A friend of mine is due out with a much better treatment of the topic soonish.
One can learn some things in that book but it’s dreadful to use in witnessing to Chinese.
It’s embarrassing.
And the Chinese require high quality stuff in that context.
Good post. Thanks.
PING for later.
Thanks Quix!
—Jo—
Regarding the book by Kang and Nelson - I have to say that I liked it and found some amazing observations regarding the Chinese alphabet ... but I also have to admit that I don't speak Chinese and when I showed this book to some native Chinese (atheists) they weren't too impressed... Basically their contention was that one could attempt to prove 'anything' by using the author's arguments.
So when is your friend's book coming out?
I’ll have to check. He’s an engineer in China and it’s tricky to talk about such things in email to them. His wife has written the book.
I think in the next 4-6 months. Will see. I should email them.
Thanks for asking.
My experience with your book was similar, BTW.
Thank you, Dear heart.
Tradition/legend, I read this somewhere, is that one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel went to China during the Diaspora-after Babylon.
Thanks for your feedback.
And you for yours.
Yes, I think there’s truth to that. I forget the evidence.
But the border sacrifice predates that event.
I think it even predates Moses and maybe even Abraham.
Yet, it’s VERY Jewish in nature.
Puzzling.
How about a post Mt. Ararat 'dispersion'?
We know Noah presented his sacrifice to the Great God right after the Flood:
Genesis 8:20 And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
I'll speculate that for whatever reason the 'Sinai' clan (whether they were descended from Japheth, Shem, or Ham -- I don't know) were able to keep this sacrifice in 'order' - by directing the sacrifice to the one true God of Heaven - for a longer time period than most of the other civilizations that degenerated into polytheism... But after being beret of the written word for guidance, the Chinese also eventually morphed into ancestor worship. Ancestor worship might have given rise to the polytheistic religions as the Babylon gods, Norse gods, Egyptian gods, Greek gods, etc -- may have been derived from memories of the first descendants from the Ark (Cush, Ham, Shem, Japheth, Nimrod, etc)...
There is actually a very intriguing Flood 'myth' attributed to the Miao of China (one of the aboriginal (pre-Han) cultures of China) that is such a close match to the Biblical Flood account that a lot of people discount it as an invention (or heavily influenced by traveling missionaries)... but maybe not...
Miao Flood Legend - Truax Version
The Flood
So it poured forty days in sheets and in torrents.
Then fifty-five days of misting and drizzle.
The waters surmounted the mountains and ranges.
The deluge ascending leapt valley and hollow.
An earth with no earth upon which to take refuge!
A world with no foothold where one might subsist!
The people were baffled, impotent and ruined,
Despairing, horror stricken, diminished and finished.
But the Patriarch Nuah was righteous.
The Matriarch Gaw Bo-lu-en upright.
Built a boat very wide.
Made a ship very vast.
Their household entire got aboard and were floated,
The family complete rode the deluge in safety.
The animals with him were female and male.
The birds went along and were mated in pairs.
When the time was fulfilled, God commanded the waters.
The day had arrived, the flood waters receded.
Then Nuah liberated a dove from their refuge,
Sent a bird to go forth and bring again tidings.
The flood had gone down into lake and to ocean;
The mud was confined to the pools and the hollows.
There was land once again where a man might reside;
There was a place in the earth now to rear habitations.
Buffalo then were brought, an oblation to God,
Fatter cattle became sacrifice to the Mighty.
The Divine One then gave them His blessing;
Their God then bestowed His good graces.
Plausible to me.
But my reading in that field has been meager to moderate at best.
Well la dee da!
It was not met as a book to witness it was to bring to light interesting things, until that time was not known and now days one can access things where when that book was published that were not available!
Really your reply show a lack of appreciation for effort to get the word out that China in the beganning belived in God.
Oh really?
Doesn’t seem like you have a clue about my experience with that book.
I eagerly received it, sought it out, bought it, read it.
Was a bit disappointed with it but still liked it.
Then when I went to share it, I observed the response by the Chinese—even Chinese Christians. They were quite scathing in their reviews.
Then I reread the book. I saw what they were talking about.
It could have been much better done to much better effect.
I won’t go into the why’s it was likely done as it was.
Thankfully, my friend is a sharp gal and has no doubt done a great job. So the info is still going to be gotten out in a quality way. It could have been done decades ago. Certainly 20 years ago . . . look at all that wasted time.
In terms of the basic info—it’s been somewhat available for a long time for those in the know.
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