EMQ » January–March 2022 » Volume 58 Issue 1
[memberonly folder=”Members, EMQ2YearFolder, EMQ1YearFolder, EMQLibraryInstitution”]By Jordan K. Monson
Few works rise to literary brilliance. Very few rise to missiological brilliance. Somehow, Shūsako Endō has done both in one volume. Though more than fifty years old, Silence remains the high-water mark in fiction surrounding issues of missiology. It is a haunting and brilliant work. Every practitioner of mission, every student of God’s mission, and every lover of beautiful literature ought to consider it with care.
Endō surfaces issues the missiological academy had not yet even dealt with in a formal way. His grasp of cross-cultural communication, conflict, break down, and pluralism are astonishing. In this essay, we’ll look at some of the evergreen concepts in Endō’s work and how after fifty years, it’s just as relevant—or dare we say, even more.
“Father, you were not defeated by me.” The Lord of Chikugo looked straight into the ashes of the brazier as he spoke. “You were defeated by this swamp of Japan.”[1]
Endō more faithfully paints the doubt, loneliness, turmoil, and silence of suffering as a Christian than we encounter anywhere in fiction. The reader senses that Endō is on to something long before grasping its essence.
We find ourselves pulled into this world. Endō’s Japan has a different chronology than the modern world, and somehow the motifs pull us in, slowing our own sense of time. Japan is a swamp. It is a land of stillness and water that has existed since the beginning of time, swallowing and stifling whatever does not natively grow there – just like its religious beliefs, extant forever and natively growing.
There is a certain dullness of life. Of death. There is a cyclical routine of the forever of creation and the meaninglessness of life. Where is the climax? The drama? Where is the praise and palm branches or the crowds screaming for Barabbas? Instead, there is a deafening silence. Dull, boring, meaningless. And a streak of meaningless peasant blood dragged across the sand. The cicadas drone on as if nothing’s changed. Has anything changed? Has the world noticed? Has the dull sea noticed, in its never-ending lapping?
Suppose there were no God? We try to silence the notion. But in God’s apparent silence, this notion won’t remain silent.
Theological Issues
“Lord, I resented your silence.”
“I was not silent. I suffered beside you.”[2]
Silence speaks to the human condition with masterful depth. Few books are written both with the depth of beauty and artistic prose as this, let alone one which includes the theological riches of human suffering.
Endō brilliantly takes us along on the ride of our own faith. Our own discipleship. At the outset of the novel, the protagonist Rodrigues regularly compares himself to Christ. He dreams of suffering like Christ. He daydreams about undergoing the same martyrdom and exaltation. As the book progresses, he sees himself in Christ’s agony, and the adolescent hunger for a hero’s shared glory fades.
This is the story of faith. Immature Christians compare themselves with Christ. As they mature, they compare themselves less with Christ and more with his all-too-human apostles. If they continue to mature, the mature Christian might see a kindred heart in the judgmental Pharisees. But at last, the true saint finds a kinship even with Judas. Or with Peter on that fateful night the rooster crowed.
We judge Judas. We paint him a wretch. But when we’re truly tested, none of us can stand. Endō makes us hate the traitor Kichijirō, and then hate the apostate Ferreira, only to show us that we are all the fallen Kichijirō, the doubting Rodrigues, the coward Ferreira.
Yet as we fail, Christ is with us. As we trample on him, so he came to be trampled. “Trample! Trample!” Jesus says in the novel “… It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”[3]
He is not just the conquering Christ. Not just the Alpha. He is also the Omega. He is the God who knows our suffering because he suffered with us. The final fifty pages of Silence are a magnum opus of theologically rich fiction. What does it mean to truly love? Is it to be the bold warrior of a martyr, refusing to recant? Jesus tells us, “So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:32, ESV).
If our necks are the only ones on the line, then this dilemma is clear. But what is love when the priest must recant in order to save the lives of the peasants? Ferreira tells Rodrigues, “Now you are going to perform the most painful act of love that has ever been performed.”[4]
He continues, “Your brethren in the Church will judge you as they have judged me. But there is something more important than the Church, more important than missionary work – what you are now about to do.”[5] And we see in this a dilemma reminiscent in some ways to that of Christ. Jesus took on others’ sin in order to save them. Rodrigues must commit what he believes to be a heinous sin in order to save others.
Could apostacy be the greatest act of love in this story? In the darkness of that dilemma, Ferreira speaks to Rodrigues in the pitch black. “Certainly, Christ would have apostatized for them.”[6]
Missiological and Ethical Issues
Geopolitical
Modern readers look back with sadness on the geopolitical fallout of what Inoue refers to as Japan’s four wives – Spain, Portugal, Holland, and England – each whispering evil about the other to their husband Japan. Their infighting was largely the reason for Japan’s closure to the world. As the book draws to a close, it seems Holland is the economic winner – rather, the only non-loser. But, in time, they too would be kicked out.
With a church and state union, the church often takes a back seat to power and politics and market forces. With a united ecumenical spirit, these countries might have kept their presence and doubled down on their missionary effort in the country. Like so many mission failures, this centered around power politics. As is often said, “when you mix politics and religion, you get politics.”
