Matteo Ricci enters the Forbidden City
A Jesuit brings the gospel to China
Matteo Ricci has been in China for nineteen years when he finally reaches Beijing and is received by the Wanli Emperor in 1601. He is fifty years old, a Jesuit from Macerata in central Italy, who has done something no Western missionary before him attempted at such depth: he has become Chinese.
He speaks Mandarin fluently. He wears the robes of a Confucian scholar. He has mastered Chinese classical literature, mathematics, and cosmology. He has built clocks, painted maps, and engaged the Chinese intellectual class on their own terms for nearly two decades before presenting the gospel.
His method is controversial then and now: he accommodates Chinese ritual practice to a degree that other missionaries find unacceptable. He allows converts to continue ancestor veneration, arguing it is a cultural practice rather than idolatry. The Chinese Rites Controversy that follows his death will consume the Jesuit mission for a century and ultimately destroy it when Rome forbids the accommodations he pioneered.
But in 1601, standing in the Forbidden City, Ricci has done what centuries of Christian mission to China had not: he has brought the gospel inside the walls.
His Chinese name is Li Madou. When he dies in 1610 the emperor grants him the extraordinary honor of burial in Beijing — the first Westerner so honored.
His method raises questions every generation of cross-cultural mission must answer for itself: how much adaptation is faithful translation, and how much is compromise?
“We must understand that the science and learning of China is different in form from our own, not inferior in value.”
— Matteo Ricci, journals, c. 1590s AD
“To the weak I became as weak, that I might gain the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some.”
Ricci became Chinese to reach the Chinese. Paul became all things to all people to save some. The principle is the same. The application is always contested.
The question the Chinese Rites Controversy puts to every missionary and every church in every culture is not whether to adapt but how far. The gospel is translatable — that is its nature. But translation requires judgment: what is cultural form and what is theological content? What can change and what cannot?
There is no formula that resolves this in advance. There is only the ongoing discernment of people who love both the gospel and the people they are bringing it to.
What in your expression of the faith is the gospel itself, and what is the cultural clothing it arrived in? Can you tell the difference?