The Conflict of the Gospel and Culture in China– W. A. P. Martin’s Answer

by Ralph Covell

The pages of history reveal an intense struggle among early China missionaries over the ancestor cult, Confucianiam, and emperor worship. This author discusses one controversial approach, which is pertinent to efforts of missionaries today to make the gospel culturally relevant.

The pages of history reveal an intense struggle among early China missionaries over the ancestor cult, Confucianiam, and emperor worship. This author discusses one controversial approach, which is pertinent to efforts of missionaries today to make the gospel culturally relevant.

Long before the term "church growth" became a part of missionary vocabulary, many of God’s servants in distant lands were living and working by its principles. Among these men was W.A.P. Martin, who labored in China in direct missionary work from 1850-68 and 1906-16, and then spent another thirty-seven years (1869-1906) in a variety of roles-administrator of the government-sponsored Peking College (T’ung Wen Kuan), adviser to the new Foreign Affairs Office, translator, and writer. While serving as a Presbyterian missionary in Ningpo he wrote a book on Christian apologetics, Evidences of Christianity,¹ which was acclaimed as the single most important religious book ever written in Chinese.² Published in many editions in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, it was circulated more widely than any other book in China for a period of sixty years.³

All that Martin did and wrote expressed his missionary strategy.4 At no point was he more unique for his time, however, than in his approach to the tremendous obstacle to church growth posed by the Chinese ancestral cult, one aspect of the honored virtue of filial piety.

The ancestral rite consists of a complex of four activities with respect to the dead: burial, the ritual in the home, annual sacrifices at the grave, and annual services in the ancestral hall.⁵ The most important part of the funeral itself is the selection by processes of divination and geomancy of the proper date and place of burial. When this has been completed, the wooden ancestral tablet, inscribed with the name and date of birth and death of the deceased, and thought to be the abode of his spirit, is prepared.

A ritual then is held in the home, and large amounts of money are expended to provide the dead with a symbolic paper outfit-house, clothing, bed, and perhaps slaves and concubines for his needs in the spiritual world. Other major services follow at prescribed intervals, and eventually a routine daily ceremony is established, conducted morning and evening before a home altar by the father or oldest son and consisting of prostrations, the burning of incense, and offerings of food. Twice a year at the Autumn and Spring festivals, sacrifices are conducted at the grave and serve both as religious ceremonies and festive social gatherings for dispersed family members. Equally important as family rituals in the home and at the grave are ceremonies held twice yearly in the ancestral hall to sacrifice to the tablets of all those bearing a common clan name.⁶

The conflict between the Christian faith and the ancestral cult was sharpest at the time when Chinese converts sought to be baptized. Martin, even early in his missionary career, was tolerant in his treatment of baptismal candidates. Careful to eliminate those with pecuniary motivation, he inclined to receive men and women who were deficient in their understanding of the Christian faith. A Presbyterian colleague at the Ningpo station spoke of an elderly Confucian scholar who had no "sorrow for sin" and saw Christianity only as a completion of the Confucian doctrine. He claimed that this did not bother Martin who wanted to baptize him right away and instruct him later.⁷ Martin and others of like persuasion– including John Nevius-nearly precipitated a dissolution of the Ningpo Presbytery so that they might be free to baptize whom they wished.⁸ Dr. McCartee, one among the minority who opposed Martin’s position, accused him of turning potential converts over to the "English Episcopal Mission who are not so strict in requiring actual proof of conversion and intelligent faith before baptism….These men are not Presbyterian and for those of us who are it is difficult to work with them."⁹

Despite Martin’s accommodating spirit with Chinese inquirers who were groping toward Christian truth, he had to sadly confess that he had once insisted "on the surrender of ancestral tablets as a proof of sincerity on the part of an applicant for baptism."¹⁰ His perception of this early failure motivated him to help others by propagating widely his views on the ancestral rite.

