Collection › LCMS Convention Proceedings (St. Louis, Missouri) › 1935 · 36th Convention, Cleveland › Page 169
LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1935, Page 169

Scan: The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod
Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

Ey. Luth. Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States. 1936. 169

true God and had worshiped Him under that name.” Longobardus,
his successor, opposed the term because he had become convinced that
the ancient Chinese had worshiped, under the name Shangdi, the
material heavens. The Dominicans and the Franciscans from the
very first protested against the idea of using the name of an idol to
designate the true God.

The question was referred to Rome for settlement; and after the
most learned men of the Catholic Church had studied and debated the
matter for almost a century, the Pope ruled in 1704 that Shangdi
should not be used “lest the Chinese be led to believe that the God
whom the Christians worship is nothing else than the material heavens
and its powers.” .

Since that time the Catholic missionaries have been using the
term Ti’en Chu, which means “Lord of Heaven.” The trouble with
that term is that it also is the name of an idol, less well known, it is
true, but still an idol.

The first Protestant missionaries, Morrison (+ 1823) and Marsh-
man (+1822), used Shen in their translation of the Bible. In doing
so, they observed the principle which, with the exception of the J esuits,
the Church had up to that time always followed, viz., that in preaching
to the heathen the missionary should not use the name of one of their
specific idols for God, but a word that includes all their deities, such
as Theos, Deus, and Gott.

About 1840 a movement was inaugurated by Medhurst, Legge,
and Staunton to substitute Shangdi for Shen wherever the English
Bible has the word God and to retain Shen in all those places where
god refers to false gods or where a discriminating adjective is added
to the name of God; e.g., 1 John 5,20: “Thou art the true Shen and
eternal Life.”

In spite of bitter opposition on the part of the more conservative
element the movement spread, until at present about ninety per cent.
of the missionaries use Shangdi and Shen as explained in the pre-
ceding paragraph.

This was the situation when our own first missionaries came to
China. When they took up the study of the Chinese language, they
were told, both by their native teachers and by missionaries of other
denominations, that the Chinese word for God was Shangdi. Later
on, when they began to read their Chinese Bible, they found that
Shangdi was used whenever the true God was meant, but that Shen
was used in the cases mentioned above. Naturally they fell in with
the ways of the country and used Shangdi and Shen in the way they
had been instructed.

That situation, however, was at best one of unstable equilibrium.
The Term Question was still a subject of lively debate among Protes-
tant missionaries. Books and pamphlets dealing with the propriety