Andrew Hong summarizes some ancient Confucian rites and their meanings, and then writes:

We don’t have many rituals in our modern world – but if you take that one simple ritual, and multiply that into every sphere of life, and every relationship, then you are coming close to the kind of society that Confucius sought to create through the rites. The rites become the means for society to go from inhumane behaviour (in the form of warfare during the Warring States period) to humane and dignified behaviour.

The rites were also the way for society to go from disordered relationships (in the form of rebellion) to ordered and reverential relationships… You may recall that there were five key relationships in the Confucianism: ruler-subject, father-son, husband-wife, older-younger, and friend-friend. These relationships were largely hierarchical in nature, and the rites gave people a way to express and reinforce those relationships.

This is what missiologist Paul Hiebert has to say about the importance of rituals,

“Modern people commonly regard rituals as harmless interludes or discount them as meaningless performances. But rituals play a central role in most societies. They are multilayered transactions in which speech and behaviour are socially prescribed. [...] They give visible expression to the deep cultural norms that order the way people think, feel, and evaluate their worlds. [...] Because rituals dramatise in visual form the deep beliefs, feelings, and values of a society, they are of particular importance in studying worldviews.” Paul Hiebert, Transforming Worldviews, 82-83.

And so it should come as no surprise that Chinese Christianity will express itself in forms that contain rituals. And in particular rituals that express some kind of relationship. They may not be elaborate, but if you tinker with them you will discover that they are jealously guarded!

Consider the period of reverential silence before a service. Consider the call to worship, the rituals surrounding the offering, the threefold Amen. Consider the practice of holding the service on a Sunday morning. Consider also what is appropriate dress for a worship service.

All of these function to express and reinforce a humble and reverential relationship to God. But more than that, they are considered important: the feeling would be that something would be missing if the collection was done through electronic funds transfer, it would be wrong to wear untidy clothing to church – because of what that would mean for them about that relationship. Remember that the rituals give expression to the relationship!

Now in saying this it is quite legitimate for a particular culture to express it’s love for God in its own forms. And for a culture that prizes rituals, it is entirely appropriate for it to create Christian rituals to express Christian realities. As a result Christians from other cultures should be careful of demanding that they relinquish those rituals and becoming just like them.

However what is important to consider is the reality that is being expressed by those rituals. Is it expressing an awe-filled, grace-filled, gospel-shaped relationship with God? Or is it expressing a transactional Christianity and a distant God? Does it acknowledge God as glorious and sovereign? or as a deity easily fooled by our attendance at his shrine, whose favours are easily bought off with cheap offerings?

It would be terrible if our rituals more closely resembled and reinforced the Confucian reverence for the distant t’ien. Or if they promoted a transactional relationship that is at odds with the Bible. Our wordless rituals, just as much as our words in a sermon, must reinforce, and never undermine the gospel. They must uphold the truth of God, and not a lie. [1]

Even in our iconoclastic, secular culture, we teach reality with rites, don’t we? Rites that are the inventions of man are liable to misinterpret reality and miscommunicate it. The rites that God gives us are intended to be correctives to our collective insanity. They re-establish the Covenant relationships broken and defaced in Eden. The question is, have we twisted the inspired rites, as Israel did?

Baptism and Table are the beginning, middle and end of the story. They both re-enact and prefigure. Are we Christians, with legal access to the new Eden, using these holy rites to tell a different story about our relationship with God — a false reality that appeals to our carnal natures? If so, we are historical revisionists concerning the Fall, we are liars concerning the requirements for unity with Christ, and we are false prophets concerning the future judgment.

They offer superficial treatments for my people’s mortal wound.
They give assurances of peace when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14 NLT)

[1] HT: Albert Garlando

or Baptizing the World

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.

In some ways, things haven’t changed. In Britain, apostate cathedrals disallow growing evangelical congregations from using their almost empty buildings. But persecution simply brings matters to a head, and a very public one. It forces hidden issues into the light and shouts them from the rooftops.

