Towering majestically amidst a forest of stone monuments on display in China’s ancient capital city of Xi’an, the “Nestorian Tablet,” as it is typically called, tells the story of Christianity’s entrance into the Middle Kingdom during the Tang Dynasty. Its cryptic presentation of the gospel and how it first came to China, hotly debated among historians ever since the tablet was unearthed in the seventeenth century, raises as many questions as it provides answers.
Glen Thompson brings much-needed clarity to this debate in his book, Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China. Thompson not only offers a long overdue reevaluation of the “Nestorian” narrative; he also leaves us with the question of why the first emissaries of the gospel to China have been so misunderstood for so long.
No Gospel in It?
Protestants have traditionally dismissed the Church of the East’s missionary foray into China as tainted by controversy, fatally flawed due to syncretism, and doomed to fail because of its dependence upon imperial favor and the missionaries’ inability to raise up indigenous leadership.
This telling of the story starts with the Syriac church’s association to Nestorius, who had been branded a heretic due to his position on the humanity of Christ. The label “Nestorian” thus carries with it the assumption that the first missionaries to China brought a gospel that was doctrinally flawed.
In Confucius, the Buddha, and Christ, Ralph Covell seems to agree with this assertion. Referring to a description on the tablet of Jesus as “the divided Person of our Three in One” and to a Nestorian hymn with the phrase, “divided in nature, he entered the world,” Covell says, “This uncommon expression probably points to the unique doctrine of the Nestorians, for which reason, in part, their founder, Nestorius, was condemned as a heretic….”1
While the appearance of the cross at the top of the monument clearly identifies it as a Christian artifact, the clouds and lotus leaves within which the cross is situated imply a mingling of Christian ideas with Buddhist and Taoist concepts. The tablet’s closest allusion to the crucifixion is found in the phrase, “He hung up the shining Sun in order to triumph over the empire of darkness.” The prevalence of Buddhist imagery throughout the text suggests the Christian gospel had been all but swallowed up in the prevailing philosophical tides of the time.
“They resorted to compromise, and compromise was foredoomed to fail,” remarks historian A.J. Broomhall in his two-volume biography of Hudson Taylor. Broomhall goes on to quote missionary and sinologist James Legge, who recounted a conversation in which he asked a prominent Chinese Christian about the tablet.2
“How could it succeed?” this believer replied. “There was no gospel in it!”3
For his part, Broomhall gives the Syrian church the benefit of the doubt by suggesting the gospel as presented on the tablet, couched in Chinese poetic language, could well have been understood by Chinese of the day. “The Nestorians’ success in getting inside the Chinese mind may have been greater than is customarily granted to them in the West. Under persecution they may have had to use veiled language as John did in the Revelation, while the message was plain to those they taught by word of mouth.”4
Imperial Favor
From their official welcome upon their entrance into Xi’an to the imperial decree that granted the Christian faith legitimacy and protection, the missionaries and the church they founded enjoyed (for a time) the favor of the governing authorities. Critics in later centuries would fault them for being too dependent upon this favor and too accommodating to the demands of the state. As a result, the church was unable to endure when the political winds shifted, and all clergy were forced to return to secular life.
Finally, the traditional “Nestorian” story faults the Church of the East for maintaining foreign control of the church in China rather than raising up indigenous leadership. China mission historian Kenneth Scott Latourette writes, “Nestorian Christianity appears never to have ceased to be primarily the faith of a foreign community…Nestorianism seems to have depended chiefly upon foreign leadership and support.”5
Daniel Bays in his New History of Christianity in China echoes this sentiment, noting there is little evidence that many Han Chinese believed.6 Richard Cook’s Darkest Before the Dawn likewise asserts that Chinese church leadership was not properly prepared: “When the foreign leadership was eradicated from China, the Nestorian church collapsed, because they had not developed an indigenous Chinese clergy that could survive.”7,8
Reframing the Story
Rooted in post-Reformation formulations about what constitutes the essential gospel and assumptions about the proper relationship between church and state, the prevailing evangelical view has often faulted China’s first Christians for coming up short, failing to clearly communicate biblical truth and forging too close a relationship with temporal authorities.
Meticulously reexamining the evidence within the broader context of the Syriac church and religious life in China from the Tang through the Yuan Dynasties, Thompson tells a different story. It is the story of deeply committed Syrian Christians who traveled thousands of miles to plant a church in China, enjoyed a season of imperial favor during which the gospel took root and spread, and succeeded in communicating the essential message of Christ’s suffering for the salvation of the world and his resurrection from the dead. Thompson finds little evidence that the Syriac church ever adopted the heretical theology for which they are mistakenly known. Rather than faulting the Syriac church for accommodation to the state, Thompson instead positions the church’s relationship to the imperial order within China’s long tradition of government-supervised religion, a tradition that continues to the present.
The Western church’s indiscriminate acceptance of the “Nestorian” narrative and its dismissal of the Syriac mission efforts as somehow illegitimate constitute a collective misunderstanding that has implications for how the gospel is understood in China today. Perpetuating this narrative indirectly supports the storyline, favored by the Chinese government and by critics of Christian mission, that Christianity first came to China centuries later, the product of cultural aggression and imperialism. Thompson counters this narrative by showing instead how the cultural sensitivity and respect shown by the Syriac missionaries paved the way for the gospel to be embraced in China. In this retelling, what has long been considered a cautionary tale becomes an entry point and an inspiration for sharing the gospel in the Chinese context.
Endnotes
- Ralph Covell, Confucius, The Buddha, and Christ: A History of the Gospel in Chinese (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 27.
- A.J. Broomhall, The Shaping of Modern China: Hudson Taylor’s Life and Legacy, Vol. 1 (Carlisle, United Kingdom: Piquant Editions, Ltd., 2005), 10-11.
- Ibid.
- Broomhall, 11.
- Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929), 58-59, quoted in G. Thompson Brown, Christianity in the People’s Republic of China (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1986), 16.
- Daniel Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 11.
- Richard Cook, Darkest Before the Dawn: A Brief History of the Rise of Christianity in China (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2021), 13.
- Covell differs on this point: “The amount of literature translated and written by the Nestorians and their obvious effort to accommodate the faith to Chinese concepts and practices would have been in vain if most adherents were foreign or if there were not a large number of native priests to use the tools put at their disposal” (Covell, 33).
Image credit: Mural probably depicting Palm Sunday discovered at a Church of the East temple in Qocho, Chinese Turkestan, 7th–9th century. Now kept in the Museum of Asian Art, Berlin. Image in the public domain, via Wikipedia.
Brent Fulton
Brent Fulton is the founder of ChinaSource. Dr. Fulton served as the first president of ChinaSource until 2019. Prior to his service with ChinaSource, he served from 1995 to 2000 as the managing director of the Institute for Chinese Studies at Wheaton College. From 1987 to 1995 he served as founding …View Full Bio
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