Where Everybody's Crazy

Damn, I missed it again! Yesterday was the feast day of St Nikolai Kasatkin, Enlightener of Japan, one of the most important unsung figures of Japanese missiology.

Unsung in our tradition, of course; within the Orthodox community he is very much sung:

O holy Saint Nicholas, the Enlightener of Japan,
You share the dignity and the throne of the Apostles:
You are a wise and faithful servant of Christ,
A temple chosen by the Divine Spirit,
A vessel overflowing with the love of Christ.
O hierarch equal to the Apostles,
Pray to the life-creating Trinity
For all your flock and for the whole world.

We don't tend to that sort of thing for our folk. But then, St Nikolai is a very special case. He has been called "the greatest missionary of the modern era"; a bishop of the Episcopalian church called him "one of the most outstanding Christian missionaries." But if you pick up a book on mission to Japan, you will be lucky to find a mention of him.

Let's give a quick summary of Nikolai's achievements before we look at why he's so important. If we remember that Nikolai arrived in Japan in 1860, then two quotes should suffice:

By 1900 the church had trained 376 Japanese clergy and 25,698 members.

Mark Mullins, Christianity Made in Japan

Indeed, there were never more than four foreigners in the work during the entire history of the Orthodox church in Japan.

Jim Stamoolis, An Examination of Contemporary Eastern Orthodox Missiology

Four missionaries, forty years, twenty five thousand converts, and a self-sustaining church fellowship. These days we are happy if four missionaries work for forty years to get twenty five converts. Perhaps the reason we don't talk about Nikolai so much is because we know what kind of position he puts us in.

Oh, and by the way, I was being a bit modest on Nikolai's behalf. When I said "twenty five thousand converts and a self-sustaining church fellowship", I meant twenty five thousand converts, a translation of the Bible into Japanese, along with a translation of all the Holy Liturgy and some other theological literature, a cathedral, a seminary, a library and at least six schools. All of which are still functioning today. Nikolai achieved in forty years what the entirety of the Protestant mission could not achieve after nearly two hundred.

You see, anyone who tells me that Japan is a "very hard country to reach" doesn't know their history. (That's OK, though; lots of people don't know their history.) We have bought into the idea that Japan is "resistant to the Gospel", and we have adjusted our expectations accordingly.

Now let's look at how St Nikolai achieved all this. (This is not a recipe, of course!)

First, he threw himself wholeheartedly into understanding the language and culture. When he was found reading non-Japanese books, his Archbishop rebuked him, and he resolved to only read Japanese literature. He got out into the community and listened to Buddhist and Shinto storytellers and preachers. He researched the history of Japan. He knew it better than most Japanese.

Second, he took the long view. He spent eight years researching the Japanese language and culture. His first convert came after four years of study. Taking the long view also means delegation. In 1869 - five years after the first convert! - he handed over his congregation to another missioner. Having established one congregation, he moved to Tokyo to set up another. This pattern of establishing, delegating and moving on marked his ministry.

Third, he understood the people. His first convert was a samurai called Sawabe. Takuma Sawabe was an ultra-nationalist - one of the kinds of people in the black minivans that we would shy away from these days - who regarded the Russian Consulate as symbolic of all of the problems of opening up the country to foreigners. When Sawabe came to the Consulate, sword drawn, ready to kill Nikolai, Nikolai knew to appeal to his samurai nature:

"Why are you angry at me?" Fr. Nicholas asked Sawabe.

"All you foreigners must die. You have come here to spy on our country and even worse, you are harming Japan with your preaching," answered Sawabe.

"But do you know what I preach?"

"No, I don'™t," he answered.

"Then how can you judge, much less condemn something you know nothing about? Is it just to defame something you do not know? First listen to me, and then judge. If what you hear is bad, then throw us out."

Sawabe did listen to him, and was persuaded through his words and through the Holy Spirit working in him. Nikolai knew how to make Sawabe listen. How many of us today can honestly say that we know how to make Japanese people listen to us and our message?

