Ming And Qing Confucian Christians Will Tongru The Human Spirit Of Jesus

In late Ming and early Qing Dynasty. there's the second wave of spreading Christianity in China, which had a very significant impact on the development of Chinese culture. In the dissemination process. the missionary Matteo Ricci. payed great efforts to spread Christianity combined with Chinese traditional Confucian. The Confucian Christians. for example Xu Guangqi put "Catholic" as a cure of social ideological confusion and moral corruption, and meanwhile accepted certrain significance of the heterogeneous civilization. In the cultural exchange process, the two sides both focused on the similarity between Confucianism and Christian. They took the missionary strategy of "mediating Confucian" and "consummating Confucian". Why did Matteo Ricci worshipped Confucian so much? There were two reasons:making the missionary convenient, and his own humanistic spirit. But there's no doubt that Christianity was the main body of his Ideological system. At the same time, as representatives, Chinese thinkers represented by Xu Guangqi showed a very positive attitude to the Christianity. They explained "Catholic" with certain principles and standards of Confucianism to link Confucianism and Christianity. But for them, the confucianist Christians, Confucian value system was dominant, while they also saw the value of Christian ethics and actively practiced it.This article mainly includes five parts:The first part is the introduction. It mainly introduces the reasons and meaning of this subject. It described the present study of Confucianism:though there are some research results but we still need take effort in studing Confucianism and humanistic spirit fusion.And this part also expounds this research method, the thinking and innovative points.The second part discusses that Matteo Ricci and some other missionarys demonstrated Christianity by using Confucianism. By doing this, they provided a bridge for the Chinese scholars to accept the Christian.On this basis, Ricci developed a so-called missonary strategy:"consummating Confucianism","mediating Confucianism","beyond Confucianism", paving the smooth way for the spread of Christianity in China. Thus, it provided a cultural bridge for the Chinese scholars to accept the Christian concept. The third part's main content is:As representatives, Xu Guangqi, Li Zhizao and Yang Tingjun showed a very positive attitude to the Christianity. They considered Catholic as the ideal method to save China in the late Ming dynasty, confirmed and accepted the significance of this heterogeneous culture system. Meanwhile, they explained it with certain principles and standards of Confucianism to link Confucianism and Christianity. They tried to combine Chinese and Western cultures and rebuild a value system with the advantages of both sides.The forth part describes a case of Xu Guangqi to indicate the two different cultures of Confucian and Christians in the late Ming. Xu payed efforts to seek the joining point of Confucianism and Christianity, giving Christianity the significance of Chinese culture:First, he combined the two different beliefs and established an absolute supremacy, universal and effective moral system; Second, through the link, he tried to find a solution to some major events such as ultimate concern of life and death; third, what he did met people's religious and theory demand. At the same time, in the process Xu thought of both sides'human spirits, including "benevolence" and "love", attention to people, equality ideology, crisis awareness, tolerance, honesty and so on.The fifth part is the epilogue, drawing the conclusion this paper:Xu positively learned from the West, but he did not fully accept the faith of Catholic. He just considered and used the Catholic as a tool for moral improvement to achieve his ideal of governance beyond the whole history. In this sense, Xu who is not just total Westernization, but a nationalist and patriot;he was not passive recipients of the Catholic theology, but active interpreters; he didn't take the West as the standard line to measure China's social reality, even to stand at a much higher point.What Xu did will be very instructive to the historical experience of today's cultural exchange and the modernization of Chinese culture.