The Reformation Era · 1491-1650 · Japan, Kongo, China, Americas
Mission-Born Christianities (Kirishitan Japan; Kongo; China; New Spain/Andes)
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About This Movement
Between the 1490s and the middle of the seventeenth century, Christian communities took root far outside Europe under very different conditions. The kingdom of Kongo, whose ruler Afonso I adopted the faith and whose letters survive in his own voice. Japan, where a Jesuit mission from 1549 gathered a large Christian population before a savage prohibition drove the survivors underground. China, where Jesuits and Chinese converts argued out how the Christian God could be spoken of in a Confucian idiom. And Spanish America, where conquest and mission arrived together and Andean and Nahua Christians made something of their own out of what they were given. Almost everything written about these communities was written by missionaries, which makes the deepest question about them a hard one — how much of what survives is the mission's story and how much the converts'. And Japan and Kongo are where converts' own voices most clearly break through.
Sources
- Kirishitan Japan: Dochirina Kirishitan (1591/1600 catechism as used); Fabian Fucan's Myotei mondo (1605) and Ha Daiusu (1620) in Elison, Deus Destroyed (Harvard, 1973); Tenchi Hajimari no Koto (trans. Whelan, 1996); martyr acts and fumi-e apostasy registers (primary) — Fucan wrote first as a convert apologist, then later as an apostate attacking the faith he'd left. The fumi-e apostasy registers are hostile, coerced evidence — produced under a torture regime designed to force apostasy.
- Kongo: the letters of King Afonso I (Mvemba a Nzinga, c. 1509-1540s) in Brasio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana (Eng. excerpts in documentary readers); the Kikongo Doutrina christaa (1624) (primary) — A genuine African Christian ruler's own voice: he requested teachers and protested the slave trade. (Dona Beatriz, a later prophetic figure from 1704, belongs to a subsequent period.)
- China: Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (trans. Lancashire & Hu, 1985); the converts' own texts - Xu Guangqi, Yang Tingyun; Kouduo richao (Li Jiubiao's Diary of Oral Admonitions, trans. Zuercher, 2007) (primary) — Lists converts' own texts first. The Kouduo richao (Diary of Oral Admonitions) shows ordinary convert experience directly.
- New Spain/Andes: Nahuatl testaments (The Testaments of Culhuacan); Guaman Poma, Nueva coronica y buen gobierno (1615); the Huarochiri Manuscript (trans. Salomon & Urioste, Texas, 1991); extirpation-trial records (primary) — The Huarochiri Manuscript exists only because a Spanish extirpator of idolatry commissioned it, and the extirpation trial records are hostile evidence. Guaman Poma gives a native Andean Christian voice writing under colonial pressure.
- Regional standards: Higashibaba, Christianity in Early Modern Japan (2001); Thornton's Kongo-Christianity scholarship; Standaert (ed.), Handbook of Christianity in China vol. 1 (2001); Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies (1997) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6, ch. 27 'The naturalisation of Andean Christianities' (Mills) and ch. 29 'Christianity shaped by the Chinese' (Standaert) (reference) — These two chapters directly cover two of the four regions here (the Andes and China). There's no dedicated chapter on Japan or Kongo; the nearest is chapter 30, by Zupanov and Hsia.