Truth and Sharing the Gospel with Japanese

“I think Christianity is probably true,” my Japanese friend finally told me. “But I’m Japanese, and I must honour my family.” We had been studying the Bible together for some months, and he had seemed to be moving steadily closer towards making a commitment. I knew the issues of honouring his ancestors and worshiping at Shinto shrines were there in the background, and we’d talked about what the Bible says about these things. But this response seemed so irrational! If Christianity is true, how could he hold on to something else that must be false?

I’ve heard this kind of response to the gospel frequently from Japanese friends. Perhaps you have encountered something similar. What is going on here?

Cambridge anthropologist Alan Macfarlane, in his introduction to Japanese culture, Japan through the Looking Glass¹, observes that for many Japanese, “social relations are more important than dispassionate cognitive truth”. We might add that in Japan such “social relations” can be with the dead (ancestors) as well as with the living!

As Christians of varied cultural backgrounds, we are of course people who value truth. God’s word is truth (John 17:17) and Jesus Christ is “the truth” (John 14:6). Salvation—becoming a Christian—involves being born again “through the word of truth” (James 1:18).

It would seem, then, that the Japanese ambivalence concerning “truth” must be a significant obstacle to their receiving the gospel. Macfarlane describes a mindset that many readers who have shared the gospel with Japanese friends will recognise: “If two ideas clash or contradict each other according to strict logic, that can be overlooked, for reason is fallible and inferior to emotion and intuition. A Japanese is able to hold contradictory views without conflict.”²

As a missionary to the Japanese, I have agonised over this “problem”. But recently I have wondered if I am perhaps missing some potential “openings” for the gospel, to which the type of mindset described above may be amenable.

The gospel is certainly “truth”, but it is emphatically not “dispassionate”. Rather, it is personal and involving and gripping. The Person of Jesus Christ is “the truth”. As I present the gospel to Japanese, too often I am guilty of presenting a “system”, which can always be relativised by the Japanese (or by anyone else, for that matter!) Sometimes our evangelistic materials and methods are unhelpful in this regard. Apprehension of truth does imply knowing – but even this knowledge is intensely personal. In John’s first letter, the truth is personified: it is seen in us, and characterises all we do as Christians. We belong to the truth (2:8, 3:18-19).

Neither is the gospel merely “cognitive”. Of course, it does have a cognitive aspect. There is intellectual content to the message. But there’s more to it than that, which is good news, because we humans are not just cognitive beings! We have bodies, which are more than just “cases” for our minds. American Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith argues that most human action is conceived at the “imaginative” level. This is somewhere between innate instinct and cognition. Smith says, “Being a disciple of Jesus Christ is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas into your head in order to guarantee proper behaviour—rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly.”³ So, what does this mean for the “non-cognitivist” Japanese? We can appeal to the “loves” of our Japanese friends, just as the gospel itself does. At a level deeper than cognition (a level which corresponds, I think, to Macfarlane’s “emotion and intuition”) I have noticed that even the Japanese do not like division of loyalties. Jesus is claiming their loyalty, which trumps other (love-like) commitments. The spiritual battle for the hearts of our Japanese friends is more likely to be won or lost at this level than if we never move beyond “mere” cognition.

Which leads us to a question: how do we “access” this level when we interact with our Japanese friends? What if we sense that they are unwilling to reveal their deep-seated “love commitments”? Some close observation and cultural analysis might help here. Smith argues that we all have our own “love stories” that have taken hold of us on a precognitive level and that these influence so much of what we do. We might not recognise them cognitively. For example, have you ever asked a Japanese friend why they visit a Shinto shrine, and been told, “I don’t actually believe in Shinto”? This is a cognitive response, but it would be entirely wrong to assume that your friend’s shrine visit is not (1) meaningful, (2) powerful, and (3) formative of a deep attachment.

Something pre-cognitive is going on! This kind of “love story” is not communicated by ideas, but through cultural practices that Smith calls “liturgies”. When we hear the word “liturgy” we probably think of church services, but Smith means by “liturgy” any repeated practice that orders the way we orient ourselves to our ultimate loves. Going to a shrine is one example, but going shopping would be another. Any liturgy (repeated practice), whether “sacred” or “secular”, shapes and constitutes our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world.

I’ve been taking more time to observe and ask questions of my Japanese friends that aim to get below the surface: How would you feel if you didn’t go to the shrine? How would your parents feel? What do you think “draws” you to go there? Questions such as these begin to tap into pre-cognition, and to where our “love commitments” ultimately lie. We start to see what our idols are; the “rivals” to Jesus for our ultimate commitment and loyalty. As we work through these issues with our Japanese friends, we can pray (and sometimes speak) with a better understanding of what is going on spiritually.

So, to return to Macfarlane, we can conclude that the typical Japanese ambivalence concerning truth is not necessarily a hindrance to sharing the gospel. That’s because the gospel is not “dispassionate cognitive truth”, but personal, transformative truth in relationship—God’s own power unto salvation (Romans 1:16). The nature of a human person proposed in James K.A. Smith’s model means that our ultimate commitments are not (first-and-foremost) shaped cognitively anyway, and so we can ask what liturgies (repeated practices) are forming the “loves” of the Japanese. But the opposite side of the coin is that a commitment to Jesus Christ will also have its “liturgies”. I’m not of course referring to liturgical church services (although I’ve nothing against them!) but to formative practices that orient us towards Jesus. If Smith is correct, we need to be drawing Japanese friends into those practices (even before they have made a cognitive commitment to him) to enable them to “experience”, viscerally, what the Christian life “means”. We need to draw them into Christian community, help them learn to pray, teach them to sing, and encourage them to serve. None of this is rocket-science, and the argument is not new! But perhaps I, for one, have underestimated the power of practice to effect change at the imaginative level.

I’ve missed the opportunity to commend the vision of a Christ-centred life by encouraging my Japanese friends to step into it. One irony of being involved in ministry to Japanese overseas is that the commitment many of them make to Jesus may well be primarily intellectual/cognitive. I wonder if this is perhaps precisely why so many fall away when they return to Japan: their commitment never infiltrated the pre-cognitive, so that they became truly “rooted” in Jesus Christ at the level of love-commitment.

In Oxford, we’ve been welcoming Japanese into an international community of postgraduate students. At the moment, about three-quarters (45) of them are Christians, and the rest (15 or so) are not yet. In this community, the non-Christians experience the distinctiveness of Christian community. They see us putting the Bible into practice in the community, and outside it. Of course, they see our sin as well! But it is real, and visceral, and – in a sense – habit-forming.

I want to think of the whole person as I share Christ. Of course I don’t stop preaching the gospel. Of course I appeal to the intellect: in Oxford, of all places, who could fail to? But in most cases—given who we are as human beings, and given who the Japanese are culturally in particular—an appeal to the mind alone seems to be insufficient. We are not after all dealing here with Macfarlane’s “strict logic”, but with a mighty Saviour who—among competing suitors for our heart’s allegiance— claims all of us—body, soul and spirit—as his own. May many more from Japan respond, in his mercy! 

1. Macfarlane, Alan, Japan Through the Looking Glass, Profile Publishing, 2007, page 157
2. Ibid, page 157
3. Smith, James K.A., Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation, Baker Academic, 2009, page 33
An earlier version of this article was published in JCL News, Spring/Summer 2014.