From Voice of the Martyrs this week:

Police in China held “about two dozen” pastors and elders of Beijing’s Shouwang Church under house arrest or at police stations over the weekend to keep them from attending a Sunday worship service in a public location, according to Bob Fu of the China Aid Association. Three top leaders of the church remain in jail and several others are under strict surveillance after hundreds of Chinese police cordoned off the walkway to a third-floor outdoor meeting area adjacent to a property purchased by the church in Haidian district, Beijing, and arrested at least 160 members of the 1,000-strong church as they tried to assemble. Most have since been released.

Church leaders claimed officials had pressured their landlords, forcing them out of both rented and purchased locations and leaving them no choice but to worship in the open. ‘The government cornered them into making this decision,’ Fu said, adding that the church had initially tried to register with the government. ‘They waited for two years, and when the government still denied them registration, they tried to keep a low profile before finally deciding to buy the Daheng New Epoch Technology building.’ Shouwang is a very unique church, he said. ‘Most members are well-educated, and they include China’s top religious scholars and even former government officials, which may be a factor in the government’s response to them,’ he said.

Under the Old Covenant, Satan’s strategy was to kill the offspring of the Woman. With a single bloodline from Adam to Jesus, this was very possible. In fact, in one case (under the reign of Athaliah, the Covenant harlot of the day) the line was down to a thread, a single child, Joash.

The New Covenant is Satan’s worst nightmare. When he sends false doctrine, all it does is separate the elect from the damned. It purifies the church! And when he sends persecution, all it does it multiply the number of believers! Chopping God’s servants up with an ax–”sawing them asunder”–not only increases their number, but also their power. This is because the Messianic line is now Spirit, not blood. The children are not those of flesh born of the will (or the willy) of a man, but those born of God by the Spirit (John 1:13). Nothing he can do will stop the flow of living water.

Dispensationalists and paedobaptists both misunderstand this marked difference between the Covenants. We have moved from external laws to an Internal Law. Jews don’t qualify on the basis of their heritage. Christian infants don’t qualify on the basis of their heritage. They are children–children under the tutelage of the Law mediated by those filled with the Spirit. This is why the Law was mediated by angels, and why we don’t need them for this purpose any more. Until the Spirit of God cuts our hearts (circumcision) and moves in, all our heritages, whether circumcision of infant baptism are, well, just so much skubalon. [2] They are entirely powerless (Romans 8:3).

True children of the New Covenant are the miraculously multiplied water chariots of the New Temple. Not only do they have legs and stand and walk upright, the house is wherever they are. Covenant kids are not what they used to be, and this is good. The children of men are symbols of the children of God.

_________________________________
[1] See An Atheist ‘Gets’ Baptism and New Covenant Virility 1 and 2.
[2] The Greek word for shit. In Finland, 90% of people were baptized as infants, yet only 3% go to church. That’s a lot of apostates. Their baptism ain’t worth, well, you know, and this tragic failure has got absolutely nothing to do with a lack of church discipline when it comes to apostates. The incredible church growth in China isn’t a result of heritage, either bad or good. It is a result of the destruction of it. See Mao, Servant of God. As with Timothy, a godly heritage may be a foundation for conversion, but it is not conversion.

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.’

‘One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world,” he said. “We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.’”

“Mao swept China clean of its old ways, gods and traditions as [the Caesars] did the Persian and Grecian Empires centuries before. They left enormous vacuums that were then filled by Christianity, and so did he. He ironically undid the possibility of his own Communist authority in his quest for modernity by sweeping everything ‘old’ away… he was, unbeknownst to himself, merely the servant of the God of the Bible.”

.

or The Root of Democracy is the Spirit of Christ

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.

The late 1980s in China was a heady period of pushing the limits on many fronts, especially in culture and law, and in this environment of creativity and new ideas, a daring, six-part documentary was aired on national television in the spring of 1988. River Elegy was co-produced by Yan Zhiming, a prominent documentary producer,and its theme was that popylar symbols of China’s historic greatness, such as the Great Wall and the Yangzee River, should be regarded as emblems of captivity and restriction. River Elegy argued that they had hindered China from access to the great progress and discoveries taking place in other parts of the world, expecially in the West. The final episode of the series, “Ocean Blue,” shows the Yellow River emptying itelf into the Pacific as an emblem of China engaging with the outside world openly and confidently. “The dream of River Elegy,” Yuan wrote later, “was born out of concern and hope for China.”