Sociological
Endō cuts deeply to the issue of the base nature of humankind and the nature of our belief. What is our faith when we’re no longer reinforced by our sociologically shared community? When our Christian community is gone, it is easy to apostatize and to write treatises against our own faith. Ferreira does this in Japan. His body language, however, registers shame upon seeing Rodrigues again in Japan. Incredibly ahead of his time regarding sociology, Endō spurs the reader to consider: How much of your faith is a public performance, a reinforcing of social norms and expectations?
Rodrigues, speaking to himself, says, “were it not for the consciousness of your priesthood and your pride, perhaps you, like Kichijirō, would trample on the fumie.”[7] Endō is well ahead of his time on the performative aspects of religion and culture.
Socioeconomic and Class-related
Through his character Rodrigues, Endō argues that Christianity took root in Japan – especially among the most oppressed and downtrodden – precisely because of its stress on the Imago Dei of all people, whether Samurai or landowner or peasant. “These people who work and live and die like beasts find for the first time in our teaching a path in which they can cast away the fetters that bind them. The Buddhist bonzes simply treat them like cattle. For a long time they have just lived in resignation to such a fate.”[8]
When the landowners and rulers squeezed the lifeblood from the peasants, Christianity instead offered rest and meaning. This is not unlike some of the sociological reasons for Christianity’s explosive growth in the early church.
Religious Conversion
A central question the reader confronts is, did the Japanese ever believe in the Christian God? Or were they simply practicing external forms? Ferreira argues that the Japanese never really believed in the Christian God. What they had was syncretism and Buddhism in a Christian shell.[9] Rodrigues reasons that Ferreira is simply trying to make himself feel better. He needs an excuse for apostatizing. People don’t go to their deaths for syncretism. Not in those numbers, he says.
I worry that Ferriera’s first linguistic argument would seem damning to many readers, but really it is quite weak. It may be the only thing Endō gets markedly wrong. He argues that the conflation of “Deus” and “Dainichi” sowed the seeds for an irreparable syncretism.[10] To the average reader, this appears devastating, much like the use of Allah for the God of the Bible causes a fiasco in Bible translation outside the guild of translators. Never mind the fact that Allah is worlds closer to the Hebrew Elohim and shares the same root.
Ferreira’s argument is a flat error in linguistics. A good example of this is the very word Deus itself in Portuguese, which comes phoneme by phoneme from the Indo-European word from which we get the Greek Θεός and the Latin Zeus.[11] The German “Got” to God shares the same kind of trajectory. Did this cause some syncretism and difficulty in Latin, Greek, Portuguese, French, and Spanish? Possibly in the first generation, but not long after. Just like no grocery store shopper was ever theologically confused by the use of “redeem” in redeeming a coupon, so the use of a deity’s name in a new theological construct causes no long-term difficulty in separating the identities. It’s not only extremely common – it’s the standard use case for translating the names of novel deities. Ferreira’s second argument is Endō’s strongest criticism and statement about Japanese belief. We will discuss this further in the section on Endō’s thesis.
Honor Shame
One issue both theological and ethical which arose in the story is the issue of honor and shame in stepping on the fumie. Rodrigues, through an unfiltered exclamation, urges Mokichi and Ichizo to “Trample! Trample!” (meaning to step on the image of Christ, the ultimate act of apostasy for them).[12] The modern reader is tempted to agree. Step on it and keep evangelizing and growing underground until you reach the breaking point of societal acceptance. The Western reader is concerned with bringing the good news of Jesus to more people. Do what needs to be done to proclaim the message. Don’t get killed! But to step on the fumie was the worst thing the Japanese peasants had ever had to do. This is true even after a life of daily extortion at the hands of their masters.
All that said, this is Japan in the seventeenth century. Japan in that era was deeply settled within the honor-shame spectrum of human culture rather than a more individualized guilt-based culture. Civil disobedience simply wasn’t realistic. Or was it? Christianity did carry on in Japan – exclusively through civil disobedience. When Japan opened its borders again to outside influence in the mid nineteenth century, the first Catholic mass attracted multitudes of secret Christians.[13] One wonders if large scale apostacy with an underground growth and revolution would have been possible if a comprehensive practice of public denial and private faith were undertaken.
What is Truth?
At the root of the theological and philosophical disagreement between the Japanese leaders and Catholic priests is the nature of truth. Is truth a universal, to be shared by all countries, at all times and places? Or is truth a social construct, meant to be as useful as possible in whatever soil it happens to be planted?
The Japanese leaders don’t reject Christianity entirely, and it seems from earlier in Japan’s history that many leaders became Christians and received baptism as did Inoue. That said, they reject it for Japan. This searing paragraph below could be taken straight out of a secular university debate on religion:
“Father, we are not disputing about the right and wrong of your doctrine. In Spain and Portugal and such countries it may be true. The reason we have outlawed Christianity in Japan is that, after deep and earnest consideration, we find its teaching of no value for the Japan of today.”[14]
Rodrigues argues for truth’s universality and the inquisitors, exasperated, say “All the fathers keep saying the same thing …”[15] In Silence, this is the most blatantly stated disconnect in worldview between the Portuguese priests and the Japanese leaders.