The first prominent opportunity afforded him to influence his colleagues came with the invitation to deliver a major paper on the theme, "The Worship of Ancestors," at the General Missionary Conference in Shanghai in 1890. Far different from the well-prepared but inconclusive technical discussion of the subject given by Matthew Yates at the first General Missionary Conference in 1877,¹¹ Martin’s paper, presented for him by Gilbert Reid, sounded the only real controversial note at the conference, although he said nothing essentially different from what he had written ten years earlier in his book The Chinese, Their Education, Philosophy and Letters.¹²

Right at the outset of his lecture he stated there were only two basic approaches to what was admittedly "the most serious impediment to the conversion of the Chinese." One was to remove the obstacle and the other was to seek a temporary accommodation while a more permanent solution was sought.¹³ Refusing to get bogged down an technical religious niceties, he concentrated on the historic and social role of the ancestral cult.

He noted, for example, the function of the rite historically in announcing dynastic succession; reporting important imperial events, and in promoting morality and courage by appealing to the honor of the departed. He pointed out, moreover, that at the present time the system, although tainted by "a large intermixture of superstition and idolatry," still served a three-fold social purpose: (1 ) to strengthen the bonds of family union, and stimulate to active charity; (2) to cherish self-respect, and impose moral restraint; (3) to keep alive a sort of faith in the reality of a spirit-world.¹⁴

Martin rejected outright not merely the possibility but the wisdom of abolishing a cult having such cohesive power in society.¹⁵ Although he shared with his colleagues the conviction that the missionary must "avoid giving countenance to anything that can fairly be construed as idolatry," he affirmed that those features to which the church most objected were "its excrescences, not its essence."¹⁶

Martin’s approach, unconsciously, utilized techniques widely adopted by any agent of cultural change confronting adverse institutions. First, he rejected both the form and function of idolatrous elements, e.g., invocations and offerings to the deceased viewed as tutelar deities. Second, he modified both the form and function of certain "announcements" so that they would not be regarded as prayers but mere expressions of "natural affection." Third, he accepted both the form and function of kneeling and bowing, affirming that while these actions were idolatrous in certain contexts, they definitely were not in others. Salutations and announcements to the dead he placed in this same category.¹⁷ A fourth solution, the development of functional substitutes, would have helped to make his views more palatable to his colleagues, but was omitted from this presentation.

Martin claimed that much of the Protestant difficulty on this matter was not from fear of idolatry but from repugnance of "any kind of connection with the dead."¹⁸ He traced this aversion to an extreme reaction to the dogmas of the Roman church. He called for the restoration of natural expressions of affection for the dead, if not among the tradition-bound churches in the West, then at least among congregations in China where "Protestant missions are still in the morning of the existence." He added that "the venerable usages of a civilized people should be judged by their own merits, and it is to be borne in mind that our aim is not to Europeanize the Chinese, but to make them Christians."¹⁹

This approach, obviously fraught with dangers and demanding caution, "kept the way open for counteractive teaching" and avoided an "uncompromising conflict" that would "close the ears of the better class to all good influences." He argued that a rigid position on this issue with the common man will cause "his incipient convictions…(to) be stifled before they ripen into practical conversion."²⁰

In the hot discussion which followed the presentation of this paper, Hudson Taylor, about whom Martin later commented that he had "erred in leading his followers to make war on ancestral worship, instead of seeking to reform it,"²¹ asked all "those who dissented from the conclusions of Dr. Martin’s paper to rise."²² Nearly everyone arose, and Martin’s views were only defended by Timothy Richard, the noted English Baptist missionary, and Gilbert Reid. He later stated, however, that "many missionaries have assured me that they concur in the general sentiment of the paper."²³

In later writing on the ancestral cult, Martin also suggested that functional substitutes might be employed–bouquets of flowers, planting of flower seeds, and shrubs–instead of offerings of meat and drinks.²⁴ This option was never as strong with him as with other liberal spirits, since he found less difficulty with the original form and functions.

