[The following report is from the Digging in the Walls section of O Timothy magazine, Volume 5, Issue 5, 1988. David W. Cloud, Editor. All rights are reserved. This material cannot be placed on BBS or Internet sites without express permission from the author. O Timothy is a monthly magazine. Annual subscription is US$20 FOR THE UNITED STATES. Send to Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org. FOR CANADA the subscription is $20 Canadian. The Way of Life Internet web site is http://www.wayoflife.org/ .]

K.H. Ting is the retired head of the China Christian Council, the Amity Foundation, and the Three-Self Christian Movement of communist China. He has been a puppet of the communist government since the takeover in 1949. Following are quotations from a lecture Ting delivered on September 23, 1984, at Rikkyo (St. Paul's) University, Tokyo, under the sponsorship of the Bishop Williams Memorial Fund of the Nippon Sei Ko Kai, Anglican-Episcopal Church of Japan. These statements leave no doubt about Ting's liberal theological position. He is as far removed from an evangelical, Bible-believing position as one can be. This, too, shows the man's deceit, as he often claims to be an evangelical.

Communist Revolution was the liberation of China

The year 1949 was a special year for China. From one standpoint the United States "lost" China in that year and, from another, in that same year the Chinese people got their liberation. For us Chinese Christians that liberation marks the beginning of a process in our church known as the Three-Self Movement. I will have other opportunities to discuss that movement. For the present I will try to describe how Chinese Christians have striven to find their own path in the theological undergirding of their faith.

The Brutal Communists were true-hearted men

There were... things which greatly jolted us Chinese Christians upon liberation. First, through direct contacts with revolutionaries, we found them on the whole to be very different from Chiang Kai-shek's Juomintang officials, and far from the caricature of them made by some missionaries and Chinese church leaders. They were certainly not the monsters and rascals they were said to be, but quite normal human beings with idealism, serious theoretical interests, and high ethical commitment... And, although they had no high regard for religion at all, they did not attempt to persecute or liquidate religion either...

Restudying the Bible in light of Communism

Caught in between, Chinese Christians all over the country started to do theological reflection on their own. It was a mass movement seeking theological reorientation, entirely spontaneous, involving tens of thousands of Christians in restudying the Bible in relation to social changes around us and in discussion, oral as well as written...

Self-Enlightenment and exaltation of human reason

in China, in the early 1950s, theology came out of the theologian's study and became a tool in the hands of lay men and women struggling to keep their faith vital and yet enabling them to relate themselves positively to the new reality as they found it. This was a mass movement for self- enlightenment, not imcomparable to the Enlightenment in Europe if we remember Immanuel Kant's characterization of the Enlightenment as "man's release from his self-incurred tutelage." And tutelage is "man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another." Kant says,"Have courage to use your own reason! That is the motto of the Enlightenment!" (Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals: What Is Enlightenment? Trans and ed. L.W. Beck, University of Chicago Press, 1950, page 286)...

Universalism and Syncretism

We do not want to negate all cultures outside the influence of the church. There are certainly movements approaching in various degrees the Christian understanding of God in these cultures, which we cannot afford to sweep aside as valueless. We find, for instance, that 3,000 years ago the Shih ching, in a section named "Ta Ya," had this to say:

Abundant sacrifice to heaven stood.
Burnt-oblation ascending,
Divine favor descending,
Simple fragrance arriving timely,
God's blessing bestowed kindly,
After her son's selfless offering,
Eternal afflictions cease coming.

And Lao-tzu is supposed to have said over 2,500 years ago:

There is already begotten before
Heaven and earth came into being:
serenely silent,
Peacefully alone,
eternally faithful,
the Immovable Mover, like
the caring Mother of all things.
I do not know its name
and describe it as Tao.

Can we fairly say that these are worthless or worse than worthless just because they have emerged outside the Christian tradition? Toward non-Christian spirituality we certainly should avoid the arrogance of the elder brother in our Lord's parable, or that of Jonah in his attitude to the Ninevites. We should welcome any and every move Godward on the part of men and women, no matter how slight.

