After Pentecost, the firstfruits church met in the Temple. Over the next few decades, the Jewish leaders barred these worshippers from their premises. What they didn’t realise was that the glory was departing as it did in the time of Ezekiel, only this time it was inside people who were living Temples as Jesus was.
Richard Bledsoe has posted an interesting article in two parts on the Biblical Horizons blog.
“The great question for the emerging East, for Asia and other awakening third world areas, for an emerging nation like China is, ‘what fate awaits them?’ They are now emerging from an analogous paganism that the West emerged from centuries ago. Here an amazing quotation from David Aikman, the Time Magazine religious editor. He is a quoting from ‘a scholar from one of China’s premier academic institutions, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, in 2002.’
An excerpt from Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power by David Aikman, Chapter 13: “Artists, Writers and Academics.”
This post is dedicated to the memory of the false premise of Christopher Hitchens.
(A post from my friend Matthew’s blog. I haven’t read this book.)
I recently read The Lost History of Christianity - The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia- and How It Died by Philip Jenkins (2008). It is a magisterial introduction to a rich but largely forgotten history. The lands Jenkins has in mind were well and truly the centre of the Christian world for well over a thousand years, even after the Muslim invasion of these lands from the seventh century.
The heir to a hero of Chinese mission says the Christian press’ obsession with persecution in China is “misdirecting the mission world” away from effective gospel ministry in that nation.
China bashing distorts mission by Jeremy Halcrow
Just watched The Painted Veil. Must be Edward Norton week. A movie based on a 1925 novel by Somerset Maugham, with strong messages of the benefit of forgiveness after betrayal, and of how suffering strips away our delusions and brings maturity and freedom to love.
The main thing that struck me was how the superstitions of the locals obstructed those who risked their lives to help them. We lose sight of just how much the gospel has changed the world, and take the foundation of our culture, the Bible, for granted.
“A delicious irony Woodward points out is that though the Darwinists have always said that the fossil record problems would decrease as more fossils are uncovered, the situation on the Cambrian is worse now that it was just a few years ago for the evolutionists. Jun-Yuan Chen of the Nanking Institute of Geology began an excavation of Cambrian deposits in southern China, which as they have progressed over twenty years now, produced the ‘the greatest Cambrian fossil bonanza of all time’ (p. 107). The paucity of evolutionary ancestors for these new creatures is more glaring than ever.”
Intelligent debate
A review of Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design by Thomas Woodward. Reviewed by Lael Weinberger
