Abstract

At home and abroad, Kagawa Toyohiko was probably the best-known Japanese Christian evangelist, social reformer, writer, and public intellectual of the twentieth century, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twice and the Nobel Peace Prize three times. Appealing to the masses with little knowledge of Christian faith, Kagawa believed that a positive, religio-aesthetic interpretation of nature and science was a key missiological concern in Japan. He reasoned that a faith rooted in the kenotic movement of incarnation and self-giving must strongly support the scientific quest. A voracious reader of science and especially biology, he argues for “directionality,” or what he calls “initial purpose” in the long, painful, cosmic journey from matter to life to mind. Through an antireductionistic, a posteriori methodological pluralism that sought to “see all things whole,” this “scientific mystic” employed Christian, Buddhist, Neo-Confucian, personalist, and vitalist ideas to envision complementary roles for science and religion in modern society