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  • Living for Jesus and Japan: The Social and Theological Thought of Uchimura Kanzō ed. by Shibuya Hiroshi and Chiba Shin
  • Thomas W. Burkman (bio)
Living for Jesus and Japan: The Social and Theological Thought of Uchimura Kanzō. Edited by Shibuya Hiroshi and Chiba Shin. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Mich., 2013. xiv, 223 pages. $25.00, paper.

John F. Howes opened his opus on the life of Uchimura Kanzō by noting the Meiji-era savant’s predicament of living “true to both the ideals of [End Page 194] his people and the commandments of his foreign God.”1 The collection of eleven essays edited by Shibuya Hiroshi and Chiba Shin addresses Uchimura’s grappling with the latter part of this dilemma as he developed and articulated his Christian theology—but always with awareness of Uchimura’s deep Japanese sensitivities.

Uchimura was a leading Japanese intellectual of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout the chapters, he is compared to Fukuzawa Yukichi, Niijima Jō, and Nitobe Inazō, all of whom played major roles in the introduction of the thought patterns of the West to Japanese society. His Christian journey began at Sapporo Agricultural College, where he was influenced by the band of students who the preceding year had converted to Christ under the short but profound tutelage of William S. Clark. His conversion was the result of pressure from his classmates, but the young student in fisheries received baptism. When he attended Amherst College, he came under the nurture of Julius H. Seelye, philosophy professor and president of the college, who led Uchimura to a deeper experience of faith in Christ. Uchimura ingested from Seelye the legacy of New England Puritanism, a tradition he valued throughout his career. After several years as a newspaper commentator, he devoted himself to a vocation of Bible teaching through public lectures to large auditorium audiences in Tokyo and around Japan; to the magazines he edited, most notably Seisho no kenkyū; and to writing books about his own religious experience and portions of the Bible. In the final decade of his life, he was absorbed in the Parousia, the doctrine of the second coming of Christ. This last stage of his journey marked a shift away from a progressive view of history, which he had imbibed at Amherst, and toward the pessimistic view that the Kingdom of God could not be established on earth short of the cataclysm of Christ’s return.

Uchimura as portrayed in these essays is first and foremost a Biblicist and an individualist. Though aware of the philosophical currents of his day, he remained throughout his career a student of the Bible and committed to its authority. His public lectures and scholarly writings were nearly all expositions on biblical passages. His first Bible was the English-language King James Version, for the translation of the entire Bible into Japanese was not completed until after his baptism. While at Amherst, he studied classical Greek, but he never finished a higher degree in theology or philosophy. Uchimura placed more value on the Old Testament—particularly the Prophets—than did his Japanese Christian contemporaries. From the Hebrew Bible, he developed his thoughts on nationalism and God’s work in human history. For his studied attention to faith and the atonement for sins, he was indebted to St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans in the New [End Page 195] Testament as were Martin Luther and John Wesley. This faith was an end in itself; the goal was to produce not a gentleman but a person wholly trusting in Christ. Uchimura acknowledged that the cultural setting of the Bible was remote from the world of his audiences but asserted that the Bible speaks to the “inner affairs of the mind.” The authors in this volume frequently note the resemblance of Uchimura’s hermeneutic to that of Karl Barth and neoorthodox theologians who emphasize the role of the Holy Spirit in enlivening the words of holy writ in the heart of the reader.

As an individualist, Uchimura stands out in the essays for his pacifism and alienation from the institutionalized Christianity of his day. He dissociated himself from churches and their...

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