That sentiment wasn’t shared by many of the old reactionaries still powerful in the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army. While students, intellectuals, and many others hailed River Elegy for pointing to the new, more open, pro-Western direction China should be taking, old-guard revolutionaries were outraged, accusing Yuan of “vilifying the Chinese people and the symbols of the Yellow River and the Great Wall.” When the authorities after the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen massacre began looking around for people to blame for the weeks of student-led pro-democracy protects, Yuan Zhiming was one obvious target. But he succeeded in eluding a national search, escaping finally to the United States. At Princeton University, to which many reform-minded Chinese intellectuals flocked, he encountered a group of committed Chinese Christians who were pro-democratic but who did not believe that democracy, in and of itself, would solve all of China’s problems.

Neither Yuan nor his collaborators on River Elegy had ever been to the West before fleeing China. On his arrival in 1989, Yuan was shocked and disillusioned; he heard about crime, suicide, homelessness, declining moral standards, and family breakdown. Yuan began to read the Bible, became friends with many Chinese Christians, and was baptized in April 1992. He then decided to deepen his knowledge of his new faith by attending the Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, where he studied Christianity in greater detail during the 1990s.

Yuan never doubted that China, for its own basic health, must sooner or later become democratic. But based partly on what he saw in the United States, Yuan also came to believe that a successful democracy in any country had to be constructed on more than tried and true institutions. “If a person lacks a firm and overcoming faith,” he wrote later, “he or she is easily tossed around on the sea of life. No democracy can be built on this.” He admitted, however, that many of his fellow dissidents, including those who had worked with him on River Elegy, didn’t share this perspective.

Democracy is not merely an institution nor simply a concept, but a profound structure of faith. At times I have called this to the attention of my friends in the democracy movement who have been in America for quite some time, but continue to lack a deep understanding of democracy. I told them that just because they have read Montesquieu and Locke and have seen an American presidential election, it does not mean that they have found the fountain of democracy. The root of democracy is the spirit of Christ.

In retrospect, as Yuan told British journalist Ian Buruma, he thought that River Elegy was superficial because it left out “the most important thing, the core of Western civilisation, which is Christianity. Without that, you cannot have democracy or human rights.”

While many Chinese dissidents would disagree, the idea became more and more powerful in Yuan Zhiming’s mind. He set out to produce a new TV documentary, in many ways even more ambitious than River Elegy. This was a multi-part series that aired for the first time in Taiwan in 2000 and was spread throughout China and Southeast Asia in VCD format. The English title, China’s Confession, doesn’t do justice to the Chinese name Shen Zhou, which is an ancient name for China, approximately “Land of God” or “God’s country.” Yuan — whose seminary research focussed on connections between the dao of Chinese philosopher Lao Zi’s boo, the Dao De Jing, and the Biblical sense of God, the Holy Spirit, or Christ — interprets the whole of Chinese history as a tragic letdown from a previous era when, he says, the Chinese worshipped God (shangdi in Chinese) and sought to live moral lives. The narrative of China’s Confession tells us:

This was the ancient land of God where people believed in God, feared heaven, obeyed the Tao (i.e., the dao of Daoism), and worshipped God… Our ancestors held firm their belief, which is: the justice of God will prevail, nothing could escape the sight of God, and sinners will receive their punishment. This belief is the moral power o promoting the good and discarding the wrong. it is the moral cornerstone of an ideal universal society. It is the dream of Confucius.

According to Yuan’s view of Chinese history, the real downturn in the behaviour of Chinese toward one another occurred about 2,500 years ago, when China was plunged into a turbulent era of internal regional warfare called the “Spring and Autumn” period (770-476 BC).

Leaving aside the historical validity of Yuan’s argument that the Chinese worshipped God at the origins of their civilisation and lived in an upright moral universe, China’s Confession attempts to account for the fact that despite China’s cultural early greatness, God’s revelation of Himself as recorded in the Bible took place in the Middle East, not in China. Like many Chinese intellectuals, Yuan sought a moral historiography of China that suggested God hadn’t simply bypassed Chinese civilisation. According to Yuan, God did actually set the moral foundation in China for what could have been a righteous and benevolent civilisation.