Fourth, he was committed to his people. This is a matter of integrity. He needed the Japanese people to know that he was on their side. Many missionaries take the option of relying on their home countries when things get tough, but Nikolai was absolutely sold out for Japan, and his congregation knew his love through his dedication to them. When Japan and Russia went to war, many of his own congregation urged him to go back home. (Remember that he came to Japan under the auspices of the Russian Consulate in Japan.) But he refused; he needed to serve and be with his people. At the same time, he found ways to minister to Russian prisoners of war in Japan.

Finally, he was quick to delegate, as we have already alluded to. When Paul Sawabe begun to believe, he brought three friends along to hear Nikolai's preaching. Nikolai left the four original believers to go and do their own discipleship, and one year later there were 12 baptised, and 25 of what we would now call "seekers". Fifteen years after this, the church was four thousand strong. To make this work would require yet further delegation, and so he began the process of ordaining Japanese clergy. By the time he came to celebrate fifty years of his mission, there were 43 clergy ordained and 121 lay preachers. And let's remember that five years after having a church of one, he passed it on and moved on to Tokyo. He knew that if he was going to reach the whole of Japan, he could not confine himself to one area for the whole of his missionary life.

He was a man who wanted to bring the Gospel to the whole of Japan. Within one lifetime, and with the help of up to three other missioners who mainly returned home exhausted, he built an entire communion of churches.

St Nikolai Kasatkin was by far the single most successful missionary in Japan, ever. Perhaps one day our histories of Japanese mission will reflect this.

I have still, even after posting this, a massive respect for the tradition and the witness of the Orthodox Churches. I wish I could join them; I tried, but it was not going to happen.

I agree with Orthodoxy on most of the issues that Protestants are supposed to disagree with Orthodoxy about: the role of Scripture versus Holy Tradition, the interpretation of Scripture, the role of the Liturgy, the witness of the Church Fathers and the Saints. All the big scary issues, I will lay my cards on the table and say that the Orthodox got right.

But there are sufficient caveats in my thinking - and I openly acknowledge that these are the result of my thinking, and as such are entirely fallible - that I have decided not to affiliate myself with the Orthodox Church. I have more or less decided to affiliate myself with the Anglican Church, (basically because they're the minimally-hated confession) and I'll go into that in more detail later.

To explain why I am not Orthodox requires an awfully long prolegomena, which I do not necessarily have time to flesh out here. The first thing I should mention is that I have attempted to form an emic view of Orthodox theology, working within the system; I came to Anglicanism afterwards, finding there not a solution to my problems with the Orthodox faith but an alternate set of problems that I'm currently happy to live with. Hence I'm not claiming, as many other non-Orthodox writers do, that Orthodoxy is Bad and Wrong because it does not contain the elements that my particular denomination stresses; I have instead tried to understand Orthodoxy on its own terms, and express my doubts and concerns from within that system.

But I at this point have to admit that I am not a member of the Orthodox church and so cannot argue completely within that system; my experience of Orthodoxy has been provisional and not necesarily wholly accurate. (But when, whose is? That is a mystery of Orthodoxy which I invite you to ponder but will not discuss further here.)

I will, I know, affect a polemic tone in my writing, but that is purely for the purposes of rhetoric style. I know that the appropriate response for me is humility, and I fully acknoweldge that I have merely scratched the surface of Orthodox Christianity; if there is something underneath which I have missed, then I must apologise in advance. Please do correct me in person or in the comments below, and I will be glad to rephrase myself. But on the other hand, I have to work with what I have! When I read Bulgakov and Lossky and Ware and other scholars and find no consensus about what Orthodox believe, I have to make up my own mind, and frequently this is incorrect. I apologise, but I hope it will not obscure my main points.

A note on the handling of Scripture. For some reason, when someone speaks about Orthodoxy and uses the Scriptures in their defence, the immediate reaction from the faithful is that this Protestant is behaving sola scriptura and taking the Word out of its context of hermeneutic and historical engagement.

I will say right now that I believe that sola scriptura is a mistake. Nobody ever said this was how we were supposed to live. And frankly, I'm not sure it's fair to label me as a Protestant, but then I'm not sure it's fair to label me as anything else either.

