Converted to Christ by Shinto Priest

This story got my attention perhaps because earlier today I had finished reviewing an article for the March issue of Touchstone about Japan's leading Christian University, Doshisha U.

Shinto teacher inspired Japanese professor to become a Christian
By Hisashi Yukimoto
Tokyo, 27 January (ENI)--A Japanese Lutheran scholar, who qualified first as a Shinto priest, has said he became a Christian thanks to his Shinto teacher.

"The teacher said to me, 'As a religion, Christianity is the greatest. Because it is the teaching of Jesus who is the only Son of God'," Toshifumi Uemura, a 49-year-old associate professor at Japan Lutheran College in Tokyo, told Ecumenical News International, adding he was surprised by his Shinto teacher's words.

Now Uemura teaches Japanese religion, climate issues, Christianity, and comparative culture and is a sought after speaker in Japan. He maintains that ancient Shintoism may have been influenced by Judaism and Nestorianism, a sect Christians consider heretical.

It was after Sueko Mita, a teacher who was in her 60s at Tokyo's Nakano Branch of the Kyoto-based Fushimi Inari Shinto Shrine, where the "god of harvests" is worshipped, said to Uemura in June 1981, "Whether you believe it or not, God solemnly exists."

"As I heard the words of the teacher, Jesus became a part of me," he said. "At that moment, I thought that I must get baptised in the future to draw a clear line [on my life]."

Uemura said Mita, who was not a Christian, died in 2008, but not before she had given him a good personal grounding in Shinto teachings for 10 years. He said the teachings included phrases like those from the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews 11.1, which says, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

"Looking back at the 10 years now, I think that they were exactly the teachings of the Bible," said Uemura, who is a member of the Japan Evangelical Lutheran Church. "The fact that I became a Christian through the words of an ancient Shinto teacher makes me a conclusive witness to that."

After 10 years of training with Mita, Uemura studied at the Shintoist-run Kokugakuin University in Tokyo to become a Shinto priest.

While on a journey on the bullet train from Tokyo to the Akama Jingu Shinto Shrine in Yamaguchi in western Japan to give thanks for his certification as a Shinto priest, he made a stopover at Nagoya in central Japan. There he attended a Christian gathering at a Pentecostal church, where he later was to be baptised at the age of 32. Afterwards he returned to Tokyo and became a Lutheran.

"Many people misunderstand Japanese Shinto shrines and believe they have been in Japan since ancient times," said Uemura. "But I think most of the Shinto shrines in Japan, including [those of] Inari [Shinto] that I was practising, came from abroad."

He added, "And some of those from abroad were influenced by Christianity, especially Nestorian Christianity," which believed that Jesus was two distinct persons. He noted that Shintoism, which some people see as a religion particular to Japan, places an emphasis on purification.

(c) Ecumenical News International. Reproduction permitted only by media subscribers [Touchstone is].

Comments

[Gian]

I believe that misconceptions and inflexibility hinders the work of spreading the Word.
Eg even CS Lewis was confused as to what Hindus really believe. He said that it is probably pantheism. But if we read pantheists themselves, they express their regret their the popular religion of Hindus is a kind of dualism
(An eternal God co-existing with a eternal Nature), a loving God that incarnates in the physical form (eg Ram and Krishna), salvation obtained only thru loving grace, and importance of prayers to this God.
The Hindu philosophers despise this popular dualism and prefer monism and keep out popular faith out of their books about Hindu religion and philosophy that foreigners read, thus giving foreigners inaccurate picture of Hindu religion and hindering conversion work.
You may read Vivekananda-he declared personal God centered dualism as a synmptom of weakness of Hindus and was still honest to confess that monism is not popular. Indeed he says that monism (or Advaitism as it is called in Hindi) is belief fit only for superman.

