NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 48, Issue 2, 1994

Nowadays in many books about the relations between the West and Japan, much attention is paid to a philosophical dialogue of Zen and Christianity. An important problem in this dialogue, however, remains the non-Christian Japanese conceptualization of what is god. Monotheism reached polytheistic Japan from the West not before the 17th century. What has been the impact of these monotheistic ideas on the Japanese elite? In this article the author points out that many monotheistic tendencies in Japan came into existence due to the incubation period of these ideas in China and the interest of several Neo-Confucian intellectuals in the Chinese translations of Ricci and others which were smuggled into Japan by Chinese sailsmen. Monotheism became embedded in Japan’s polytheistic developments and changed its course. On the other hand this process turned Western monotheism into Japanese monotheism even in Shinto and many new religions. It is clear that Japan’s monotheism, though differing from Christian monotheism, became established among more than a third of Japan’s population, a figure forty times larger than the total number of Christians in Japan.

In this article fundamentalism is defined as religious orthodoxy in active opposition to modernization. Fundamentalist movements are especially fascinating because their unexpected growth seems to be a falsification of the secularization-thesis. We argued that the evangelical movement in the Netherlands is not a fundamentalist movement pur sang. It is an orthodox movement in mainly passive opposition to some cultural aspects of modernization. We do not expect that this movement will become radicalized during the coming years.

At the beginning of the fourth century, the debate between pagans and Christians centred round the question of whether Jesus had to be considered a ‘divine man’, like the famous Apollonius of Tyana, or a God in human shape. Because of his miracles, the pagans were prepared to accept that Jesus had been a ‘divine man’, but they strongly opposed the Christian view that by these miracles he had proved himself to be God. Moreover, they pointed out that certain aspects of Jesus’ behavior had not been in accordance with that of a true ‘divine man’. These views, expressed by Sossianus Hierocles and an anonymous philosopher, were answered by Eusebius, Lactantius and Macarius of Magnesia. They refused to see Jesus as a ‘divine man’ and, int. al., pointed out that the prophets had predicted his incarnation and sufferings long before they actually took place. For Macarius the question was no real issue anymore, in answering the pagan accusations he often attacks the Jews.

The author poses the question why and how people can be helped by the idea that God suffers with them. He argues that divine co-suffering, though it cannot give all pointless suffering a point and cannot solve the problem of theodicy, can comfort the suffer in two ways: (1) by reaffirming the sufferer’ human identity that is threatened by his suffering and (2) by transforming the suffering from something to be ashamed of into an unpleasand experience which nevertheless can lead to the establishing and deepening of divine-human fellowship.

In this review article the author discusses at some length four important recent studies on various aspects of ancient postbiblical Jewish angelology (by M. Mach, S. Olyan, M.J. Davidson, and R. Elior). He demonstrates that by renewed study of sources already known for a long time but also by investigation of sources made available only recently, real progress has been made in our understanding of the processes behind the enormous growth of these angelic speculations, of the motives behind the naming of angels, and of the dangers for monotheism that lurked in this development (angelolatry).