The current issue of the Economist has an informative article about Christianity in China. Here are a few significant paragraphs.

On the number of Christians in China:

ZHAO XIAO, a former Communist Party official and convert to Christianity, smiles over a cup of tea and says he thinks there are up to 130m Christians in China. This is far larger than previous estimates. . . . If so, it would mean China contains more Christians than Communists (party membership is 74m) and there may be more active Christians in China than in any other country. In 1949, when the Communists took power, less than 1% of the population had been baptised, most of them Catholics. Now the largest, fastest-growing number of Christians belong to Protestant “house churches”.

On the growth of the house churches:

House churches have an unclear status, neither banned nor fully approved of. As long as they avoid neighbourly confrontation and keep their congregations below a certain size (usually about 25), the Protestant ones are mostly tolerated, grudgingly. Catholic ones are kept under closer scrutiny, reflecting China’s tense relationship with the Vatican. Private meetings in the houses of the faithful were features of the early Christian church, then seeking to escape Roman imperial persecution. Paradoxically, the need to keep congregations small helped spread the faith. That happens in China now. The party, worried about the spread of a rival ideology, faces a difficult choice: by keeping house churches small, it ensures that no one church is large enough to threaten the local party chief. But the price is that the number of churches is increasing.

On the need for educated pastors:

Abundant church-creation is a blessing and a curse for the house-church movement, too. The smiling Mr Zhao says finance is no problem. “We don’t have salaries to pay or churches to build.” But “management quality” is hard to maintain. Churches can get hold of Bibles or download hymn books from the internet. They cannot so easily find experienced pastors. “In China”, says one, “the two-year-old Christian teaches the one-year-old.” Because most Protestant house churches are non-denominational (that is, not affiliated with Lutherans, Methodists and so on), they have no fixed liturgy or tradition. Their services are like Bible-study classes. This puts a heavy burden on the pastor.

On Christianity as a private or public matter in China:

So far, Christianity’s spread has been largely a private matter for individual believers. The big question is whether it can remain private. The extent of its growth and the number of its adherents would suggest not. But at the moment, both Christians and Communists seem willing to let a certain ambiguity linger a while longer.

“Christians are willing to stay within the system,” says Mr Zhao. “Christianity is also the basis for good citizenship in China.” Most Christians say that theirs is not a political organisation and they are not seeking to challenge the party. But they also say clashes with public policy are inevitable: no Christian, one argues, should accept the one-child policy, for example.

Here’s the point Van Til was driving at in the previous post (though the whole argument is worth reading, even if it is a bit long).

It would appear then that the theory of being that we have presented fits in with the notion of the Bible as an authoritative revelation of God. Such a being as the Bible speaks of could not speak otherwise than with absolute authority. In the last analysis we shall have to choose between two theories of knowledge. According to one theory God is the final court of appeal; according to the other theory man is the final court of appeal.

Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., 58.

The Associated Press Stylebook has a decent working definition of Fundamentalism (even if most reporters don’t heed it):

fundamentalist The word gained usage in an early 20th century fundamentalist-modernist controversy within Protestantism. In recent years, however, fundamentalist has to a large extent taken on pejorative connotations except when applied to groups that stress strict, literal interpretations of Scripture and separation from other Christians. In general, do not use fundamentalist unless a group applies the word to itself.

In the October edition of First Things, Richard John Neuhaus uses an article in the New Yorker as the basis for a discussion of changes in evangelical political involvement.

Here are a few key paragraphs.

In the last issue I discussed “An Evangelical Manifesto,” with its palpable and touching eagerness to be accepted by those whom its signers view as their cultural betters. The message of the manifesto is: “Please, we are not that kind of evangelical.”

p. 62

But sometimes what passes for change is a replay of very old stories. Rick Warren is quoted by Fitzgerald as declaring to a Baptist convention that the great need is for  ‘a second Reformation,’ one that would be about ‘deeds not creeds.’ I hope he is misquoted . . . . The slogan ‘deeds not creeds’ was of course the rallying cry of the social-gospel movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was the “modernism” to which first fundamentalism and then its post-World War II reconfiguration in evangelicalism was the response. And now the New Evangelicals are hailed as the social-gospel movement redivivus. As one never runs out of occasions for mentioning, history has many ironies in the fire.

