By Foot To China Mission of The Church of the East, to 1400 BY FOOT TO CHINA Mission of The Church of the East, to 1400 By John M. L. Young Chairman Japan Presbyterian Mission Missionary of Mission to the World of the Presbyterian Church in America Assyrian International News Agency Books Online www.aina.org 1 By Foot To China Mission of The Church of the East, to 1400 Published 1984 A.D. ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¡ to the memory of the men of God who thirteen centuries ago first took the gospel to China - "the missionaries who traveled on foot, sandals on their feet, a staff in their hands, a basket on their backs, and in the basket the Holy Scriptures and the cross. They went over deep rivers and high mountains, thousands of miles, and on the way, meeting many nations, they preached to them the gospel of Christ.” FROM AN ANCIENT TEXT. ¤ ¦ ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¡ to one who "also serves" in a thousand ways with her faithful help - my wife. A restoration of the original silk painting of a missionary bishop of the Church of the East, now in the British Museum, London, discovered by Sir Aurel Stein at Tun-huang, western China, in 1908. It had been found, along with many manuscripts including some Christian ones, in a cave sealed in 1036. This restoration was painted by Robert MacGregor. 2 By Foot To China Mission of The Church of the East, to 1400 CONTENT PREFACE.............................................................................................................................................................4 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................5 PART I..................................................................................................................................................................8 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE FIRST CHRISTIAN MISSION TO CHINA...........................8 Chapter 1...........................................................................................................................................................8 The Early Centuries ..........................................................................................................................................8 Chapter 2.........................................................................................................................................................10 The Church of the East Establishes Its Independence.....................................................................................10 Chapter 3.........................................................................................................................................................13 The Christian Mission to T'ang China ............................................................................................................13 Chapter 4.........................................................................................................................................................18 The Mission Under the Khans ........................................................................................................................18 PART II ..............................................................................................................................................................31 THE NESTORIAN CONTROVERSY...............................................................................................................31 Chapter 5.........................................................................................................................................................31 Nestorius and "Nestorianism".........................................................................................................................31 Chapter 6.........................................................................................................................................................36 Nestorius' Christology.....................................................................................................................................36 PART III.............................................................................................................................................................44 AN APPRAISAL OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN LITERATURE OF CHINA................................................44 Chapter 7.........................................................................................................................................................44 The Twelve Early Christian Documents.........................................................................................................44 Chapter 8.........................................................................................................................................................49 The Theology Reflected in the Early Missionary Literature...........................................................................49 Chapter 9.........................................................................................................................................................56 Reasons for the Ultimate Failure of the Mission ............................................................................................56 BIBLIOGRAPHY...............................................................................................................................................65 FOOTNOTES.....................................................................................................................................................70 3 By Foot To China Mission of The Church of the East, to 1400 PREFACE A gospel-preaching church with 1,300 years of missionary experience deserves our attention. It is the purpose of this book to focus on that great missionary effort. Only a part of the story, however, of the Church of the East's missionary enterprise, from the second century to the end of the fourteenth, can be told here. The main focus will be the mission to China during the last 800 years of that period. Research materials for writing on this subject are available, although they are scattered over half the earth and are in various languages. Little, however, is written for the reader who is not pursuing advanced studies. English speaking Christians have been interested in the western expansion of Christianity--in history that involves their own origin and development - and little is accessible to them concerning the amazing missionary effort of the Church of the East. That the gospel of Christ's kingdom did confront the masses of Asia long ago, when the world's population was the densest there and civilization the most advanced, is today little appreciated by western Christians. How it fared in that confrontation is almost totally unknown. The result is that when someone asks, "Where was the evangelical church of Christ during those long `Dark Ages' of Europe when the Church of Rome usurped the place of the Holy Spirit?" there usually follows a notable silence. The Iona colony of Scotland may be mentioned, or the later Waldenses of the Italian Alps, both involving small numbers. There is a better answer to the question, however, and the following narrative seeks to shed some light on it. The story of the Church of the East's mission to Asia is one that needs to be told to today's church. It is the story of a dedicated missionary effort and the ever expanding witness of Christians from Antioch to Peking, nearly 6,000 miles by foot, until multitudes of Christians lived from the 30th to the 120th longitude in medieval times. The facts and analyses that follow concerning the church's great epic of eastward advance, it is hoped, will bring encouragement, edification, and perhaps warning to our contemporary churches in their present mission to the unreached. Here is evidence that God gives strength and conversions in the direst and seemingly most impossible circumstances. Here also is evidence that pitfalls to the church's mission always exist. Common examples are such things as an inadequate appreciation of the spiritual deadness of the natural man, failure to recognize the necessity of heart repentance and the meaning of baptism, the temptation to consider external acts of piety as necessarily representing inner holiness, the acceptance of liturgy and form in the place of justification by faith alone and identification with Christ, compromise with the world's secularism and other people's religious practices, sacramentalism, over-identification with a particular political regime, and concern with the elite that leads to failure to reach out to the common people. As troublesome a problem as any, however, to those desiring to bring the gospel by word and deed into a foreign culture, deeply concerned to make the love and salvation of Christ understood, is the difficulty of adequately contextualizing the gospel without compromising its true meaning and uniqueness. The contextualization takes place not necessarily when the missionary succeeds in crossing the barriers of culture and language, so as to enable the listener to feel he understands the westerner's gospel, but when this new understanding is genuinely reflective of the New Testament message of Christ's redemptive love and mercy and involves a heart commitment to Him. The lesson of the gospel in the Near and Far East during the Middle Ages is that such failures as are referred to above can cause Christian communities where churches once flourished to disappear