The World is not the devil's occupied territory

Human sin has affected creation, but the created world, after all, is still under God and not the devil's occupied territory.

Christ is the pantheistic god whose incarnation was not an intrusion but a renewal.

From debating on the level of God's creation and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, not only in the church but also in the world and in history, Chinese Christians moved forward and grounded their thinking on a more solid Christological foundation. Many Chinese Christian intellectuals from a Social Gospel background found, as if for the first time, the Christ of St. John's Gospel and Ephesians and Colossians and claimed him as their own. He is the preexistent Logos, the crown or the fulfillment of all creation, the revealer in all fullness of its nature and meaning. His incarnation is not an intrusion into an alien world, but a renewal... The ascended Christ is like sunshine filling the universe, both its mountains and its valleys, and bringing out every spark of color latent everywhere.

Evolution from man to god

Reality is one gigantic process, one in which matter and simple organisms attain higher and higher forms of existence, with the loving community as the ultimate attainment of the image of God on the part of men and women, just like the triune God in a community of love. Justin Martyr spoke of the Logos Spermatikos, the presence of seeds of the Logos in all human beings. This view has been received warmly by many Chinese-thinking Christians in recent decades.

Universalism: Grace already present; God has no wrath toward the world

We also appreciate the words of Thomas Aquinas to the effect that grace does not supplant nature, but perfects it. Indeed the New Testament sees all creation as embodying Christ from the very beginning. Grace is not so much added on to nature, as in Luther's simile of snow falling on a dunghill, but is the ground for nature. Christ spoke of the joy of the mother for having given birth to a child into the world. Here we are again led to see that Christ harbors no antagonistic attitude to the world, to humanity, and to nature.

Romans 5:15 becomes full of meaning to us as we read it again in the new light: "If many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many." The words "much more" take upon themselves a meaning previously untapped. We are led to see that Christ is stronger than Adam, the gift stronger than disobedience, and grace stronger than sin. It is inconceivable that the incarnation of the Son of God should have made less of an impact on humanity than the fall of Adam. Too often we make sin universal, while narrowing down divine grace and redemption to a limited few, as if Adam has left a deeper imprint on humanity than has Christ. The verse assures us that our human solidarity with Christ is more universal, more decisive, and more efficacious than is our solidarity with Adam. The greatest word in the New Testament is not "sin," it is "grace."

Liberation Theology

We think very highly of liberation theology as a theology permitting and mobilizing Christians in Latin American to join with the masses of people around them in their struggle for independence, democracy, and a more humane socioeconomic system. We Also appreciate liberation theology for its emphasis on context and praxis. The resultant biblical hermeneutics is fresh, eye-opening, morally impelling, and politically conscientizing. We consider liberation theologians to be our friends and inspiring fellow pilgrims.

History is evolution toward perfection

They bring forth one after another newborn things, "for the end is not yet." "When a woman is in travail she hath sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world" (Jn. 16:21). This, to us, is history. Creation is a process as yet incomplete and subject to frustration. Birthpangs are antecedent to the emergence of creatures who will eventually respond to their Creator and cooperate among themselves lovingly, intelligently, and voluntarily. They will then be truly sons and not slaves. A world still in this process must inevitably be one in which ugliness and devilry have their place. We may well recall the inspiring words of Telhard de Chardin: "Someday, after we have mastered the wind, the waves, the tide and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love; and then for the second time in the history of the world man will have discovered fire."

With this theological orientation we approach the vicissitudes of world affairs in both calm detachment and passionate involvement. It is a longer view of history than any humanly possible, and yet makes sharing in the day-to-day burden and struggle for the renewal of the people's life worthwhile. It makes the role of the Christian at once participatory and critical... ("Theological Mass Movements in China," K.H. Ting, International Bulletin Of Missionary Research, July 1985, published by the Overseas Ministries Study Center, Ventnor, New Jersey, page 98; This article is the transcription of a lecture Ting delivered on September 23, 1984 at Rikkyo (St. Paul's) University, Tokyo, under the sponsorship of the Bishop Williams Memorial Fund of the Nippon Sei Ko Kai (Anglican-Episcopal Church of Japan)