A 1914 painting from a Jesuit orphanage in Xujiahui shows Matteo Ricci, SJ, in Ming garb. Painting: Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at the University of San Francisco.

Erected in 781 CE, the Nestorian Monument in Xian provides the earliest evidence of Christianity in China. The nine-foot-tall stone tablet, located in east-central China, records the arrival of missionaries from the East Syrian Church in 635 to spread what was called “the Luminous Religion” (Jing Jiao). One hundred twenty-eight priests had their names etched in the stone, together with a text that shows a high degree of cultural adaptation, using Daoist and Buddhist terminologies drawn from the religious traditions of eighth-century China.

The text summarizes the essentials of the Christian message, covering the Creation, the Trinity, the Incarnation, and baptism into the Church. It is worth noting that there is no mention of Christ’s bloody sacrifice on the cross—the act of redemption—probably because blood sacrifice was an alien concept difficult for the Chinese to understand. (Centuries later, one Protestant missionary would translate Jesus’s redemptive nature as being like medicine, good for the people’s ills.)

Concerning the work of Christ, the monument’s text says this:

He instituted the rule of the eight stations, purifying the stains and perfecting the truth; he opened the door for the three constants, giving access to life and destroying death.

In the ninth century, when the Chinese emperor turned against Buddhism, Christianity was banned not only because it, too, was a foreign intruder but also because, in its religious language and its monastic form, it appeared close to Buddhism.

When Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and other Jesuits arrived in the 16th century, they initially dressed in the saffron robes of Buddhist priests. They later changed their attire to that of the scholarly class, when they heard that Buddhist priests were not respected. Ricci wanted to appeal to the Confucian literati. He learned Chinese and the classics and won the respect of the emperor and the official class because of his respect for Chinese customs and culture and his knowledge of mathematics, the Western calendar, and clock making. In his treatise The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, he argued that Confucianism and Christianity were very similar. He found the ideas of tian (Heaven) and zhu (Lord) in the Chinese classics and used them to translate the Christian term “God” as Tianzhu (Lord of Heaven). He saw no problem with presenting Christianity in Chinese garb.

Unlike the Franciscans and the Dominicans in China, Ricci supported the Chinese practice of veneration for ancestors. This led to what has been called the “Chinese Rites Controversy,” with Ricci, and the Jesuits who followed in China, emphasizing the practice’s social qualities over its religious aspects, and the Franciscans and Dominicans arguing that the Jesuits had gone too far in their cultural adaptation. In 1715, Pope Clement XI ruled against the Jesuits’ viewpoint, declaring, “Such a ritual is heathen in nature regardless of the circumstances.” The Rites Controversy resulted in the expulsion of Catholic missionaries from China by the emperor. It created tensions between the Vatican and Chinese governments that continue today (exemplified by the issue of independent election of Chinese bishops without Vatican approval).

When Protestant missionaries arrived in China in the 19th century, they worked among the lower classes and adapted their methods to popular religious practices. The Buddhists distributed religious tracts to propagate their beliefs, and so the early Protestant missionaries followed suit, translating portions of the Bible and writing simple homilies to be handed out in the markets and other public spaces. Seeing that women were able to teach and assist in rituals in Chinese popular tradition, the missionaries employed “Bible women” to assist them in teaching women and children to read.

In sum, in order to get its message across, Christianity had to adapt to the “codes” of the culture, as Robert Schreiter writes in his Constructing Local Theologies (1985). Asian Christianity has always been a hybrid. And interreligious encounter, if not dialogue as we understand the term today, has shaped the Chinese interpretation of Christian doctrine, as well as Chinese forms of Christian monasticism, leadership, and religious and communal life. In the Chinese Protestant Bible, the prologue in the Gospel of John begins this way: “In the beginning was the dao, and the dao was with God, and the dao was God.” The Chinese Bible also uses many Buddhist terms, including those for heaven and hell. Reading it, one is introduced to an inter-spiritual world, whether one is conscious of this or not.

It is because Asian Christians have this hybrid identity and experience of more than one religious tradition that some of the most prominent writers on interreligious dialogue, including Aloysius Pieris, Stanley Samartha, Peter Phan, and the late Raimon Panikkar, come from an Asian background. They have been in the vanguard of the effort, because they are accustomed to “being religious interreligiously,” as Phan, a professor of Catholic social thought at Georgetown University, put it in the title of his 2004 book on Asian understandings of interfaith dialogue.

Lest anyone think that this way of being Christian happens only in Asia or in Africa, I hasten to note that it is also taking place to a certain extent in the United States. We all know white, middle-class, mainstream Christians who have tried Tai Chi, Zen Buddhist meditation, yoga, and other Eastern forms of spiritual healing. Inter-spirituality and multiple belongings can also be found within the racial and ethnic minority Christian churches. In The Next Evangelicalism (2009), Soong-Chan Rah observes that the fastest-growing Evangelical churches in America are the minority churches. Here different cultures, festivals, and customs come together, and new immigrants find a place for negotiating their identity.

With the U.S. Census Bureau projecting that in 2050 the country’s population will be 30 percent Hispanic (up from 12.6 percent in 2000), 9.2 percent Asian (up from 3.8 percent), and 15 percent black (up from 12.7 percent), it may be too early now to tell what American Christianity will become. (Hispanics already make up about 40 percent of U.S. Catholics.) If we focus on the sanctioned teachings of established denominations, Christianity may appear to change rather slowly. If we look at the periphery, we will see a lot of vitality and creativity.

Kwok Pui-lan is the William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her essay is drawn and adapted from remarks she delivered on September 22 as part of a symposium titled “Cultural Identity and Interreligious Dialogue” sponsored by Boston College’s theology department, School of Theology and Ministry, and Church in the 21st Century Center.