HOMAGE TO CONFUCIUS AND THE EMPEROR
Two other closely-related issues-homage to the tablets of Confucius and the Emperor-became prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With Western learning being introduced into schools and the examination system being threatened, early signs of what would later become a concerted drive to make Confucianism the state religion were everywhere apparent.²⁵ One aspect of this was insistence by school officials that teachers and students should bow before the tablet of Confucius. Martin and his fellow-faculty members had participated voluntarily in this rite at the inauguration of the Imperial University in 1899 and stirred the indignation of the Peking missionary community.²⁶ It became an issue for Christians, both student and faculty, in the proliferating government schools and in Christian schools over which the government was seeking to exercise a more rigid supervision.

Martin’s views on these two themes were identical to what he had said on ancestral worship in general. He contended that bowing before Confucius’ tablet, or that of the Emperor, was an exaggerated Oriental mark of respect intended to secure loyalty.²⁷ The Christian who performed this rite "renounces nothing, nor is he supposed to accept any anti-Christian doctrine."²⁸ Christian students, if not burdened by their churches with the weight of this "imaginary offense," will be able, he claimed, to matriculate in government schools, to exercise positions of influence on faculty and administration, and "to deal with the moral issues that meet them in daily life."²⁹ Appealing for "cool logic, unbiased by any question of advantage," he urged his colleagues to take the path that would give Christian youth the best opportunity for exerting an influence in China.³⁰

Martin’s Chinese publications, while phrased in a manner calculated not to offend the conservative views of many Chinese Christians, carried essentially the same message as his English writings. In Evidences of Christianity a potential convert was made to ask, "If I follow this way, must I turn my back on Confucius?" The basic principle which Martin enunciated was that "Confucianism and Christianity may be distinguished in terms of breadth and narrowness, but not in terms of truth and error."³¹ "How then, " he asked, "can you talk about turning your back on it?"

In very discreet and polite language he empathized with Chinese views that termed failures to bow and to sacrifice as unfilial conduct producing dire consequences. He urged his readers to remember that Lu, one of Confucius’ disciples, had said that "life and death, prosperity and all things" were under Heaven’s control. If this were so, Martin argued, then our first obligation was to God, the originator of all life and the one responsible for parents and their care for their children.³²

In his book, Christianity and Other Creeds, Martin traced the details of the famed "Rites Controversy" and clearly took his stand with the Jesuits against the Franciscans and the Dominicans. Shang-ti was the most acceptable name for God, he felt, and he further claimed that if the ancestral rites had been permitted, even temporarily, the Emperor K’ang-hsi might have become a modern-day Constantine and brought officials, gentry, and the common people into the Christian fold. This at least, in his opinion, would have bought time until Chinese Christians would have been granted liberty on these customs which were such an integral part of Chinese life.³³

As a natural outgrowth of his convictions on the ancestral cult and on the Confucian rites, Martin developed a new strategy for reaching China for Christ. He had always been concerned with the common masses, whether they were to be won by a national people’s movement,³⁴ through vernacular literature, by wide itineration, or through a prior appeal to the influential upper classes. In the post-Boxer period, when China was, as it were, awakening from a deep slumber, he saw the possibility of "conversions en masse."³⁵ Nations, not individuals, should be the goal of the Christian mission.

How did he believe that this vision should be implemented? First, baptism should precede the two stages of enquirers and catechumens rather than follow them. Second, "whole families, entire clans, villages or districts" ought to be admitted to baptism as soon as they have "committed themselves to a better doctrine, however imperfectly it might be apprehended." Third, the catalyst for this would be the conversion of the head of the family or clan. Fourth, teaching and training, now with a much larger audience, would follow baptism rather than precede it and would eliminate many false motives. Fifth, the rapidly growing number of converts, would "exert an irresistible influence on the community to which they belong."³⁶

