Author(s): Stephanie Painter

Presentation: oral

In the mid-19th century a desire to reach a consensus over the correct translation for God into Chinese resulted in a debate that fractured the unity of Protestant missionaries in China. Missionaries in China regarded Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism as all-enveloping faiths. This religious blending prompted missionaries to scrutinize Biblical translation efforts to guarantee that Christianity would be the sole faith of its practitioners. One of the most public debates of this nature was that between American William J. Boone and British Walter H. Medhurst. Each missionary published papers defending what they believed to be the proper translation of God in Chinese. This was not a personal dispute. Rather, it was an entrenched linguistic disagreement based on regional differences concerning the role of missionaries in China. In general, American missionaries expressed a preference for the term shen, a generic term for spirit that was applied freely to numerous deities in various Chinese religions. While the British missionaries preferred shangdi, a term which referred to a past emperor and evoked hierarchal supremacy. Drs. Boone and Medhurst felt that if their term for God was not applied to the Chinese Bible there was little hope that Christianity in China would succeed.

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