Creation and the Great Parent: The Thought of Yang Tingyun, a Chinese Christian in Late Ming China

Abstract

The paradigm shift from missiology to the study of the Chinese indigenous context has driven scholars in the area of Christianity in late imperial China to the Chinese reactions to the Catholic missions, either positive or negative. As an influential yet controversial model, Jacques Gernet's approach to Chinese responses to Catholicism in late imperial China has been recognised as an essentialist analysis of both Christianity and China, which are treated in that approach as two confrontational and monolithic entities. This article, by contrast, explores the dynamics of Chinese Christians' reception of Christian teaching by focusing on the interiorisation of creation theology in Yang Tingyun, one of the earliest Chinese Catholics in Late Ming China. While accepting the Christian idea that God created the world out of nothing ( ex nihilo), Yang has to respond to the cosmogonic discourses advocated by Song Confucians, who exerted considerable influence on Confucianism in the Ming dynasty. Moreover, his way of expounding the Great Parent, Dafumu, as the Creator and Sustainer further shows an active engagement with both the Christian idea of creation and Chinese traditional discourses of cosmology and ethics. Approaching this concept of the Great Parent will provide a window into Chinese Catholic theology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 1