The key to success was not to be as rigid in examining candidates for baptism. Speaking of some of his legalistic colleagues, Martin commented, "If I were to illustrate their attitude by the use of a cartoon I should draw a picture of the blind Polyphemus feeling the fleeces of his sheep one by one, lest his cunning enemy should be crouched on the back of some of them." He observed that "the devil…(often) escapes detection by attaching himself to the belly of the sheep rather than on the back."³⁷ The obvious lesson, not lost on his readers, was that all their extremely careful prebaptismal screening did not guarantee the elimination of unworthy candidates.³⁸

W.A. P. Martin’s missionary strategy had many strands. His attitude toward the ancestral cult is probably the most important, because, without it, nothing else that he said or did has real significance. This was the sore point between Christianity and the Chinese, and failure to properly empathize meant that sound doctrine and effective methods had lost their point of contact with the Chinese mind. In a sense, he summed it up well with a short translation from Chinese entitled "Remarks of Momo, A Native Christian, on the Preaching of Missionaries."³⁹

This unidentified Chinese convert, possibly Martin’s own creation, observed, "If you are not acquainted with the moral relations of men, how can you understand the nature of God?" The Chinese church, he claimed, had failed precisely at this point-it had "thrown off the duties of society under the cloak of religion" and thus "rebelled against the teaching of the Gospel." What was the corrective for this state of affairs and for a deeper impact upon Chinese life? "To teach reverence for the Supreme Ruler, let them begin by teaching loyalty to the Emperor and to teach the service of our heavenly Father, let them begin by insisting on the services of earthly parents."

Many gatherings, large and small, are discussing ways and means to promote the cause of Christ on the Chinese mainland. Hopefully, Protestant Chinese theological groups will give first priority to formulating a biblicallybased theology of filial piety. The thoughts of Mao will not easily root out concern for ancestors. This problem, which has plagued the Protestant church throughout its history in China, must be resolved. A first step in the development of such a theology would do well to examine the historical thought of outstanding Chinese and missionary thinkers, of whom W.A.P. Martin is one example.

The inability or unwillingness of the Christian church in China to relate its biblical theology to a central aspect of Chinese culture is a warning to the church in other lands. Compromise of the gospel is never an option. Neither must the church opt for a policy which in many of its features reflects the fears and thought patterns of the culture from which the first messengers of the gospel have come. If we wish to talk seriously of an indigenous church, we must give much more systematic thought to how the gospel relates to the forms and functions of the social institutions of the target culture. Change there will be, for every culture is judged by God’s truth. Hopefully, however, this transformation will not needlessly rend the basic fabric of that society.

