The Meaning Of The Chinese神in The Eyes Of The West, Which Takes Calvin Wilson Mateer For Example

The Bible`s translating into Chinese caused the translation problem of "God",which has always been a big problem among the modern Protestant missionaries inChina. Calvin Wilson Mateer as a representative of the modern missionaries to Chinaalso conducted researches and discussions on this issue. From1901to1902, Dr.Matter published16articles entitled "The Meaning of the Word神" on The ChineseRecorder and Missionary Journal to respond to the cause. Taking this opportunity, Dr.Matter fully understood the variety of gods in the Chinese traditional culture. What’smore, he quoted a large number of examples from Chinese classics, novels, andproverbs and consulted the theory of "the Trinity" which has three images that are theFather, the son of God, and the Holy Spirit in order to analyze the Chinese godsrespectively. There are numberless gods in the Chinese traditional culture,whichordinary people can’t list, so Dr. Matter not only took Ti(帝), Tian (天), theBuddha,the spiritual gods and other popular Chinese gods for instance, but alsoclassified them in comparison of the God to show their power, or the role they playedin the Chinese life. By doing this he wanted to show us that the Chinese gods andGod have consistency in nature. At the same time, he was more convinced that theonly supreme Christian "God" should be translated to Chinese for "神" instead of "上帝".Based on the problem of translating "God" into Chinese, Dr. Matter sought fromthe perspective of human emotions for the common between the Chinese and thewestern religions.From the point of him, both gods in China and the Christian Godwere the product of the needs.They are abstraction of people living in the society whowant to meet the needs of it and their emotions. The difference between them just isChristians give all their hopes to God, while the Chinese give them to more various ofthings that exist in the natural history, such as people, animals, plants, things, etc. Infact they are standards which people are used to guide,to constraint themselves.They are also people’s yearning for life, or a profound reflection on the living standards.