take center stage, as the description indicates. And was the title "Great Patron and Spiritual
Lord of the Empire" conferred upon Alopen just an honorary title, or did it require certain
actions of its holder? Did he now have to attend court functions and take part in traditional
courtly religious observances? The experience of Jesuit missionaries a millennium later
would lead one to believe that some accommodation, if not outright compromise, might have
been required. Patronage by the mighty is always a two-edged sword.
C. Cultural Sensitivity and Syncretism
When missionaries enter a new culture, they have to translate the Word into a new language
and dress it in local clothing without compromising the Gospel by fitting it to local customs
and beliefs. How well did Alopen and his successors walk this tightrope?
Martin Palmer, in his recent book The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist
Christianity paints a picture of a Taoist Christianity in seventh-century China. When he first
read the texts he felt they might be "a kind of Taoist Christian Rosetta stone of the spiritual
imagination." While certainly he is entitled to his own opinion and/or wishful thinking, there
can be no doubt which side of the tightrope he will end on. Let us take a closer look.
The stele begins with a summary confession of the doctrines of God, the Trinity, creation,
original sin, the incarnation and redemption. Dauvillier comments: "The attributes of God --
his eternity, being a spirit, transcendence, infiniteness and impassibility, existing before all,
and being without end these correspond to the most rigorous Christian orthodoxy." Pelliot
and others have noted that the actual terminology used was popular among Taoists of the
time, but Taoism has no creation ex nihilo nor a personal God. In other words familiar terms
were used to express new teaching. This is standard missionary practice.
However, a more difficult problem involves the name of God. When teaching about the
Triune God, can the missionary use the traditional local word for a divine being, or should he
coin new ones, or transliterate the names from Hebrew or Greek? This problem has plagued
missionaries right through the 20
Your handout shows how the Nestorian mission to China struggled with this problem. It
gives evidence from 3 documents. For each, two columns are given the first gives an
approximate pronunciation for the Chinese characters used; the second gives the English
meaning for the individual characters.
When giving the general term for God we see that the first text simply uses the Chinese
characters for Buddha, the second uses the characters for "one god" while the stele
transliterates the Hebrew (or Syriac) "Elohim." Since the first two texts are roughly
contemporaneous, perhaps even from the same pen, it shows that the author or translator was
struggling to find an appropriate term to use. A century and a half later, the stele settles on a
simple transliteration of the Hebrew "Elohim" or Syriac "Aloha".