Dreaming of the World to Come: Yonaoshi Millenarianism and Monotheism in Tenrikyō and Christianity

2024. Journal of Religion in Japan 13 (2-3): 1-38.
(Brill)

In comparative studies, Tenrikyō’s this-worldly, millenarian vision has found little resonance with Christian expectations of going to heaven after death. However, an “earthly turn” in Christian eschatology is redirecting Christian expectations away from heaven and toward bodily resurrection into an earthly Kingdom of God, providing new opportunity to revisit the potential historical and conceptual overlap between Tenrikyō’s view of earthly renewal and that of Christianity—in both its first-century and contemporary “restorationist” forms. This article considers the historical origin of Tenrikyō’s millenarianism against a backdrop of late-Tokugawa yonaoshi (world renewal) and Miroku based movements. Here, the timeline for the appearance of millenarian views of yonaoshi proposed by Miura (2019) is revised to give Tenrikyō’s foundress primacy as a millenarian innovator. I furthermore suggest that monotheism may have been a catalyst for millenarian yonaoshi development. Finally, I propose “yonaoshi millenarianism” as a cross-cultural, comparative category applicable to both Tenrikyō and early/restorationist Christianity.

Read at Brill.com (here)

Orientalism and Monotheism in Studies of Early Japanese Christianity

2024. Journal for the Study of Religion 37 (1): 1-30. (Association for the Study of Religion in Southern Africa / University of Johannesburg)

In the wake of Said’s landmark work, Orientalism (Said 1979), scholars have been widely concerned with countering the value-laden interpretations which have historically traveled with ‘colonialist’ or ‘Orientalist’ analyses of religions in Japan. However, modern studies of early Japanese Christianity, i.e., Japan’s Kakure Kirishitan (hidden Christians), despite their emergence in the ‘post-colonialist world’, have often maintained a subterranean, Orientalizing tendency to generalize and abstract an inauthentic or compromised Christianity of early modern Japan against that of a more genuinely Christian West. Kakure interpretations of monotheism, the doctrine of the Trinity, and certain worship practices are portrayed as ‘polytheistic’, ‘syncretistic’, and as uniquely serious misunderstandings or abrogations of both ‘Christian theology’ and the very concept of monotheism. Meanwhile, Western Christianities, despite their own analogous and statistically-demonstrable penchant for misconception and theological imagination, are subsequently implied to be more authentically or quintessentially monotheistic or Christian. This essentializing configuration betrays an a priori separation of ‘Japanese’ and ‘Western’ religions and raises the question as to whether analysts operating in the ‘postcolonial era’ have yet to become fully aware of the basic warning of Said’s Orientalism–a still-timely message which is not, as some seem to believe, centered on the errors of a specifically Western hegemony, but on the dangers of otherizing in general as a form of devaluation.

Read at the JSR website (here)

 

Unitarian Monotheism in Meiji Japan: Confucian Ethics, Syncretism, and the New Testament

2021. The Japan Mission Journal 75 (2): 103-118. (Oriens Institute for Religious Research)

During the period of Japan’s modernization (1868-1945), many Japanese Christians rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and embraced unitarian theology. Explanations of this phenomenon have appealed to a Japanese misunderstanding of the Trinity, an ignorance of church tradition, a preference for personal experience over the Bible, and a desire to syncretize Confucian ideology with Christianity. This article explores the historical interaction between Japan’s cultural bedrock of Confucian ethics, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and the unitarian interpretation of church history and the New Testament, in order to clarify the theological concerns of the period. As will be demonstrated, the reasons why many Meiji-era intellectuals rejected the Trinity were far more historically and biblically-motivated than previous studies have allowed

Read at Academica.edu (here)

 

Gods, Kami, and Apotheosis: Akira Toriyama’s Concepts of Deity and Divinization

2025. In Anime, Religion, and Theology, edited by Roberto J. De La Noval and David Armstrong, 71–107 (Minneapolis: Fortress Academic / Bloomsbury)

Order here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/anime-religion-and-theology-9798216276081/

Other Articles & Chapters:

• “Christological Laxity, Nicodemism, and Baptist Identity: A Reply to Stephen R. Holmes.” Journal of European Baptist Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4, December 2024 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: IBTS Centre), pp. 163–188. https://doi.org/10.25782/jebs.v24i2.1327.

• “Monotheism and Syncretism in Late Antiquity: The ‘Hellenistic’ Religion of Julian the Apostate.” The Japan Mission Journal Vol. 75, No. 3 (Tokyo: Oriens Institute for Religious Research, 2021), pp. 196–213.

• “Emlyn’s Humble Inquiry: English Unitarianism and the Rise of Tolerance in the West.” Introduction to An Humble Inquiry into the Scripture-Account of Jesus Christ by Thomas Emlyn (Nashville: Theophilus Press, 2021), pp. 1–32.

• “Deuteros Theos: Constantine’s Christology at Nicaea.” Journal of Early Christian History, Vol. 10, No. X (London: Routledge, UNISA, 2021), pp. 1–17. DOI: 10.1080/2222582X.2020.1845571.

• “Unorthodox Christology in General Baptist Tradition: The Legacy of Matthew Caffyn.” Journal of European Baptist Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn 2019 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: IBTS Centre, 2019), pp. 140–151.  DOI: 10.25782/jebs.v19i2.223.

Articles Under Review

“Cult-Rhetoric and Unitarian Christology: The Evangelical Creation of a Christological Other.”

“Article on Multiple Religious Belonging (anonymized for review).”