Well financed by overseas Chinese Christian backers, Yuan used dramatic excerpts from several historical dramas about ancient China to illustrate his point. He flew in one of Beijing’s top TV documentary narrators for several days to help out. Toward the end of the documentary, there is news footage of Chairman Mao at different stages of the revolution, including the fanatical Red Guard idolatry of him in 1966. Aired on TV across Southeast Asia as well as Taiwan, China’s Confession is unlikely to be released legally in China in the near future. But China’s Confession has been shown secretly to Christian groups all over China. Those Chinese Christians I spoke to were full of praise for what Yuan was trying to do. They said they knew a number of peole who had become Christian after watching the documentary. Yuan is also an accomplished preacher; tapes and videos of his sermons are in wide circulation across China and are enthusiastically received.

Yuan’s objective is very ambitious. “Our goal,” he explained in his modest home in Petaluma, California, “is to change the perception of China by the Chinese. If you go to any city and ask the average person, 99 percent of the people don’t understand Christianity. They don’t even know what the question is. Some people in China don’t even know that there are Christians in China.”

To counter this lacuna in basic knowledge, Yuan in 2001 embarked on an even more ambitious documentary a multi-part series on Christianity in China. Making many secret trips in and out of China that year, Yuan took his film crew to Christian communities the length and breadth of China. At one point, early in 2002, they filmed a Christian rock concert in the city of Daqing, close to the Russian border. Having a total of some four hundred hours of interview and narrative film, Yuan’s latest project is called The Cross. It seeks to explain to ordinary Chinese what major contributions Christians have made to Chinese life in the past century or more. He said in 2002, “We want to let government leaders see the movie. The most important thing is to make people realise that Christianity is related to Chinese culture. It is not a Western religion. The main purpose is to tell the Chinese people that the God of the Bible is the God of the Chinese people.” Yuan would like to have the English-language version of The Cross shown on American TV.

The Cross was released in both the United States and China in October 2003 and immediately achieved what Yuan had hoped: it attracted the attention of the Chinese authorities. The State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) showed the documentary to several of it high-ranking officials, and also distributed it throughout the country to lower-ranking officials in charge of religious work with orders that everyone watch it. The intent was to put them on alert to the alarming trend of the spread of Christianity throughout the country and society. According to one Three-Self [government approved] pastor, however, some low-level Communist Party cadres who watched The Cross were perplexed. “This is a bad thing?” he quoted some as asking in response to the stories of repentant criminals, healed marriages, honest businessmen and well-behaved teenagers as a result of conversion to Christian faith.

David Aikman is a former Beijing Bureau Chief for Time Magazine.

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.

To understand the Middle East, Africa and Asia as the centre of Christian gravity at any time might now seem as natural today as arguing that the Buddhist homeland was once Buddhist. But Jenkins argues that even in 1200 AD there were 21 million Christians in Asia and the proportion of the world’s Christians living in Asia and Africa was 34 per cent. These Christians are different from us, but they had a rich and vibrant church life of academia (far above anything the Western Church approached until at least the 14th century), liturgy (which may be the source of Gregorian Chants) and mission (particularly the Syrians, who quite successfully reached into India, central Asia and China).

Before England had an archbishop of Canterbury – possibly even before Canterbury had a church – the Syrian church had established metropolitan sees in Merv and Herat, modern Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. Before Poland was Catholic, before Good King Wenceslas ruled a Christian Bohemia, the church in Bukhara, Samarkand and Patna had all reached metropolitan status. Our mental maps of Christianity are too small, and we can’t understand Christian history without Asia – or Asian history without Christianity.

Which makes the decline of these churches all the more tragic. The number of Christians in Asia in 1500 had fallen from 21 million to just 3.4 million. Most of these great churches ceased to exist, whilst the ones that did were small, marginalised and associated ethnic minorities. Churches who’s leaders had once commanded the respect and obedience of at least a quarter of the world’s Christians (and had prayed for the gospel of Yeshua to transform lives in Tibet and Java) was reduced to scratching out an existence in the hills.

Jenkins tells the stories of the churches and what happened to their survivors in the 20th Century. He also offers advice on what to do when churches die, particularly such large slabs of area where almost all Christian history has been totally eradicated. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Church history, particularly for those interested in the meaning of that history for today.

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