The search for God in ancient China: James Mellon Menzies, China missionary and archaeologist

How can Christianity be made acceptable to the Chinese, whose history and culture extended far beyond the history and culture of those who were preaching the new religion? This has been a problem that generations of China missionaries had tried to solve. The Jesuits, led by Matteo Ricci, had endeavoured to link Christianity to early Confucianism. Some more modern Protestant missionaries such as Timothy Richard saw commonality between Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism.; James Mellon Menzies, a China missionary of the North Henan Mission of the United Church of Canada, believed he had answered this question. A trained civil engineer, Menzies was converted to the missionary cause by the informal but pervading campus evangelism when he was a student at the University of Toronto. In 1914 while serving in North Henan as a rural evangelist, he “discovered” the Waste of Yin, the ancient capital of the worshippers of Shangdi . Convinced of the providential nature of this discovery, he started to collect and study oracle bones, the religious documents produced by the Shang people. Eventually he built up the largest private collection of oracle bones in the world and became a known scholar of Chinese archaeology, especially oracle bone studies. Through his archaeological work, Menzies discovered the Shang concept of Shangdi, the very term that Protestant missions used to translate the Christian concept of God, which he thought “as good a primitive idea of God as the Hebrews before Moses.” He believed this provided a firm grounding for accommodation between Christianity and Chinese culture.; This thesis sees Menzies' life as a missionary and archaeologist as an important part of China's modern encounter with the West, a dynamic and complicated process with multiple forces competing with each other. By placing Menzies life and work in this historic context, this study examines his success and frustration in negotiating his China mission with Christian missions, imperialism, and Chinese nationalism.; Menzies was a unique and important missionary and his life and career highlight some of the important issues concerning cross-culture and faith encounter and dialogue. The value of this study is further enhanced by its use of unpublished family papers, archival documents, and oral histories. Menzies has been remembered as a collector and scholar, but his life goal was to harness his scholarship to the good of his missionary work.