Friday, March 10, 2023

It is the 10th of March 2023 Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org, I’m Dan van Voorhis.

One of my favorite topics in Christian history that I did not study as an undergraduate or postgraduate is the history of Christianity in Japan. I have since worked with the church there on two occasions: in Sakata in 1999 and in Tokyo in 2015. Today, on the anniversary of the death of Guido Verbeck in 1898, I’d like to tell you his remarkable story and give you a glimpse into the church's history in the land of the rising sun.

First, suppose you know the book or movie Silence by Shusaku Endo. In that case, you know that as missionaries spread across the globe in the 16th century, the Japanese were especially careful to keep Christian missionaries away. It was 1542 when the first Portuguese came to Japan. By the end of the century, most Christian missionaries were expelled. Things looked even grimmer when the Edo period began in 1603 and ushered in a 250-year period characterized by the Sakuko policies, which limited interaction between the Japanese and foreigners.

Interestingly, the one European group that was allowed to do some business was the Dutch- they were seen as primary merchants not interested in missionary work or other proselytizing.

In 1853 Japan was opened to international trade as the Edo period was ending, and the Meiji Restoration sought rapprochement with and emulation of the West.

Enter Guido Verbeck of Zeist in the Netherlands, born in 1830 to a Moravian family. Guido had hoped to become a civil engineer and studied at the Polytechnic school in Utrecht. Upon graduating, he followed his sister and her husband to Green Bay, Wisconsin. From Green Bay, Guido made his way to Arkansas, where he worked for a time as an engineer but contracted cholera. He vowed to God that he would become a missionary if he survived.

His sister and brother in Law had moved to New York, were he was studying at Auburn Seminary. Guido would join him and graduate in 1859. He was then ordained, married, and off to Japan. The Reformed Church in America sent Verbeck to Japan for two primary reasons- his work with linguistics made him fluent in many languages and likely to pick up Japanese (in fact, it was said about him after he died that one of the more remarkable things about him was his impeccable Japanese). Secondly, as a Dutchman, he would cause less anxiety for the Japanese, who were leerier of Americans.

This is still the Edo period, so Christianity was still illegal- but Guido would open a school for foreign languages that became a favorite of some who would be influential in the coming Meiji Restoration. His fame as a teacher and westerner led him to receive job offers at various schools. During the Meiji Restoration, he served in the government school of Western study and became a translator for government officials. Verbeck's work helped encourage the Emperor to send the Iwakura Mission of some 100 Japanese to the West to study democratic and educational institutions.

He would continue to work with government officials, but with Christianity being legalized, he spent the last decades of his life working as a more traditional missionary. What is fascinating about Verbeck is how the Japanese have remembered him. Most in the West saw him as a missionary, but many in Japan referred to him as the oyatoi gaikokujin (foreign advisor) and hero to those wanting Western-style reforms.

Guido would be honored by the Emperor in 1877, was granted a Japanese passport, and was buried with official honors from the Japanese government, in Japan, upon his death on the 10th of March in 1898. Guido Verbeck, the Dutch Missionary to Japan in Wisconsin, Arkansas, and New York, was 68 years old.

The last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and Ephesians:

14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 10th of March 2023, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who thought Sakoku was that game with the boxes and the numbers, he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who, frankly, is still upset about the Ham and Banana Hollandaise from yesterday- I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.