Shangdi The Chinese Deus

Abstract

Central to the Christian worldview is the monotheistic belief in an omnipotent and omniscient God, which is effortlessly rendered without much controversy in most European languages as cognates of the Latin Deus or conceptual equivalents, such as the English “God”. However, the Jesuits of the early sixteenth century found themselves in a conundrum upon arriving in China as the first ever European mission when they encountered an ancient culture possessing a wealth of religious traditions, yet with no word that would obviously accommodate all the meanings and connotations of “God” as understood by Christianity. Matteo Ricci, the leading Jesuit missionary and arguably the prototypical sinologist, believed that the solution lay in the adoption of the indigenous term Shangdi (上帝), a term that is commonplace in the Chinese Classics.