Speculation and Discussion on the Encounter with God and Experiences in Nature : An Analysis of Tsunashima Ryosen and Uchimura Kanzo

Abstract

This essay analyzes two kinds of religious discourses from the point of view of the role and place of nature in the encounter with God. Amidst the popular rise of kenshin, or "seeing God," which had originated in a series of mystical experiments proposed by Tsunashima Ryosen (1905), Uchimura Kanzo raised a question about what kind of kenshin constituted an authentic encounter with God (1906). Drawing on his life experience as a Christian and his Bible studies, he derived two requirements for the authentic kenshin, which had not been at the core of Ryosen's descriptions of kenshin: encountering God first "via Jesus Christ," and second, "through nature." After Ryosen's death, Kanzo speculated on the standard or ultimate pattern of kenshin through his biblical studies, as the occasion arose. His search for what is at the heart of real kenshin progressed to find the cosmological significance of nature in the history of the salvation of man from the Bible. In the process of his study, Kanzo grew convinced that nature was a basically sound medium for humans to approach God. But in a separate context, he also observed that an authentic God comes into existence for the human senses in a space from which nature, an ugly face of God, is absolutely excluded.