p. 63

The only reason a Frances Fitzgerald is interested in evangelicals or evangelicalism is that these people are political players. For people such as Fitzgerald, politics is “the real world.” In the perspective of Carl Henry’s 1947 manifesto and the emergence of that earlier instantiation of “the new evangelicals,” the so-called religious right of recent years may be seen as the first inning in the game of cultural and political engagement. The evangelicals didn’t always play it well, but at least they were playing in the big leagues. Now, impressed by their unaccustomed influence, some evangelicals are prepared to concede the game in return for a permanent pass to the stadium. If Fitzgerald and like-minded commentators are right, evangelicalism is joining liberal Christianity on the well-worn path to public irrelevance.

p. 63

Neuhaus, however, closes on a positive note:

It is a heady sensation to be exalted by the likes of the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, but it is an embarrassingly paltry reward for betraying the promise of evangelicalism in American public life, and I am persuaded that most evangelicals will not accept the deal.

p. 63

Rod Decker notes that a Council on Dispensational Hermeneutics met last week as a forum for traditional Dispensationalists to talk about a variety of hermeneutical issues.

In addition to the discussion questions for each session, the council website also includes a statement of affirmations and denials and three papers:

• Joseph Parle, “On Implicitly Conditional Prophecy: What are You Trying to Imply by That?“
• Rodney J. Decker, “Why Do Dispensationalists Have Such a Hard Time Agreeing on the New Covenant?“
• Robert L. Thomas, “The Value of Speech Act Theory for Interpretation“

We have now before us in bare outline the main points of the Christian doctrine of God. Christianity offers the triune God, the absolute personality, containing all the attributes enumerated, as the God in whom we believe. This conception of God is the foundation of everything else that we hold dear. Unless we can believe in this sort of God, it does us no good to be told that we may believe in some other sort of God, or in anything else. For us everything depends for its meaning upon this sort of God. Accordingly we are not interested to have anyone prove to us the existence of any other sort of God but this God. Any other sort of God is no God at all, and to prove some other sort of God exists is, in effect, to prove that no God exists.

Defense of the Faith, 4th ed, 34.

The chapel messages I was able to hear this month were quite good. These are the ones that I heard. I especially commend the messages by Minnick, Berg (esp. the opening minutes), and McGonigal.

Stephen Jones – “Putting Feet to the Truth

Mark Minnick on the transformitive nature of God’s Word.

Bruce McAllister – “God’s Word, the Touchstone of Truth”

Mike Barrett on Colossians 3:1-4

Jim Berg – “Not by Bread Alone”

Kerry McGonigal on the relationship between truth and life in Titus

Greg Mazak – “How to Pray When Times Are Rough”

In the preface to Moo’s new commentary on Colossians and Philemon, D. A. Carson makes a comment well worth pondering:

The vision of “objective scholarship” (a vain chimera) may actually be profane. God stands over against us; we do not stand in judgment of him. When God speaks to us through his Word, those who profess to know him must respond in an appropriate way, and that is certainly different from a stance in which the scholar projects an image of autonomous distance.

p. viii

Some years ago I was in a company of teachers of the Bible in the colleges and other educational institutions of America One of the most eminent theological professors in the country made and address. In it he admitted that there are unfortunate controversies about doctrine in the Epistles of Paul; but, said he in effect, the real essence of Paul’s teaching is found in the hymn to Christian love in the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians; and we can avoid controversy today, if we will only devote the chief attention to that inspiring hymn.

In reply, I am bound to say that the example was singularly ill-chosen. That hymn to Christian love is in the midst of a great polemic passage; it would never have been written if Paul had been opposed to controversy with error in the Church. It was because his soul was stirred within him by a wrong use of the spiritual gifts that he was able to write that glorious hymn. So it is always in the Church. Every really great Christian utterance, it may almost be said, is born in controversy. It is when men have felt compelled to take a stand against error that they have risen to the really great heights in the celebration of the truth.

Machen, What is Christianity, 132-33 cited in Piper, Contending for Our All, 146.

Jim Hamilton has a helpful post on Jeff Niehaus’ Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology.

According to Hamilton, Niehaus is challenging evangelicals to use ANE background material from a seriously Christian and Biblical basis. In other words, the ANE background material should not dictate how one understands the Bible. The Bible should dictate how one understands the ANE material.

The works by Niehaus that I’ve read and consulted before have all been very good. See especially his commentaries on Amos and Obadiah in the McComiskey set on the minor prophets.