Early Japanese Christian thought reexamined: Confucian ethics, catholic authority, and the issue of faith in the scholastic theories of Habian, Gomez, and Ricci

Many late sixteenth/early seventeenth century Japanese Christian texts worked directly within arguments that could be found concurrently in Confucian, syncretist, and other traditions in Japan at this time. Japanese Christian thought has often been characterized as an example of the "non-Japanese" other, or as playing a primary role of "importing Western thought" during this period. This article argues, on the contrary, that the importance of many of the major currents of Japanese Christian thought actually lies precisely in the way they interacted with and within arguments which were not particular to, the Christian tradition.