This review points to a book that looks very helpful in understanding Chinese religion.
For Christians, two aspects of particular importance:
One, we need to understand how other cultures perceive God and human relations with God. The Chinese understanding starts from a very different reference point from the Christian understanding.
It would be easy for a Chinese person to adopt the outward forms of Christianity because they see it working for other people, while at the same time their inner understanding of who God is and what he wants from them has not really been affected.
Understanding Chinese religion gets us to the inner motivation of how they perceive their relationship with God so that we can communicate the meaning of Jesus' life more effectively.
Two, learning about the history of religion and its practices in China will help us understand the Chinese government's attitude towards religion. My experience is that the government is not particularly anti-Christian, but is afraid of any kind of secret movement, and especially suspicious of religious ones.
"One stark continuity with modern China strikes those who have heard about the persecution of house church Christians: Government leaders have always feared popular religious movements. Not only because Buddhist- and Daoist-inspired uprisings have on several occasions nearly toppled the throne, but because local religion resists government control."
No comments:
Post a Comment