ABSTRACT
An attachment to the moral and social values of Christian inspired cultures, an acceptance of Christian monotheism, even an admiration for the person of the historical Jesus does not make a Christian. An important sphere of activity for our “Confucian Christians” was that of the scholarly academies, the shuyuan, where philosophical debate as well as literary and ritual activities took place. It is unfortunate that among the surviving seventeenth century Christian literature there is comparatively little on the inner lives of the Confucian Christians, their spirituality. There are treatises on meditation, on devotional practices, and on Christian rituals by both missionaries and converts. The issue that remains is the balance of the elements in the encounter, and that can only be determined by a focus on the persons involved, not some abstraction such as “culture” or “religion”.
