The theological terminology used by Chinese Christianity has been a significant issue for all missionaries preaching the Gospel in East Asia. For the first time since the Christianization of Hellenism, Christianity in China was confronted by a highly developed civilization, with its own philosophical tradition, which could not be ignored in the process of constructing an authentic Chinese theological vocabulary. The author examines how the approach of Western missionaries to the Chinese cultural heritage from the 17th century influenced the Orthodox missionaries who translated the New Testament into the Chinese language and thus embraced the task of developing a Chinese theological terminology. Gury Karpov (1814–1882) and Innocent Figurovsky (1863–1931), who respectively led the fourteenth and eighteenth missions in China, relied mainly on Catholic and occasionally Protestant terminological solutions, especially regarding the translation of crucial terms such as God and Logos, but also showed originality in adopting philosophical terms from Neo-Confucianism. Nevertheless, both Karpov and Figurovsky rejected the word dao (道; pinyin: dào), one of the most significant terms in Chinese philosophy and culture, and thus created a substantial obstacle to the genuine indigenization of Orthodox Christianity in China. The author dedicates the major part of the paper to explaining why dao is preferable to the terms utilized by Karpov and Figurovsky in their New Testament translations.

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