However, I also believe that if the Bible belongs to the Church, then it belongs to the individual theologians - that is, as Bishop Kallistos frequently reminds us, each believer - to interpret under the authority of the Church. So I humbly submit my uses of Scripture to the deliberation of the Church.

But what, I have to ask, does it mean for the Church to deliberate on a matter? I admit that I am very much impressed with the idea that the pronouncements of the Church are inspired and infallible. I want this to be true.

But then I began to think about where the locus of this infallibility lies, particularly its temporal locus. When is something infallible? This is particularly a hard question when you have Councils of the whole church which are true but are not accepted for a while, and you have Councils of the whole church which are accepted for a while and are later found to be not true. (Second Ephesus, for instance.)

So here is an interesting question: at what point is it possible to declare an infallible answer to a question? Remember that any answer you have now may later be found not to have the sense of the church, and hence not to be infallible. If you think about it, there is not any point in the present for which one can say that the answer to a given question is able to stand the test of time of the Church in the future. That is, I have a question now, but any answer I receive now may not be judged to be infallible until some later date. And therefore, I have no useful answer to my question right now.

And hence the doctrine of ecclesial infallibility - which I agree is much needed - is unfortunately meaningless, since such infallibility cannot be temporally located.

Also, there is the issue of Hellenism. I am not going to stagger over to the library to dig out Jim Stamoolis' thesis on the topic, but one of the issues in Orthodox mission is the acceptance of Hellenistic categories of thought, particularly Platonism, as an intergral part of the Orthodox faith. To put it absurdly, the Orthodox took a Middle Eastern faith and contextualised it to Greek philosophy, and then refused to allow any further contextualization from there. The symbolics of Orthodoxy, even today, are framed in Greek philosophical patterns of thought. The absurdity of this is not lost on me.

I have mentioned in my previous post the primacy of God's action over man's dogma; therefore I have issues with the Orthodox exclusivist tendency which considers a dogmatic formulation of the faith to be more important than the manifest work of God. Frankly, they - for whichever version of "they" you worry about - are brothers if they have received the Holy Spirit, not if they measure up to your standard of doctrinal purity. When reaching out to the Gentiles, God asked of the Apostles to look to the external outworking of His Spirit and not to the theological nitty-gritty, and surprisingly, after much persuasion, they did! I find it amazing that this is the only activity and attitude of the founding Fathers of the Church that the Orthodox do not today follow.

Finally, I wish to end on a more positive note. It is my wish that all Christian confessions be able to gather together under the banner of what they agree on - Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, as Lord and Saviour - before they begin to worry about what they disagree on. The Orthodox Church, amongst its theologians, has a lovely word for that-which-they-disagree-on - the "theolegoumena". These are the things which, in the grand scheme of things, don't actually matter, so long as we agree on the basics.

The Orthodox attempt to minimize these distinctions amongst themselves and maximise the distinctions between the "confessional bases" of the other confessions. But to be honest, it's all theolegoumena. We don't agree, but that's OK; we agree on the basics.

And one day, we will all realise it, and celebrate it together. Maybe on this earth, and maybe not; but one day.

Two quick quotes:

Indeed, there were never more than four foreigners in the work during the entire history of the Orthodox church in Japan

- Jim Stamoolis, An Examination of Contemporary Eastern Orthodox Missiology

And yet:

More remarkable during this same period was the development of the Russian Orthodox Church under the leadership of Bishop Nikolai. By 1900 the church had trained 376 Japanese clergy and 25,698 members.

- Mark Mullins, Christianity Made In Japan

Four missionaries, twenty five thousand converts. Not too shabby a ratio.

I've been mumbling these from time to time, but never in the blog. There are probably a few more, but:

• All theology is a branch of missiology.
• We need to keep doing theology not because God changes but because man does.

Incidentally, the latter is one of the reasons why I'm unimpressed with Orthodoxy.

This:

Information will now be gathered on the former pope's life and teachings, including all private writings from the period before he became pope, and checked for orthodoxy to ensure that he expressed no heretical views.

- Pope John Paul II to be beatified

explains this:

6 March 1979
My personal notes are to be burned.

- Key excerpts: Pope's will