Research source

Neither Shang Ti nor T'ien mean the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of the…

Date of account: Traditional material presented in a work published 1922
Source: Myths and Legends of China
Reference: Myths and Legends of China · selected passage 28
Rights: public_domain
Language: English synthesis of Chinese traditions
Translation: E. T. C. Werner
Record updated: 2026-08-24

Record summary

Neither Shang Ti nor T'ien mean the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of the New Testament

Published source text

Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

Source text · mention only

Neither Shang Ti nor T'ien mean the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of the New Testament. Did they mean this, the efforts of the Christian missionaries to convert the Chinese would be largely superfluous. The Christian religion, even the Holy Trinity, is a monotheism. That the Chinese religion (even though a summary of extracts from the majority of foreign books on China might point to its being so) is not a monotheism, but a polytheism or even a pantheism (as long as that term is taken in the sense of universal deification and not in that of one spiritual being immanent in all things), the rest of this chapter will abundantly prove.

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This is a passage from a historical religious or interpretive text. Its genre, manuscript history, translation and place within its own tradition are part of the evidence and must remain visible.

Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

Lattice can compare the passage's descriptive features with later reports, but resemblance does not turn a vision, angel, mythic creature or sacred narrative into a modern incident report.

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