[Joe Long]

Favorite story in this vein: Morihei Ueshiba, founder of the martial art of aikido, gave public demonstrations in which groups of men (sometimes burly American MP's borrowed for the event) tried to grab him and were evaded, and often dramatically thrown. He's generally considered one of the greatest martial artists of all time. One day an American observer suggested to him that a similar event happened in Luke 4:16-30. Shinto mystic Ueshiba replied, very seriously, "In aikido we study to make ourselves pure. He was born pure, and knew it from the beginning."

[labrialumn]

FWIW, the Nestorian Christians do not and did not hold to the heresy attributed to Nestor, and Rome now agrees.

They did reach through China and may have reached China. Tales of the Kachin peoples in Indochina suggest that at least some missionaries may have reached there, as well, during that first millennium of the spread of the Church eastwards before the persecution at the hands of the Confucians, Hindus and then Muslims.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>FWIW, the Nestorian Christians do not and did not hold to the heresy attributed to Nestor, and Rome now agrees.<<<

Well, duh! I think I mentioned that several years ago. Communicatio in sacris exists between the Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church. The faithful of both Churches can receive the sacraments from either. The only thing missing for full ecclesial communion is concelebration of the Eucharist.

And, by the way, Nestorius did not hold the heresy attributed to Nestorius. But that's what happens to you when you cross Cyril of Alexandria.

In the 13th century, the Church of the East probably had more adherents than the Church of Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Churches combined.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Hallelujah! Takes a thread about a Buddhist becoming Christian to see Labrialumn and Stuart Koehl agree on something!

Anyways, a nominee for bishop in the Episcopal diocese of Northern Michigan has a background in buddhism:

The Diocese of Northern Michigan is set to elect as its bishop a priest who once received “lay ordination” in Buddhism. On Jan. 23, a diocesan search committee announced that a single candidate had been put forward to stand for election as bishop at the diocese’s special electing convention Feb. 21 at St. Stephen’s Church, Escanaba.

The Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester, rector of St. Paul’s, Marquette, and St. John’s, Negaunee, was put forward by the diocesan search team to stand for election as bishop/ministry developer under the “mutual ministry model” used by the small, rural diocese on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A priest of the diocese since 2001, Fr. Forrester also serves as ministry development coordinator and newspaper editor for Northern Michigan.

In recent years, he also was a practicing Buddhist, according to the former Bishop of Northern Michigan, the late Rt. Rev. James Kelsey.

In his Oct 15, 2004 address to the diocese’s annual convention, Bishop Kelsey took note of some of the milestones among the lives of members of the diocese. After recognizing recent university graduations, the bishop said Fr. Forrester “received Buddhist ‘lay ordination’,” and was “walking the path of Christianity and Zen Buddhism together.”

Fr. Forrester did not respond to requests for clarification or comments on how as presumptive bishop he would model the two faiths in his episcopacy.

The director of the Office of Pastoral Development, the Rt. Rev. F. Clayton Matthews told The Living Church that background checks for the nominee were “still in progress,” and “at this point” the question of Buddhist lay ordination had not been addressed. However, a “background check does not cover that sort of thing,” he observed.

The Diocese of Northern Michigan has a “particular theological process” that it has been using to call its bishop based upon the mutual ministry model, Bishop Matthews said. He had been “monitoring” the process, but said he had only “just heard” of the nomination. He added that he could not verify if what Bishop Kelsey said in 2004 was an accurate statement of the nominee’s current beliefs.

If Fr. Thew Forrester was an Episcopalian-Zen Buddhist, and if he was elected by the special convention as bishop, objections to his being seated in the House of Bishops would be raised, according to one senior diocesan bishop. That bishop said he hoped the House of Bishops was “still sufficiently faithful to recognize the total self-contradiction this would involve and deny consent.”

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>and was “walking the path of Christianity and Zen Buddhism together.”<<<

This is the kind of crap that happens when people are unaware of the authentic Christian mystical traditions, such as Hesychia. There is the gift, waiting for them to discover, but they have to reinvent the wheel--a very inferior defective wheel--with false syncretism like "Christian Zen" and "Centering Prayer".