Thesis
As a creative writer myself, and an avid reader of other writers’ processes, I think few novelists set out with a central thesis in terms of a sociological, political, or a missiological argument. A writer’s worldview – somewhat intentionally formed though mostly accidental and organic – surely comes through, and literary critics mine this layer for talk of theses, but most writers write from a plot or character inspiration. They speak of the story almost coming of its own accord. Because of this, I’m nervous to state that he had a specific thesis.
That said, he certainly has ideas, or even proto-theses concerning Christianity in Japan. He has an emotion, or a sense. And it comes through. The first thesis falls from the lips of Ferreira, and it’s the most direct statement about Japanese belief in Silence:
“The Japanese till this day have never had the concept of God; and they never will.”
“Till this day” and especially “and they never will” are literary devices that for the first time in this novel, eject the reader from the chronology of the novel straight into their own time and place. These statements, if true, are about as serious a critique of a culture that one can give, and they’re aimed at Endō’s home culture.
This wrecking ball of a critique against Japan combines with the water symbolism. Water rots things, dissolves things, silences things, and buries things. Water serves as a motif of the forever-ness and monotony of Japan. Japan’s nature as a swamp slowly kills foreign plants. Japan is a spider that gobbles up the inner juices – the heart of the butterfly – leaving only its skeleton and external form.[16]
These are fighting words, and they serve as a major critique against Endō’s home country which never truly served as a religious home for him. In these words, the reader senses the pain he felt. You cannot be Japanese and a Christian. If you try, you will always be pressured to trample the image. Slow monotony will rot you from the roots.
Missions Considerations
Missiologically, Silence is a gold mine of consideration for today’s cross-cultural missionary, local Japanese ministry workers, and church planters. Entire dissertations could be written on the subject, but here we’ll cover just three. The Japanese view of time, of its own history and ancestors, and of how the common person fits into that narrative, will deeply affect the success that any missionary endeavor has on a societal scale.
Another very important consideration is that if the root is cut, the plant will wither. This was an argument from the Lord of Chikugo in discussing why the priests had to apostatize in order to save the peasants. He understood that the root was Rome. The supply lines extended from Rome. If he cut them, Christianity as a foreign plant would wither.
All throughout Silence, the Protestant reader sighs at the Roman and Luso-centricity of the activity of the church. Rodrigues says to himself “You and Garrpe are probably the only priests in this whole country. If you die, the Japanese church dies with you.”[17]
This is not true, and he knew it. Already the Japanese Christians showed ecclesiastical innovation in their three-tiered system of leadership, corresponding roughly to the office of bishop, priest, and brother. In fact, this indigenous system worked so well that Rodrigues begins to institute the system elsewhere in the beginning of his missionary journey in Japan. Why wasn’t this developed further? If they were equipped with their own leaders, and encouraged to speak Scripture and read it in their own language instead of Latin, might they have thrived? The phrase priesthood of all believers comes to mind. But this is my Protestant bias. It’s likely that the symbolism and liturgy and tokens of Roman Catholicism were received better among Japan’s peasants than would Protestantism’s idea and word-focused center.
A healthy church anywhere – let alone in Japan, with one of the most homogenous populations in the world for a large country, needs local leadership. Any supply line to Rome was destined to suffer, especially given the geopolitical variables of the era. One can’t help but wonder: what if a Protestant movement took root first? What if Dutch missionaries made the first contact? What if the feudal lords and Samurai became pastors rather than keeping leadership in the hands of outsiders?
Lastly, if Endō was correct, Christianity was so well received because it met a real and felt need. Christian missions today, whether carried out locally or by cross-cultural missionaries, need to exegete the culture to discern the real and felt needs. If Christianity answers their deepest needs as it once did, perhaps we will see Christian growth in Japan in the same kinds of percentages as we now see in China, or as we once saw before the pages of Silence take place.
Jordan K. Monson is a PhD Student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, an investigative journalist, and a pastor. He wrote the 2021 January/February cover article of Christianity Today.
EMQ, Volume 58, Issue 1. Copyright © 2022 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
[1] Shūsako Endō, Silence (Taplinger Publishing, 1969. Picador, reprint 2016), 199.
[2] Endō, Silence, 203.
[3] Endō, Silence, 183.
[4] Endō, Silence, 182.
[5] Endō, Silence, 182.
[6] Endō, Silence, 181.
[7] Endō, Silence, 82.
[8] Endō, Silence, 44.
[9] Endō, Silence, 157–161.
[10] Endō, Silence, 159.
[11] R. S. P. Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Brill, 2009): 499.
[12] Endō, Silence, 59.
[13] John Updike, “From Fumie to Sony,” The New Yorker 55, no. 48 (January 1980): 98.
[14] Endō, Silence, 116.
[15] Endō, Silence, 117.
[16] Endō, Silence, 160.
[17] Endō, Silence, 76–77.