Endnotes
1. T’ien-tao su-yuan. A literal translation is "to search out the origins of the heavenly doctrine. "
2. This ‘was the result of a poll taken of Christian missionaries by the Christian Literature Committee previous to the China Centenary Conference of 1907. Arthur Brown, "The Death of the Rev. W. A. P. Martin," Minutes of the Board of Missions of the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A., XXXIV, 1917, 321-322.
3. Copies are still available in Taipei, Taiwan, at a publishing house that specializes in reprinting important historical works. Christian book stores have never heard of it!
4. His best known English works are A Cycle of Cathay (New York, 1896), The Lore of Cathay (New York, 1901), Siege in Peking (New York, 1900), and The Awakening of China (New York, 1907). His many Chinese works include Evidences of Christianity, Natural Philosophy, Christianity and Other Creeds, Christian Psychology, and a landmark translation of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law.
5. Karl Reichelt, Religion in Chinese Garment (New York, 1951), 62.
6. Ibid., Summary of Chapter 3, "The Cult of Ancestors," 61-71. See also C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society (Berkeley, 1967), 28-57 and David K. Jordan, Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors (Berkeley, 1972), 87-133.
7. China Letters of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., IV, Ningpo, Dr. D. B. McCartee to Board, March 31, 1855. China Letters will hereafter be abbreviated as CL.
8. CL, IV, Ningpo, S. Martin to Board, #82, February 22, 1856 and CL, IV, Ningpo, Richard Way to Board, #32, November 14, 1854.
9. CL, IV, Ningpo, McCartee to Board, #57, May 31, 1855.
10. W. A. P. Martin, The Lore of Cathay (New York, 1901), 277.
11. Matthew Yates, "Ancestral Worship," Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionary in China, 1877 (Shanghai, 1878), 367-86.
12. W. A. P. Martin, The Chinese, Their Education, Philosophy and Letters (New York, 1881), 257-70.
13. W. A. P. Martin, Hanlin Papers, Second Series (Shanghai, 1894), 328. Chapter 14, "The Worship of Ancestors," is the text of Martin’s paper. He compared the first alternative to a man trying to remove a hill in front of his home rather than shifting his habitation. The latter option was to build a railroad track over the mountain while construction proceeds on a tunnel to go through it.
14. Ibid., 341.
15. Ibid., 341. "Let us ask ourselves whether, if we had the power by a penstroke to sweep it all away, we should dare to incur the responsibility of doing so?"
16. Ibid., 342.
17. Ibid., 343-46.
18. Ibid., 348.
19. 1bid., 350.
20. Ibid., 350-51, 354.
21. W. A. P. Martin, A Cycle of Cathay (New York, 1896), 214.
22. Records of the General Conference of Protestant Missionaries in China, 1890 (Shanghai, 1891), 59.
23. Martin, Hanlin Papers, Second Series, 355.
24. Martin, The Lore of Cathay, 277.
25. Wing-tsit chan, Religious Trends in Modern China (New York, 1953), 4-11.
26. "Peking University," North China Herald, February 6, 1899, 211.
27. W. A. P. Martin, "The Worship of Confucius, Is It Idolatry?" Chinese Recorder, XXXIV (February, 1903), 92-93.
28. W. A. P. Martin, "The Worship of Ancestors, How Shall We Deal with It?" Chinese Recorder, XXXV (June, 1904), 308.
29. W. A. P. Martin, "How May Christian Schools Bring Their Influence to Bear Most Effectively on the Educational System of the Chinese Government?" Records of the Sixth Triennial Meeting of the Educational Association of China (Shanghai, 1909), 45-46.
30. Martin, "The Worship of Confucius," 93. The editor of The Chinese Recorder disassociated himself from Martin’s position, asking, "How . . . can a Christian who holds this view of Confucianism (that it blocks morality and true progress) bow in reverence to the tablet of him who is honored as the representative of a system which is the chief hindrance to the spread of Christianity in China?" He conceded that Martin’s respect for Confucius, unlike his own, might be profound enough to enable him to bow without it being idolatry, 94. Martin certainly would agree that "to him who thinks it is sin, to him it is sinful. " Martin, "How May Christian Schools … Influence . . . China," 45.
31. W. A. P. Martin, Evidences of Christianity (Ningpo, 1854), 73a, 9. "a" refers to the first side of the double leaf and "9" to the line.
32. 1bid., 130a, 6-131a, 2.
33. W. A. P. Martin, Christianity and Other Creeds (Tungchow, 1909), 80-81.
34. Martin had been the most persevering of all missionaries in his support of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) which, he felt, could bring a Christian dynasty to power in China.
35. W. A. P. Martin, "Conversions En Masse," Chinese Recorder, XL (November, 1909), 625-27.
36. 1bid., 626-27.
37. Ibid., 626.
38. Martin’s proposal, unique for the day in which he lived, was apparently ignored as an old man’s dream. A noted Chinese Christian, Lin Shao-yang, described it as a "peculiar policy." Lin Shao-yang, A Chinese Appeal to Christendom Concerning Christian Missions (New York, 1911), 12.
39. Chinese Recorder, XXXIV (May, 1903), 240-41.

——-

Copyright © 1975 Evangelism and Missions Information Service (EMIS). All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMIS.

Comments are closed.